“Lonely,” Sloane said. He lifted his gaze to hers. “What’s it like, being unable to help your son survive?”
Sam’s throat tightened so much that she could scarcely take a breath. “It’s hell,” she admitted. “It casts everything into doubt and leaves you second-guessing every decision.” She turned her mug on the counter. “Did you know about Nathaniel from the very start?”
Sloane leaned his hip against the counter. “I knew you were hurting. When I found the picture, I recognized him. That smile could light the universe.”
“Yes,” Sam agreed. “It lit mine.”
Sloane’s voice softened in a way that made her want to fling herself into his arms. “I’m sorry, Sam. No parent should have to go through that.”
“No, they shouldn’t.”
They stood there for a long moment, and Sam found it hard to take a breath. She ached for the loss of Nathaniel all over again, and for all the other failures of her life. “Wish you were here,” she said, quoting the last note from her son. Her fingers were tangling in the chain of the necklace. “I’m never there, you know.”
“I suspect every working mom says that.”
“No, I’m never there,” Sam corrected, her anger turned on herself now, where it belonged. “I always think I’m making the right choice, and it never quite works out. I’m always sure of how things are, then find out that I’m wrong. I know things are impossible, but then they happen.” She lifted her head to find Sloane watching her closely. “I thought my mom would always be there, and even when she died, I thought my father would always be there. That’s stupid.”
“That’s optimism and trust.”
“It’s illogical.” Sam shook her head with frustration. “It’s about assumptions. I assumed marriage was forever. I assumed people would see their grandchildren born. I assumed children survived their parents. I was wrong.”
“You’re not the only one who has believed in the future and been disappointed.”
“I took things for granted. I took people for granted. I thought they’d always be there, waiting for me to finish what I was doing.” Sam lifted her gaze. “But they aren’t. It’s not always their fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything can be snatched away in a heartbeat.”
Like Sloane.
Sam caught her breath, realizing that he could be snatched away within months.
She didn’t want to even think about it.
She needed to change, and to change right now.
“It isn’t usually,” Sloane said. He pursed his lips, considering her words, and she liked that the anger was gone from his expression. He was giving her a second chance, just because she was trying again. He really did understand intuitively how to heal, both people and situations, and her heart swelled with something more than admiration.
“I’ve said crappy things to you,” she said. “I’ve made assumptions. I’m sorry.”
“You were hurting.”
“Still.” She swallowed. “I was wrong.”
“Even though I’m a dragon shifter?”
Sam nodded. “Thank you for helping me.”
Sloane held her gaze, that little hum of electricity between them becoming stronger. “I think there’s a balance to be struck, between taking care of what and who you love, and trusting in the future. Taking care of what matters today, so that if tomorrow doesn’t come, you don’t have regrets.”
“Do you know how to do that?”
His smile was rueful. “No, but I keep trying.” Their gazes locked and held for a potent moment.
“What do you regret?” Sam asked on impulse. “Is there anything?”
“Lots of things. I’ve had some time to mess up.”
Sam smiled because she knew he expected it.
“Bad partings. Blunt speech when it was more cruel than honest.”
“Oh good, I’m not the only one.”
Sloane shrugged. “Things I never said aloud to my father. I hope he knew how much I admired him.” He considered his coffee as if it were fascinating. “I was young when he died. We were in the midst of arguing about my future plans.”
“Whether you’d become the Apothecary or not.”
“How I’d become the Apothecary,” Sloane corrected. “The role and the responsibility was mine, but I wanted to do it differently. My father always argued for the power of tradition.”
“You wanted to go to med school, such as it was then.”
“I see now that he was afraid for me. He feared that I’d be revealed.”
“Probably not then, but now you would. Drake’s blood is seriously awesome, and in med school, we did use our own blood for various tests. Now you be outed immediately.”
“My father only saw the risk.” Sloane studied the floor. “There was a time when our kind were nearly hunted to extinction by humans. It was before I was born, but my father remembered the hunts, as does Erik, our leader. It left a scar upon the surviving Pyr, an inability to trust the human race as much as they might want to.”
“I’ll guess even you can’t treat that.”
“No. There are injuries that we carry with us to our graves. That’s something that Pyr and humans have in common.” His gaze was steady and warmed her. “Maybe those are the injuries that we can only try to move past ourselves, with the power of our minds.”
“Physician, heal thyself?” Sam asked, her tone teasing.
Sloane almost smiled. “Or Apothecary, as the case might be.”
Could she heal her own wounds? Since meeting Sloane, Sam was starting to believe it possible. She stood in his kitchen, which was filled with the scents of warm butter and hot coffee. She watched him, feeling more alive than she had in years even as he was utterly still. The moment could have been frozen in time, potent with possibilities. She sensed the opportunities ahead of her and a vitality that she’d nearly forgotten could exist. She could shape her life. She could change her choices. She could try to heal her own wounds. She could choose differently, change herself, reshape the world.
She was glad that she’d decided to wear Nathaniel’s gift and knew she’d only done it because of Sloane’s gentle persistence.
