“Hi.”

  She pushed at her hair. The stuff had been burned off in places, and he worried about a raw patch on her cheek. It was at least a second degree, maybe a third degree’er.

  “You know something…” she murmured, “I’ve had a helluva day at the office.”

  He started to smile. “That’s what they make Coke for, honey, why do you think I drink it all the time?”

  When he reached up for her, she kneeled by him and rested against his chest like they had been together for years.

  Then again, they had been partners for three years, two months, eleven days…

  Gus checked his watch and said against her mouth, “And seventeen minutes.”

  He knew this because he had been counting on her.

  All along.

  FORTY-THREE

  YOU’RE AWAKE AGAIN.”

  As the condition report was presented to him, Daniel wasn’t so sure about that. But he knew who was talking to him. Then again, he could probably be dead and still recognize his Lydia’s voice.

  Opening his lids, he had a thought that he was tired of playing patient—but then all he saw was her smile. She was so blindingly beautiful, in a way that had nothing to do with how she looked. She was glowing from the inside—and by some miracle, he was still alive to be warmed by her.

  “You are”—he cleared his throat with a little cough—“a sight for sore eyes.”

  She started blinking away tears as she kissed him. Then she eased back, and he was able to orientate himself. He was in a hospital bed—but not in any of the ones he was familiar with down in the underground lab.

  “Where… are we?”

  “Cathy’s bedroom.”

  He rolled his eyes. “She’s changed her name again.”

  “This time it’s sticking—”

  “IsGusokay?” he asked in a rush.

  “Yes.” She stroked his face. “And Blade made it through as well. Gus had to operate on him in the middle of a battlefield in the foyer. But he’s doing well, and so is Xhex. She’s with him now. She hasn’t left his side, actually. She showed up at just the right time with just the right kind of friends.”

  Daniel frowned, and tried to piece things together properly. When that effort didn’t go far, it dawned on him that—

  “You’ve told me all this before, haven’t you.” As she nodded patiently, he remembered other things… explosions, escapes… “My memory’s sketchy.”

  “It’s okay. Gus says everything will come back, we just have to give it time.”

  Daniel took a deep breath. And then another. And braced himself for a coughing jag. When it didn’t come, he frowned.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Eight o’clock-ish.”

  “In the morning.”

  “No, at night.”

  “Oh. How long’s it been since the attack?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Oh,” he repeated.

  Glancing down at himself, he discovered that there was an IV in his other arm and beeping from somewhere behind him, all common things to him. He also had the joy of a catheter. But something was different.

  Lydia… was different. She was glowing in a new way, an aura of some kind of emotion he couldn’t remember her having before turning her face and her hazel eyes into something that seemed almost dreamlike.

  “What day is it?” he asked.

  “Thursday, December first.”

  All at once, he went to sit up. “What? That’s more than a couple of—how long have I been out of it?”

  She didn’t stop him from going vertical. She didn’t warn him to calm down. She didn’t call out for Gus or a nurse or another doctor.

  She just stared at him with those glowing eyes.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he said slowly.

  With a little laugh, she brushed away another round of tears. “Knock knock.”

  “Okay, now’s not the time for jokes, Lydia. I don’t get what the hell is going on—”

  “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there,” he snapped, aware he was being an impatient ass, but come on. After all the shit that had happened—like, fifteen fucking days ago—he was not in the mood for games.

  “Cancer free,” she said.

  “What?”

  Lydia took his hand again. “No, the proper response is ‘who.’ ”

  Daniel blinked. A couple of times. “Who… is cancer free.”

  “You.”

  In the quiet that followed, he tilted his head. “I’m sorry, what did you say…?”

  “Blade was right. Whatever is in that scorpion’s venom? It’s a cure. Gus is over the moon, and I guess he and Cathy are going to partner with some big pharmaceutical company down in Houston to develop the compound and figure out how to make it in a lab. That scorpion sting has a revolutionary, tumor-targeting chemical in it that starves cancer cells. They can’t access any energy, and anything that doesn’t have energy dies.”

  He took another deep breath. And another. Then put a hand over his chest.

  “It takes time,” she said gently. “But everything inside of you is reducing. They’ve been doing regular imaging up here—and the results are irrefutable. And guess what, Cathy took the venom five days ago. She’s having the same experience. They don’t know if it will work for all cancers, but for you two, it’s a miracle, and that means for other people, it will help as well.”

  “Cancer… free? Have you told me this before?”

  Lydia shook her head. And then laughed a little. “They told me to wait until you were further recovered, but I just can’t hold it in anymore. And I get the shock. It took me some time to get used to it, too. I can assure you, though, you’re cured.”

  “I don’t… understand. Am I dreaming?”

  Lydia shook her head again. “No. This is real—”

  “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 WHAT you 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.

  “Yup, only the table, he’s telling me.” Gus put his arm out to the side. “I tried to sell him on one of the sculptures, but it’s a no-go.”

  As she fit herself against him and looked up, he pulled her in for a kiss. Ten days after Daniel was stung, while the dust was still settling after the attack, Cathy had been stung. It had been ludicrous. No clinical controls other than him shitting bricks and being ready with all kinds of crash-cart/epinephrine support.

  Oh, wait. He’d swabbed her forearm with alcohol.

  He’d never forget her lying in that hospital bed, eyes locked on his, a peaceful expression on her face. She’d been rock solid. He’d been a mess as he’d held her hand while that man with the red robes had placed the scorpion on her skin. Right before the strike, two things had gone through Gus’s mind: One, that the foreigner with the accent and the calm surety was all that made him hang on to his emotions—and in this, he was seeing himself through the eyes of his patients: He’d been that guidepost for others so many times.

