Stay the Night (36 page)

The contessa grabbed Chris, locking her arm around her neck and cutting off her air. “Stay away from me.”

“Salva.” Robin dropped down from the trees and grabbed her free hand, holding the vial upright. “Let it go.”

Salva struggled wildly, trying to tip the vial into the fountain. As it spilled, Robin dove under her hand, forcing her hand to his mouth. With one swallow, he drank the contents of the vial.

The contessa screamed, pulling away with a savage jerk. Chris saw a tiny drop of blood fly from the lip of the vial to land on Salva's cheek. The red stain raced across her skin, covering her head and turning her eyes solid scarlet.

The contessa dropped like a stone, taking Chris with her. Chris shoved the dead woman away and crawled over to the fountain. Robin lay half in, half out of the water, his skin already turning dark pink.

“Robin.”

He opened his eyes, the copper irises fading to scarlet-tinged amethyst. “Did any of the tears touch you?”

Unable to speak, Chris shook her head.

He smiled. “I'll be waiting . . . for you . . . love. Take . . . your . . . time.”

Robin sagged into the water and didn't move again.

 

Alex helped the redheaded mortal woman pull Robin's inert body out of the fountain.

“Someone tell me what this stuff he swallowed is,” she yelled as she rolled Locksley onto his back.

“Poisoned tears,” the redhead told her. “It kills Kyn on contact.”

“Not this time.” Alex wrenched open Robin's shirt. “He's still breathing. Richard.”

The high lord came to kneel beside Robin. “He swallowed the tears.” He sounded as if he were dazed.

“What difference does it make?”

He focused on Alex's face. “I cannot say. No one has ever done this.”

“All right. Let me think.” Alex pressed her hands against her face before letting them fall. “The pathogen is present in our saliva, blood, and body fluids. It must be trying to counteract the poison.” She surveyed Robin's skin and the pink flush that was growing deeper and darker by the moment. “What's the antidote for this stuff?”

“There is none,” Richard said softly.

“Bullshit. If the pathogen can fight it, so can we.” She stood. “We need to get him downstairs so I can draw a blood sample and have a look at it.”

No one came near them.

Richard lifted Robin's body into his arms. “I shall take him.”

Alex didn't have to clear the way as she, Richard, Michael, and the redhead descended to the hospital; no one followed them but Nottingham.

“Why is everyone acting like pussies?” Alex asked Michael on the way down.

“They are being cautious,” he said. “They remember what happened the last time Beatrice's tears were unleashed.”

“They're being pussies,” the redhead said, giving Alex a fierce look. “I'm Chris Renshaw, and I'll do whatever it takes to save him.”

“Alex Keller.” She gave her a tight smile. “Ditto.”

Alex had Richard place Robin on an exam table and quickly drew a sample of his blood, from which she made a slide smear.

She put the glass slide under the scope and adjusted the power before she took a look. “This chick Beatrice wept this stuff he drank?”

“Her tears were blood,” Richard said, “and her blood was lethal.”

“Maybe not.” She saw the pathogen colliding with a larger, mutated form of itself. The two cells shaped and reshaped themselves, each trying to absorb the other. After a few seconds the mutant pathogen engulfed the other and moved on. “Shit. Maybe so.”

Alex moved away from the scope and back to Robin. His skin had turned a dark rose, and his body temperature was dropping rapidly. “Was there anything that stopped it?”

“Killing Beatrice,” Richard said.

“We don't have time for jokes,” Alex snapped. “This stuff is like leukemia on crack. If I don't do something, right now, he's going to be dead in a few minutes.”

“What about a transfusion?” Chris asked suddenly. “Take out all the poisoned blood and replace it.”

Alex shook her head. “I can't get every drop out of him, and the pathogen replicates too fast.”

“How do you treat this leukemia in humans?” Richard asked.

“Acute cases? Radiation and a bone-marrow transplant.” Her brow furrowed for a moment before her expression hardened. “It's not feasible.”

“Why not?” Chris demanded.

