Stay the Night (37 page)

Alex applied a swatch of gauze to the small wound and held it there. “You're still on a liquid diet for now, but tomorrow we can start you on some solids.”

He stared at the blood staining the gauze. “You aren't jesting.”

“No.”

He met her troubled gaze. “Will I make the change again?”

“If you were going to, I think you would have by now,” she said. “I wouldn't try to force a change, either. I can't say for sure, but I don't think you'd survive it a second time.”

“So I am human.” He smiled, and then he chuckled, and then he laughed. “A mortal again.”

“Robin, I can't tell you how sorry—”

He reached up, grabbed the front of her lab coat, and pulled her down for a long, heartfelt kiss. “I love you, Alexandra Keller.”

“That's nice,” she said, very carefully. “But I'm taken, and so are you.”

“I do want solid food,” he said. “As soon as possible. I have a list. Strawberries and champagne to start. Filet mignon, rare, and a baked potato. I want it smothered in butter and sour cream. A side of broiled asparagus will go nicely. Then, for dessert, I want cake.”

Her brows rose. “Any particular kind?”

“Just bring cake. I'll tell you when to stop.” He laughed again. “Oh, Alex. You didn't just save my life. You gave me cake. And now I can eat it, too.” He looked around. “Where is Chris? Does she know?”

Alex bit her lip. “Yeah, she knows.”

“We can be together now. I can become an American citizen and vote and file tax returns and complain about the whole lot.” He sat up. “My God, Alex—
I can have jury duty
.”

“I can see you're all broken up about this,” she said, her expression wry, “but try to pull yourself together.”

Robin took her hand in his and noticed how much cooler hers was. He looked up at her. “How am I ever to thank you and the others for saving my life? For giving my life back to me? Bring everyone in. I shall try.”

Alex patted his cheek. “I'll get the whole gang in here shortly. One other thing: You should know that Nottingham kept you alive by putting you on ice.”

Robin blinked. “
Guy
saved me?”

“Without him and the bone-marrow transplant, you'd be dead.”

Robin's belly tightened. “He gave bone marrow as well?”

“He couldn't. You guys are cousins only by marriage.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I needed bone marrow from a blood relation. It's usually a match.”

“I have no living . . .” He paused and looked at her, stricken. “No, Alex.”

“She was in the middle of a siege, Robin. She wouldn't come until I told her why it had to be her.” Alex let out a long breath. “Look, I didn't give her any details. I thought you might want to tell her yourself.”

For a moment Robin wished she'd let him die. “What was it you said after the tournament at the Realm? That it would come back to bite me in the ass?” He sat back. “Is she still here?”

“Yeah. She's been waiting with the rest of us.”

Robin held out his arm. “Take these tubes out of me, please.”

 

During the crisis with Robin, Braxtyn and the Kyn nurses Alex had trained had taken over caring for the refugees down in the hospital. Geoffrey's lady chased Alex out of the ward after she came down to check on her surgical patients.

“Between treating Locksley and coming here to work on the burn patients, you have barely had an hour to yourself,” Braxtyn said. “Go to your lord and rest. I know Cyprien pines for you.”

“Michael is busy mapping out search grids for Nick and Gabriel.” Alex saw the look in the other woman's eye and pretended to yawn. “All right, you talked me into it.”

She was becoming a very good liar, Alex decided as she returned to the upstairs room she had appropriated to serve as a lab. Ever since she'd seen the results of Robin's first blood tests after the transplant, she'd been wide-awake.

If Robin could be changed back to human, then it had to be possible to do the same for every other Darkyn.

In the lab, Alex reviewed the scans of Robin's abdomen. His restored digestive system appeared to be functioning perfectly, and the latest CBC still showed no trace of the Kyn pathogen.

Alex glanced at the refrigeration unit where she'd stored the other blood samples she'd taken. She still had two vials of blood she'd drawn from Robin's veins after thawing him but before giving him the radiation treatment, and as they were as lethal as Beatrice's tears, they needed to be destroyed.

