I sat back, rubbing my eyes. There was something deeply uncomfortable about sitting up on a stool for hours on end, bent over the table, studying slides I could make neither heads nor tails of.

“See what happens to the blood when I add this?” I

leaned forward again, looking into the lens of the microscope as Carissa added a single drop of the solution she’d been working on for two days straight.

Before my very eyes, some barely-visible substance leeched from the blood cells and clung to that drop of solution. The solution absorbed it and almost seemed to erase it from the slide.

I couldn’t help grinning like a maniac. I had seen a lot of magic over the course of my life. I was born into it. Fairies and trolls and, of course, dragons—not to mention much more than that. I’d considered myself jaded until that moment in front of the microscope. There was more magic in the world than I’d been aware of, and she was the magician.

“How did you do it?” I marveled, staring as she repeated the process with another slide.

“I located the compound in your blood which reacts to iron by adding an iron-based solution and watching the reaction. It was just a matter of coming up with something to draw that compound out.”

“Just a matter of that. You act like it was nothing at all.” I leaned back, smiling at her. “You’re a genius, that’s what you are.”

She blushed, turning away. There was no mistaking how much healthier she looked after two days. Granted, she’d been working like the devil, nearly around the clock, but she’d been eating and drinking liquids other than coffee. And it worked for her.

Hope went a long way as well. She had hope. We were closer than ever to an antidote and to getting Tommy back. She’d told me all about him as she worked—once she’d started talking, the words had flooded out. How she’d come to take care of him, how he’d turned her world upside down. Having to go from being a workaholic to a makeshift mother overnight. How smart he was, how kind, how insightful. How she feared he thought she didn’t want him, especially after the shoddy way his mother had treated him once drugs took hold of her.

“I don’t blame Chrissie,” she’d revealed at one point. “I don’t blame anybody for getting hooked. I’m sure everybody has a story. None of them go unto using drugs with the intention of losing their souls. I know my sister didn’t. She was an artist. She went to art school, while I studied chemistry. She drew so well, her pieces looked like photos. It was uncanny. She painted, too, and took photos. She had an eye. She saw the world like nobody else could. And now, all that talent…”

Her eyes had darkened then. Her mouth curved down in a frown. I could sense the depth of love she felt for her sister, still felt in spite of the way things had turned out. “

Anyway, she gave me Tommy,” she’d finished with a shadow of a smile. “He saved me. The least I can do is save him back.”

That was likely the moment I fell in love with her, when she said that.

Knowing what a genius she was sent me even further down the rabbit hole until there was no going back.

“What do we do now?” I asked, suddenly energized in spite of the long hours I’d spent watching her work. I wouldn’t leave her alone, just in case somebody decided to call and terrorize her again.

“I make a whole lot of this,” she said, stretching, grinning. “Like, a whole lot. I have the formula recorded, of course. And we do have to test it. But I’m almost sure it’ll work.”

“When can we test?”

“Whenever you want. Now, in fact. I’ll make up the injection, and we’ll go from there.”

I shooed her away to indicate that yes, I wanted her to do it. Even if it meant we wouldn’t strictly have a reason to be together anymore. But we could work that out.

Just as we’d work out the situation with the assholes who were holding Tommy hostage. They had another thing coming if they thought they could get away with it.

It was Harrison all along.

Mary’s men had confirmed it after only a half-hour’s questioning—another word for torture, of course, but Mary chose to sugarcoat what had taken place. Probably for Carissa’s sake. He’d given away their location, their history, the entire story. Low life scum.

“He always pretended to be a father figure,” she murmured as she created the solution.

“Hmm?”

“Harrison.”

As if she’d been reading my mind. Perhaps she had. There was an undeniable shorthand between us already, where one could merely indicate what they needed and the other picked up without another word. She could reach for something without looking, and I would hand it over without asking. The dutiful lab assistant.

“People like him like to pretend,” I mused. “I wouldn’t know for certain, from experience, but he seems to be the type.”

“He’s most certainly the type.” She glanced up at me. “You do that a lot.”

“Do what?”

“You talk about things, and you say you haven’t had much real-life experience. I know you weren’t born yesterday. In fact, judging from the way your blood never seems to age, I would bet you were born a very long time ago. What gives?”

“Och, lass, I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a secret.”

She smiled for a second—but when she saw that I wasn’t joking, the smile dissolved. “I see.”

“No, you don’t. Not really. There are secrets like the one you were keeping, and there are secrets like the one I’m forced to keep. I want to tell you, like you wanted to tell me. And if this antidote works, you’ll know what one of them is. But there are many more.”

She looked unhappy, and neither I nor the dragon wanted that.

So, I made a compromise with myself. “I’m very old. I’ve lived away from most of the world for my entire life. My experience comes from media, television, movies. Things such as that.”

“I see.”

Only she didn’t, and she knew it. I let it go for the sake of letting her get back to work. I had other things to concern myself with, besides. Such as what we were going to do once the antidote proved successful.

There was a plan forming in my mind, one which we’d already taken steps toward putting in motion.