"I love you."
"I love you, too." His eyes crinkled at the corners as he grinned. "And may I just tell you that I adore the sound of those words in my ears."
"Well, good, because I love saying them."
Chapter Twelve
"It's a Happy Meal!"
As Silas started to laugh, Ivie rolled a table over and sat down next to the hospital bed. "Two Happy Meals, actually."
"You went to McDonald's just for us?"
"I did. There's one that's open twenty-four hours on the far side of the bridge, and you and I need some happy, right now."
She unpacked both of their cheery little boxes, lining up their prizes and the miniature french fry bags and the hamburger and the apple slices. They both had tiny cartons of whole milk and puzzles and quizzes to look forward to.
Ivie chowed down on her burger even though it tasted like cardboard--although that wasn't because it was fast food. She could have been eating filet mignon and the prime cut would have tasted like nothing much.
"Tell me about your childhood," he said as he pushed his fries around. "And then I want to know about your transition. And what makes you want to do this job. And why you aren't scared in the face of death."
Ivie swallowed through a tight throat. She had no intention of telling him she was flat out terrified at the moment.
"Well," she said, "I was born in the middle of July, on a hot night. My poor mahmen, going into labor like that? The air-conditioner at the house was broken and I gather it was very unpleasant."
"She didn't come in here? Wait, she had you at home?"
"Yup, I was born in the house that burned down."
"But Havers doesn't charge...well..."
"Poor people?" She smiled to take the edge off. "We could have gone to the old clinic, but my parents are kind of fatalistic. Or maybe it's the flip side of that, maybe it's faith. But they stayed put and had a midwife over, and that's how I came into the world..."
She kept talking, providing him with a distraction from all the food he couldn't eat. But he seemed to like picking up the milk and taking a test sip from the red straw, and then lifting the burger to his lips. Her stories came out faster and easier than she would have predicted, all manner of anecdotes about birthdays and adventures with Rubes and her other cousins filling up the time.
It was nice for her, she realized, to remember the simple fun of childhood, when a surprise candy bar could make her night or the perfect book could leave her heart fluttering with excitement. In the hustle and bustle of her adult life, she hadn't thought about any of that for a very long time.
And all the while, Silas's attention on her was rapt, as if her words were a lifeline.
"So that brings us up to date." She tapped her heart. "To when I met and fell in love with you."
God, it was freeing to say that. The only good thing this grim diagnosis gave them was the freedom to express emotions without worrying about whether they were rushing things. "Too early" didn't exist for them.
"It's a good story," he whispered. "I just wish I could stick around for the rest of it."
And that was when it happened.
Later, much later, she would pinpoint that moment as the awakening of her anger. Because as Silas fell silent, she knew exactly what was going through his mind: Whatever her life turned into, wherever she went, whoever she was around...he wouldn't know because he would be in the Fade. And the sad resignation with which he accepted that loss, along with all the other gradual chipping-aways of his health and function, made her furious.
Who was he to be cheated out of the rest of his life?
Why was he going to die early?
How the hell was it fair that they were going to have to part?
From out of the depths of her soul, from the very caldron of her will, she had an abiding thought: Fuck. That. Shit.
Hell no, she was not going to sit by and watch this male die. She had no clue what she was going to do, or how she was going to do it, but goddamn it, she was going to find a way to reverse this curse.
She didn't care that Havers was in charge of the case. She didn't give a crap that she was just a nurse and he was a full-fledged doctor. And p.s., this disease could really, totally go fuck itself.
There had to be something.
There just had to be a way out of this.
"What?" Silas prompted.
She shook herself. "I'm sorry?"
"You look like you're thinking about something important."
Ivie cleared her throat. "Listen, I'm sorry to bring this up. But you need some nutrition and hydration. So I'm going to have to get you hooked up to everything again."
With a sudden clarity, she realized she had to make sure he was alive long enough for her to find the cure.
"Ivie, don't you think it's time we stopped all that."
"No," she said forcibly. "I do not."
* * *
--
Silas insisted on working the feeding tube himself, and she gave him his dignity and independence by thinking up an excuse to go and tell housekeeping his sleep schedule. When she came back in, his eyes were closed, those features of his tight as if he were uncomfortable.
"I hate the pain," he mumbled through pale lips.
"Let me help you."
There was a long period of silence, and Ivie waited, praying that he would allow her to give him some relief. She respected him too much to push him, though. Patients like him, once they started on the morphine, did not get off of the drug and he knew this from what had had happened to his father--unfortunately, his sire had also suffered from Crane's.
Except Silas was going to be different, damn it.
"All right," he said in a low voice.
Ivie went over and programmed the morphine pump. After she double-checked it was ready, she gave him the clicker.
"You're in control," she said. "You decide when you need it."
He smiled a little. "If I were really in control, we would be in a Jacuzzi."
"I like the way you think."
She brushed his hair back and kissed him on the forehead. And the nose. And then on the mouth.
"Help me," he whispered.
She knew exactly what he meant. Placing her thumb over his, they depressed the button together.
He gasped a little. And then his eyes closed.