She put on three pairs of latex gloves before she removed the tubes from the tray and held one up to the light. The blood looked almost black now.

“It's off to Geoffrey's furnace with you two.” She placed them in a holder, and then frowned. Sometime during the short walk from the refrigerator to the lab table, both vials had turned bright red.

“That's weird.” She checked the seals on the tubes, which were intact. “You responding to my body heat, or lack thereof?”

She knew the blood was dangerous, but she'd worked with hazardous materials countless times. It wouldn't hurt to draw out a drop of the blood and have a look at it under the scope. No one would ever know she had.

She took all the necessary precautions to protect herself and contain the samples before she made a slide. Geoff had obtained one of the best scopes on the market for her, so she had no trouble seeing the pathogenic cells and what they were doing.

“You look just like Jema Shaw's blood,” she murmured, and then went still. Jema, the only female turned by the Kyn who had not been an orphan, had had a very unusual blood profile before and after her change to Kyn. Alex had studied it for months, but as it matched no one else's she had mentally filed it away as an anomaly.

Jema wasn't the odd one out. She was the key.

Alex backed away from the scope and stood staring at it for several minutes. The facts that she had gathered about the Kyn pathogen suddenly began to fall into place, like puzzle pieces that had decided on their own to quit waiting for her to fit them together and make the big picture. And then it was all so simple. The radiation treatment hadn't turned Robin human. Neither had Jayr's bone marrow.

Beatrice's tears, and the fact that he had drank them, had been the reason for his remarkable transformation. His pathogen had attacked, then combined with hers to cause one final mutation.

It was all right there, under the scope.

A laugh escaped Alex, and she slapped a hand over her mouth to smother the sound. “It can't be that simple. No way.”

Alex didn't sleep that night. She stayed in the lab and performed a few more tests on the blood samples, but she wrote nothing down about the results.

Every test she ran was positive.

She could run a hundred simulations, but she knew the results would always be the same. The problem was when she made the serum. She had only enough blood to make one treatment, and she wouldn't be able to test it on anyone.

She held up the syringe and stared at it. Here was the answer. All she had to do was roll up her sleeve, shove the needle into her arm, and she could have her life back.

She'd be human again.

“Alexandra.” Phillipe burst into the room. “You must come right away.”

He startled her so much that she nearly crushed the syringe in her hand. “What is it?” She shoved the syringe into her coat pocket. “Robin?”

The seneschal shook his head. “It is the mortal woman, Chris. She has collapsed.”

Alex relaxed a little. “Exhaustion, probably. She hasn't slept for days.” She picked up her medical case. “Come on, I'll have a look.”

“It is not that,” Phillipe said as he accompanied her out into the hall. “She vomited before she fainted. And her scent is changing.”

“What?” Alex stopped in her tracks. “Her scent is what?”

“It is changing, Alex,” he said, his voice low and tight. “As she is. Changing to Kyn.”

 

Chris felt cool hands on her face and opened her eyes to see the Kyn doctor standing over her. “What happened?”

“Well, for one thing, you puked all over the place. Then you fainted.” Alexandra Keller smiled absently as she picked up Chris's wrist and pressed two fingers against it. “Your blood pressure is making me very unhappy, too.”

“My mouth is sore.” Chris felt the roof of her mouth with her tongue. “What other things?”

For a moment the doctor didn't answer her, and then she sat down on the side of the bed. “You've been through a lot the past couple of days. So has Robin. Maybe too much.”

Chris tried to think. She felt as if she were coming down with a bad case of the flu. “Am I sick? Is that it?” She thought of how weak her lover had been. “Robin. Oh, God. Did I infect him with something?”

“It's kind of the other way around.” Alex put her hand in her pocket and fiddled with something. “You love him, don't you?”

Chris nodded. “Don't ask me why.”