“Assuming I could find a bone-marrow-donor match, I don't have the equipment to do it here,” Alex told her. “Robin won't live long enough to make it to a cancer treatment center. There's just no time.”

“Then we stop time.” Chris turned to Nottingham. “Use your talent on him.”

“Honey, I'm sorry, but his talent will only . . .” Alex's head snapped up. “Guy, get the hell over here.”

 

Nottingham looked at Robin, and then regarded Chris. “Do you love him?”

“What?”

“Excuse me.” Alex glared at both of them. “My patient is dying. Can you chitchat about your love life later?”

He bent and put his mouth next to Chris's ear, his cheek brushing hers. “Do you love him?”

“Yes.”

He moved back and looked into her wet eyes. “If I do this, will you come away with me? Will you give yourself to me?”

“Guy,” Alex snapped.

Here was the perfect revenge on Robin, and all Chris had to do was agree to it. “If that's what it takes to save him, then yes, I will.”

“I thought as much.” Nottingham lifted his chin and pressed his cool lips to her forehead before he moved over to the table. Arrogance filled his eyes as he regarded the other Kyn. “Give us the room.”

Alex put a hand on Chris's shoulder as they went outside. “He'll be okay.”

“How would you know?” Chris countered. “Did you perform that many bone-marrow transplants back in the Dark Ages?”

“I'm not actually from the Dark Ages myself,” Alex told her. “I was a reconstructive surgeon in Chicago before the Kyn sank their fangs in me. You?”

Chris leaned back against a wall and closed her eyes for a moment. “Federal agent out of Chicago.”

“Robin. With a fed.” The doctor coughed. “Hokay.”

“I'm not here in an official capacity.” Chris wasn't sure what she was now, except terrified. All at once she remembered Hutch and Robin's people. “The contessa has hostages back in the States.” She filled in Alex on the details, and then added, “She may have already given orders for them to be killed, but if there's any way you can help them, I'd be grateful.”

“We'll take care of it.” She turned to the man with the white-streaked black hair. “Michael, can you send Jayr and Lucan with the cavalry?”

He nodded and took out his mobile phone.

Whatever Nottingham was doing seemed to take forever. As Chris waited, she saw frost slowly creep over the edge of the door to the exam room, and her breath turned white as the air temperature steadily dropped.

“Here, mademoiselle.” Michael removed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “You should perhaps go upstairs. You will be warmer there.”

Before she could answer, Guy came out of the exam room.

“I have encased his body in ice,” he told Alex. “It will last only two or three hours, but it should slow the poison long enough for you to transport him.” He started to walk away, but Alex grabbed him.

“You're the only relative he has,” she said. “You can't leave.”

He gave her a twisted smile. “He will not want me at his side.”

“Probably not,” Alex replied, “but if this works, he will need a little of your bone marrow.” At his blank look, she added, “I'll have to perform a transplant from a blood relative in order to replace the bone marrow that the radiation kills.”

“It cannot come from me, my lady,” Nottingham said, his expression turning grim. “Locksley and I are not related by blood. Our connection is through marriage only.”

“Doesn't Robin have any other relatives?” Chris asked.

“Yeah.” Alex suddenly looked miserable. “There's one more.”

Nottingham bowed to her and Chris, and continued out of the hospital.

“Guy. Wait.” Chris caught up with him just outside the lift. “If you never intended to take me with you, why did you make me promise that I would go?”

“Sometimes knowing what you can have is almost as satisfying as taking it.” He gestured toward the lift. “You may still come with me, if you like.”

“I think I'll stick around here.” Chris smiled. “Thank you.”

“If you really wish to show me your gratitude,” he said, “be sure to tell my cousin when he wakes that I saved his life.” For the first time since they'd met, he produced a genuine smile. “That should bedevil him for the rest of eternity.”

He bowed once more to Chris, and then stepped into the lift.

