Loud footsteps came down the stairs, and Sarah glanced through the hall to the see the male half of the couple shirtless and clearly worried … as he presented a nasty shoulder wound for the doctor’s inspection.

“Sarah? Will you look at me?”

Reflexively, she glanced at the commando—only to recoil at the intense expression on his face. At which point, from out of nowhere, a strange, piercing pain hit her temples, as if she’d eaten ice cream too fast—

“This is getting worse,” she heard the doctor say off in the distance.

Breaking eye contact with the commando—something that was strangely difficult to do, as if their stares had formed a tangible tie—Sarah leaned to the side and looked down the hall again. The doctor was palpating that shoulder—and before Sarah could help herself, she burst up and walked down to the two of them.

The doctor seemed surprised at the intrusion—and Sarah didn’t bother with reading anyone else’s expression. She was fascinated by the wound. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before—and jeez, talk about ugly. There was a blackened erosion of the first and second layers of skin along the edges of an infected area that extended from the top of the shoulder down onto the pectoral.

“Have you tried antibiotics?” Sarah asked. “What have you done so far to treat this?”

When they all stared at her and the commando came in from the kitchen, she glanced around at the group—which now included the girlfriend/wife who had come down the stairs.

“I’m sorry.” She took a step back and looked up at the patient. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m a molecular geneticist. I specialize in the immune system and I’m just curious about what’s going on here for you. Your body’s clearly fighting off something, and the researcher in me wants to know what it is and what you’re doing to help yourself?”

She was surprised when the man lifted his hands and signed, I was hurt fighting. We haven’t treated it with antibiotics because it’s not that kind of infection.

The girlfriend/wife cleared her throat. “He really doesn’t want to talk about this—”

Sarah signed back, What kind of infection is it?

Smart was sexy.

It was also incredibly inconvenient when you were trying to get into someone’s brain, take over their thoughts, erase their short-term memory … and send them back to the human world where they belonged.

Murhder had a lot of experience wiping memories and replacing them with different versions of events, but he’d never started the process and had his target break away from the mind control and latch onto something else so completely that their consciousness locked him out.

Hello, Sarah.

And P.S., he loved her name.

As she and John signed back and forth, Murhder was very aware he needed to get into her skull again, and not just finish the scrub job, but start the damn thing all over. Instead, he just stood there like a planker, enjoying the sight of her as she communicated with John, her hands flipping smoothly through positions.

Lot of nodding between the pair of them.

Then Sarah looked at the doctor known as Jane. “I don’t have to know the details of how it happened. I can respect his privacy. But I don’t understand what the infection is—any more than you all do, evidently. I have a feeling you are not going to take him to a medical center, and no, I am not going to make trouble for you guys.” She glanced around. “But I can help if you want someone who knows a helluva lot about immune response to take a stab at it.”

Xhex spoke up from the stairwell’s bottom step. “What kind of help?”

“I’m not going to lie,” Sarah replied. “I don’t have any treatments immediately in mind. But I don’t like to see patients in pain or scared about their future. I deal with cancer patients, and trust me, after having lost both my parents to that disease, I know too well how hard it is to be terrified about your health. I’m motivated by all that, but also the researcher in me is fascinated. I want to know what the tissue looks like under the microscope. I want to see what his white blood cells are doing. I want to go down to that cellular level and find out what’s happening. There’s no easy solution, of course. Immunotherapy is still new science and it’s not like there’s a magic pill or shot that I can recommend that will make him better. I would love to help, though, and it is my area of expertise.”

Murhder waited for the Brotherhood’s doctor to pump the brakes on the idea. Then he glanced at Xhex and figured she’d be shaking her head. Finally, he checked out John and expected him to no-thank-you the offer.

When none of that happened, he tried not to get excited. Failed.

And had to remind himself that ultimately it was not going to work. Sarah couldn’t stay in their world, and the longer she was involved with vampires, the more memories she gathered, and the more difficult and painful it was going to be to clean her out.

Short-term stuff was one thing. Long-term was a different story.

Sarah shrugged. “Besides, after tonight, I’m out of a job anyway. Likely out of a career when I come forward with what I know.”

The Brotherhood’s doctor spoke up. “What was your name? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch it.”

