“Yes. And I don’t think he’ll be waking soon.” Quentin closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. “Is everyone all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve already checked on Irene—she’ll be badly bruised, but nothing is broken. She was very fortunate.” The straight line of her lips promised a long list of questions for the Haven’s heedless residents when this was finished. “We must find out what Boroskov did with May. She could still be in danger.”
“We’ll find her,” he said with absolute conviction. Real confidence, not the false bravado that had sustained him for so long. He reached for her hand and squeezed it gently. Boroskov couldn’t have taken her far.”
“And Fenris?” she asked, for his ears alone.
“He came when we needed him,” he said. “You were right. He was the one who finally defeated Boroskov.”
“Was he?” Her eyes, so beautiful even now, demanded more from him, a deeper truth.
Such truths were no longer to be feared. Quentin searched his heart and found all the fear shrivelled up and bereft of power. Just as the memories, freed from Fenris’s mind, could no longer distort his life, though it might take him years to fully reconcile himself to him.
“We defeated him,” he amended. “Fenris and I. But only after I realized that I had to make my surrender complete. I had to trust him with everything I am. As I trust you.”
“You accepted him at last,” she said, stroking his hand. “You let him out. And yet he did not kill Boroskov.”
“No.” Quentin smiled—no bitterness or mockery, only a sense of peace, almost too new to seem real. “He used powers I lost long ago, if I ever had them. He met Boroskov on his own ground—on the ground we shared, all three of us. And then he—” He paused, trying to put the impossible into words. “He joined with Boroskov, and gave me back myself.”
“He… joined—”
He touched his temple. “Fenris is gone, but he’s not. What he was is still in me—the parts I needed, just as you said. The parts that make me a whole man again. But the rest—it’s Boroskov’s, now.”
He could see she didn’t understand. He didn’t truly understand it himself. Fenris had willingly flung his being into Boroskov’s mind, and the two had become one.
Fenris had not killed Boroskov. He’d left him hopelessly mad.
“Perhaps one day I can explain,” he said. “Suffice it to say that Boroskov will not be a threat to anyone, human or otherwise. Fenris will stop him.”
Johanna shivered, her scientific curiosity left without answers, and she looked at the Russian. “I judge him to be in a cataleptic state. We cannot leave him here.”
“It will be necessary to confine him to some place where he can be cared for—and watched, in the rare event that I am mistaken.”
“An asylum,” she said, sadness in her eyes.
“But not the Haven.”
She glanced away. “I could not care for him, in any case. I am not sure if I am qualified to see patients again.”
He cupped her chin in his hand and turned her toward him. “Johanna—don’t you know that I—we—couldn’t have done this without you? I never would have found the courage to recognize the darker part of myself, or the memories that created it, if you had not shown me the way. You made it possible.”
“You give me far too much credit,” she said with a faint, self-deprecating smile. “I have learned that we doctors do not cure our patients. We merely help them, just a little, to cure themselves—if we are very lucky.”
“You’re wrong, Doc.”
Harper came to crouch beside them, looking from Johanna and Quentin to Boroskov and back again. “None of us would be where we are now, if not for you.”
Johanna’s eyes sharpened. “How did you come to be here, Harper? What possessed you to put yourself and the others in danger by following me?” She looked beyond him to the remaining three patients. Oscar was perched on a broken chair, kicking his legs and looking quite unperturbed by the recent action. Amazingly enough, Lewis Andersen sat beside Irene, half supporting her. He was brushing himself off with a once-pristine white handkerchief, glancing about the filthy room with visible distaste. Irene gave a loud sniff, and he belatedly passed the kerchief to the actress, who blew her nose into it. His narrow upper lip curled, but he did not draw away from her. Something had changed with Lewis during Quentin’s absence.