are a couple. An I Love You on both sides, not just one.
Too bad they were counting down the time.
As they were both aware of what was coming, they hadn’t said much on the way back, and when they’d arrived at the series of gates, she’d distracted herself by watching as the wintery forest landscape had gotten hazy again. So strange. Like an optical illusion.
It was a shame she didn’t have more time here. There was magic in this part of the world, supernatural things that she would love to have learned about, lived around, experienced for herself. In comparison, the human world seemed one-dimensional. Uninteresting. Unremarkable.
Or maybe that was the prospect of her life without Murhder.
“I’ll go sit with Nate while you talk to Doc Jane,” he said.
“I’ll come find you when I’m done—”
Far ahead, a door in the clinical area was thrown open and the doctor in question skidded out into the hall. When she saw Sarah, she came running down, her Crocs slapping against the bald concrete floor, her scrubs and white coat flapping behind her.
“Oh, God, Nate,” Sarah said. “Is he—”
“You were right!” Doc Jane took Sarah’s free hand. “The blood samples were exactly what you wanted to see! The white blood cell count is off the charts, the immune activity is so strong—it’s what you were hoping to find!”
Sarah released Murhder’s palm. “Show me.”
The two of them ran off to the clinic and all but pile drove their way into the pocket lab the facility used for rudimentary testing. Ehlena, the nurse, was smiling over by a refrigerator with a biohazard marking on it.
Doc Jane pulled a sheet out of a printer that sat on the counter. “Here are the values.”
Sarah took the readings, and as she reviewed them, she had to remind herself that what was normal for vampires was not anything close to what she was used to.
“Okay,” she murmured to herself. “So the immune response is striking. Evolutionarily, that would make sense. Given the amount of change in the body during the transition, infection could easily occur through leaks in the digestive tract or from the lungs being flooded. And then the white blood cell count must return to normal—let me see if I can get Nate to give us one more sample. If the count is even lower, my theory may be correct. In which case … we could try and trick John’s body into believing it’s going through the change and stimulate his immune response in that way.”
Jane whistled under her breath as she leaned back against the counter by a microscope. “That could be catastrophic.”
“Are you aware of the growth hormone that triggers the transition?” Sarah tapped the sheet. “I’ll bet there’s a pituitary trigger. It’s the same for humans, except for us, HGH is secreted over time and allows for maturity to occur gradually. As you told me before, there is a similar mechanism for vampires, only it happens all at once. If we’re looking to juice up John’s immune system, we could synthetically trigger the change.”
“What if it works, though?” Jane rubbed her neck like it was stiff. “One thing I’ve learned about vampires is the normal rules of medicine don’t always apply. What if it kills him? Or deforms him?”
Sarah stared at the columns of numbers without seeing them. “Too bad we can’t somehow test it first—”
“I’ll do it.”
All three of them looked over to the door. Murhder was standing just inside the lab, his big body dwarfing the space between the jambs. His eyes were calm and steady, his face composed.
Like he hadn’t just volunteered to try out something that could put him in his grave. When he was perfectly healthy.
“What?” he said as Sarah and the two females continued to stare at him. “You need somebody to try it out, this transition thing. You’ve got to know whether it works and whether it’s safe, right? Before you use it on John. So I volunteer.”
Sarah cleared her throat. “This is a highly speculative theory. There are huge risks involved, and I’m not even sure I’m correct.”
“So.”
She put the sheet aside and went over to him. “Will you excuse us for a moment,” she said to no one in particular.
Out in the corridor, she made sure the door was closed behind them. “This is inherently dangerous.”
“I know.”
Looking up into his handsome face, she was struck by the need to protect him from her own idea. “I can’t let you do this—”