Her fingers rose to it and tangled in the chain. “My sister adored Nathaniel, you know. He might have been her own son. She always wanted kids, lots of them, and she’d be an awesome mom. She just never seems to meet the right guy. In a way, I felt that I was giving her the chance to live vicariously, to have Nathaniel all to herself.” Sam bit her lip. “Of course, she saw it differently. She thought I was just handing him off because he was inconvenient.”
“That’s hard.”
“We’ve said a lot of hard things to each other over the years. We said more when Nathaniel was infected. I think we both blamed ourselves for his condition, but out loud, we blamed each other. We weren’t even speaking during his illness, although we both visited him.” Sam shook her head at her own pride and stubbornness. “We ensured that we visited at different times. But I didn’t visit nearly enough. It broke my heart to see my son like that, to know that I’d failed him and that I was still failing him, that taking time to visit him was time away from the lab and a possible cure.”
“You must have been exhausted,” Sloane said quietly. “No wonder you burned out.”
“Spun out, burned out, imploded.” Sam grimaced. “All of the above and more. Jac gave me the gift box at the funeral. I guess she’d tried to do it sooner, but I rebuffed her. That note.” She swallowed. “That note just finished me.”
“It would,” Sloane agreed. “Although Nathaniel couldn’t have known the power his words would have, not when he wrote them.”
“Of course not, but right then and right there, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My back. I walked away from all of it, without a backward glance, bought the house in California and wept for a week after I moved in.”
Sloane smiled gently at her. “That was when you decided to read tarot cards?”
“Illo
gical!” Sam admitted. “Insane maybe. But Jac had said I needed to get in touch with my own feelings and her accusation hit a nerve. All that intuition, emotion and touchy-feely stuff had never been my department. It was hers. I was drawn to the cards in a shop, and for once, I decided to follow my impulse. I thought it would be easy to learn to interpret them.”
“You thought you would apply logic to it and memorize the system.”
“I guess I did.” Sam dared to look at him and liked that he didn’t seem to have judged her and found her wanting. “But there isn’t a system. It’s like they have a life of their own, and their meanings change depending who asks the question and when.”
“Isn’t that impossible?” Sloane asked with a smile.
Sam smiled back at him. “Once I would have said that it was, but I’ve learned that a lot of apparently impossible things are real.”
Sloane chuckled and topped up their coffees. “Maybe the cards called to you, because they knew you needed them.”
Sam shook her head. “No. It was a dark-haired stranger, a Knight of Cups, who came to my door bearing wine who did that.”
Sloane averted his gaze, reminding Sam of what Drake had told her about the firestorm. He wouldn’t promise what he couldn’t deliver. She respected that. It was a sign of a moral code that she admired.
“What if you never have a firestorm?” she asked softly.
“I will,” he replied, with a confidence Sam wished she shared.
Sam swallowed, then admitted something she never would have expected herself to say aloud. “The world is in flux all around me now, for the first time.” It was terrifying to make such a confession, but it also felt right. “It’s unfamiliar and unpredictable, and I feel a bit lost.”
“You’ll find your stride. We all do.”
“Probably. But in a way, I’m jealous of your firestorm. It would be nice to know that something was absolutely true and unassailable.”
Sam found Sloane in front of her then, though she hadn’t seen him move. His fingers were under her chin and he bent to kiss away a tear she didn’t even know she’d shed. He felt so good and she couldn’t keep herself from leaning against his warmth and strength.
“Here’s a truth,” he murmured. “You did more for Nathaniel than anyone could have done. You gave your all.”
“It wasn’t enough.” Sam heard again her father’s expectation that she could always do more and always give more.
“That doesn’t mean there was no point.” Sloane was holding her shoulders in his hands, and Sam welcomed the weight of his grasp as much as his reassurance. “You know that success comes in stages when combating viruses. You know that there’s no instant or easy answer.”
“He was my son,” Sam whispered. “I wasn’t even there when he died!”
Sloane shook his head. “You were in his mind, in his memories and in his heart. We should all be so lucky to have someone fighting with such diligence on our behalf.” He seemed to believe what he said.
Sam knew she wanted to believe it more than anything she’d ever heard.
“Nathaniel was your son,” Sloane whispered. “He had to love you for everything you are.” He bent to touch his lips to her forehead, and Sam felt her eyes close in gratitude as his arms closed around her.
“I don’t deserve your solace,” she whispered and heard Sloane chuckle. “I’m not your mate and this isn’t your firestorm.”
“You’re stuck with this kiss anyway.”
But not more than that.
But then, that meant she had little to lose by telling him the truth in her heart.
Sam tipped her head back to meet Sloane’s gaze. “I’ve missed you,” she admitted.
His eyes darkened and he backed her into the counter, his gaze sweeping over her before he bent to capture her mouth with his. His kiss was potent and gentle, as if he feared she’d reject him, and Sam couldn’t bear that she’d put any such doubt in his mind. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer, surrendering all she had to his kiss.
When Sloane deepened his kiss and locked her in his embrace, Sam didn’t care who or what he was.
