No wonder the Food and Drug Administration had such stringent rules about drug trials. What they were about to do to him was nuts—and would never happen to a human. Yet … even as she thought that, she had to consider the courageous cancer patients who volunteered to take the drugs she and her colleagues developed in the immunotherapy field. This was no different.

Except Murhder was not the sick one.

“It’s going to be fine,” Murhder said. “It’s all going to turn out exactly as it needs to.”

Sarah threw her arms around him and held him tight. As she put her head over his heart, she considered how she was going to feel if this test killed him: Like a murderer.

“I’m going to be fine.”

She looked up at his chin and didn’t want to say what she was thinking: You don’t know that.

“Trust me,” he said. “And wait, there’s something I want to give you.”

He eased back and reached up behind his neck. When he brought his hands forward again, the necklace he always wore dangled behind his fingertips.

“I want to give you this,” he murmured as he tied it onto her.

The quartz gleamed in the midst of the leather crisscrosses that kept it in place, hanging much lower on her than it did on him. As she picked up the stone, she looked down—

Sarah recoiled and stared up at him. “It’s a painting of you.”

“What?”

“See?” She turned the flat stone to him. “Your face.”

Murhder leaned in and stared at the thing. And then a smile, slow and sad, pulled at his lips. “That is me. And when I wore it … it showed me you.”

“What?”

He tucked the necklace inside the scrubs’ top. “It’s a little piece of magic to take with you after all this.”

“But what about my memories?”

“It will be a special souvenir that you were given by a mysterious man you never got to know. Every time you look at it though … your mind will tell you that you are loved.”

Sarah grasped the thing through the scrubs.

“Come on.” He held open the door. “Let’s do this.”

She was numb as she went down the corridor with him, and only snapped out of the dissociative state when they entered the operating room. Ehlena, Doc Jane, and their medical partner, Manny, were there, and the facilities were ready, the hospital bed under the brilliant fixture in the center of the room surrounded by monitoring equipment.

Murhder greeted the medical staff. Got up on the bed. Stretched out.

He had on scrub bottoms and a muscle shirt. When Jane suggested his chest should be bare, he sat up and peeled off the top.

Sarah went over to the bed and picked up the folded sheet that was under his ankles. Shaking it out, she draped his lower legs in it. Then she took his hand.

“The compounding is done?” she said to Jane, who nodded. “Okay, let’s get a line in, the EKG set up, and the blood pressure cuff on. Ehlena, you’re ready for the blood draws?” As the nurse nodded, Jane addressed Murhder, stroking his hand with her thumb. “We’re going to give you a series of injections and monitor your body’s response between each one. We want to see what your immune system does, but we have to be careful not to give you pancreatitis.”

Or worse.

“I trust you,” he said as he stared up at her.

He was so calm. So at peace.

When they’d been resting after their marathon sex session in the shower, he’d told her that if something happened to him, he’d requested that Xhex be the one to take her back to Ithaca and deal with her memories. He’d said he trusted the female. He’d also sworn that Sarah would be watched over for a while, just to make sure there was no fallout from the BioMed raid even with the corporation going under.

As she contemplated his contingency plan, she found it ironic as hell that she hoped he himself was the one who robbed her of her memories and their relationship.

Yay. What an upside.

I love you, he mouthed as he looked at her.

“I love you, too,” she said as the medical staff began to hook him up to the machines that would tell them whether or not he was dying.

As she contemplated the lulls between doses being administered, Sarah truly wished she was religious, because prayer seemed like the only way she could help affect the outcome. But that was nuts.

Squeezing his hand one more time, she touched the necklace he had given her and nodded at the medical staff. “Let’s begin.”

Murhder turned his head to the side so he could watch what was happening on his arm. The needle they inserted into a vein at the crook of his elbow was very small, just a sliver of metal that bit delicately into his flesh. After the thing was taped into place, tubing that ran up to a bag suspended on a pole was hooked on.

“I taste salt in my mouth,” he said after a minute.

“It’s the saline.” Sarah smiled a little. But the lift to her lips didn’t last. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

She took a syringe out from behind her back and inserted it into a break in the IV tubing. As the plunger found home and the drugs went in, he felt nothing. Tasted nothing new. Took a deep breath.

