18. The Diagnosis

(Maxine)

Watching a Marwick prince walk into a vampire medical facility was the most entertainment I'd had in weeks, and I'd recently been married without laying eyes on my groom, survived an assassination attempt, and been haunted mid-feed.

The facility treating Theo was carved into the cliffs below the old city, all cold stone and colder staff, the kind of place built to keep whatever happened inside it from ever getting out. Morrison drew stares the second we came through the doors. A mage. Here. In the one building in the vampire kingdom where our sickest and most valuable bled quietly behind sealed doors.

Vampires don't do hospitals the way the rest of the world does. No cheerful reception, no pastel walls pretending everything's fine. Ours are quiet, ordered, faintly ceremonial, because when your patients can live for centuries, dying young is an obscenity you handle with your voice down. Morrison read the room in about four seconds and adjusted, dropping his volume, keeping his hands visible, doing the one thing almost no mage ever bothered to do in our spaces: behaving like a guest instead of an occupier.

I hated how much I noticed.

Theo was propped up in the best room they had, which was still a room carved into a cliff, and he took one look at Morrison in the doorway and grinned like his birthday had come early.

"You came." He said it to Morrison, not me. "She went and produced the husband. I owe a nurse forty crowns."

"Your sister doesn't produce things. She acquires them and refuses to explain how." Morrison stepped in, unhurried, and drew the visitor's chair close to the bed without being invited, which in a vampire sickroom is either a grave insult or a gesture of real respect depending entirely on how it's done. He did it right. 

"Morrison," he introduced himself.

"Theo. But you know that. We've met online.”

“You were significantly less gray."

"I'm dying. It's fashionable this season."

"So I hear. My condolences on the timing."

"Thank you. I scheduled it to maximize my sister's inconvenience."

I stood in the doorway and watched my husband and my brother decide to like each other, and something in my chest did a slow, dangerous thing I didn't have a permit for. I'd spent a year as the only person in Theo's corner. I'd forgotten what it looked like to have company there.

Then Morrison asked to see the charts, and the room changed.

He went through Theo's records the same way he'd gone through the spell that came through my wall: quiet and total. The physicians let him, because Maxine Varco's royal mage husband offering to help was a diplomatic situation nobody wanted to be the one to escalate. 

He read. Then he asked three questions the best doctors in Marinescu hadn't thought to ask. Then he went still in a way I'd learned to be afraid of.

"May I?" He held his hand over Theo's forearm, not touching, asking. Theo looked at me. I nodded. Theo held out his arm.

Morrison lowered his marked palm to a breath above Theo's skin and sent the smallest thread of his magic looking.

Two things happened at once. Theo's whole body went rigid, a sound tearing out of him that I hadn't heard since his worst nights, and under the skin of his forearm the dark rose, the same wrongness that surfaced whenever he crashed, except this time it moved. It climbed toward Morrison's open hand like it knew him. Like it recognized something.

Morrison's hand snapped back as if he'd touched a hot stove. The mark on his palm had flared hot and bright, the black lines lit and straining toward my brother, answering whatever had surfaced in him, and I didn't need to be a mage to see the two were the same thing.

I only understood that it was bad. That my brother was gray and shaking. That my husband had gone rigid and silent, and on Morrison that was as loud as a scream. 

One second I was in the doorway. The next I was at the bed, in front of my brother, my brother who I'd watched waste away for a year while every physician alive shrugged and called it a mystery, and the floor of everything I understood tilted hard to one side.

"That's not possible," I said. "He's sick. He's been sick for a year. There's no mage magic in Marinescu, there's none in my brother, he's a Varco, he's—"

"Maxine." Morrison's voice had gone gentle, which was how I knew. "There's mage magic in his blood. Old. Woven in deep, underneath everything, dressed up to look like a wasting so no one would think to hunt for a spell." He held my eyes. "Your brother isn't dying of a disease. Someone did this to him."

I'd built my whole life on one fact: my brother was dying and it was nobody's fault, only the cruel fate of a body giving out. I'd made a terrible sort of peace with fate. You can't fight fate. You can grieve it, you can scream at it, but you can't put a knife in it.

You can absolutely put a knife in a someone.