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increasing the magnification of the images by two hundred percent, then three, then four. She stared at the screen, searching for evidence of microinfarcts, subtle tissue damage, but there was none. His arteries were lovely. His entire cardiovascular system looked stellar. If she’d been reviewing these images for a physical, she would have happily signed off on any activity.
    “Come on, Nat. You’ve gotta be done by now.” Colin’s tone this time was closer to a mumble, a protest he didn’t expect her to hear.
    Natalya rested her forehead on her hand for a second or two, trying to think. With a long exhale, she stood. She’d run the troponin test again.
    She pushed the button to slide the table out of the scanner. Standing, she crossed to the door between the two rooms, and as Colin sat up, told him, “I need to take more blood.”
    His sigh of relief at being out of the machine turned into a sigh of exasperation. “Seriously?”
    “If you were in Gainesville or any reputable hospital, they’d be checking the enzyme counts in your blood every hour. Don’t be giving me a hard time about this.” With one last glance at the sleeping child—still motionless—she gestured for Colin to follow her and headed to the small exam room down the hallway. GD was a research facility, not a clinic, but she routinely checked her subjects’ basic vital signs, including blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature, before proceeding with their imaging.
    Colin didn’t complain, but as she slid the hypodermic needle under his skin, he grimaced. “I think you’re turning into a vampire.”
    “Overgrown mosquitoes. Not a chance,” she responded automatically, as she watched the syringe fill with red. Pulling it out, she pressed the cotton ball she had ready onto his skin and slid her hand up his forearm, gently forcing him to close his arm around the insertion point. And then her eyes met his. 
    His were hot, almost smoky. She could see the thought, the memory, as clearly as if her gift were telepathy. His old apartment. The television on. Him trying to convince her to watch. Her huffing in disgust. Vampire shows. Pfft. And then… how many times had five minutes of television turned into heated kissing on the couch, his hand sliding up her shirt, her hand sliding down his?
    Too many.
    Her lips parted, the heat rushing into her cheeks, flooding the rest of her. She dropped his arm as if it burned, turning away and fumbling with the vial of blood.
    Without a word, she marched off into the adjacent storeroom.
    He followed her. He was bare-chested, only half-dressed so she could scan his heart without interference from his shirt. She’d look like an idiot if she told him to put some clothes on, but she was much too aware of his presence behind her as she set the vial of blood down on the counter.
    She opened the industrial-size refrigerator. Her eyes skimmed down the full boxes to the one she’d located earlier and she grabbed it and slid another test pouch out.
    “Why do you guys have all this stuff?” The question was casual, but she could hear the tension underneath it.
    How many years had it been since the two of them were alone together?
    Too many.
    Not enough.
    Natalya frowned down at the test instructions, trying to focus on the present, not the past. What had he asked? Oh, right. The over-stocked refrigerator.
    “Zane. And Grace,” she added, to be scrupulously fair. Really, Grace should have known what she was doing. She scanned the instructions, looking for any place where she might have gone wrong before. She was no expert but they seemed perfectly straightforward. Drip whole blood on the test unit, wait fifteen minutes, check the line.
    “Not really an answer,” Colin murmured.
    She glanced at him, surprised, and then chuckled. It felt like a complete answer to her, but then she’d been working with her siblings for the past few years. “Grace didn’t have time to do her usual emergency preparedness planning