  Now a stranger he didn’t understand was it for him.

  The second thing he’d thought of was that this was how modern medicine had started, people using what was available in the environment to help themselves survive. The vetting had not been in a laboratory. It had been out in nature, the trial and error coming at a high cost when the dice roll went against you.

  “Where have you gone, Gus?”

  The soft words were punctuated with a stroke on his cheek, and he came back into his body. He’d been prone to fits of drift for the last month, his brain vacillating between trying to catalog what reality now looked like and flying off into all kinds of molecular chemistry. But again, he was going to figure out why the venom worked, and then he was going to synthesize it in the lab, and then he was…

  “Hi,” Cathy said as she waved her hand in front of his face. “You’re still gone.”

  Yes, he was. But one guaranteed anchor? Looking at her. She was like Daniel, refreshed with health, her cheeks flushed with good circulation, her lips a natural pink, her eyes also lively, and paling out like Daniel’s. Courtesy of not leaving the compound, her short blond hair was growing out, the roots showing dark, and she was trying to decide whether she was going to keep the light color or not—and wasn’t that a nice preoccupation. As she’d said, if all you had on your mind was what was growing out of your head? Life was—

  “Life is so good,” he murmured. “I get lost.”

  Cathy looked at Daniel and the pair of them shared the stare of survivors. Although her physical status hadn’t been anywhere near as declined as his, she had been braced for a long road into her grave—and the knowledge of that approaching descent had been a stressor that had aged and depleted her. With them both freed of that burden? Not just health had returned.

  “Anyway,” Daniel said. “Just this table, and thanks.”

  Gus pushed up the sleeves of his Army green M*A*S*H sweatshirt. “I’ll help you get it into the car.”

  They each took one end, and Gus did the backing out. As they crossed the foyer, Cathy ran forward and intercepted a pair of movers, pointing them to the back of the house so they didn’t forget something. Then she fell in step again.

  Outside, December’s icy night was a slap in the face, but the snow-covered landscape was an apology for the sting. The pristine drifts were like the abstract marble sculptures the movers were packing into the black-on-black eighteen-wheeler. No commercial company for Cathy. Even after all this time, Gus had no idea how she pulled so many dark-market things out of thin air, but she seemed to have access to some kind of billionaire’s Craigslist where everything was super discreet, no questions were asked, and service didn’t come with any smiles.

  As Gus humped the table out, there was no har-har, we’re-in-this-with-you-boys to the professionals. Hard to compare a four-legged with a little top to a polished frickin’ bolder, but there was a sense of satisfaction as he and Daniel stuffed the freebie into the back of the Suburban.

  As Daniel hit the button and the rear door automatically closed, the man jacked up his jeans. “So we’ll see you up on the mountain?”

  Gus checked his watch. “Yup. Gettin’ close. You ready?”

  “More than ever before in my life.”

  “Amen, brother.” The two clapped palms and jerked in for a clutch. “And then we’ll meet in Houston.”

  Daniel passed a palm over his short hair. “New Year’s Eve.”

  “The four of us.”

  “We’re looking forward to it. New phase.”

  Cathy came forward and the two murmured to each other. They were in a special club, one that didn’t necessarily exclude anybody else, but that had an inner circle of understanding that no one but survivors shared. Gus was glad for them. Miracles were great and all, but they didn’t go tabula rasa on shit. The past stalked each one of them, a panther in the shadows thrown by the bright light of hope and health and excitement for the future.

  Over time, maybe things would feel more solid. In the present, the slope they’d all ascended sure as hell felt slippery and gravity seemed very greedy.

  But sure as shit, they were grateful to be at the summit.

  Daniel opened the driver’s side door, gave them both a final wave, and got behind the wheel. After a flare of red taillights, the engine came to life, and the Suburban skirted the moving semitruck and trundled down the allée.

  “Come on,” Cathy said as she slipped an arm around him. “We have a wedding to get dressed for.”

  He looked down at his woman. “You’re really going to let me wear my Converse All Stars?”

  “It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t.”

  * * *

  Blade knew the moment that she was back on the mountain. He felt the disturbance in the molecules of the already brisk wind, even through the rock wall of the cave, and his only thought was…

  Please, no.

  Sitting on the bedding platform, he knew the reason she had come, but as he checked his watch, he saw that she was early—and he worried that he was going to have to congratulate her and pretend that he was fine. That everything had worked out as it should be. That the future was bright because it was assured, and optimism was the sun that outshone the moonlight.

  The reality was that he was sitting here in his red robing, like a young scolded for bad behavior, his hands twisting with torment in his lap.

  Because her hello was his goodbye.

  As the footfalls in the tight throat of the cave grew louder, his emotions got turned up even further in volume. For a male, and a symphath at that, he found the inner quaking very unpleasant, but when the center of the chest was affected, one had no choice except to ride the wave. The truism of “everywhere you go, there you are” was never more apt than when the wolven you loved was going to mate another—

  Blade jumped to his feet. “Oh, it’s… you.”

  As Xhex stepped into the open area, she crossed her arms and then eased into a lean on the cave’s granite wall. With her gun belt on, and the knife strapped to her thigh, she was as close to being in wedding attire as any fighter was willing to get.

  At least she was not in white, he thought with a surge of fondness.

  “Expecting someone else?” she murmured.

  But that wasn’t really a question. His sister knew who he’d thought it would be.

  “Here early for the festivities?” he asked. “Is your hellren with you?”

  “He’s on his way.” Those wise, gunmetal gray eyes dropped to the bag that was by the end of the bedding platform. “Going somewhere?”