It was said with bitterness, but he looked at her and the vial with longing. But she was still several steps back. “What do you mean?” She said. Mentaphen is what he gave to Mattias. “What do you mean, it’s Alex?”

  He gave her a long look, one that started out as the patented Westian glare, really? But slowly it moderated, as if he was realizing something that was, at the moment, beyond her. Shadow had nearly died—she’d almost lost him twice—and now he was saying she held Alex in a bottle? What did that even mean?

  She was maybe hyperventilating. She wasn’t sure. Her head was spinning too fast.

  “Kaiser Willheim gave it to me,” he repeated, a bit slowly, as if he were speaking to a child. “He told me that it was Alex West’s memories, his emotions, his feelings, and that if I took it, or were forced to take it, I would cease to exist. It would be purely Alex in here, a stranger I do not and, I suppose, will never truly know.”

  Mentaphen. She looked down at her hand, unsure of what she felt. Whatever it was, it was huge, with jutting, waving wings that had eclipsed her own ability to process emotion. She was cut loose from the most important of mental sensations and was drowning in emotion. It felt good and clear and rational, and a small part of her, screaming, knew that was just an illusion. But what did she feel? What did he mean?

  “I didn’t know this existed,” She whispered. “I mean…how could it? Alex wasn’t one of Kaiser’s employees. He didn’t do anything Kaiser would have found useful…” she trailed off. Because she was starting to put pieces together here. Oh, yes, she was. “Kaiser told you about this before he stabbed Henry?”

  “In the little garden, when I returned to bring Kaiser to the Nexus.” He agreed. “He told me that you had planned to use it on me the first chance you got, and that he had saved me.”

  She nodded. Set the vial down on the bedside table and stepped away from it. “That son of a bitch.” She said. Suddenly his cool reactions to her, his reticence, the frequent withdrawals from her, his refusal to have sex (damn it), all made a sort of dreadful sense. It required that he first be in love with her, which she nearly dismissed out of hand. No, she decided. She shouldn’t eliminate a possibility until it’s been completely disproven. Call it an X factor. If X equaled zero, he did not love her, and this was not an issue. But suppose he did, and that gave X value. If he loved her, if some part of him still wanted her, or had come to want her in spite of everything, then he would be more apt to ally himself with her.

  She’d made another mistake, she realized. She’d assumed that Kaiser would want there to be a connection between herself and the Shadow; it’d be something he could use. Instead, he’d taken an axe to the tree. He’d introduced an idea—that she could destroy him in favor of Alex—and allowed the Shadow to run with it. Perhaps he’d thought the connection to Alex, and thus to her, was too weak to be worthwhile. Or perhaps he wasn’t that high-and-mighty after all. He hadn’t cared what the outcome would be; he just wanted to hurt the Wests as deeply as he possibly could.

  That still didn’t sit right with her, though. Why give him the serum? He had no way to test it, no way to prove it was what Kaiser said. There might be nothing in that vial. Might be water and air and nothing more. No, she realized. The only reason to give it to him was because the stuff inside was genuine…and there was an expectation of use.

  “Alright,” she said, coolly. She had to be cool, for now. Had to be as chill as frozen water, as the rooms Illyris had given her, as ice in a condensation-gloried glass. She stepped away from the vial, and it was easy. Almost freeing. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Do?” he blinked, looking surprised. He now struggled to sit up and encountered his monitor cords for the first time. Hawk had mostly ignored her own, moving as necessary to keep them from ripping off her skin and going off with the loud, dread beep. The Shadow didn’t care. These were strange objects to him, artifacts from a world he’d forgotten entirely, and he tore them loose with a single gesture and a loud beeeeeep, screaming and echoing in the otherwise silent room, Beeeeep, like it wanted to drill through the eardrum.

  “Curse these things. What are they?”

  “Things that tell the nurses station you’re alive. And all of them are alerting now so—” and the doors to the ward opened and medics entered, the nurses Hawk had theorized about, and began immediately trying to placate the Shadow into letting them put the wires back. He protested, “I’m fine, I’m well.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  A nurse in military fatigues, who still somehow radiated sunshine scrubs with Disney characters, pushed her way to the fore. “You’re an unknown species who just had brain surgery. Please let us put the wires back.”

  “Orb surgery,” he corrected. “And from the feel of it they didn’t put all the pieces back.”

  “You took one out for Henry,” Hawk said, dry as the Sahara, or maybe as her own mouth. When was the last time she’d had a drink? Illyris’s palace? No, the water skin on the road, with the Large Man. She hoped he’d survived.

