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Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four

LUNA

TWO WEEKS LATER

Carmine has almost entirely lost the use of his right leg. He insists on walking with a cane. His pride is going to go before his fall unless we get the knife to do its job.

“We don’t have a lot of data to go on,” Dr. Watanabe says, hands folded on the hospital’s conference room table.

It’s the dead of night, four days after we left the labyrinth. We’ve slept through much of it. Carmine has taken as much of my blood as he could without depleting me, and piece by piece, he’s told me how Manod made him. He tries to make it funny when he can, but it’s harrowing.

In this space, there are two lamps on for my benefit alone.

None of the vampires present need light, but Laro turned them on before I even asked.

The knife cured him of puberty and the mess I made inside him.

And since, without a king, the colony cannot keep him cast out, he’s also ten percent less of an asshole.

“You said you have someone in your colony with an injury.” Dr. Watanabe adds, “If it’s a lower stakes procedure, we can do controlled testing.”

“Ferrante’s out of stasis,” Carmine says. “His arm is healing. He’s decided to just be patient.”

Once Ferrante heard about Manod’s arm, there wasn’t much of a decision for him. He wasn’t risking his restoration going wrong in the same way.

“Can you talk to him? Maybe sell it a little more?” Dr. Watanabe asks.

“He’ll be here tomorrow. I can ask, but don’t bet on it.”

“Well, that’s that then.” Dr. Watanabe stands.

“Let’s look at the board.” He flips on the wall of lights behind him.

A grid of MRI slides appears. “The exact location of the knife’s damage is visible with a contrast MRI.

We have two people in this room who’ve been restored, and one is human.

So we’ll start there because it’s the least relevant. No offense.”

“None taken,” I say.

“Your C1 and C2 smashed against each other.” He uses a stick to point at the MRI of my neck.

“The spinal cord was partially severed by a bone shard. Your lungs and heart stopped receiving signal from your brain, but you weren’t quite dead when you were sliced right here… do you see that dark shadow?”

“Actually, no.”

“Trust me, it’s there. The knife grazed the cord and touched both fractured vertebrae.”

“So, that’s why I was healed completely?”

“I have no idea.” He admits ignorance so flippantly, I have to respect him.

“Laro is here.” He moves to the next set of slides.

“This dude got sliced like a Thanksgiving turkey. Here. Here. Here. This one is really faint, but there’s another right here.

And this one, right between the eyes, is why, in my opinion, he won’t get carded if you all go out for a beer tonight. ”

“I have over four hundred years on you.” Laro may have the body of a grown man, but he lives with the same experiences. He’s still petty and easily triggered about his age. I told Carmine that I think he’ll be able to grow out of it now, with a mature body and brain, but sometimes I’m not so sure.

“Of course.” Dr. Watanabe is unfazed. “Now, we’ll never know what all these entry points would have done if the blade hadn’t directly impacted the pituitary gland. But that’s the little brain walnut responsible for growth and sexual maturity.”

Laro’s cheeks get red. I try not to stare as the man becomes a boy again.

“We have one anecdote of a vampire I can’t examine because apparently the earth swallowed him.” He looks from me to Carmine as if it’s our fault. “He had his arm amputated in 1527.”

“I wouldn’t say amputated,” Carmine says.

“He tried to restore it with the knife, correct?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I interviewed someone who met him in 2001. They say he had no arm at all. You’re reporting an appendage with a few fingers.”

“About this long.” Carmine holds his hands a foot apart. The right one tremors back and forth.

I lace my fingers through his and pull our hands down to his lap.

“Basically,” Dr. Watanabe says, “the knife didn’t work as intended, and this is what we have to consider with your case.

” He pushes the panel of MRIs away and draws down another showing brains and hearts perforated by a dark circle.

“You’ve got this intrusion”—he taps a circle—“that isn’t actually in your heart.

The stake scraped the fibrous pericardium, and over fifty years, the heart grew around it.

Like the Grinch, but weird. Now, what’s actually killing you is a degenerative nerve disease, so.

” He taps brains and spines and hearts all over, then stops.

“I have no idea what to do with this knife. Work the stake out? That might not help the ALS. Stab you in the brain? The stake could still kill you. And those are the easy options. Who knows what options three through three thousand are?”

I clear my throat and lean forward.

“So.” I wait for their undivided attention. “I have an idea, but the doctor’s not going to like it.”