“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.

“So stupid,” she muttered to the heavens.

Naturally, they didn’t respond.

Had she even just taken this to the King?

In a rush, the reality that she was no different than all the other loved ones on the planet hit hard. Why hadn’t she thought of those many times people had come to her and asked her if there wasn’t something else, some other treatment, a different kind of therapy that might bring relief, healing, a return to normal? She’d been so arrogant in draping her heart’s desire in the vestments of her profession that she’d missed the truism that just like the stars didn’t care about the destinies of mice and men, neither did disease.

Silas’s body, that proverbial car which took his brain from place to place, was a lemon without a refund/exchange program. Only emotions turned this into a tragedy. According to biology, those white blood cells that were attacking things were just doing their job, albeit with too much enthusiasm and bad aim.

“Shit.”

Leveling her head, she kept walking and tried to think what she would say to someone in her position if she were once again on the uniform and crepe-soled-shoe side of all this…

Nothing good.

Damn it, she would have nothing good to say to anybody sitting at Silas’s bedside.

* * *

—

When Ivie got back to the clinic, she went directly to the VIP unit and let herself in with her new passcard. Instead of using the staff corridor, she marched right down the gracious patient and family hallway, passing by tables with fresh flowers on them while listening to the soft classical music that was piped in from overhead. As she came up to Silas’s suite, she looked at the ornate gold number on the door. There was no notation of who was inside, or any indication that what laid beyond was anything less than first-rate luxury accommodations.