  “I mean other than that. I’m missing more pieces of my humanity than I should be.” He held up his inhuman hands. The violet shade did, perhaps, seem a bit higher on his arms than before. His claws looked a bit more wicked.

  “Is that why…” she struggled to find the words.

  “Why I look like a piebald monstrosity?” He nodded, and sighed, and allowed the monitor pads to be replaced on his sweat-slicked skin. “Some of it was the God’s own dinner on my person. Some of it was my own folly. But yes, it’s the result of damage to my Orb. And it’s been getting worse for centuries, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the injury continues apace.” There was unhappiness and bitterness dripping off every word.

  “What’s going on here?” Captain Spectre entered the room, with Mulligan himself shortly behind.

  “Oh, god. Tell me you weren’t waiting for us to wake up?” Hawk said.

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but yep. Had kids waiting to alert us the minute you woke up. Though we thought for a minute that god-boy here had finally bought it.” Mulligan stepped forward out of all of them, and glared down at the Shadow in the hospital bed. “According to my surgeons, you’re goddamn lucky to be alive. And don’t worry, the only sample they took was the one you offered, and I’ve got it reserved for Henry Dyson’s resurrection…though you might want to hurry up with that. Rumors are starting to get out about you people.”

  “Yes, I expected as much,” the Shadow said. “Which is why I have a proposition for you…for all of you. But mostly for her.” And he took a deep breath. The monitors he was hooked up to twitched wildly. Whatever he was about to say was upsetting to him. Greatly.

  Oh no, Hawk thought.

  “Kaiser Willheim created a serum that put Henry Dyson in Mattias’s head. He said he created it using the fluids in the spinal cord—I do not pretend to understand it.” He looked at the General expectantly.

  “We get it.”

  “He made one of Alex West. In the hours before the Rift was opened—before my own creation—he got this substance from Alex and used it to create the serum that he later gave to me. He gave it as proof of your perfidy, your cruelty, as a sign that I should mistrust your intentions.”

  A pause, a deep breath, as a multitude of voices now erupted over him. Hawk’s numbered among them. She was barely aware of what she was saying—the word no figured prominently—but knew that she had to say something. The cloud of mistrust that was now exposed was titanic, worthy of storm, and all she could do was rail against it. No. I wouldn’t. How can you think—

  But the answer to that one was easy. Of course he’d think she’d leap at the chance to have Alex back. She’d done nothing but moon over her husband until…until…

  Why, until she’d fallen in love with another man, of course. The living one, not the ghost. The damaged one she had, though she would not have called his scars, his hurt, his recovery “damage” until he’d forced his own vocabulary down her throat. Gods eaten he might be, but he was worth the salvage. Not because he had been Alex West, though that certainly recommended him, but because he was the Shadow, and he was worth it now.

  What a funny thing to discover. What a silly thing to always know.

  Then he rose his voice, “I’d bid silence!” he said, and somehow that sounded kingly and commanding, despite the hospital bed and collection of wires. He was so commanding that even Mulligan shut up and stiffened his spine, as if his former drill instructor had suddenly echoed its way through the past into this room. And the Shadow said, “Thank you,” into the quiet that followed. “I was not done. At the time, I believed that being Alex West would be a terrible thing, because it would be the end of me. But—”

  And he continued on, talking, spinning a story that sounded quiet epic to Hawk’s unlistening ear. But she was caught back on something he’d said. It’d be the end of me. There it was, the reason why she was so repelled by the vial of glass with her husband’s name on it. It’d be the end of the Shadow. It’d be the end of not just everything he was, now, but everything he was, before. His past, gone. His history, erased. Everything he’d fought for, everything he’d done, every person he’d touched since his transformation, all of that would vanish into the ether, and only a man would remain.

  But no, that was the wrong way to see this. Only a man? No, only a core. The foundation of the building, yes, something worth having and as necessary to the person as the sun is to seeds…but the seed is not the plant, the acorn isn’t the oak. Alex was not the Shadow. And it’d be as wrong to reduce him back to what he’d been as it would be to force the oak tree back to seed. He’d grown—no, he’d out grown Alex. And bringing him back to this would be a perversion.

  The Shadow was in tears.

  That pulled her out of her own self-important ramblings. She stared in horror as the tears emerged, more plentiful than anyone had a right to expect, as he continued to speak.

  “—but now I understand something better. That maybe what was meant in wickedness could truly be a blessing. I’ve seen, in Henry and Mattias, how this substance works. I could amplify it, I think. Make it be permanent.

  “So I want you to use it,” he said, at last. “I want you to use it on me.”