“Then I’m dead anyway.” Isabelle’s tone was lighter than her heart. “But at least you will have tried, and for that I will thank you.”

Quill stared at the door for a minute, his gaze far away. His hands clenched and unclenched in a way that was not strictly spasmodic.

“I will help,” Quill said at last. “Shall I fetch the doctor?”

“I’d rather do this as discreetly as possible,” Isabelle said. Her letter of recall would not be delivered as long as Vrain believed her mentally incapacitated. “I have my own rig.”

Marie dove into Isabelle’s trunk again and surfaced with a case containing tubes, needles, bottles, and a pump.

Quill gave Isabelle a wary look. “Do you do transfusions often?”

“This will be my first,” Isabelle said. “I salvaged this gear from the man who rescued Marie from being a bloodhollow. I had hoped to analyze the residue left behind in the equipment to figure out how he’d done it. Unfortunately, there was not enough of his serum left for me to puzzle it out.”

“And asking him was out of the question?”

“He was dead by then, and his records did not describe the process.”

Marie set up the rig and, after some inexpert prodding, managed to get a needle in Quill’s arm. She worked the pump until a drip of red appeared at the opposite needle, which she then inserted in Isabelle’s vein.

Isabelle did not know what to expect, and was therefore not surprised to feel nothing at all except the pain of the needle wound.

“How much do you need?” Quill asked.

“I have no idea,” Isabelle said. Her ghost stains bloomed again. She knew Marie was working the pump, but her mind insisted on identifying her as the nurse she’d met outside the walls at the Siege of Grimhold three centuries ago.

Marie said, “A third of a liter is safe to give.”

“That much?” Quill asked. To Isabelle’s confused perception, he had become the quivering prophet from the divine well below Gnossos, one of the supposed locations of the Ravenous Gate.

“I’m seeing things again,” Isabelle said. It was hard to hold on to what she knew to be true in the face of contrary experience. The real world slipped through her grasp. “I must retreat.”

“Go,” Marie said.

Isabelle turned from the light and dove once more into the everdream to put as many of her ancestors in order as she could. She prayed completing the transformation would silence them for good, or at least teach them to tug her sleeve before whispering in her ear.

If she survived.

If.

CHAPTER

Seventeen