As she caught her last glimpse of him, Ari’s vision doubled…then trebled and she realized she was crying.
Liv seemed to notice it at the same time because she steered Ari into a small room and helped her sit on an exam table covered in a soft, blue drape.
“It’s all right now, honey,” she told Ari in a low voice. “We’re in private now—just let it out.”
The way the nice nurse was helping her hide her grief reminded Ari of Lathe holding her in the Rec Yard, shielding her from the eyes of the other inmates as she sobbed her heart out. His strong arms around her…the warm fragrance of his skin…the low soothing words he’d used to comfort her…
And now he’s gone, she thought desolately. Gone and I’ll never see him again. Ever.
It was all too much. Ari collapsed on the table, sobbing as if her heart would break—as if it was already broken and there was no mending it ever again.
Lathe’s heart was sore and proud as he made himself walk away from her. He told himself he was giving Ari what she wanted—her life back. Now she could go back to Phobos with her brother and never think of him again.
As he intended to never think about her.
Liar, whispered a little voice in his head. Even now you can’t get her out of your mind.
He tried but he couldn’t seem to put Ari’s stricken face out of his mind. Still, he was sure he would forget her in time. And despite her words, Ari was probably already on her way to forgetting him.
After all, she had never really loved him the way he had foolishly allowed himself to love her.
I was a means to an end, Lathe told himself. Protection from Tapper and the other violent inmates…a way to rescue her brother…a way to get out of BleakHall. That was all I ever was to her.
Of course some of that might be slightly unfair—after all, Ari hadn’t known that he had a way out of the prison until he told her. So she couldn’t have been using him as a means of escape.
Well she used me enough, Lathe argued with himself angrily. She got me to fall in love with her and let me believe she was something she wasn’t. Just like Talsa did! And besides she doesn’t love me—she never did.
Feeling justified, he left the med center for his own suite. He had much to tell Commander Sylvan and plenty of incriminating vid-feed stored in his prison ID tag but that could all wait. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d had a decent night’s sleep and he intended to get one now…and then get back to his normal life as soon as possible.
A life that didn’t include Ari.
Forty-Six
“It’s all right, honey—just let it out. It’s okay.” Liv stood by the sobbing girl and rubbed her trembling back and shaking shoulders, feeling helpless. Poor little thing—Liv really didn’t know her but she seemed completely heartbroken.
Was this all about Doctor Lathe? He had always impressed Liv as withdrawn and somewhat aloof but extremely competent. Thanks to his unique gift as a Cure-All, he had a one hundred percent success rate with his patients. But he didn’t lean on his natural abilities too heavily—he was also one of the most knowledgeable physicians Liv knew. In fact, aside from Sylvan and Yipper, the little Tolleg surgeon who lived aboard the Mother Ship, she couldn’t name another doctor she trusted more.
He also would have been the guy she would think was least likely to have a tortured romance. But if the girl sobbing her heart out on the exam table was any indication, he had certainly gone out of his way to break character.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked Ari when the girl finally seemed to have sobbed herself out.
“N-no. Not…not right now, anyway.” Ari looked up at her with wet, wounded eyes. “It’s still too…too fresh. But is there any way…” She hesitated for a moment.
“What is it, hon?” Liv urged her. “Go on—ask for anything you need and I’ll do my best to get it for you.”
“I just…I’d really like a shower,” Ari said in a small voice. “I just went through a long dirty tunnel to get out of a prison where I was afraid to do more than wash in the sink.” She looked at her fingernails which did appear to be full of dirt. “I feel so grimy.”
“Of course you can have a shower,” Liv told her. “You’re in luck—I believe this is one of the exam rooms with a full bathroom in it. Come on.”
She helped Ari off the table and led her to the small bathroom with its sink, toilet, and shower stall. After showing her how to work the Kindred appliances, and making sure she was steady on her feet, Liv left, leaving the door cracked open behind her just in case Ari needed anything else.
As she came out of the bathroom, there was a knock on the door and a familiar voice said, “Lilenta? You in there?”
