Song glared at the woman, then he lost patience and bodily pushed her aside so he could press the front of his chest and face against the unbreakable one-way viewing glass that separated him from Violet. He could see her right there—so damned
close
—but he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t talk to her. God, he needed her so badly, and he could see she needed
him
. His pleasantly plump wife had disappeared; now Violet’s form had thinned out and her eyes were open, but she clearly wasn’t aware of him or anyone else; her pupils were half-dilated and glassy, heavy with drugs. Her arms lay limply at her sides and her waist, the bulge of pregnancy gone and covered by a sheet. Even so, he could still make out the lines that showed through the fabric, those of thick leather restraining straps around her wrists. Why did they have to do that? Unless—
“What about the baby?” he demanded suddenly.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Sharif,” the woman said. Her voice was bland, as though she were reciting a well-rehearsed litany, one she had practiced many times in her head in case the need arose. A well-rehearsed
lie
. “Your son was lost due to complications shortly after birth.” She didn’t blink, but he thought he saw her hold on the clipboard she was hugging tighten. It was a nearly imperceptible movement, a barely noticeable whiteness in her knuckles, but he had been a doctor for too long to miss that oh-so-rapid bit of body language.
He stared at her as the weight of her words rolled over him. Son? He and Violet had had a son? God—he’d never even been told, never even known that Violet had gone into labor. He should have been there with her, to hold her hand through the pain, to see the child come into the world, to hold him. If the boy had died, he and Violet should have been given the right to bury him, to name him and lay him to rest. They had plots, for God’s sake, a family mausoleum. And Violet had been so healthy—what kind of complications?
Without warning, Song jat yanked the clipboard out of the doctor’s stiff grasp and riffled through the medical charts on it, turning his back and shouldering her aside when she tried to grab at it from around his back. “Dr. Sharif—that is confidential medical information!” The tone of her voice had changed to desperation.
Confidential? Bullshit—this was his wife’s chart. And Song jat had been in the medical profession for decades anyway. He was
very
good at what he did, and he only needed a few seconds to scan the charts and find the information he wanted. When his gaze stopped on the words, it took another second, a strange sort of fast eternity, for their meaning to sink into his brain. Then he gasped.
“Fentanyl?” For a long, terrible moment, the stress of the truth he’d discovered made it impossible for him to make the connection between this one particular word and its consequences. He couldn’t recall what exactly the drug did, why they would give it to . . .
Of course he couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to.
But he knew.
Oh, God, he
knew.
“Fentanyl,” he repeated. He felt like he was moving through ice as he turned to face the other physician. She seemed to be paralyzed with fear as she stared at him with wide eyes. Her throat worked but no sound came out of her mouth. Where the skin on his face had previously been red from anger, now Song jat felt the blood drain away. His flesh went cold and he took a step toward her.
“Security!” she finally squawked. She stumbled backward, trying to stay out of his reach as he brought up the clipboard and shook it at her.
“You
euthanized
my son with Fentanyl!” Song jat was more than bellowing now, he was
screaming,
his lungs and body feeding the rage and hate he’d bottled up for so long.
“It’s not our policy!” the doctor shouted back at him. While she might have just been trying to be heard over his fury, raising her voice only fueled the fire in Violet’s husband. “It’s that new Office of Medicine and Politics! He was born with the disease—what kind of life would that have been?” Her voice rose another notch, climbing into screech range.
“Security!”
“Violet!” Dr. Sharif yelled suddenly. Still hanging on to the medical clipboard, he shoved the doctor aside when she tried again to take it from him, this time knocking her sideways hard enough to make her stagger against the wall. Then he was there, at the glass window,
and
using the clipboard to hammer wildly on its surface. “Violet—VIOLET!” In another five seconds, two burly security guards were grabbing him painfully by each of his arms and hauling him backward. The clipboard clattered to the floor and he still kept shouting—
“Violet! VIOLET!”
—but she didn’t hear him, she didn’t see him, she didn’t do
anything.
