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Daniel’s mission had been to destroy C.P. Phalen’s secret facility, but instead of getting to that goal, he had become a patient in it—and, for a time, the first person intended to test Vita-12b. But after so many conventional treatments had failed? Who needed another medication gauntlet, especially one that had never been in a human before.
Gus St. Claire had understood that, even better than Lydia had. The man had devoted his life’s work to trying to help patients like Daniel, as well as family members and loved ones like her, who were suffering alongside.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.
“If there was something, anything else,” Daniel muttered, “I’d be pursuing it. Especially because Gus may already be dead. But that man believed inmiracles, and there are times you have to engineer your own.”
Lydia looked over her shoulder. Her man seemed so frail as he lay there, his heavy-lidded eyes bloodshot, those too-bright cheeks now making her worried he had a fever—except surely all those medical degrees in white coats had checked that?
Had she seen them take his temperature?
God, she was tired of playing nurse.
On that note, if she left Daniel to go on some wild-goose chase, and he had an acute event—which they had been warned could happen at any moment either because of all the treatments he’d had or because of the fucking cancer—she would never forgive herself.
But if she didn’t go up the mountain and try to find Blade, she’d feel responsible for Gus’s death. Or at least complicit in it. And she would never forgive herself.
As she teetered, she heard Gus’s voice:
Call me anytime, my phone is always on.
The words came to her through the dualities of her exhaustion and panic—she couldn’t count the number of times he’d said that to them. And he’d meant it, too. The other thing that he’d always said?
Why didn’t you call me if you were this worried?
He had always put his patients first—
The coughing spell started as they all did, a little throat-clear that Daniel tried to hide. But like themost recent ones, the spasms in his lungs were a deadly locomotive that refused to be slowed down or derailed.
The hacking brought him up off the pillows, his hands punching into the mattress as he jacked himself forward and bent his knees to triangulate into a pose that gave his poor lungs the best chance to inhale fully. Desperate to breathe, his mouth opened wide and his eyes bulged as sweat broke out across his chest and forehead, his flush an ugly purple as he desperately attempted to haul oxygen in.
She grabbed a towel on the way to him, yanking it off the top of the bureau. Idiotically, she noted it was still damp from when they’d showered together earlier—
Too late. The blood speckles, bright as ink, marked up the covers underneath him.
As he grabbed the terrycloth, she lunged for the bedside table, knocking bottles of pills onto the floor as she went for the inhaler. Shoving it into his open mouth, she pushed hard on the cylinder, but he couldn’t breathe anything in—
“Work with me,” she said. “Calm yourself—work with me—”
Lydia had no idea what she was saying. No clue whether the medicine was getting into his bronchial tubes. No prayer left to offer up to anything or anybody. With tears spearing into her eyes, andher own chest turning into a block of ice-cold terror, she couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t live like this for one more day, one more night. She couldn’t bear to hear the staccato, snare drum beat of the cough—
The tide began to turn subtly, a little more air getting down and carrying the spray into Daniel’s throat. Then the coughing took a pause of a second. Then two. Then three… seconds.
“One more,” she said over the wheezing as she punched the top of the cylinder again. Even though she’d been told to only give him a single dose in a rescue situation.
Like anything had gotten into him, though?
When Daniel finally sagged in relief, his head dropping between his knobby knees, her own legs went out from under her and she sank down onto the floor at his bedside. With shaking hands, he moved the towel away from his lips.
There was so much red on it, the thing looked like it had been died.
Dyed, she corrected.
“I’m calling the doctors back to us,” she said as she reached for the phone. “Right now—”
Daniel grabbed her arm. Desperate eyes locked on her own. “Find Blade. Help Gus. It’s what he would do for you and me.”
SIX
