Chapter Thirteen
Danny could only vaguely remember receiving the infusions as a child, though from talking to Doctor Hollis, he knew he had, regularly, until the age of eight. He sat on the side of the bed as the nurse placed the line into his arm. He was getting used to that but Hollis was talking about putting a more permanent line in while he was undergoing treatment.
“What’s to stop it closing over like the ones in my arm?”
“We have a little solution, a modified, diluted version of the anti-lycan serum, that we wash out the line with a few times a day. That stops the body from pushing out the line or sealing it closed. We’ll wait and see how you do with the infusions first.”
Chris was sitting outside the room. He hadn’t been in with Danny too often. Danny got the sense that the Alpha was angry with him, about his decision to seek treatment. He missed his company but wasn’t sure there was anything left to be said. What other choice was there for him to make?
The nurse stayed for the first half an hour of the infusion, then left him alone. A knock on the door a few minutes later saw Chris poking his head in.
“Doing alright?” he asked.
Danny nodded, glancing at the bag of fluids hanging next to his bed. “It takes about four hours for the whole thing to go through. Seems like an age.”
“Want some company?”
“Please.”
Which was how he and Chris wound up playing cards for three hours as the medicine made its slow way into his system.
Every so often, Chris would glance at the bag or at the tube going into his arm, but he didn’t say anything. Danny was grateful, he wasn’t feeling up to an argument.
“Have you asked Doctor Hollis about the others?”
“Others?” he asked, checking his hand as Chris threw down a queen of hearts, before picking up a card from the pack.
“The others he’s been treating with the same condition as you.”
Doctor Hollis had said there were others, but he’d never talked about them specifically. Danny said as much to Chris.
“I was just wondering how long he’s been trying to treat this.”
“Does it matter? He said it took years to perfect the infusions the first time around. These things don’t happen overnight.”
“No, you’re right. They don’t. What about progression though? Does it get worse over time?”
Danny didn’t have a clear answer for that, either.
“Why don’t you ask Doctor Hollis? He’d know better than me.” He didn’t mean to sound grumpy, but he was starting to feel tired.
“You’re right, I will ask him. Do you want to finish up? I think you’re more tired than you think, you just threw down a two.”
He glanced down at the pile of cards to see that Chris was right.
“I think maybe I am. It’s one of the side effects. Extreme tiredness that lasts for a day or two.” He yawned as he spoke, letting Chris take the cards from his hand and clear them from the bed.
“Did you get that the last time?”
“I don’t remember,” he said, as Chris moved the head of his bed down and urged his heavy head onto the pillow. “Is that strange, that I don’t remember?”
“Not really, you were just a kid. Get some sleep now, Danny. I’ll be right here, watching over you.”
His eyes closed and he tried to drag them open again, but they were heavy, so heavy…
The screaming woke Chris about an hour after he’d fallen asleep on the bed across from Danny. He was at his side in an instant, switching on the overhead light and trying to work out what was wrong. Danny was curled up, his knee bent and held between two hands as he rocked on the bed.
“Shit. Danny, wake up,” Chris called, placing a hand over his knee to confirm what he suspected.
“Get the nurse!” he shouted to Robin while hitting the call bell. “He needs pain relief,” he called after her.
While Robin went to get the nurse, Chris tried to wake Danny, but nothing he did worked. All the while, Danny was alternating screaming from the pain and keening loudly his hands scrabbling at his knee. It had been bad before, with his back, but this was worse with him unable to wake, trapped as if in a nightmare.
The nurse came, giving Danny a dose of morphine and something else to help relax him. It didn’t seem to have any effect, and a few minutes later, he gave Danny a higher dose of the morphine. That seemed to work, Danny’s screaming petering off to soft whimpers.
“I don’t know what happened,” Chris said to the nurse. “He was sleeping, all seemed fine, and then he was in agony. As bad as before, if not worse.”
“We’ll keep him topped up,” the nurse said, “and have Doctor Hollis check him over first thing.”
It was a long night, Chris wary of leaving Danny’s side in case the pain returned. But he slept on, oblivious to the world around him.