He kept his gaze pinned on her face as they pulled him away, trying to wait, trying to hope for some response, but there was nothing—
“Violet! Violet!”
She heard the voice from far away—farther away than anyone, human
or
vampire, had a right to hear, in fact, as though someone had implanted hearing aid amplifiers deep into her eardrums.
The voice was annoying, and she tried to ignore it. After all, she was cool and comfortable, and it was dark; it had been a long time since she hadn’t woken with a hundred nagging aches and pains from the constant physical battles, with the sting of God’s good sunlight trying to blister her oversensitive eyes. Such a very, very long time since she had been . . .
content.
But . . .
“Violet?”
. . . that voice, that damnable
noise.
It would not be ignored. It just kept nagging at her, on and on, worrying at her consciousness like one of those nasty, yappy little old-woman dogs that chews at the ankles of visitors. Against her will, her eyelids fluttered and tried to open, but she squeezed them tightly against the irritating noise.
“Violet!”
But that movement—the one, stupidly simple little act of using the muscles in her eyes and face—was the worst possible thing she could have done. It was her undoing, that dreaded straw that broke her iron will. It was the thing that forced blood to circulate and muscles to wake, that made sensation spread through the surface and subsurface of her skin until awareness crawled across her nerve endings edge to edge as though she were a giant spiderweb.
“Violet!”
There was no fighting it, no resisting. At last, she surrendered to her body and let her eyelids slowly open. There was a shadow across her vision, someone standing over her—a hazy figure who seemed vaguely familiar. That face . . .
“G-Garth . . .”
Her voice was a raspy whisper, like air being forced through a grate clogged with old debris. He stared down at her, his eyes wide and eager as he scanned her face and examined her pupils. He looked absurdly pleased. “Your recuperative powers are nothing short of amazing,” he said with a wide grin.
Violet blinked back at him. The edges of her eyelids and her lashes were crusty and slightly sticky, as though she’d been sleeping for a very long time. Her body felt stiff and cold, unwilling to move. None of it felt good, none of it felt like she would have expected. “Is this . . .?”
“Heaven?” Garth’s grin faded into a small, sad smile, but his eyes were bright and victorious. “No.” He inclined his head toward something to his left and Violet forced her own head to turn so she could see. The movement was grating, like making a wheel turn on ungreased gears, and there was pain in her head, intense enough to border on vicious. Still, her vision was finally clearing and she could just make out two wriggling forms on the floor—humans, bound and gagged and wearing Incendiary Team uniforms. The avenues of thought were stuck on foggy in her brain, but things were grudgingly beginning to sort themselves out . . . and she wasn’t very pleased with the results. “We very thoughtfully subbed in for the Incendiary Team,” Garth told her, then shrugged. Now his expression had morphed into an obviously pleased-with-himself grin.
“But . . .” Violet’s voice was still raspy, more like a croak; she cleared her throat and tried again. “I thought . . .”
“You were,” Garth said and nodded energetically. Feeling had returned to all her limbs and for the first time she registered that he was wearing a surgical outfit, full green scrubs and latex gloves that he now peeled off and tossed into a trash can she couldn’t see. “Your heart stopped three times,” he continued. “But four hours of surgery and . . .” He shrugged and lifted his chin almost arrogantly. “A lot of prayer, and we managed to save your life.”
She stared at him and wished vaguely that she could slap that satisfied look off his face only because it was so irritating. Then, as the full realization of what had happened went through her brain, she pushed up on her elbows and made herself sit up. Pain zinged through her scalp like a thousand nasty beestings. “You . . .” It took an immense effort just to swallow. “You
what?
” She managed to swing her legs over the side of the cot on which she was lying. When she found her footing, somehow Violet got herself in an upright position. “You stupid, stupid son of a
bitch!
” Fury rammed through her, but she wasn’t sure what was stronger—her rage or the monstrous ache in her head. She reached automatically for her hair and found it covered by a bandage, then she balled up her fists and tried to hit Garth. Surprised, he dodged out of the way. “I was
there!