"Try and sleep, okay?" she said. "I'm not leaving the clinic, but I have to make some arrangements about my shifts."
"All right..."
Ivie stayed with him as he drifted off, and then she got to her feet, straightened her uniform, and marched out of that suite like she was going to war.
Havers's office and private quarters were located just outside of the VIP unit, and as she approached the paneled doors, she smoothed the flyaways from her ponytail and rechecked that her uniform was buttoned properly. Then she knocked.
The rule was that staff could approach him without an appointment between the hours of four and six a.m., and Ivie had certainly never bothered the male before. Then again, she had always discharged her duties appropriately, and if there were any questions or issues they had never been of the sort that she and her supervisor hadn't been able to handle.
This was really frickin' different.
"Come in."
The voice was female, not male, and as Ivie entered what turned out to be a small anteroom, Havers's private secretary looked up from her French desk with a professional smile.
"Hello, Ivie. How are you?"
How the female knew her from Adam, she hadn't a clue, but she was going to go with it.
Returning that pleasant, open expression with one of her own, Ivie said, "Very well, thank you. I was wondering if I may please have a word with Havers?"
"But of course. He's just in with someone now. If you'll take a seat?"
"Thank you."
Ivie went over to the nicely appointed chairs and lowered herself down. As she waited, she had to consciously still her
bouncing heel and keep her fingers from tapping.
In her mind, she ran through Silas's medical record again, forward and backward. Twice. There had to be something they could do. There just had to--
"Take care now," Havers said as he opened an inner door and patted the departing male nurse on the shoulder. "You're doing quite well, quite well, indeed."
Ivie closed her eyes. That aristocratic accent of the healer's reminded her of Silas. They both had the same intonation and beautiful diction.
"Ivie is here to see you, sire," his assistant announced.
"Oh, yes, Ivie, how are you?"
Ivie jumped up out of the chair and did another smooth-thing with her hair. She had interacted with the clinic's head in different kinds of medical situations, but she hadn't been one-on-one with him since she'd had her job interview how many years ago?
"I am very well, sire, thank you."
"Come right in. Do sit down."
His office was really beautiful, paneled in rich wood on which oil paintings of formal rooms hung as if he wanted to be surrounded by the memory of a place he had once lived in and loved. And his desk was tremendous in size with all sorts of gilt curlicues on it, the piles of paperwork, files, and laptops all neatly arranged, nothing out of place.
As he sat down on the far side of the expanse, he looked like he was exactly where he belonged, his horn-rimmed glasses and his bow tie and his crisp white coat suddenly intimidating her.
"What may I do for you?" he asked.
Ivie ducked his eyes and focused on her twisting fingers. As her mind went blank and her heart thundered, she had an impulse to run out of the room.
But then an image changed her mind.
She saw her father, standing out in the cold from the night before, his feet planted in the snow, his huge muscled arms bare to the frigid night air, his head up and shoulders back as if he were prepared to bull's rush anything and everything in his path.
That was her oak, that male.
And she was his daughter, damn it.
Ivie sat up straight and pegged Havers with a direct stare. "We need to do something for Silas, son of Mordachy. And I'm not talking about morphine and cans of liquid nutrition. I do not accept a terminal diagnosis. I refuse to accept it."
Havers recoiled like she had dropped an f-bomb--and then followed that insult up by taking a cat out of her pocket and having the thing take a crap on his monogrammed blotter.
"I'm sorry to be so blunt." No, she wasn't. "I feel very strongly about this, however."
The healer cleared his throat and steepled his hands. "Forgive me, but how we feel about patients doesn't necessarily affect their outcome."
"It will in this case."
Havers pushed his specs up higher on his aristocratic nose. "Ivie, I have long admired your commitment to your patients, your compassion, your focus. You are an exceptional nurse, and that is why I suggested you go and see about the private position to offer him support in his decline."
"I went through his medical file, and--"
"Except I understand that his retainer has some concerns about your presence?"
Oh. Right. Pritchard had already been by, hadn't she. "It's not her decision. And I don't care that I offended her--"
"That is not a professional stance, Ivie. That is not the conduct or the attitude of a professional."
She looked away. Shook her head. "You don't understand."
"I assured the retainer that if there had been some kind of a misunderstanding, you would do your utmost to ensure that the patient could move forward secure in the knowledge that his well-being was in the forefront of everyone's mind. Indeed, I was going to seek you out at the end of my open hours to discuss just this matter. We must be engaged, but not immersed."
As Havers continued to talk, his words drifted off into the background, Ivie's mind churning over options. She had heard that the Black Dagger Brotherhood had private physicians and surgeons who worked for them. Maybe they could help? She could go to the Audience House first thing after sundown and see--
"Ivie?"
She refocused. Havers was staring at her expectantly, as if he'd asked her a question and was awaiting a reply.
Ivie got to her feet. "I appreciate your advice, but I can't be professional on this case. It's impossible. I love him. He is my mate. And there is no way I will sit on the sidelines while he suffers and dies and not fight that fate with everything I've got. I'm going to go wherever I have to, do whatever it takes, but the one thing I will not worry about is who I piss off in the process. If the love of your life was dying, what would you do?"
