One With the Night (25 page)

“Then I’m glad you stayed to get the powder. It would have taken a quart of tincture of laudanum.” Her father lit a flame under a small metal bowl.

Kilkenny paled further as he stared at the bricks of white powder Flavio unwrapped.

Her father loaded four teaspoons into the bowl. “Jane, find my notebook.” She could feel his excitement. He thought this was it. “I shall have to make several injections. Flavio, can I get you to stir this? I’ll get the syringe.”

Flavio stepped up to his task. Jane rummaged among the books on the table and found the leather-covered journal. Flipping the pages, she saw the endless recipes her father had tried. She turned to a clean leaf and rubbed her palm along the crease to flatten it. Now for a pen … How did her father find anything in this jumble? There, under the table. She bent to retrieve it, and held it to the light. It wanted mending.

Kilkenny took it from her. “Let me do that.” He grabbed the knife her father used to cut herbs. It was much too big to mend a quill. She started to protest then realized that he wanted occupation. He cut his finger, but it healed even as she watched. He handed the quill back to her.

“Thank you,” she murmured. She wanted to tell him he would be all right. Or maybe just that she wouldn’t let him die just because he’d had sex with Elyta. She had no right to think it a betrayal. He’d never promised her a thing. How depressing …

Her father had assembled the syringe. He peered over Flavio’s shoulder. “It’s ready. Now just keep adding more, a spoonful at a time.” He glanced to Kilkenny. “What, man, are you still dressed? The formula tonight contains an emetic.”

“What’s that?” Kilkenny asked.

“It makes you vomit,” Jane whispered.

“I’m used ta that,” he said grimly. “Just ha’ one o’ th’ buckets handy and I’ll do.”

Flavio grabbed a wooden milk pail and set it next to the pallet on the floor.

“Very well, young man, but you must take off your shirt at least. I’ll need several injection sites.” Her father filled the syringe from the metal bowl. “I may want to use the femoral artery, too.” Kilkenny’s countenance darkened. He knew about femoral arteries. He had many circular scars along his own.

Kilkenny pulled his shirt up over his head. The sight of his strongly muscled torso stirred juices Jane would rather suppress.

“Jane,” her father said sharply, recalling her to her senses. “The cord.”

She grabbed the rubber tube her father used to aid in injections from the laboratory table. “Hold out your arm,” she murmured, tying it tight. “Now make a fist.” His biceps muscle bunched. She caught Elyta’s smirk out of the corner of her eye. Elyta must smell the scent of Jane’s reaction. Jane stepped back, breathing slowly to calm herself.

Her father turned, the upended syringe spouting a tiny fountain of liquid as he made sure the needle had no air bubbles. Thirty ccs? Could anyone take so much pure opium? “If you’re wrong about the dosage, Flavio,” he remarked, “we’ll kill him outright.”

“Nonsense,” Elyta snapped. “He’s immortal. Well, except for decapitation.”

“It’s the right dose,” Brother Flavio said quietly. “Enough to stun his Companion.”

“Relax your fist,” her father ordered, his focus all for the vein in front of him. It was a ropy blue shadow plunging down Kilkenny’s forearm. Her father took Kilkenny’s elbow to steady it and slid the needle into the vein, just below the crook of his arm. Kilkenny didn’t even flinch. Her father pushed the plunger slowly home. “Number one.” He pulled out the syringe and turned to collect a small pad of gauze. By the time he turned back, the puncture wound had closed. “Well!” Her father raised his brows and tossed the gauze away. “Jane?”

Jane repeated the process. At least there would be no need to use the femoral artery. They could probably stick the same vein a dozen times with no consequence. This time she looked up at Kilkenny. He too was intent on the vein that even now bulged in his arm. The longing in his gray-green eyes was startling. He wanted the cure that much. He must have felt her gaze, for he glanced up at her, and the expression changed to one of shame. He looked away.

Her father stepped up with the next syringe and plunged it in.

Jane bit her lip when her father filled a third syringe. Surely no one could take so much opium, even a vampire! She peered at Kilkenny. Already his eyes had lost focus. As the third dose plunged home, he staggered. Flavio stepped up and steadied him.

“Lie down,” her father ordered.

