Stay the Night

Before she could answer, Guy came out of the exam room.



"I have encased his body in ice," he told Alex. "It will last only two or three hours, but it should slow the poison long enough for you to transport him." He started to walk away, but Alex grabbed him.



"You're the only relative he has," she said. "You can't leave."



He gave her a twisted smile. "He will not want me at his side."



"Probably not," Alex replied, "but if this works, he will need a little of your bone marrow." At his blank look, she added, "I'll have to perform a transplant from a blood relative in order to replace the bone marrow that the radiation kills."



"It cannot come from me, my lady," Nottingham said, his expression turning grim. "Locksley and I are not related by blood. Our connection is through marriage only."



"Doesn't Robin have any other relatives?" Chris asked.



"Yeah." Alex suddenly looked miserable. "There's one more."



Nottingham bowed to her and Chris, and continued out of the hospital.



"Guy. Wait." Chris caught up with him just outside the lift. "If you never intended to take me with you, why did you make me promise that I would go?"



"Sometimes knowing what you can have is almost as satisfying as taking it." He gestured toward the lift. "You may still come with me, if you like."



"I think I'll stick around here." Chris smiled. "Thank you."



"If you really wish to show me your gratitude," he said, "be sure to tell my cousin when he wakes that I saved his life." For the first time since they'd met, he produced a genuine smile. "That should bedevil him for the rest of eternity."



He bowed once more to Chris, and then stepped into the lift.



Chapter Twenty



Robin smelled her scent first, sweet-sharp, like the taste of candied ginger. He had been drifting in and out of shadows for so long that he clung to it, following the trace until it grew stronger, until he knew he was only a hand away from touching her—and then she bridged the gap between them.



Chris's fingers moved over his brow, brushing his hair back. As Robin woke, he turned his face into her palm.



"You're awake."



"I'm dreaming." His voice sounded as weak as he felt. "Or perhaps God has made a tremendous error and let me into heaven. Say nothing to Saint Peter."



"Oh, yeah." Her low, tired laugh caressed his cheek. "You're awake."



Robin opened his eyes to the only face he had ever wished to see again. Chris looked pale and thin, and shadows bruised her eyes. She had slept in the dress she wore, judging by the telltale wrinkles, and had scraped back her tangled hair into a lopsided ponytail.



She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, Robin decided.



He finally looked away from her to study the place he occupied, which he recognized as one of the guest rooms in Geoffrey's stronghold. "In addition to God, I imagine I have Alexandra Keller to thank for this."



"Alex and a few of the others." Some of Chris's smile became forced. "I'd better go get her. She wanted to know if… when you woke up."



"Send someone else," he told her. "You, madam, are never leaving my sight again."



"You might want her to step outside the curtain when I perform the ten or fifteen consecutive colonoscopies I have planned for you," Alex said as she came in carrying a chart.



Robin tried to look lofty. "I have no idea what a colonoscopy is, but I am sure the Kyn do not require them." He grinned. "Hello, Alex. You're looking well."



"Hi, yourself, handsome." Alex exchanged a look with Chris, who bent over and kissed the bridge of his nose.



"I should go take a shower before I started attracting flies," his lady told him. "I'll be back."



She left before he could reply.



Robin tried to sit up and go after her, and discovered he was entangled in a mesh of tubes and wires. Bewildered, he lifted his arms. "What the devil is all this?"



"This is your IV," Alex said, pointing to a transparent tube. "The wires are monitoring your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your blood oxygen. I also have you on a catheter, but you can't see that one. Keep moving around, though, and you'll feel it."



"A what?" Robin lifted the edge of the sheet covering him, looked at what she had done to him below the hips, and then dropped it. "Good God. Alex, none of this is necessary, I assure you. I am Darkyn; I do not need—"



"You're not Kyn anymore, Robin. You're human."



He regarded her for ten long seconds in silence before he chuckled. "Oh, very good. Was this Cyprien's idea? I've always suspected a sense of humor lurked under all that dour French sensibility."



"You ingested Beatrice's tears, which contained a mutated form of the Kyn pathogen that feeds not only on human white cells but on other strains of the Kyn pathogen," Alex said, her expression gravely serious. "Your natal pathogen tried to fight it off, but it was coming out of a dormant phase, and it was starving."



