As the donated marrow was hooked up to the central venous line’s feed, Ivie shook her head and glanced at her cousin. “The donor was such a good guy. So generous. I told him…you know, it was really important to me that he knew in his heart it wasn’t his fault if this fails. I told him over and over again that his gift was amazing and Silas and I are grateful to him no matter the outcome.”

She had been in the OR with Ruhn during the harvesting because she had wanted to support him and participate in the process somehow—and she couldn’t be with Silas right now.

“Your father called me again,” Rubes said. “And your mom.”

“They have been great. Did you tell them I was okay?”

Did you lie for me, Rubes? she thought.

“I did. I lied.”

As her cousin looked over with that sad smile again, Ivie put her arm around the female. Funny, for all their lives, since they were kids, Ivie had…well, not exactly written Rubes off for being a little scattered and falsely optimistic, but she had certainly viewed her cousin as not as strong as herself.

Wrong. Rubes had proven to be equally made of granite.

Just because her outside was as bouncy as her red curly hair did not mean the core wasn’t solid.

“I love you, Rubes.”

“I love you, too, Ivie.”

As Ivie’s eyes went to the tubing that ran from the bag now hanging with the rest of the IV fluids and drugs, through the dispensing computer, and out the other side to Silas’s port, she prayed this was going to work.

And that if it did, the results were something he wouldn’t blame her for.

* * *

—

Time crawled by.

The staff members were so kind, moving a bed directly outside the isolation room, putting it right against the glass so that when Ivie laid her head on the pillow, all she had to do was open her eyes and there was Silas.

People brought food. Her parents visited her. So did other members of her family.

The donor stopped by a couple of times. The Black Dagger Brotherhood’s physicians visited and consulted. Nurses in those white protective suits went in and out of the annex and the room itself. Havers was always around.

To keep her own body from breaking down, Ivie put herself on a schedule of eating and bathing and sleeping, literally setting her iPhone alarms to make sure she stayed focused on basic needs. Clothes from home were brought in, and she was pretty sure the entire staff was making her hot dishes on a rotation schedule, but it was so hard to track anything.

It was kind of like having a high fever, an essential disconnection putting her on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, anything from her environment—whether it was food, conversation, or movement—having to travel a great distance to get to her.

She cared about one and only one thing: some sign of hope.

A twitch of his hand or foot that seemed intentional. A blood test that said his immune system was waking up in its new home. A monitor that announced his major organs were coming back to life.

The stress and suffering were unimaginable, and in the back of her mind, she recognized that however much she had assumed she’d sympathized with her patients’ families before, had known what they were going through, could put herself in their shoes…all that had been bullshit.

Until you walked this path and tried to measure the sliding scale of Hell, you had no clue what it was like. The brain compulsively read into every small piece of data, the tipping between hope and loss constantly bottoming out on one side or another. And just when you thought you couldn’t do it for one more night? For one more hour? For a single second?

You got up and you ate something you couldn’t taste and rubbed your gritty red eyes…and plugged right back into it.

On that note, Ivie checked her iPhone. Tuesday. It was Tuesday.

So it had been three days since the transplant.

Seventy-two hours.

“I brought you some coffee.”

Ivie turned and looked up. It was Havers, and he seemed as exhausted as she felt. “Oh, thank you.”

She didn’t want it, but she took the mug and drank from it because she needed fluids, the caffeine was a godsend, and moreover, the fact that the healer himself had thought to bring her something? She was amazed at the gesture.

They both refocused on Silas.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m looking for signs of a change.”

“How much longer?”

“It’s hard to say. In humans, it takes a couple of weeks, but our systems run so differently from theirs, it’s hard to use that as any kind of benchmark.”

They stayed there for the longest time, her sitting with crossed legs in the tangle of hospital blankets on the bed that was also her sofa and her desk, him standing beside her, straight-spined and bow-tied.

“Thank you for trying,” she said hoarsely.

“I just pray this works.”

“Me, too.”

There was resignation in both their voices, and Ivie recognized it for what it was: the first sign that they were coming to terms with what was clearly a tragic failure.

Chapter Seventeen

Miracles, however, do happen.

Just when all felt lost, when all signs were on the negative, when Ivie had begun to counsel herself that things had not gone as they had hoped and she needed to face the hard truth…

Silas came back.

And not with a whimper, but a roar.

Ivie was lying down, her head on the pillow, her eyes on him, when she felt her lids start to droop. Staff had come in about twenty minutes before to take another blood sample from him and adjust his support meds, but now it was just the two of them again.

Later, she would wonder what made her check on him one last time—maybe it was reflex; perhaps it was destiny knocking on her proverbial door.

But she forced her eyes open and…saw that he was lifting a hand.

At first, she had no idea what she was looking at. He hadn’t moved since he’d crashed and had had to be revived.

Was this a seizure—

As she sat up, he moved his hand around—seemed to be lifting it up to try to look at it. And then the other side rose as well.

Ivie jumped off the bed and hit the anteroom so fast, she was a cartoon character of herself, capable of smashing through walls and leaving a cutout of her running body.

Struggling with the sterile gowns and headdresses, her hands fumbled and she dropped things and then couldn’t get her feet into the bootie bottoms of the damn suit.

When she finally broke the seal and heard the hiss of the higher pressure being released, she felt like she was too late or too…

“…Ivie…Ivie…dearest Ivie……”

Silas was moving his head back and forth, his arms starting to pinwheel, his legs pumping restlessly under the sheets.

“I’m here! I’m here!”

Her voice was muffled and tinted with an electronic whine as it came through the speaker on the head cover.

But he turned to her. And seemed to recoil.

She put her palms out. “No, no, it’s me, I promise. It’s me in here.”

Ivie patted the suit. And then she was holding his hand and looking into those amazing pale eyes of his through the mask. “Silas?”

His face was like a skeletal version of what it had once been, the bones threatening to break through his skin, his eyes sunken in their sockets, his cheeks drawn in. His skin was gray and dry, his black hair hidden by the cooling unit on his head. His arms were thin as twigs, the flesh hanging off them in loose folds from where his muscles had atrophied.

And as he met her stare and started to smile…he was the most beautiful male she had ever seen.

“Why?” He motioned with a floppy hand at her headgear.

“You’ve had a bone marrow transplant. We need to not get you infected with anything. This is…for your protection…”

At that point, she started weeping, and she honestly couldn’t have said why. As tears streamed down and her mask got fogged up, there was no parceling the emotion she felt; it was one giant ball of love and relief and fresh terror this was a brief resurgence that was going to fail.

“Bone…marrow…?”

His voice was so weak and raspy, she could barely hear it, but it was the best thing that had ever entered her ears.