On that note, she turned away and went to the door. She didn't bother with a goodbye or anything like that.
She had probably just huffed herself out of a job and certainly out of a good reference.
But Silas was the only thing she cared about. And that was a great short-term clarifier.
Chapter Thirteen
The following evening, Ivie left the Audience House around nine p.m., being careful to shut the heavy door behind herself and make sure it stayed closed.
She ran out of gas for a moment, her feet stopping, her hands tucking into the pockets of her parka. Looking around, she saw a whole lot of stately-Wayne-Manor, the other houses in the neighborhood just as grand as the Federal showcase she had just come out of. Not a lot of traffic on the street, but when she'd dematerialized here, she'd seen a Rolls-Royce tooling on down the lane.
Yeah, a Mercedes was probably considered too common in this zip code.
Kicking her own ass, she went forward, proceeding all the way down to the sidewalk. Without making a conscious decision, she hung a left...and just kept going, her footfalls even and slow, her boots giving her traction on the snowpack, the cold air that whistled through her hair and circulated around her body, clearing her mind.
Actually, that was not exactly true.
Her thoughts, which had been spinning since she had gone to see Havers the night before, finally got quieter. They were replaced, however, by a series of postcards from a nightmare.
She saw Silas straining as he tried to have a bowel movement in a bedpan. Gritting his teeth as the morphine wore off and he fought the need to take another dose. Vomiting bile into a pink, kidney-shaped plastic dish.
She remembered him twitching in his fitful rest and then waking up in a panic from a bad dream--which quickly became a morphine-induced hallucination she had had to talk him out of. She recalled him standing up on rickety legs, tubes and wires hanging off of him as he insisted on getting in the shower to wash his hair.
Whereupon he'd become stuck on the stool in the stall and she'd had to get a wheelchair to help him back to the bed.
It was all stuff she'd had to help patients with before--and she tried to remain grounded by her experience and training. In her heart, though, she was a family member, not a nurse...a mate, not a clinically trained professional.
Which was kind of the issue Havers had tried to discuss with her.
God, bodily malfunction was ugly. You didn't stop and think, when you were healthy, exactly how many things your corporeal form took care of on its own, the orderly systems of intake and exit and routine maintenance accomplished with nothing but the occasional, temporary hiccup. And as a nurse, her primary purpose was to try to reproduce the stasis of health through artificial means in bodies that were having difficulty.
But in situations such as Silas's, that was like fixing a flat tire with a toaster oven and a beach ball.
And holy hell was he failing faster than she could ever have imagined. The extent of his deterioration gave her an idea of how much he had willed himself to do when they'd been out together. Strong, so strong--but eventually, the brain's motivation could only do so much. When organs were no longer performing their jobs, not even love could bridge that gap forever.
Meeting with the King just now had been surreal. She had left a message at the number people called to get appointments,
explaining the situation and begging to see Wrath, son of Wrath, sooner rather than later. She wasn't sure what she had expected, but the last thing had been a text within two hours telling her to show up at eight-thirty sharp.
They'd given her the first appointment of the night, and conferenced in a female named Doc Jane who had promised to reach out to her human (?!?) colleague to see if there were any options outside of the race. Ivie had been both grateful and disappointed.
And now she was out here alone, walking past very elegant human houses, hunched over not so much because of the winter, but because the bright flare of hope she had had the evening before was getting snuffed out.
She was so glad she hadn't told Silas what her "plan" was.
False hope was torture in a situation like this.
Still, surely there had to be something, some drug, some procedure, some...
A pall came over her and she stopped walking.
Letting her head fall back, she tried to see stars in the sky. It was hard, though, because of the city's ambient light.
She caught enough of the twinklers, though. And that was what made her feel foolish. Nothing like looking at the expanse of space to recalibrate the significance of you. Your life. Who you loved. Who you were losing.
Abruptly, she couldn't believe she had marched herself into Havers's office and demanded he fix Silas--as if all of the other loved ones of the other males who had died from Silas's disease hadn't done the same thing.
Oh, no, clearly she had been the first, she thought with derision. She had been the Lewis and Clark of mourning family members who had gone to the race's healer--who happened to have handled countless cases like Silas's over the course of the centuries he'd been a physician--and said, You need to work harder and fix this now.
At which point, in her misguided determination, it had been his role to pull an I-could-have-had-a-V8, and go, You're right, Ivie! I forgot that if I just slip him a couple of Bayer aspirin, instead of the Tylenol I've been using on him, he'll be fine! His immune system will stop thinking his intestinal tract is a jumbo buffet and the cellular attacks will cease! Then we can grow him a couple of new kidneys and a liver in my hydroponic shed out back--and jeez, just to be safe, let's give him a new heart, too.
Thank you, Ivie, I owe you my career. I don't know what I would have done without you telling me to focus and work a little harder! I'm going to promote you to supervisor at work, and here, take my degree from that human university Harvard with you as a token of my eternal gratitude.