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“Oh, God.”
Hard to know if that was a prayer to keep him awake and to believe in what he was hearing or if it was thanks to a higher power… or if it was just a pair of words that humans uttered when they don’t understand a shocking truth.
What he did understand? Down to his core?
Was the feel of his woman as he pulled her up onto the bed, onto him: Lydia was warm, and weighty, and very corporeal, and as his emotions overflowed and he began to shake, she held him fiercely. Because that’s what your partner did when you were splintering apart.
They held you together.
Squeezing his eyes closed, he couldn’t breathe—but this time, it was for a good reason. Gratitude flowed through him, and it was like an antiseptic to the sorrow he had carried for the last six months, cleaning him on the inside, scrubbing out the grief and terror and loss, the pain and side effects, the self-blame and the guilt over what he had put Lydia through.
“It’s okay,” she said hoarsely. “Just let it all out. I’ve got you.”
Pulling back, he touched her face and found himself thinking back to the moment they’d first met. With a vivid clarity that gave him hope his memory would indeed come back fully, he remembered being shown into her office at the Wolf Study Project. She had been wiping down her desk with Lysol, scrubbing at something like it was contaminated, like her elbow grease was going to save the world from whatever bacteria she was so worried about.
The instant she had looked up at him, she’d had him.
He’d refused to acknowledge this, of course, because he’d had a job to do, a mission to complete—and falling in love with a woman, who later turned out to be a wolf, while they ran from artificial intelligence mounted on Terminator chassis, as vampires rallied around them as allies, and some guy in a red robe, who was a romantic rival but turned out to be a friend, delivered a lifesaving drug packaged in an albino scorpion at the last minute to give them their future back…
“I mean, fucking hell,” he said. “You just can’t make this shit up.”
“What?” his Lydia asked.
“Never mind.” He started to smile. “I’m not going to question good fortune.”
“Neither will I.”
EPILOGUE
Three weeks later…
THIS IS WHATyou want?”
As Gus tossed out the question, he looked around the library’s collection of first editions and seriously questioned his buddy’s fiscal prudence. “Cathy’s giving the whole place away—and all you want is this sofa table?”
Daniel put his hand on the glossy top. “Yup. We’ll take this.”
“You sure you don’t want one of those?” Gus nodded out to the foyer. “I mean, those sculptures are… great. Well, they’re worth a bank, at any rate.”
On that note, the team of movers tilted a dolly and started rolling out one of the melted-cheese-marble lumps.
“We don’t have a lot of space in Eastwind’s old place. And you guys are already insisting we take an SUV.”
Gus refocused on the man, and maybe it was the doctor in him, maybe it was the researcher—probably it was just the human—but he couldn’t help but measure the change in the last thirty days.The height was the same. The dark hair, skin color, and the moles on the side of the throat and the jaw and that one on the temple were the same. Voice was the same.
No, it was stronger.
And yet for all that remained unchanged, it was a new man who stood in front of him. Daniel Joseph was a good thirty pounds heavier, and gaining every day. His balance was spot-on, his movements fluid and balanced, his body resuming a normal course of functioning. The improvement was even in his face, too, his cheeks flush with healthy blood flow and his smile ever-ready.
His eyes were different, though. For reasons that were not well understood, the pigment in his irises was draining out, the rings around his pupils so pale now, they were nearly indistinguishable from the sclera—
“There you guys are—Daniel, are you sure you just want that table?”
Gus’s body started to turn to the voice before he had a conscious thought that he wanted to look at his woman. But it was like that with Cathy. She was a destination for him even when his physical form wasn’t traveling. Part of it was everything they had been through with her looming illness, the touch-and-go and coming goodbye wiped off the board by a miracle he was still deconstructing on the science side.
He was going to figure that venom out, however. And then he was going to bring it to the world.
With Cathy. And Gunnar Rhobes, their new partner.