Doctor Hollis ordered some tests and while the nurse was collecting the bloods, Chris stepped outside to speak with him.
“What’s wrong with him? Why is it so bad all of a sudden?”
Hollis shook his head. “I don’t know that it is getting worse. It shouldn’t be. The progression is much slower usually. And if anything, he’s been getting better the past few days, not worse.”
“Is it the infusion, is that what’s caused this?”
“I can’t see why that would be the case. The infusion removes the shifter proteins from his blood, it doesn’t affect the deposits in his joints.”
“Yet hours after he’s given it, he’s in terrible pain.”
“And in the days before you brought him here, he was also in terrible pain, yes?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So what we’ve seen is a temporary improvement followed by a return to his baseline. Not a significant deterioration.”
Maybe Hollis was right and Chris was seeing what he wanted to see, his feelings about the serum affecting his judgment.
They went ahead with the second infusion the next day. Danny was still sleepy but roused enough to agree to it. Chris tried to talk to him, suggesting he wait, give himself a chance to recover.
“No, I want to do this. Doctor Hollis knows what he’s doing.”
They increased his baseline pain medication, which kept Danny drowsy most of the day. He woke up when called but slipped back to sleep within moments.
Chris bedded down next to him again, unsurprised to be woken at one a.m. by a cry from Danny. The nurse was called, more pain relief given, and he settled in for another long night. This one was much worse than the previous. Every time the pain relief wore off, Danny would wake in terrible agony, barely conscious, and struggling to understand what was going on.
Before seven a.m., he’d reached maximum dosage and they had to call Doctor Hollis to come in. The pain shifted as the time passed, his knee, his hip, his shoulder, his back. The morphine seemed to be barely touching it.
They were all relieved when Hollis arrived, administered a different pain relief and a sedative, sending Danny into an oddly still slumber.
This time, instead of talking to Doctor Hollis, Chris tried Heidi. He explained what was happening, and she listened, interrupting now and then to ask questions.
“I’ve looked over his research, it’s quite comprehensive. But there are a few holes. His testing of bitten humans and the use of serum to prevent infection shows that it destroys the circulating shifter proteins but also prevents bone marrow and germ line infiltration.”
“What does that mean?” Chris asked, not familiar with the terminology.
“It’s the reason why they clear their lycanthropy completely, why they don’t become infected. And also why they don’t pass it on to their offspring. Born wolves have shifter cells already in their bone marrow, from gestation. It’s written into their genetic code like everything else. But it’s a positive feedback loop. The shifter proteins encourage the bone marrow cells to multiply. Remove the proteins and the bone marrow cells stop growing and producing protein.”
“So Doctor Hollis’ treatment works?”
“It’s only part of the cycle, the part that allows us to shift. They’re still shifters by virtue of their DNA, their bone marrow, and their shifter cell lines. All Hollis has done is stunted their development. They’re stuck like shifter children, unable to make that transition to adulthood.”
She was silent for a moment and Chris didn’t speak, sensing she had more to say.
“There’s one very rare time that I’ve heard of that happening without the use of anti-lycan serum. There have been shifters who develop leukemia as children. In most cases, shifter cells win out and the cancer is destroyed. In some cases, the cancers were fast-growing and aggressive. The cancer cells were replicating faster than the shifter cells. When they got to the age that a lycanthrope normally shifts for the first time, they weren’t able to. They suffered similar symptoms, the joint pain, the fluctuation of their human tissues.”
“What happened to them?”
“At that point, their cancers were discovered and treated. The shifter cells regrew and once the protein levels normalized, they shifted like everyone else.”
“So it can be undone?”
“I’m not saying that, Chris. These were two very different circumstances.”
“But you would agree that using anti-lycan serum to destroy Danny’s shifter proteins wouldn’t be a good idea?”
“Hell, no. If he’s somehow producing them again, then his best chance of survival is to let the levels build.”
“Do you have anything I could show Doctor Hollis, anything about those two cases?”
“They were written up but never published. No reputable medical journal wants to hear about shifters. I’ll see if I can root out copies and send them on.”
“Thanks, Heidi, I’d appreciate it.”