” she cried. She flailed at him again, but her strength wasn’t there yet, she was still in too much pain to be effective; he avoided her next swing, then caught her by the wrists and let her rant. “I was fucking
there,
and you brought me back!”
Garth’s expression twisted into something she couldn’t read—pain, regret, she didn’t know what. He let go of her wrists and she grabbed him by the collar and pushed him backward, using her weight to slam him against the wall. She felt the vibration run through the incision in her scalp, and it was just another ugly, jolting reminder that she was still alive. Garth grunted as the breath got knocked out of his lungs, but he didn’t try to defend himself or push her away. “Why?” Violet demanded. “
Why?
Explain that to me!”
His blue eyes were wide and this close, Violet could see that now he was nearly crying. “Isn’t it—” he began, then shook his head as his voice choked. His voice was thick with anguish as he tried again. “Isn’t it
obvious?
”
She glared at him, eye to eye, then flushed and released her hold on his shirt. Her hands fell to her sides as she stepped back and her gaze on him changed into dismay. Dear God—
He was in love with her.
She and Garth faced each other outside the truck as she got ready to leave for the last time. He kept trying to meet her eyes, to pin her down with his pain-filled gaze, but Violet wouldn’t do it—she knew better. Instead, Violet looked to the left, to the right, at the ground, up at the beautiful, star-filled night sky. Seeing that sky was nearly as painful—it would have been better had it been full of clouds, heavy thunderclouds ready to spit lightning and spill cold, cold rain on them both. To stand beneath a sparkling blanket of heaven with a man, a good one, who loved her, but whose love she could never return—God, Violet would have rather gone through the pain of dying again. And really, that wasn’t so far off.
Finally, she gritted her teeth and let her eyes meet his. Instead of holding it, his gaze dropped to the meta-crystal he’d finally convinced her to wear; he reached over and touched it, and when Violet glanced downward, she saw that only the smallest sliver of white remained on one edge. Garth had performed a miracle in bringing her back, but even his miracle had its limitations.
“Violet,” Garth said hoarsely, “since you left with the boy, I’ve been working like crazy. Just like . . .
crazy.
” When she tried to glance away again, his fingers reached out and gently steered her face back to look at him. “What that kid wrote down . . . there’s something
there.
I can
see
it, and maybe if you just stuck around—”
She shook her head and looked away again, staring at the ground. She didn’t have to say the words for him to know that she would not be talked out of leaving. Not this time, not anytime. She’d lost too much, and she couldn’t rebuild this time. If she did . . . well, it was nothing but a never-ending cycle of loss. She couldn’t go through that again, even if she were able to survive.
Especially
if she could.
Garth’s fingers had been resting on her forearm, and now he let them slide down so he could grasp her hand. His fingers squeezed hers gently and she could feel the desperation in them, the
want.
“In all the time I’ve known you,” he said mournfully, “why won’t you ever let anyone
in?
”
This time Violet did meet his gaze, didn’t look away or try to downplay anything. “Because,” she said simply, “these moments, as beautiful as they are? They’re fucking evil when they’re
gone.
” She inhaled deeply, feeling the chilly air seep into her lungs and spread outward from there, like energy radiating from a power cell into a machine. She nodded at him, then eased her hand out of his and turned her back.
Without saying good-bye, Violet disappeared into the night.
It was a stupid, stupid thing, but it had never occurred to Violet that they would have told her husband she was dead.
In retrospect, she’d been an idiot. Of course they would have done that—he was like a bulldog when he set his mind to something, and it would have been the only thing that could have stopped him from hounding them about releasing her. It would have also, at least in his mind, if not justified that made him accept the reason they had killed their son. She could almost hear the lies they would have made up, perhaps about how she had been one of the alpha victims and the virus hadn’t strengthened itself fully yet, and so she had succumbed more easily, more
quickly
than the Hemophage victims who came later. He would have never dreamed that she could not only recover but escape the clutches of the ArchMinistry—