Flavio eased Kilkenny to the pallet. Her father took a candle and knelt beside him. He pulled up Kilkenny’s eyelid and waved the candle in front of his face. “Pupils dilated,” her father remarked. “The drug is taking effect.” Indeed, Kilkenny seemed hardly sensible. “We’ll wait a bit now before we give him the formula for tonight.” Her father stood. He dipped the quill in the inkstand and began scribbling notes.

“What formula have you used?” Elyta asked. Her voice was almost too casual.

“Time enough for that if it works,” her father muttered. “But the ingredients are common. We’ll be able to produce a metric ton of it, if you’ve the need, and a source of opium.”

“Excellent,” Elyta murmured.

*   *   *

Callan felt heavy, his senses dull. He looked down on his body from somewhere above. They were all clustered round, peering at him, except Elyta, who fanned herself from her position on the periphery. His own gray-green eyes stared up, focused on nothing. Strange that no one seemed to notice their true color except Jane Blundell. There was Jane. How sorry he was she had to know the worst of him. But perhaps that was all there was to know.

Better she was disillusioned earlier than later. He wasn’t worth her attentions. He knew that. He wasn’t worth anything. The feelings he had tried to put by swirled around him.

There, the doctor was pouring out a cup of something of a strange purple color. He leaned over, holding it to Callan’s lips. Callan felt himself choking. The liquid burned. But he felt it all from a distance. He watched his body convulse. Flavio brought the bucket. His body vomited until he spit up blood. There was pain. But it felt as though it belonged to someone else. This was not nearly as bad as before. He felt himself drifting. The connection with his body was growing longer, stretching until it was just a tenuous thread …

*   *   *

“Papa, do something!” Jane held Kilkenny’s wrist. His pulse was faint, irregular. She looked back up at her father, accusing.

“What?” he asked, distracted as he looked up from his notebook.

“If you don’t do something, he’s going to die. The Companion isn’t able to help him.”

“But we must kill the parasite, Jane.”

“Not at the cost of his life,” she hissed. “A stimulant! Inject something with a stimulating effect to the heart.”

“What? Pennyroyal?”

“Or tincture of foxglove. What do you have?”

Her father looked around vaguely.

“Papa! Hurry?”

“Uh, let’s see. I might have some foxglove here somewhere.”

“Get it,” Jane ordered. She lunged for the syringe as her father emptied a tube of powder into a beaker of water and sloshed it about. She pushed the end of the needle into the beaker and sucked up the liquid. No time to administer it orally and have it absorbed through the stomach lining. Had anyone ever injected the essence of foxglove directly? She felt Kilkenny drifting away. She knelt beside him. No time to bind his arm to bring up the vein. She felt for the vessel and rolled it under her fingers. Thank goodness men had such prominent veins. She glanced to his face, hesitating. His eyes were half-closed, unfocused. The injection might kill him.

But he was dying anyway. And no one else would care, not even her father except that they would have no one to experiment on. She slid the needle slantwise into the vein.

She was all Kilkenny had. She pushed the plunger home.

*   *   *

“He’ll require more opium at intervals.”

The voice was far away. His body burned. Fire ate along his veins, pumped by his heart. He tried to speak, but couldn’t.

“Reduce the dose, Father. He can’t stand so much again.”

Jane. That was Jane’s voice. He wanted to reach out for her, but something held him, just like he had been immobilized by Asharti’s compulsion, or Elyta’s. He could almost see Asharti’s face, hanging above him. Asharti’s almond eyes resolved themselves into Elyta, and then the image shifted back. Somewhere he heard someone groaning.

The faces above him were one, and both, and one again. They held him imprisoned. His cock rose at their command. He wouldn’t, couldn’t serve them. Could he? Would he?

“Well, we’ve seen this phenomenon before. He’s a virile lad, I’ll give him that.”

“Papa, he’s suffering…”

The voice grew fainter.
Jane,
he wanted to call. But he couldn’t. There was only Asharti, and Elyta, and pain.

*   *   *

Jane wiped Kilkenny’s naked body with a damp cloth. His body had been racked with fevers for two days. His sheets were constantly soaked with sweat. Flavio had helped her change them twice already. They needed changing again.

