Crazy, all of it.

Because she needed to go back to her world, without any memory of ever having met him.

First, however, he had to get those files she was talking about.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly when Sarah’s brain began to send out warning signals that all was not as it appeared—or exactly what tripped up her suspicions.

But as she leaned to the side for a third time, and looked down the hall to the front room, she knew something was way off. As she watched the doctor take a bog standard stethoscope out of an old-fashioned physician’s bag and place it on the young boy’s chest … as his blood pressure was taken with a proper juvenile cuff … as the woman in scrubs checked his pupils with a penlight and looked into his ears … none of it felt right.

The doctor and patient talked the whole time, their voices so quiet, Sarah couldn’t hear what they were saying. And she could not find fault with the attentiveness of the clinician. The woman was solely focused on the boy, her face grim, her body turned to him.

But this just was not right.

Sarah shifted her eyes to her commando—the commando, she corrected. “An ambulance is coming, right? They’re taking him to a hospital.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Which one?”

“It’s a private clinic.”

Sarah frowned and shook her head. “Okay, you need to get real with me. What the hell is going on here.”

The commando shrugged his powerful shoulders. “As you see, he’s getting checked out by a doctor.”

She thought of the six-chambered heart. The bizarre CBC readings. The test results that indicated profound disease resistance even in an immunocompromised state.

One of the things they taught residents in medical school was that when you heard hoofbeats, don’t think zebras. In other words, don’t immediately assume a bump was malignant, flu-like symptoms were Ebola, a cough was the Black Death.

For the most part, it was good advice. Right up until the symptoms you were presented with turned out to be cancer or the plague.

She leaned into the table. “That child should be dead right now. He should have died two years ago, assuming that the files I found were his scans, his reports. None of this is adding up.”

At that moment, the doctor came into the kitchen. She was a good-looking woman, with short blond hair and deep green eyes, and you had to appreciate the gravity with which she seemed to be taking the situation. But there was something … well, off about her.

Like she had a different energy source or—

“He’s been through a lot,” the physician announced. “But he’s in physically fine shape. Other than …” She glanced at Sarah. “Anyway, I’d like to bring him in for further testing—”

“I am going wherever he goes.” Sarah got up. “I am not leaving his side. And will someone please explain to me why we’re not on the way to law enforcement and a medical center right now?”

The doctor gave the commando a look like he was accountable for something. Then the woman said, “I’d like to check John before I go.”

“He’s upstairs.” The commando also stood. “And I’ll take care of things down here.”

“Take care of what things?” Sarah asked sharply as the doctor went to the bottom of the stairs and called up.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Sorry about what?”

Loud footsteps came down the stairs, and Sarah glanced through the hall to the see the male half of the couple shirtless and clearly worried … as he presented a nasty shoulder wound for the doctor’s inspection.

“Sarah? Will you look at me?”

Reflexively, she glanced at the commando—only to recoil at the intense expression on his face. At which point, from out of nowhere, a strange, piercing pain hit her temples, as if she’d eaten ice cream too fast—

“This is getting worse,” she heard the doctor say off in the distance.

Breaking eye contact with the commando—something that was strangely difficult to do, as if their stares had formed a tangible tie—Sarah leaned to the side and looked down the hall again. The doctor was palpating that shoulder—and before Sarah could help herself, she burst up and walked down to the two of them.

The doctor seemed surprised at the intrusion—and Sarah didn’t bother with reading anyone else’s expression. She was fascinated by the wound. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before—and jeez, talk about ugly. There was a blackened erosion of the first and second layers of skin along the edges of an infected area that extended from the top of the shoulder down onto the pectoral.

“Have you tried antibiotics?” Sarah asked. “What have you done so far to treat this?”

When they all stared at her and the commando came in from the kitchen, she glanced around at the group—which now included the girlfriend/wife who had come down the stairs.

“I’m sorry.” She took a step back and looked up at the patient. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m a molecular geneticist. I specialize in the immune system and I’m just curious about what’s going on here for you. Your body’s clearly fighting off something, and the researcher in me wants to know what it is and what you’re doing to help yourself?”

She was surprised when the man lifted his hands and signed, I was hurt fighting. We haven’t treated it with antibiotics because it’s not that kind of infection.

The girlfriend/wife cleared her throat. “He really doesn’t want to talk about this—”

Sarah signed back, What kind of infection is it?

Smart was sexy.

It was also incredibly inconvenient when you were trying to get into someone’s brain, take over their thoughts, erase their short-term memory … and send them back to the human world where they belonged.

Murhder had a lot of experience wiping memories and replacing them with different versions of events, but he’d never started the process and had his target break away from the mind control and latch onto something else so completely that their consciousness locked him out.

Hello, Sarah.

And P.S., he loved her name.

As she and John signed back and forth, Murhder was very aware he needed to get into her skull again, and not just finish the scrub job, but start the damn thing all over. Instead, he just stood there like a planker, enjoying the sight of her as she communicated with John, her hands flipping smoothly through positions.

Lot of nodding between the pair of them.

Then Sarah looked at the doctor known as Jane. “I don’t have to know the details of how it happened. I can respect his privacy. But I don’t understand what the infection is—any more than you all do, evidently. I have a feeling you are not going to take him to a medical center, and no, I am not going to make trouble for you guys.” She glanced around. “But I can help if you want someone who knows a helluva lot about immune response to take a stab at it.”

Xhex spoke up from the stairwell’s bottom step. “What kind of help?”

“I’m not going to lie,” Sarah replied. “I don’t have any treatments immediately in mind. But I don’t like to see patients in pain or scared about their future. I deal with cancer patients, and trust me, after having lost both my parents to that disease, I know too well how hard it is to be terrified about your health. I’m motivated by all that, but also the researcher in me is fascinated. I want to know what the tissue looks like under the microscope. I want to see what his white blood cells are doing. I want to go down to that cellular level and find out what’s happening. There’s no easy solution, of course. Immunotherapy is still new science and it’s not like there’s a magic pill or shot that I can recommend that will make him better. I would love to help, though, and it is my area of expertise.”