“Payne?”
When she didn’t reply, Jane repeated, “Payne. Look at me.”
She shifted her eyes over and felt nothing as she stared into the worried face of her twin’s shellan. “I need my brother.”
“Of course I’ll get him. He’s in a meeting right now, but I’ll have him come down before he leaves for the night.” Long pause. “Can I ask you why you want him?”
The even, level words told her clearly that the good healer was no imbecile.
“Payne?”
Payne shut her eyes and heard herself say, “He made me a promise when this all started. And I need him to keep it.”
* * *
In spite of the fact that she was a ghost, Jane’s heart was still capable of stopping in her chest.
And as she eased down onto the edge of the hospital bed, there was nothing moving behind her sternum. “What promise was that,” she said to her patient.
“It is a matter betwixt the pair of us.”
The hell it was, Jane thought. Assuming that she was guessing right.
“Payne, there might be something else we can do.”
Although what that was, she hadn’t a clue. The X-rays were showing that the bones had been aligned properly, Manny’s skills having fixed them perfectly. That spinal cord, though—that was the wild card. She’d had a hope that some regeneration of nerves might be possible—she was still learning about the vampire body’s capabilities, many of which seemed like pure magic compared to what humans could do in terms of healing.
But no luck. Not in this case.
And it didn’t take an Einstein extrapolation to figure out what Payne was looking for.
“Be honest with me, shellan of my twin.” Payne’s crystal eyes locked on hers. “Be honest with yourself.”
If there was one thing that Jane hated
about being a doctor, it was the judgment call. There were a lot of incidents when decisions were clear: Some guy presented at the ER with his hand in an ice cooler and a tourniquet around his arm? Reattach the appendage and run those nerves back where they needed to be. Woman in labor with a preemergent cord? C-section her. Compound fracture? Open it up and set it.
But not everything was that “simple.” On a regular basis, the gray fog of maybe-this, maybe-that rolled in, and she had to stare into the cloudy and the murky—
Oh, who was she kidding.
The clinical side of this equation had reached its correct sum. She just didn’t want to believe the answer.
“Payne, let me go get Mary—”
“I did not wish to speak with the counseling female two nights ago, and I shan’t speak unto her now. This is over for me, healer. And as much as it pains me to call upon my twin, please go and get him. You are a good female and you should not be the one.”
Jane looked at her hands. She had never once used them to kill. Ever. It was antithetical not just to her calling and her commitment to her profession, but her as a person.
And yet as she thought about her hellren and the time they’d spent together when she’d woken up with him, she knew she couldn’t let him come here and do what Payne wanted him to: He’d taken a small step back from the precipice he’d been about to jump off of, and there was nothing Jane wouldn’t do to keep him from that ledge.
“I can’t go get him,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just won’t put him in that position.”
The moan that rose from Payne’s throat was despair from the heart given wings and released. “Healer, this is my choice. My life. Not yours. You wish to be a true savior, then make it look accidental, or get me a weapon and I’ll do it. But leave me not in this state. I cannot bear it, and you have done no good for your patient if I continue thus.”
On some level, Jane had known this was coming. She had seen it clear as the pale shadows in the dark X-rays, the ones that told her everything should be working right—and if it wasn’t, the spinal cord had been irreparably injured.
She stared at those legs that lay under the sheet so still and thought of the Hippocratic oath she had taken years ago: “Do no harm” was the first commandment.