“Dr. Sarah Watkins.” She put her palm out. “As I said, I specialize in immunotherapy for cancer patients and I am about to have a lot of time on my hands.”

“I’m Jane.” The two shook hands. “Dr. Jane Whitcomb.”

“Pleased to meet you.” There was a long pause. “Do you mind if I make some phone calls first?”

Murhder stepped up. “Sarah? Look at me, please. Just for a moment.”

This time, without her incredible intellect distracted by the thing that interested it most, he found getting into her consciousness and staying there much easier.

Images rose from out of the depths of her memories, sunken boats floating to the surface of her own private sea. He saw a lot of a human man and guessed it was her fiancé—no surprise, he had an instant dislike of the guy. He also saw a lot of the inside of a laboratory not unlike the one they had infiltrated at the site. He further saw a simple house, with simple furnishings, and a bed that was messy only on one side.

He also caught the recollections of an FBI agent showing up on the doorstep of that simple house … and how she had made the man a coffee and sat down with him to answer questions about her dead fiancé.

Sarah had been unnerved by the whole thing.

Murhder slipped a patch over those memories associated with the FBI agent, effectively disappearing any mental trace of that visitor and his line of inquiry. Gone. As if she’d never met the man.

As he withdrew from her consciousness, she winced and rubbed her temples. “Does anyone have a Motrin? I’ve got a heck of a headache.”

“I’ll get you some,” Xhex said as she turned and went back up the stairs.

Murhder took a deep breath. “Sarah, exactly how open-minded are you?”

It wasn’t exactly a question.

More like a prayer of his.

As Doc Jane went off somewhere with her phone up to her ear and her voice at whisper level, and Murhder and the human researcher went back to the kitchen, John turned to the sofa and looked at the pretrans who was sitting under a quilt and watching everything with wide, exhausted eyes.

John lifted his palm at the kid.

“Hi,” the boy said back. “You don’t talk?”

John shook his head and went over to a rocking chair. When he sat down, the thing creaked like it might lose its structural integrity under his weight, but somehow the antique managed to hold him.

“What happened to your voice?” the young asked. “Were you hurt?”

John shook his head and then shrugged.

“You were born like that and you don’t know why.” When John nodded, the kid seemed sad. “I’m sorry.”

John shrugged again and put up his palms, all what-can-you-do. Then he pointed into the other room, to Doc Jane, and gave the boy a thumbs-up.

“You trust her?” John put his hand over his heart, closed his eyes, and nodded. “You trust her with your life.”

John gave the a-okay sign. Then pointed to the kid and made the a-okay sign.

“You think I’m going to be all right?”

John nodded, made the cross in front of his chest, and then pointed his finger like a gun, put it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

The young smiled. “Cross your heart, hope to die.”

John jammed a thumb toward his eyeball.

“Stick a finger in your eye.”

John made the a-okay sign again.

The boy got serious. “I knew my mahmen was dead. Last night, I was asleep in the cage, and all of a sudden, I felt someone shake me awake. As I sat up … I felt like she was sitting next to me, the way it used to be, the two of us together. It made me miss her so much. And then the feeling went away. It was like she visited me on her way unto the Fade.”

John nodded and put his hand over his heart, rubbing.

“Thanks. I appreciate that.” When John nodded again, the young took a deep breath. “I told the doctor what the last month has been like. The humans at the lab, they were getting excited because my readings are all messed up. My mahmen, she told me if I lived this long that I had to watch for signs that my change was coming. She also told me that I had to get out of that lab before the transition hit. The humans weren’t going to know what to do to get me through it.”

John shook his head. Then he exposed his watch, tapped it, and pointed at the young.

“How old am I? I’m twenty. Or at least I think I am that old. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I count the years correctly. It’s kind of messed up in my head. My mahmen, she told me I’d go through the change at about twenty-five, but that stress could add or subtract from that.”

John let the kid talk it all out and decided that one good thing about being mute was that he was able to give people a lot of space to share what was going on for them. And the more the kid chatted to him, the more he returned to his own past, to when he’d been scrawny and living in that rat hole, calling the Suicide Prevention Hotline, praying for Mary’s voice on the other line.