Where things had stalled out.

“ ’Scuse me.”

Ivie stepped to the side so the human who was leaving could get out the vestibule’s door. And then a minute later, she was easing against the wall of mailboxes again as a man and a woman came in.

She checked her watch. And then her phone.

“Okay, enough with this.”

Although even with the resolution, she lingered a little longer, staring at the short-nap snow mat and the dissolving tracks left by that couple.

It was a little after quarter of seven when she turned away and took the stairs back up to her place. Letting herself in, she went over to the couch and sat down, putting her purse on the coffee table.

She stared at the dark screen of her phone as the humans above her moved around, the ceiling creaking quietly. Someone was making a curry down the hall. Another person was cooking something with basil and onions in it.

The mingling scents made her think of the plans they’d had.

Something had to be wrong.

Calling up a text screen, she took a couple of tries and settled on a quick Hope everything is okay—no worries about dinner. I’m off to work to cover that extra shift. Maybe we’ll catch up at the end of the night.

And then she waited.

When nothing came back at her, she frowned and replayed the goodnight from the evening before. There had been nothing amiss, nothing to suggest he would blow her off—unless he was an Oscar-winning actor, and he certainly hadn’t seemed duplicitous in any way. So what the hell was going on?

She lit up the screen of her phone. No notifications.

Five minutes later, she put her password in and checked everything internally. Nothing. No missed phone calls or messages—yeah, nothing had come through during the nanoseconds when she had been blinking.

The longer she stared at that little screen, the more she realized…she really didn’t know a lot about Silas. She had never been to his house. She’d never met his family or friends. She had only a vague idea of what he did. And she had no means of contacting him other than his cell phone.

When she was with him, when she was looking into his eyes, she felt as though she knew all she needed to. But faced with this black hole? She began to wonder.

And yet there was another side of her, a more rational one, which quite reasonably pointed out that it was a little bit premature to go into drama just because the guy was an hour late and hadn’t checked in with her.

Fine, soon to be two hours late. But still.

There was no doubt a reasonable explanation for this, and any minute the phone was going to go off, and she would hear his voice, and she would get the story of what had happened, and they would be back on track.

“Okay. Right. Time to go to work.”

Clapping her free hand on her thigh, she got to her feet, grabbed her purse, and headed for the door once again. The good news with having to go into the clinic was that there was no way she could sit for hours staring at her phone while her emotions cannibalized her higher reasoning.

Silas would be in touch. There was no way he wouldn’t.

* * *

—

Nothing.

As Ivie’s second break ground to an end, her phone was still a wasteland of no-comment, no-call, and she was about as twitchy as an addict without their fix. And that was seriously alarming.

Sitting alone in the break room, with nothing but the hum of the staff refrigerator and the whisper of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling to keep her company, she missed Rubes. Well, sort of missed the female. With her cousin having transitioned over to the VIP wing, it turned out that the two of them weren’t on the same break schedule, and one thing about Rubes was that she was a cheerful distraction. That being said, however, chances were her cousin would just be prattling on about true love and romance and how all of this was going to work out.

So yes, it was hard to know whether it was better to be alone with her head or in the company of the kind of optimism that Ivie certainly wasn’t feeling at the moment.

Probably best she was by herself. Her mood was getting worse, and the nurse clinician in her was not helping by providing a commentary on the sudden dopamine and serotonin imbalance that occurs in the vampire brain when pleasure is replaced by stress and hurt. For example, that sense of an ache behind the sternum? There was an actual physiological reason for it. Romantics, like Rubes, put a name on the pain, but “heartbreak” was actually nothing more than a combination of stress hormones, blood pressure variants, and unconscious muscle tension. And just like the cold or the flu, eventually it would pass.

Too bad you couldn’t take Mucinex for it—

The staff room door burst open and a colleague of hers leaned in. “Ivie, your patient in eight is coding again.”

Ivie jumped up and tossed the sandwich she hadn’t eaten in the trash. “Damn it, I thought he’d finally stabilized…”

The rest of the shift was spent dealing with a death that everyone in the family and on the staff had known was coming. The patient had been upward of six hundred years old, which for a commoner who had lived a hard life was considered advanced age, and yet when his heart had stopped for the fourth and what turned out to be the final time, it had nonetheless been a surprise.

But that was the nature of death, Ivie had come to learn. No matter when it happened or how expected it was, there was always a shock to the loss.

And because of that, she took special care with the family, holding their hands and letting them ask as many questions as they needed to. Ultimately, though, there was no response she could offer that would give them the relief they were seeking. Only time could bring them over the difficult road out of the pain, the mourning process the sole thing that would heal the wound of the loss.

When they finally departed the facility, she still had thirty minutes to go on the shift, but her supervisor caught her as she was coming out of the family counseling room and told her to leave early. For a minute, Ivie was tempted to finish things out, but she was scattered for so many reasons, and it was probably best to just go home.

Walking into the break room, she took a deep breath and proceeded to the bank of lockers. As soon as she opened hers, she went for her phone, because she was pathetic like that, and she was not surprised that there was nothing waiting for her on it.

She needed a plan. That was what she needed. A concrete, step-by-step, A-to-B-to-C progression that took her from here to home to her shower to Last Meal in front of the TV to what was no doubt going to be fitful sleep. She might not be able to control Silas and where he was and what he was doing, but she could micromanage her own moments.

Thus redirecting the angst to a series of tasks.

Classic distraction technique. Better than drinking, because it didn’t come with a hangover—or the specter of calling Silas and making an ass out of herself. It was also a one-up on gambling, overeating, and a whole host of other things that people self-medicated with.

“Shower first,” she said. “And then—”

The door swung open, and Ivie dimly noted someone coming in, but she didn’t look over from getting her coat and purse—

“Ivie.”

At the sound of Rubes’s voice, she twisted around. “Oh, hey, cousin—”

Ivie stopped dead. Everything about the other female was off. Rubes wasn’t smiling, for one. More shocking? Her eyes looked old, absolutely ancient. Which was the antithesis of her. And then there was her voice. Low, grim.

“What’s wrong?” Ivie asked. “What can I do to help?”

“I need you to come with me.”

“Is it a patient?” She shut her locker back up, ready for whatever was required. “Anything you need, I got you.”

Rubes ducked her eyes. “Just come with me.”

Ivie frowned and followed her cousin out of the break room. The clinic was a maze of corridors and levels, people moving around constantly, pushing carts of medicine and supplies or pieces of equipment with them, transporting patients, directing family members and visitors. On the surface, there was nothing unusual for Ivie and Rubes to be walking at a clip together. Underneath, though, Ivie’s head was racing in a million different clinical directions.

Couldn’t be a code in the VIP unit. There were tons of staff on hand for that.