Robin eyed the tubes. "Alex, you're going to make me puke."



"That's all the gross part. We put you on ice, transported you to a private cancer center, thawed you, and then irradiated your blood to kill all the pathogens in it." She set aside his chart. "When I transplanted the donor bone marrow, I thought everything would go back to normal. Kyn-normal, anyway. But the bone marrow did not have a trace of the pathogen in it, and your body had other ideas. It began to revert to human almost immediately."



"Alexandra," he said, very kindly, "I cannot be mortal. I have been Kyn for nearly eight hundred years. Once changed, we cannot be changed back."



"I know it's a shock," she said. "I couldn't believe it, either. But after the transplant your digestive and immune systems regenerated and began functioning normally. I've tested your blood about three hundred times, but found no trace of either Kyn pathogen. I can't tell you how or even why it happened, only that it did. You are human now, Robin."



"It's an excellent jest, but truly, my lady, you carry it too far." He yanked the intravenous tube out of his arm and went to work on detaching the wires. "I would be greatly obliged if you would remove the blasted tube from… my…" He stopped and stared at the small hole in his forearm, which was not closing, and the trickle of blood spilling from it, which was not stopping.



Alex applied a swatch of gauze to the small wound and held it there. "You're still on a liquid diet for now, but tomorrow we can start you on some solids."



He stared at the blood staining the gauze. "You aren't jesting."



"No."



He met her troubled gaze. "Will I make the change again?"



"If you were going to, I think you would have by now," she said. "I wouldn't try to force a change, either. I can't say for sure, but I don't think you'd survive it a second time."



"So I am human." He smiled, and then he chuckled, and then he laughed. "A mortal again."



"Robin, I can't tell you how sorry—"



He reached up, grabbed the front of her lab coat, and pulled her down for a long, heartfelt kiss. "I love you, Alexandra Keller."



"That's nice," she said, very carefully. "But I'm taken, and so are you."



"I do want solid food," he said. "As soon as possible. I have a list. Strawberries and champagne to start. Filet mignon, rare, and a baked potato. I want it smothered in butter and sour cream. A side of broiled asparagus will go nicely. Then, for dessert, I want cake."



Her brows rose. "Any particular kind?"



"Just bring cake. I'll tell you when to stop." He laughed again. "Oh, Alex. You didn't just save my life. You gave me cake. And now I can eat it, too." He looked around. "Where is Chris? Does she know?"



Alex bit her lip. "Yeah, she knows."



"We can be together now. I can become an American citizen and vote and file tax returns and complain about the whole lot." He sat up. "My God, Alex—I can have jury duty."



"I can see you're all broken up about this," she said, her expression wry, "but try to pull yourself together."



Robin took her hand in his and noticed how much cooler hers was. He looked up at her. "How am I ever to thank you and the others for saving my life? For giving my life back to me? Bring everyone in. I shall try."



Alex patted his cheek. "I'll get the whole gang in here shortly. One other thing—You should know that Nottingham kept you alive by putting you on ice."



Robin blinked. "Guy saved me?"



"Without him and the bone-marrow transplant, you'd be dead."



Robin's belly tightened. "He gave bone marrow as well?"



"He couldn't. You guys are cousins only by marriage." She sat down on the edge of the bed. "I needed bone marrow from a blood relation. It's usually a match."



"I have no living…" He paused and looked at her, stricken. "No, Alex."



"She was in the middle of a siege, Robin. She wouldn't come until I told her why it had to be her." Alex let out a long breath. "Look, I didn't give her any details. I thought you might want to tell her yourself."



For a moment Robin wished she'd let him die. "What was it you said after the tournament at the Realm? That it would come back to bite me in the ass?" He sat back. "Is she still here?"



"Yeah. She's been waiting with the rest of us."



Robin held out his arm. "Take these tubes out of me, please."



During the crisis with Robin, Braxtyn and the Kyn nurses Alex had trained had taken over caring for the refugees down in the hospital. Geoffrey's lady chased Alex out of the ward after she came down to check on her surgical patients.