Chapter 20

R
obin smelled her scent first, sweet-sharp, like the taste of candied ginger. He had been drifting in and out of shadows for so long that he clung to it, following the trace until it grew stronger, until he knew he was only a hand away from touching her—and then she bridged the gap between them.

Chris's fingers moved over his brow, brushing his hair back. As Robin woke, he turned his face into her palm.

“You're awake.”

“I'm dreaming.” His voice sounded as weak as he felt. “Or perhaps God has made a tremendous error and let me into heaven. Say nothing to Saint Peter.”

“Oh, yeah.” Her low, tired laugh caressed his cheek. “You're awake.”

Robin opened his eyes to the only face he had ever wished to see again. Chris looked pale and thin, and shadows bruised her eyes. She had slept in the dress she wore, judging by the telltale wrinkles, and had scraped back her tangled hair into a lopsided ponytail.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, Robin decided.

He finally looked away from her to study the place he occupied, which he recognized as one of the guest rooms in Geoffrey's stronghold. “In addition to God, I imagine I have Alexandra Keller to thank for this.”

“Alex and a few of the others.” Some of Chris's smile became forced. “I'd better go get her. She wanted to know if . . . when you woke up.”

“Send someone else,” he told her. “You, madam, are never leaving my sight again.”

“You might want her to step outside the curtain when I perform the ten or fifteen consecutive colonoscopies I have planned for you,” Alex said as she came in carrying a chart.

Robin tried to look lofty. “I have no idea what a colonoscopy is, but I am sure the Kyn do not require them.” He grinned. “Hello, Alex. You're looking well.”

“Hi, yourself, handsome.” Alex exchanged a look with Chris, who bent over and kissed the bridge of his nose.

“I should go take a shower before I started attracting flies,” his lady told him. “I'll be back.”

She left before he could reply.

Robin tried to sit up and go after her, and discovered he was entangled in a mesh of tubes and wires. Bewildered, he lifted his arms. “What the devil is all this?”

“This is your IV,” Alex said, pointing to a transparent tube. “The wires are monitoring your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your blood oxygen. I also have you on a catheter, but you can't see that one. Keep moving around, though, and you'll feel it.”

“A what?” Robin lifted the edge of the sheet covering him, looked at what she had done to him below the hips, and then dropped it. “Good God. Alex, none of this is necessary, I assure you. I am Darkyn; I do not need—”

“You're not Kyn anymore, Robin. You're human.”

He regarded her for ten long seconds in silence before he chuckled. “Oh, very good. Was this Cyprien's idea? I've always suspected a sense of humor lurked under all that dour French sensibility.”

“You ingested Beatrice's tears, which contained a mutated form of the Kyn pathogen that feeds not only on human white cells but on other strains of the Kyn pathogen,” Alex said, her expression gravely serious. “Your natal pathogen tried to fight it off, but it was coming out of a dormant phase, and it was starving.”

Robin eyed the tubes. “Alex, you're going to make me puke.”

“That's all the gross part. We put you on ice, transported you to a private cancer center, thawed you, and then irradiated your blood to kill all the pathogens in it.” She set aside his chart. “When I transplanted the donor bone marrow, I thought everything would go back to normal. Kyn-normal, anyway. But the bone marrow did not have a trace of the pathogen in it, and your body had other ideas. It began to revert to human almost immediately.”

“Alexandra,” he said, very kindly, “I cannot be mortal. I have been Kyn for nearly eight hundred years. Once changed, we cannot be changed back.”

“I know it's a shock,” she said. “I couldn't believe it, either. But after the transplant your digestive and immune systems regenerated and began functioning normally. I've tested your blood about three hundred times, but found no trace of either Kyn pathogen. I can't tell you how or even why it happened, only that it did. You
are
human now, Robin.”

“It's an excellent jest, but truly, my lady, you carry it too far.” He yanked the intravenous tube out of his arm and went to work on detaching the wires. “I would be greatly obliged if you would remove the blasted tube from . . . my . . .” He stopped and stared at the small hole in his forearm, which was not closing, and the trickle of blood spilling from it, which was not stopping.