“Right here.” Liv drew the privacy curtain, blocking the bathroom from view and went to the door. “Is everything okay?” she asked when she opened it and saw her husband’s wide, golden eyes.
“Fine. It’s just…Sylvan wanted to see you.”
Baird stepped back, revealing Sylvan, who was waiting behind him with a troubled look on his face.
“Oh, hi, Sylvan,” Liv said. “If you’re wondering about the patients from Dr. Lathe’s ship, I put the two males in exam rooms six and seven for Dr. Brike to examine and I have the girl, Lady Arianna, here with me. I just…”
But her words trailed off when Sylvan came up to her and took her by the shoulders. He leaned down, peering into Liv’s eyes, seeming almost to examine her for some reason. Then he shocked her completely by giving her a crushing hug.
“Sylvan?” she gasped, barely able to breathe in the big Blood Kindred’s embrace. Sylvan was a wonderful brother-in-law and an excellent doctor but he wasn’t usually this demonstrative. Also, there was a kind of unwritten rule that mated Kindred didn’t touch women other than their wives. If they did, the woman’s husband was likely to get very upset. But Baird just stood there watching with solemn eyes as Sylvan embraced her.
At last he released her and Liv could breathe again.
“What was that for?” she asked, looking up at him, wide-eyed.
“I’m just…so glad that you’re all right, kin-of-my-mate.” Sylvan’s pale blue eyes were suspiciously bright and his deep voice was slightly choked.
“I don’t understand.” Liv shook her head. “What in the world is going on?” She looked first at Sylvan and then at Baird. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.
“Tell you later, Lilenta when we know more about it,” her husband rumbled. “For now—”
But then the three of them heard a gasp and a clatter followed by an audible thump from the bathroom.
Forty-Seven
Ari swam back to consciousness to see three pairs of worried-looking eyes bending over her. One pair was silvery-gray—those belonged to the nice nurse called Liv, she was sure. The second pair of eyes was pale, wintry blue. And the third pair was pure gold and looked almost animalistic.
She blinked up at them, realizing as she did so that she was wet and naked except for a large towel someone had wrapped around her. She was also back on the exam table, she saw as she looked around.
“She’s coming around,” Liv said to the man—no, Kindred—he has to be Kindred, Ari thought—with the pale blue eyes. “Maybe she just fainted from exhaustion.”
“Or hunger,” said the Kindred with pale blue eyes. Wasn’t he the one Lathe had called on the viewscreen during their ride to the Mother Ship? Ari tried to place him. Commander Sliver? Commander Sylpan? What had Lathe called him?
“Uh, I hate to contradict you two since you’re in the medical field and I’m not,” the other Kindred—the one with the bright gold eyes—rumbled. “But what about that? Do you think it could have anything to do with why she fell out?”
He was pointing at her, Ari saw. Pointing at the side of her neck, right under her ear. As soon as she realized that, she felt a dull throb of pain coming from that area.
That’s where it hurts, she thought groggily. I touched it in the shower and it hur
t so much everything went black. What is it?
“Oh my God, what is that?” Liv echoed her thoughts, a worried look on her pretty face. “I didn’t notice it before because of her hair but now I can’t unsee it.”
“It looks infected.” Commander Sylvan—that was his name, Ari remembered suddenly—sounded grim. “I’ll have to clean it out and then we’ll need a biopsy.”
He started to reach for Ari but she jerked away from his hand instinctively.
“No,” she begged faintly. “No, please. It hurts…hurts so much. Please, don’t…don’t touch.”
“Olivia, please get me a sedative,” Commander Sylvan said. “And a numbing agent as well.”
“Right away.” Liv bustled away and was back in a moment. “All right,” she said to Ari. “This is only going to sting for a minute and then you won’t feel anything at all.”
Something sharp pricked Ari’s arm before she could protest and then she found herself floating off again.