“It never really comes with a full explanation, does it?” Alex sounded tired. “Do you want to be with him, even though he's just a garden-variety human now?”

“I don't think I could handle having a vampire lover,” Chris confessed. “At least this way we're the same now. We can be together, and have a normal life.”

Alex nodded slowly. “And if you could ever be Kyn, would you want that instead? You'd have the chance to live forever. You could still be with Robin, if you were careful.”

“Me, a vampire?” Chris chuckled and shook her head. “No, thanks.” She met the doctor's strange gaze. “Why are you asking me all these weird questions?”

“Call it idle curiosity.” She stood and took something out of her pocket. “You must be feeling sleepy. Close your eyes and take a nap, sweetie.”

The scent of lavender filled her head, making her eyelids droop. As she was drifting off, she felt the sting of a needle in her arm. “What's . . . that . . . ?”

Alex sighed. “Call it a wedding gift.”

 

Robin agreed to rest, stay in bed, and do everything else Alexandra ordered. As soon as she left the room he rolled out of the bed.

For a moment he wondered if he should have listened to her—as he stood there the room upended itself around him—but then he felt steadier, and slowly dressed in the garments he found in the room's closet.

Robin found the gardens with his nose, which, despite all he had been through, still seemed to work. He walked through the pretty flowers to a bower of sweet pea, and sat on the stone bench beneath it.

“Lord Locksley.”

She came out of the shadows, bringing with her the scent of tansy blooming in moonlight. She still wore her leathers, but the treatments Alex had given her back at the Realm had changed her body from that of a boyish girl to that of a mature woman.

There came a time to pay for everything, Robin thought. His had just arrived.

“Suzeraina.” He didn't move over to make room for her. He could see she did not wish to sit beside him. “You are enjoying your visit to England?”

“Not especially.”

“Neither am I.”

She studied him for a moment. “You are well enough to be roaming about by yourself?”

“Probably not, but if I had stayed in that bed, Alexandra would have inserted another thousand tubes in me.” The words felt like ashes on his tongue, and he abruptly abandoned all the pretense. “I am sorry, Jayr. I never wished you to know.”

“You felt it would be better if I assumed that Nottingham was my sire?” She nodded to herself. “Of course. He is a villain. You were a friend. Why would I wish to name you my mother's rapist?” She came to stand over him. “I have been waiting for you to awake. I gave you the marrow from my bones to save your life. Now you will tell me why you raped my mother.”

“I loved her.” He didn't flinch as she slapped him. “Her mind was addled, and I thought it would bring her back to me.” The second slap made his ears ring. “She did not fight me, Jayr.” He caught her wrist before she struck him a third time. “I think that is enough.”

She yanked free of his touch, breathed in, and went down on her haunches before him. “You're bleeding.”

He touched his split lip. “Aye. You have a strong swing. Another slap and I might have lost some teeth.”

“You're bleeding and you're not healing.” She straightened. “I shall summon Alex.”

“There is nothing she can do, other than mop it up.” He used his sleeve on his mouth. “Humans bleed.”

She turned around to stare at him. “What did you say?”

“Alexandra's poison remedy worked very well. It healed all of me, even that part that was cursed by God.” He rubbed his throbbing cheek. “I forgot that pain does not go away in an instant for a mortal. I wonder if I should continue cliff diving and BASE jumping.”

“You cannot be human.” But she could smell that he was; the shock on her face testified to that. “She has helped others change. I shall have her change you back.”

“She cannot, Jayr. Even if she could, I no longer wish to be Kyn.” Robin rose and walked as close as he dared to her. How pale and unworldly she was, his girl. “I have good reason to remain human now.”

“This federal agent.”

He nodded. “When you no longer feel like killing me, I would like you to meet Chris.”

“Is she to be my stepmother, then?” Her expression changed. “How will you introduce me? As the bastard daughter you never bothered to claim?”