After a bland dinner of chicken noodle soup, Grace barely contained her irritation as she sat on the examination table and listened to Emma and Faith discuss her test results, which were spread over the wide counter, using terms that might as well have been in another language. In fact, some of them were Latin. Probably. She leaned to the side and drew her trusty old Pentax out of her bag, snapping several shots of the two women.

Emma, now wearing a white lab coat over her casual clothing, looked over her shoulder. “Sorry. That probably didn’t make much sense.”

Grace took several more pictures before setting the camera on her leg. “No, and none of it sounded good.”

Faith turned around and leaned back, rubbing her eyes. “No. Interesting but not good.” She brushed her hair away from her face. “We tested your samples with several others.”

Emma stuck her hands in her lab coat. “We let the virus attack your cells in a Petri dish, and it’s clear that if you took the virus, you’d be back in a coma.” She shook her head. “There’s something odd in your blood that I can’t identify, and it probably has to do with being a Key. I don’t understand the Key marking, by the way. But taking the virus will change you almost into a plant.”

Well, that sounded terrible. Grace braced herself for more bad news. “And?”

Faith looked at Emma and then back. “We used an agent that speeds up the life of a cell exponentially, as if you just did nothing and let your body do what it’s doing.”

Grace cradled her camera. “That was encouraging?”

“No,” Faith said, fine lines spreading out from her pretty eyes. “The cells died. Which means—”

“I’d be in a coma for a while and then I’d die.” Grace drew air in through her nose. She had to appear brave for Faith. “No matter what, you gave me five more years of living, Faithie. Never forget that. I enjoyed these years.” She’d learned of people she’d never imagined, and she’d gotten so see her sister happy and mated to a great male. “This has been good.” She swallowed several times, her body heating. “I’m sure you also combined my cells with more of Adare’s. As if he mated me for real this time.”

Emma nodded. “Yes. Your other doctors misinterpreted the tests because they didn’t know about you being a Key. I do and set the parameters for the tests accordingly. Um, your cells, the antibodies you’ve developed, destroyed his. Completely. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Not what she’d been expecting. Grace stiffened. How was that even possible? “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I ran the test three times,” Emma said.