She had strange dreams while she was under—a number of people came into the exam room. Commander Sylvan worked on the side of her neck with a sharp looking instrument. Liv the nice nurse held a little blue basin for him and when he was done, the basin was filled with some kind of blackish, oozing liquid that, even in her half-conscious state, Ari thought looked disgusting.
As they worked, they talked.
“…some kind of poison.”
“…never seen corruption this advanced on a patient who was still mobile. No wonder she fainted.”
“…eaten through several layers of tissue. I’m afraid it’s quite close to some very important blood vessels.”
Ari didn’t think they knew she could hear them or they wouldn’t have spoken so freely. The things they were saying probably would have frightened her if she could have felt frightened. But just at the moment, she seemed to be floating on a cloud, utterly weightless and she couldn’t make herself feel any emotions at all—not even about Lathe when she thought of him.
All right, that wasn’t exactly true—she did still feel a dim sense of sadness and loss when she thought of the big Kindred and she had a vague idea that these cloudy emotions would solidify into something truly awful if she wasn’t floating.
But that was something she would have to deal with in the future, when whatever it was they had given her had finally worn off. For now she could only lay inert on the exam table and let herself be worked on.
“All right,” she heard someone say after what seemed like a long time…and no time at all. “I think she’s stable. It should be safe to let her sleep.”
There was a faint pressure in her arm and everything slowly faded to black.
When she woke up again, there was another strange person staring at her. He had long floppy ears and big, soulful brown eyes. He looked like some kind of animal to Ari but there was definite humanoid intelligence in his gaze. He was looking under the bulky pad of white bandages someone had placed on the side of her neck and shaking his head doubtfully.
“This is very bad. Yes it is, yes it is!” he told Liv in a high, piping voice.
“I know, Yipper.” Liv looked worried. “Is there anything you can do? Sylvan says he’s out of options.”
“I will have to think. Yes I will, yes I will.” The little man? person? looked upset. “What kind of poison was it?”
“We don’t know. But look…her eyelids are fluttering. Lady Arianna?” Liv called, putting a hand on Ari’s arm. “Honey, can you hear me?”
“Just…Ari,” Ari croaked through dry lips. “So…thirsty.”
“Oh, of course. Here—do you want to sit up? I have some water.”
“Yes… please,” Ari whispered.
Liv raised up the bed she was in, getting her into a sitting position and then helped her sip some water. Ari felt about a hundred percent better afterwards although the side of her neck was still strangely numb.
“What happened to me?” she asked Liv, feeling much more able to talk now that her mouth wasn’t so dry. “All I remember is feeling an awful pain in my neck and falling down in the shower.”
“Yes, you gave us quite a scare. I never should have left you alone.” Liv looked remorseful. “I should have seen that you had something wrong with your neck too.”
“I do?” Ari put a hand to the side of her neck instinctively. “I mean, I knew it hurt and it was bleeding when I was in the hole—it almost got me eaten by Lashers. If I hadn’t let the Beast out of his cell—”
“Whoa—hold on.” Liv put up a hand to stop her. “I want to hear the whole story—it sounds fascinating. But first I need to know how you hurt your neck in the first place. Did you cut yourself on a piece of rusty metal or—”
“Rusty metal? No…no, it wasn’t rusty.” Ari swallowed hard, remembering the bright silver glitter of Tapper’s blade as he held it under her ear. What the hell had been on that knife?
“I got it from a poisoner,” she remembered him saying. “It’s deadly, it is.”
At the time Ari had thought nothing of his words—she’d been too busy trying to stay alive. But now they came back to her with sick clarity. Was Tapper going to reach out from beyond the grave and kill her after all?
“I…I got poked with a knife,” she whispered, looking down at her hands. “By a man who wanted to rape me. But Lathe…he stopped him.”
“Oh, honey…” Liv squeezed her hand consolingly. “I’m so sorry. But…do you know if there was something on the blade? Or maybe you got something—some germ from the prison—in the cut afterward?”