She just wanted more of his touch.
No matter what he was.
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was a better rapport between Sam and Sloane, thanks to Drake’s intervention. They worked together in the lab after that, comparing notes and observations, and Sam dared to believe that their progress was better.
Faster.
Drake’s blood was amazing. Sam knew she’d never tire of studying it. The cells within it were sufficiently similar to human cells that she could identify them, but their actions were so different. White cells, for example, always defended the body from infection, but Drake’s white cells rode for war with a vigor and speed that astonished Sam. Not only did they isolate and surround any virus she injected into the sample, but they multiplied at a phenomenal rate. They were apparently driven to contain and destroy any intruding cells and to do so with incredible speed. Sam was blown away by it.
“Do you Pyr ever get sick?” she asked Sloane one day.
“We tend to be wounded more often,” he replied, his tone revealing that he was giving all of his attention to the sample he was studying.
“Did any of you get this virus?”
Sloane shook his head. “We haven’t been taking any chances.”
“So, as Apothecary, you mostly tend battle wounds. Unless there are specific diseases that only Pyr get.”
He nodded once, then frowned. “There is one thing you could call an illness specific to us, one that might as well be fatal. When Pyr turn Slayer, it’s a choice that manifests physiologically.”
“How so?”
“Slayers have blood that’s both black and corrosive.”
Sam looked up at that. “What makes it black? Extra hemoglobin?”
“Their decision to turn away from the Great Wyvern and her wisdom,” he said. She saw that he was completely serious, even though he sounded like Jac. “Their decision to be selfish and to decline the quest of the Pyr to defend the earth and its treasures means that the divine spark dies within them. Slayers aren’t dead, but they might as well be.” Sloane shrugged. “The world would be a better place if they were dead.”
They didn’t talk about the reckoning that was pending.
“Good dragons and bad dragons?” Sam kept her tone light, but Sloane straightened.
“The last living Slayer was Jorge, who is topaz with gold,” he said. “You might remember his appearance in Seattle.”
Sam flinched, hiding her reaction by looking into the microscope again.
“Since then, there have been new Slayers appearing.”
“Like the ones in the video from Australia?”
Sloane nodded. “Groups of them, hatching at each eclipse.” He shook his head. “We’ve never seen anything like it before. I think they might be clones of a dead Slayer.”
Sam shuddered. Then she realized something and looked up. “Wait a minute. Jorge wasn’t infected with the virus.”
“Possibly because he’s consumed the Elixir, and it ensured that he recovered quickly from any infection.”
“The Elixir?”
Sloane turned an intent look upon her. “There’s a substance called the Dragon’s Blood Elixir. It confers a kind of immortality upon any Pyr who consumes it. He’ll heal quickly after taking it, but always needs more.”
“Like a drug, then,” Sam mused.
“It’s a toxin,” Sloane corrected. “Only Slayers have ever consumed it, so it makes them both more violent and harder to kill. I’ll guess that Jorge healed from the exposure to the virus, because of the Elixir.”
“But Drake wasn’t infected with the virus, either, and I’m guessing he hasn’t had the Elixir?”
“No. His immunity is probably because he had antibodies as old as the virus itself, also unmutated.”
Sam spun on her stool to face him. “But what if Pyr can??
?t get this infection at all? What if it’s not the Elixir and not Drake’s age but something fundamental in your physiology that ensures you can’t get it?”
Sloane turned to stare at her and she knew she had his attention.
“Do you know any Pyr who’ve been infected with the Seattle virus?” Sam asked.
“No,” Sloane said, shaking his head. “No! Not one. That’s brilliant. I was assuming they hadn’t been exposed, but you’re right. They must have been, given how widely it’s spread. Plus Theo and Kristofer helped Drake recover Ronnie from Jorge—they were exposed and they never got it.”
Sam shrugged. “It might be simply that they failed to have an exchange of body fluids with her…”
Before Sam could finish, Sloane peeled off the hood of his HazMat suit and chucked it aside, then shed his heavy gloves. “There’s one way to find out.” He unzipped the top of his suit and shrugged out of it, revealing the T-shirt he wore beneath and his muscled build. He grabbed a wide elastic band and wrapped it around his upper arm, then gestured to the syringes. “We’ll take a before and an after sample,” he instructed Sam. “And compare the differences.”
“Before and after what?” Sam asked, even though she was afraid she could guess what he was going to do.
“We’re going to test Pyr immunity to the Seattle virus, right here and right now.” His eyes were shining with resolve.
“No! You aren’t going to inject yourself with it! That’s not protocol,” Sam protested. “We need to do this in a controlled process…”
Sloane interrupted her flatly. “We don’t have time for protocol.”
“We’ll take a sample of your blood and infect it first…”
“And we won’t learn nearly enough about the way my immune system responds,” Sloane said, interrupting her again. “I’m going to infect myself and you’re going to study the results. You’re going to compare my body’s reaction to Ronnie’s, then try to isolate the variable that makes the difference.” He shrugged. “Assuming that there is one that does.”