It didn’t matter whether he was a traitor now, or a murderer. Even one who was evil shouldn’t suffer like this. She wouldn’t think about that. She was so worried about him, his nakedness and his periodic erections didn’t cause her as much distress as they once would have. She was too busy trying to balance her father’s dosage of opium with tincture of foxglove. Her father was lessening the opium each time in a blind attempt to avoid killing his patient, should Kilkenny actually be turning human now. But there was no certainty about the program. Too little and the Companion survived, too much and the patient didn’t. Kilkenny vomited up anything she tried to feed him. His urine output had been minimal, which said his body was in shock, his kidneys under stress. He was consumed with toxins he had no way of processing.

How much trauma could a man’s body endure?

She shook out a clean sheet over him, then took up a little pot of cream and sat beside him. A fire crackled in the grate. Kilkenny had been alternating bouts of fever and chills, so she kept the room warm. Though he had been staying here more than a week, there was little to say it was his. No brushes were laid out on the dresser, no nail-paring knife. But he owned them. He had been well groomed before his illness. He must have left them in his valise, as though he was poised to leave at any moment. Only the great sword leaning against the mantel said a man occupied this space. She smoothed a finger full of cream across his chapped lips. How she wished to see the words ripple out through those wonderful, mobile lips again!

She rubbed her temples. Two days since she had slept. Her father didn’t know she attended Kilkenny continuously. He thought Clara took a turn. But Jane would never trust Kilkenny’s care to anyone else. Jane moved a wet strand of hair off Kilkenny’s forehead.

All her anger at him, all her feeling of betrayal seemed silly now. Could she of all people not understand the internal fires that had driven him to bed Elyta? Surely the expression on his face of horror and shame when she had stumbled in on them went deeper than the fact that he’d been caught
in medias res.
He was ashamed of what he was, and what that made him do.

He didn’t care for her, of course. He had been tender with her in spite of their driving lust at Urquhart Castle. But she didn’t fool herself. The driving lust was why he was there. Who was she to cast stones at that?

The fact that she might be weak enough to care for him, beyond the simple fact of vampire lust, was her own failing not his. If he died, and she never got to … To what? She couldn’t tell him any part of what she felt. She touched his three-day growth of beard. She wouldn’t think of her feelings for him. She only wanted him to live.

The sun was rising. She glanced around. The curtains … She rose and felt the room waver.

“Miss Blundell, let me.”

Flavio steadied her and sat her in a chair. When had he come in? He looked at her with concern until she smiled with what she hoped was reassurance. Then he pulled the draperies.

“I’ll watch him.” He came to stand in front of her.

“I’m fine,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “A momentary faintness.”

“You haven’t slept in days. What good will you do him if you collapse?” Flavio’s brown eyes were soft with understanding.

She shook her head. “What if he should need a stimulant and there is no one here to administer it? You do not know how. Father is busy compiling his notes…” Indeed, the fact that her father seemed more interested in his records than the patient himself … disturbed her. Had her father become so fixated on the outcome he could not see a man’s suffering?

“If his pulse weakens or becomes erratic I will call you.”

“You’re tired. You’ve been taking care of the animals … if you fell asleep…”

“I won’t fall asleep. You can count on me.”

Could she? She searched his face. She was perhaps no more reliable than someone else at this point, she was so tired.

“I … let someone down once. Kilkenny reminds me of him. Give me a chance to redeem myself.” Flavio’s voice sounded as though his throat was raw.

One couldn’t deny that kind of plea. She nodded once. She would be better for some sleep. “Very well. You’ll call me at the first sign of an erratic or fading pulse.” It was a command more than a plea. She stood. Kilkenny’s long black eyelashes brushed his ashen cheeks.
Don’t die. I’d never forgive myself.

“I’ll change out his sheets,” Flavio promised.

“And check his pulse every quarter hour,” Jane instructed.

Flavio nodded, smiling. “Now get thee hence.”

Tears rose. They were just tears of exhaustion. “Thank you,” she murmured.

*   *   *

A rhythmic thumping invaded Jane’s dreams of monsters in the loch. She realized that she hated that sound, though she couldn’t think why. She blinked, groggy.

Wait! She lurched upright.

It
couldn’t
be! Anger churned up, banishing the vestiges of sleep. She threw off the coverlet and struggled out of the high bed. She did not stay to don slippers or wrapper but lunged for the door and strode down the hall. A low masculine moaning issued from Kilkenny’s room and a higher-pitched panting. She didn’t bother knocking, but threw open the door.