Season Of Strangers. Kat Martin

I’m here to inquire about a friend…Patrick Donovan. They just brought him in.” The woman began to search the names on her computer screen while Julie stood tensely, running her tongue over her trembling lips.

      “How is he?” Babs asked when she reached Julie’s side.

      “I-I don’t know yet.” They both turned to stare at the woman.

      “His condition is listed as stable,” she said, the age lines around her mouth puckering unbecomingly. Too many years in a job where it was all too easy for people to become merely numbers. “He’s been taken to intensive care, but he can’t have visitors, only immediate family.”

      “We are immediate family,” they both said in unison, then looked over at each other and grinned, light-headed with relief. At least he was still alive.

      “I thought you said he was a friend,” the woman reminded her tartly, her rheumy eyes suspicious above the rim of her glasses.

      “Well, he is,” Julie agreed. “But he’s also our brother.”

      The receptionist eyed her with suspicion, but one hard look from Babs and she pointed a bony finger down the hall.

      “Take the elevator up to the third floor. Follow the signs. They’ll tell you where to go from there.”

      “Thanks,” Julie said as they walked away, thinking it was time she called Alex, but first she wanted to speak to the doctors.

      Babs pushed the elevator button. “At least he isn’t dead,” she said with her usual bluntness.

      “He nearly was.” Julie nervously plucked a speck of lint from the front of her pink linen suit. “His heart had stopped and he wasn’t breathing. I was afraid he wasn’t going to make it.”

      “It’s the damned drugs and booze. We’ve both been telling him for years that one day it would kill him.”

      “Maybe now that this has happened, he’ll listen. Sometimes a close call with death can make a person change.”

      Babs flashed her a look of disbelief. “Don’t get your hopes up, honey. Nothing is going to change Patrick Donovan. Between his motorcycle races and his skiing, he’s had half a dozen close calls. He hasn’t changed a lick and this time won’t be one bit different.”

      Julie knew she was right, but it still hurt to admit it.

      Patrick would always be Patrick.

      Yet the memory of him lying on the sidewalk, of his pale, waxen face and blue, bloodless lips—the terrible thought of him dying—was enough to make her heart pump painfully again.

      Five

      Commander Valenden Zarkazian lay quietly beneath the clean white sheet on the hospital bed, listening to the beeping sound of the heart monitor attached by wires to his chest. The curtains were drawn so that only a sliver of light fed into the darkened room, dimly illuminating the stark white walls and dull gray linoleum floors. He was lying on his back, his mouth and nose covered by a plastic oxygen mask, his arms resting limply at his sides. A needle dripped clear liquid into a vein in his wrist.

      He was glad for the quiet, the undisturbed moments to gather his thoughts and come to grips with where he was and what he was feeling.

      To discover exactly who he had become.

      It was the oddest sensation, lying there in the darkness, one that, with his limited information, he hadn’t completely expected. His body lay still but his thoughts were in turmoil. His mind was a jumble of information, his senses bursting with memories, images, and sensations—both tactile and internal—the forces so powerful they nearly overwhelmed him.

      It was easier to deal with the physical aspects of his incredible journey, the weight of a body influenced by Earth’s heavy gravity, the pulsing of a heart inside the cage of his chest, the in-and-out motion of air rushing to and from his lungs. Those things he had expected. He had been studying the human form for years; he was well prepared for the physical transition he would make.

      It was the invasion of the mind, the onslaught of memories and emotions he was ill-prepared to deal with, the meshing, the mixing, the overwhelming oneness he felt with Patrick Alexander Donovan.

      The astonishing fact was, in a way he hadn’t expected, he actually was Patrick Donovan. He knew everything Patrick knew, every thought he’d ever had, every fear, every need, every wish. He knew the man’s strengths as well as his failings. He knew the depth of his depravity as well as the heights of his goodness.

      Fortunately, considering Patrick’s somewhat weak, self-destructive personality, it was Val Zarkazian who was now in control.

      It was Val’s strength of will, Val’s sense of purpose, Val’s set of values that would rule Patrick Donovan’s heretofore misused mind and body.

      He settled his head against the pillow, feeling the slick white smoothness of the case, smelling the stringent hospital odors, and trying not to think of the prickle of pain in his wrist where the intravenous needle pumped fluid into his body. Instead he let himself absorb the memories, the experiences that had been the sum total of Patrick Donovan’s life.

      Val knew most humans had not been born into the privileged existence Patrick had, yet from the images he received of the boy’s lonely childhood, he wondered if other, less advantaged children were not far better off.

      He wondered about Patrick’s father, the man Patrick had loved so much, a man too busy after the death of his beloved wife to pay attention to his only son. A man Patrick had always admired, yet also resented. A man who in the past few years had tried to reach out to him. Unfortunately for Patrick, by then it was too late.

      He wondered about the mother who had died when the boy was ten years old, at the stepmother, a society woman, a beautiful “social butterfly”—to quote one of Patrick’s own thoughts—who dressed him up in blue blazers and showed him off to her friends, who bought him dozens of expensive toys, but abandoned him to a nanny until he was big enough to be left on his own.

      Big enough to get into trouble. Big enough to turn to sex and drugs.

      Val wondered about the former. On Toril, the planet he came from, generations were perpetuated by test tube births. Male and female were paired genetically, then linked together after their maturity to form a loosely regulated, monogamous family unit. There was no such thing as sex, not in the sense of the physical linking that Patrick had apparently enjoyed so much.

      Drugs Val understood. He was a scientist, after all. He knew their debilitating effects, the totally destructive power the misuse of drugs could unleash. In that regard, there was no need for experimentation. Only a need to repair the damage to Patrick’s ravaged body that the drugs, alcohol, and off-and-on smoking had caused.

      Val stirred restlessly on the hospital bed. Now that he was here, there was so much he wanted to do, so much to see, so much to experience. There was nothing he could do to hurry things along; he couldn’t afford to alert them to the fact that this Patrick was somehow different than the Patrick he was before. The change would have to be gradual. Believable. Allowing Val to emerge, to become an acceptable part of Patrick without destroying the essence of who Patrick was.

      It would happen all in due course, he told himself. Patience had been a virtue he had tried hard to cultivate, yet already he found himself straining at the bit, as Patrick would have said, itching to be free to get on with his work. Patrick’s body had been physically repaired, the massive damage to his heart had been undone at the moment of Unification. By a physical weakness, an instant of good fortune for Val, and Patrick’s own reckless nature, the perfect vessel had been provided for him to continue his work.

      It was the chance he’d been waiting for.

      The chance of a lifetime.

      Val clenched his hands into fists, testing the dexterity, feeling the smooth glide of muscle between skin and bone. Careful not to disturb the needle in his wrist,