“I don’t know.” Ari shook her head. “He said…the man who was trying to…to…” She took a deep breath, trying not to feel Tapper’s hot, rancid breath on her cheek again…trying not to hear his screams as Lathe fed him feet-first into the meat grinder. “He said he got the knife from a poisoner on…I think he said on Chathm Prime. He said…” She grimaced. “He said it was deadly.”
“Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is bad news. Yes it is, yes it is.” The little person whom Liv had called, “Yipper” was shaking his head again, his long ears flopping. “The Chathm system is known for its deadly poisons,” he said, sounding both worried and sorrowful. “Now I am quite certain—there will have to be considerable excision and restructuring.”
“What?” Ari demanded. “What does that even mean?”
“Lady Arianna…Ari…” Liv squeezed her hand harder. “I’m afraid you had a malignant cyst on your neck. By the time Doctor Sylvan got to it, it was…well, it was pretty big.”
“How big?” Ari felt a sick kind of curiosity. It was almost like they were talking about someone else entirely—someone who had nothing to do with her.
“About like this.” Liv held up a closed fist. “It was black, too. That’s why I didn’t see it right away—it blended right in with your hair.”
“Black?” Ari had a vague memory of the Kindred Doctor working on her neck and Liv holding a little blue pan filled with goopy, vile-looking black liquid.
“It’s all cleaned out now,” Liv hastened to assure her. “But I’m afraid the effects of whatever poison you were given have spread. And if we don’t do something very soon, they’re going to spread even more.”
“I can excise from here…” Yipper poked a spot just above the top of Ari’s ear and then drew an imaginary line down to just above her collar bone. “To here. And apply a prosthetic. Yes I can, yes I can. I will try to make it as natural looking as I can—especially the ear.”
“But what about the blood vessels?” Liv asked anxiously. “Sylvan said her jugular and carotid are both affected.”
“I can build her new ones. Yes I can, yes I can.” Yipper nodded his head, his long ears flopping. “It won’t be easy but—”
“All new blood vessels, a fake ear, and you want to make the whole side of my neck a prosthesis?” Ari interrupted, feeling panicked. “Are you sure that’s my only option? Has anybody asked Lathe what he thinks? He’s a really good doctor too, righ
t?”
“Well…no, nobody has asked him,” Liv said carefully. “But I think Doctor Sylvan believed the corruption from the poison is too far advanced—”
“It might not be though. It might not, it might not!” Yipper exclaimed excitedly. “I don’t know why I didn’t remember the Cure-All. Maybe because he has been gone for so long from the Mother Ship. But one bite from him—”
“No, wait—I changed my mind,” Ari said hastily. She well-remembered the cold expression in Lathe’s eyes the last time he had looked at her, as well as the way his bite made her feel. She couldn’t bear to have pleasure from him that way knowing that he felt nothing for her. It would kill something inside her—something that was already almost dead.
“Why not, honey?” Liv asked. “If Yipper thinks there’s a chance—”
“I don’t want him to think I’m just using him, all right?” Ari burst out. “That’s what he already thinks—that I was only with him in BleakHall because he could protect me. But I didn’t mean to do that—I wasn’t faking how I felt. I was just so afraid almost every single minute…”
She tried to swallow past the lump in her throat and felt tears stinging her eyes as she struggled to continue.
“So many awful things almost happened to me and Lathe kept talking about how he hated liars and I was afraid if I told him what I really was he would hate me too and throw me out of his cell. And then he found out when Tapper tried to…to rape me and he was so angry…”
She choked up, unable to help it. The events of the past week seemed like a nightmare to her now—a nightmare that was still somehow going on even though she had finally gotten to safety.
Liv rubbed her arm comfortingly.
“Listen, Yipper, I think you’d better go so Ari and I can talk,” she said to the little surgeon. “I’ll let you know what she decides soon.”
“Very well but don’t wait too long, please.” Yipper’s big brown eyes were worried. “The corruption is halted for now, yes it is, yes it is. But there is only so much we can do to stop it and it will continue to grow if the area is not healed or excised.”
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