The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

But this would only happen if the baby were brought to the island, which depended on Kristian’s status. They wouldn’t risk exposing a newborn to such lethal pathogens. Do they make PPE that small? Lily wondered.

She turned to Finn, seated in the armchair, and could almost see the remorse pressing down on him. Evidently consumed by the destruction his fight with Kristian had wrought on his brother’s family, he presumably hadn’t turned his thoughts to how Cora would receive Hannah’s announcement.

Lily’s heart constricted and she recognized the sensation for what it was: love. For an innocent baby girl, who in less than five months would be born into whatever devastating circumstances had emerged by then. An urge to protect her coursed through Lily, and she knew that she couldn’t break up with Finn this night. Perhaps her longing to care for a child of her own needed this redirection. Whatever the cause, she felt compelled to be there for this child and do everything she could to give Cora this opportunity to love and be loved.

Three days later

March 30

he smell of antiseptic wafted through the blackness. Kristian snapped open his eyes, expecting to see the hospital that had been his second home for the past fifteen years. Blinking rapidly, he tried to bring into focus the familiar ceiling tiles, but their perfect right angles wouldn’t emerge. Instead, an irregular swath of flaking ivory paint materialized. From the two-toned ceiling hung a series of rusted metal frames, their lightbulb sockets bare. Old surgical lamps. A chill raced down his spinal cord.

Kristian knew this location: an operating theater within the tuberculosis pavilion. Cora’s territory.

Jolted, he sat up, a spasm of pain igniting his abdomen, followed by a crushing wooziness. He gripped a pair of side rails and recognized the bed as the gurney where he’d bound her.

Just as his dad had burst into the room . . . Finn thrashing with a surgical knife . . . the acute sting . . . Cora’s wailing and Lily’s shrieking. The last thing Kristian remembered seeing was Milo’s face—obviously a sign that he’d been in hemorrhagic shock.

He raised his hospital gown, the same style they kept in the onsite lab, and inspected his professionally treated wound. It had to be his father’s work, as was the IV needle in his arm connected to a bag of saline and another of morphine, hanging from a pole. Rollie must have been here, but where was he now?

“Hi. You’re awake.”

Kristian whipped his head toward the sound of Cora’s scratchy voice and recoiled at the sight of her only three feet away.

He hadn’t heard her arrive. Has she been here this whole time? he wondered, his skin tingling. “You’re too close; back off!”

As if she hadn’t heard, she simply stood there, smugly beaming at him, her eyes practically sparkling. How could she be gazing at him like that after all he’d done to her?

He hated that smile.

She must be envisioning her revenge. Instinctively, he checked his wrists and ankles: they weren’t bound. Her scalpel pouch was missing from her hip, which only heightened his mistrust.

Not constrained by her usual braid, her reddish-brown hair looked untamed—so emblematic of the wild beast she’d become—and her face and folded hands were free of the protective gear he’d rarely seen her without.

After twenty years of adhering to proper contagion procedures, he felt a compulsion to rebuke her, but he held his tongue. The absence of her PPE must be intentional, part of her plan to be rid of him. “Where are the others?” Hopefully his dad and Finn had taken Lily home. He shouldn’t have brought her with him. Because of his obsession—and overconfidence—he’d endangered that sweet girl, he realized, now angry at himself.

The room spun, but lying back down would reveal his weakness.

Cora’s arm snaked across his back, supporting him. “You need to rest.”

Her foul breath warmed his neck, and he pictured highly lethal virions landing on his skin. “Get away from me.”

Wincing, she jumped back. “I’m sorry,” she stuttered, wringing her hands. Her cheeks flushed, she turned her head toward an open, dark supply closet. “Rollie said to take it slow,” she whispered. “I should have listened. I’m just so—”

The hairs on Kristian’s arms rose. “Who the hell are you talking to? Why am I here?”

Cora fixed her attention back on him, her soft countenance and relaxed posture highly disturbing. This could not be the same woman whose behavior and anatomy he’d obsessively studied for two decades, whose actions he could usually predict with nearly 100 percent accuracy.

“Spit it out.”

“Your idea worked,” she said gently, “for me to give you blood.”

Appalled, Kristian looked down at his chalk-blue hospital gown and the IV in his arm. With an urge to scream welling in his throat, he longed to rip the needle from his flesh, but that would accomplish nothing. By now, Ebola, Rift Valley fever, and 1918 H1N1 microbes had to be teeming within his cells.

“I don’t believe you,” he said through gritted teeth despite a murky memory of pointing out that Cora had his same blood type. “I was delirious. Rollie would never have allowed it.”

“I’m so glad he did,” Cora said, her obnoxious grin returning.

Kristian’s hand quivered with the urge to push her away. Three concurrent systemic infections. He wouldn’t survive the onslaught of symptoms. “Where’s Rollie?”

“I asked him for this time alone with you.”

His heart palpitated, and he was suddenly aware of cool perspiration trickling down his sides. “He would never allow that.”

“Well, he did. I’ve got something for you,” she said coyly.

“You’ve already given me plenty.” He narrowed his eyes. “The symptoms will start any day now.”

“Actually,” she said, enunciating each syllable, “Rollie kept you sedated to give your body time to recover before . . .” Her voice trailed off as she made the sign of the cross, then she kissed that trite pendant of hers. Several times throughout the years following his grandfather’s death, when he’d impulsively