As the nurse nodded, Jane addressed Murhder, stroking his hand with her thumb. “We’re going to give you a series of injections and monitor your body’s response between each one. We want to see what your immune system does, but we have to be careful not to give you pancreatitis.”
Or worse.
“I trust you,” he said as he stared up at her.
He was so calm. So at peace.
When they’d been resting after their marathon sex session in the shower, he’d told her that if something happened to him, he’d requested that Xhex be the one to take her back to Ithaca and deal with her memories. He’d said he trusted the female. He’d also sworn that Sarah would be watched over for a while, just to make sure there was no fallout from the BioMed raid even with the corporation going under.
As she contemplated his contingency plan, she found it ironic as hell that she hoped he himself was the one who robbed her of her memories and their relationship.
Yay. What an upside.
I love you, he mouthed as he looked at her.
“I love you, too,” she said as the medical staff began to hook him up to the machines that would tell them whether or not he was dying.
As she contemplated the lulls between doses being administered, Sarah truly wished she was religious, because prayer seemed like the only way she could help affect the outcome. But that was nuts.
Squeezing his hand one more time, she touched the necklace he had given her and nodded at the medical staff. “Let’s begin.”
Murhder turned his head to the side so he could watch what was happening on his arm. The needle they inserted into a vein at the crook of his elbow was very small, just a sliver of metal that bit delicately into his flesh. After the thing was taped into place, tubing that ran up to a bag suspended on a pole was hooked on.
“I taste salt in my mouth,” he said after a minute.
“It’s the saline.” Sarah smiled a little. But the lift to her lips didn’t last. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
She took a syringe out from behind her back and inserted it into a break in the IV tubing. As the plunger found home and the drugs went in, he felt nothing. Tasted nothing new. Took a deep breath.
It turned out he’d braced for naught. After twenty minutes, they took a sample of his blood from another port they’d put in his opposite arm. Behind him, a subtle beeping noise, tied to the compressions of his heart muscle no doubt, was a metronome without a symphony. Just beep … beep … beep …
His back became stiff as he lay on the flat surface—no doubt everything he had done in the shower with Sarah had activated muscles that hadn’t been used in a very long while. He wanted to turn on his side, but that was a no-go.
“Let’s increase the dosage.”
Sarah gave him more of the somatropin, as she called it, and he cleared his throat, like he was getting ready to give a speech. Sing contralto in an opera. Recite something by Robert Burns.
More waiting. From time to time, he looked over at the two physicians, the human man with the intense eyes and the female with the short blond hair. The latter had a strange scent—nothing unpleasant, but not really something that was a vampire, either. Curious, the case of this Doc Jane. She wasn’t a vampire, but neither did she read as Homo sapiens. He wasn’t going to ask for details, however. It was rude and none of his business.
More testing. A third dose. More waiting. More testing again.
And then a knock on the door. The human man went over, cracked things only an inch or two and spoke to someone softly. Then he went over to Doc Jane. When she nodded, he approached the bed.
“John and Xhex are outside. They want to come in and pay their respects if that’s okay with you?”
“I’m not dead yet, you know.” Murhder smiled. “Let’s not plan my …”
Funeral, he thought. The word was “funeral.”
For some reason, he couldn’t get the syllables out. He tried again, forcing his mouth to move while he pushed air up his throat and through his voice box.
Dimly, he was aware that that metronome tied to his heart rate had sped up suddenly, the sound it released more like beepbeepbeepbeepbeeeeeeeepbeep. And right after his brain registered that increase in intensity on a strange kind of delay,