“Stay with me, Kate,” he said.

“I will,” I promised.

Chapter 12

THE MAGIC WAVE jolted me out of my sleep, the crushing headache a familiar agony by now. This one-night stand with my stroke had lasted way too long. The pain was intense but my thoughts were no longer jumbled. The current of the city had pushed me a few inches higher.

I opened my eyes to the morning light and saw Doolittle looking at me. Curran sat on the other bed.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for.” Doolittle rolled his chair close to me.

“Oh boy.”

“Leave, please,” Doolittle said.

Curran rose and took a step to me.

“Remember now,” Doolittle warned him. “We have an agreement. I’ll hold you to it.”

Curran stepped to my bed. His arms closed around me and he squeezed me to him. My bones groaned. His voice was a low growl. “I will wait for you. As long as it takes. Even if you never choose to come back. But it’s your choice.”

He let me go, turned, and marched out. Okay, then.

Doolittle regarded me with his dark eyes. “Your brain is very delicate. Think of your mind as a forest crisscrossed by many paths along which signals travel to your body. Some are clear, some become overgrown over time, but all have formed naturally. Right now these paths are damaged. I can use magic to restore them.”

I sensed a big “but” coming. “But?”

“Think of me as clear-cutting the paths by force instead of allowing the natural development to take place. I will do my absolute best, but my power is limited. The pathways I create won’t match the old pathways precisely. I have done this previously on four different occasions. I’ve restored function and, in one case, memories lost during an amnesia-inducing event; however, one of my patients had a drastic personality change and two others developed severe anxiety and reported episodes of depersonalization, during which they felt unable to control themselves, as if the events they experienced were happening to someone else. They felt disconnected from reality and disconnected from their memories. One of them improved over time. The other left her family and moved out of state. She had four children, a supportive husband, and elderly parents. Nobody has heard from her in over nine years.”

“You are a bucket of cheer, Doc.”

“There is an alternative,” Doolittle said. “You could let the healing take place gradually. There is a possibility that your brain will restore itself.”

“How big a possibility?”

“A significant possibility. The only reason you are alive and have regained some minor motor function is that immediately after the trauma that caused the strokes, the blood vessels in your brain sealed themselves. The process of healing had already started before you were ever brought to me. I believe that over time, with my help, you will recover most of what you lost.”

“How long would that take?”

“I don’t know.” Doolittle’s leaned forward. “But I’ve observed it happen.”

“How long did it take in the cases you observed?”

“Three years to complete recovery for one patient and fourteen months for the other.”

Three years.

“How long if you heal me now?”

“It will be miraculous,” Doolittle said. “You will walk out of here when I’m finished and no doubt run straight into another foolish fight.”

That was a given.

“I want you to know that you have a choice,” Doolittle said. “Curran is . . . Well, there is a reason we all followed him. When he wants something, he can be very persuasive.”

“You don’t say.”

“He will abide by your decision, I promise you that. His feelings, or anyone else’s feelings except your own, do not matter here. Only you can dictate the speed of your recovery. We don’t fully understand how the mind works, but everything within it is connected. There is no guarantee that after I mitigate the damage, you will experience the same emotions you once felt toward people in your life. Curran will wait for you.”

If Doolittle healed me, there was a chance I would no longer want to be me. How hard must it have been for Curran to walk out of this room and take that chance?

“He will take care of you and he won’t abandon you if you choose to take your time. Neither will Julie. I will always be here.”

There was only one thing I could say to that. “Thank you.”

He reached over and gently touched my hand. His stern medmage composure broke. “You shouldn’t have left the Keep. Look what happened.”