It turned out he’d braced for naught. After twenty minutes, they took a sample of his blood from another port they’d put in his opposite arm. Behind him, a subtle beeping noise, tied to the compressions of his heart muscle no doubt, was a metronome without a symphony. Just beep … beep … beep …

His back became stiff as he lay on the flat surface—no doubt everything he had done in the shower with Sarah had activated muscles that hadn’t been used in a very long while. He wanted to turn on his side, but that was a no-go.

“Let’s increase the dosage.”

Sarah gave him more of the somatropin, as she called it, and he cleared his throat, like he was getting ready to give a speech. Sing contralto in an opera. Recite something by Robert Burns.

More waiting. From time to time, he looked over at the two physicians, the human man with the intense eyes and the female with the short blond hair. The latter had a strange scent—nothing unpleasant, but not really something that was a vampire, either. Curious, the case of this Doc Jane. She wasn’t a vampire, but neither did she read as Homo sapiens. He wasn’t going to ask for details, however. It was rude and none of his business.

More testing. A third dose. More waiting. More testing again.

And then a knock on the door. The human man went over, cracked things only an inch or two and spoke to someone softly. Then he went over to Doc Jane. When she nodded, he approached the bed.

“John and Xhex are outside. They want to come in and pay their respects if that’s okay with you?”

“I’m not dead yet, you know.” Murhder smiled. “Let’s not plan my …”

Funeral, he thought. The word was “funeral.”

For some reason, he couldn’t get the syllables out. He tried again, forcing his mouth to move while he pushed air up his throat and through his voice box.

Dimly, he was aware that that metronome tied to his heart rate had sped up suddenly, the sound it released more like beepbeepbeepbeepbeeeeeeeepbeep. And right after his brain registered that increase in intensity on a strange kind of delay, a wave of heat flooded his arms and legs: Starting at his fingertips and toes, the blaze rode his limbs as if they were the wicks for dynamite sticks … like somebody had put a match to his extremities and the TNT they were charged to ignite was stored in his torso.

His body jerked up from the table. Fell back.

So much thrashing came next.

The human man raced over and threw his heavy weight across Murhder’s seizing muscular load, and straps, black and wide and linked around the table, were added before the doctor could remove himself.

A ring of fire.

Murhder was consumed in a ring of fire.

His last conscious thought was that he should focus on his Sarah. But it was too late for any kind of coordinated anything. He was riding a bucking bronco … and holding on for dear life.

Sarah wanted to get in there. Do something to ease Murhder’s pain. Give him chest compressions—even though he wasn’t in the kind of cardiac distress that would benefit from that kind of thing.

And that last impulse was why she needed to hang back. Scientists who studied the immune system were not medical doctors, even if they had an MD after their names courtesy of their joint degree program back at uni.

And as for the cardiac arrest, she feared it was a case of “not yet.” That heart monitor was practically tap dancing.

Sinking back against the wall, she covered her mouth in her hand and gripped his necklace with the other. Murhder was pulling against the arm restraints, great veins snaking down into his clenched hands and standing out in stark relief under his skin. His neck was the same as his head craned up off the pillow, the cords on either side like ropes pulled taut in the effort of securing a vessel against violent seas. Under the sheet she had pulled up over his legs, he was kicking and not getting far with it, the restraints down there keeping him on the table.

Jane shouted something. Ehlena rushed over with a syringe. Dr. Manello looked at Sarah.

“We need to stop. Right now. We can’t take him any further without risking damage.”

“I agree—”

“No!”

They all turned to the word that exploded out of their patient. Murhder’s eyes were wide open and locked on Sarah. Through gritted teeth, he let out a growl of pain.

And then he said, “You keep going. You keep going … you keep … going.”

The force of his will had a physical impact on her, sure as if he had stood up off the bed and rushed at her.

“You don’t stop this, Sarah …”

His face was beet red, sweat beading on his brow, his jaw so tight, it seemed like it was going to snap free the tethers of its joints.

“Last … thing … I do.”

Sarah looked deeply into his peach eyes, searching for the right thing to do. But then she knew that any calculation of hers was wrong. The choice had been, and was, his to make.