Eidolon snorted at his younger brother’s words. “The Haven spell keeps me from killing him. It doesn’t prevent me from dispensing a little justice during treatment.”
“Can’t escape your old job, huh?” Shade pushed aside the curtain separating two of the three ER cubicles and stepped fully inside. “The son of a bitch eats babies. Let me wheel him outside and waste his sorry ass.”
“Wraith already offered.”
“Wraith offers to waste all the patients.”
Eidolon grunted. “Probably a good thing our little brother didn’t go the doctor route.”
“Neither did I.”
“You had different reasons.”
Shade hadn’t wanted to spend that much time in school, especially since his healing gift was better suited to his chosen field, paramedicine. He was all about scraping patients off the street and keeping them alive long enough for the Underworld General staff to fix them.
Blood dripped to the obsidian floor as Eidolon probed the patient’s most serious wound. A female Umber demon, the same species as Shade’s mother, had caught the patient sneaking into her nursery, and had somehow impaled him—several times—with a toilet brush.
Then again, Umber demons were remarkably strong for their petite size. The females were especially so. Eidolon had, on several occasions, enjoyed the application of that strength in bed. In fact, when he could no longer resist the final maturation cycle his body had entered, he planned to make an Umber female his first infadre. Umbers made good mothers, and only rarely did they kill the unwanted offspring of a Seminus demon.
Putting aside the thoughts that plagued him more frequently as The Change progressed, Eidolon glanced at the patient’s face. The skin that should have been a deep reddish-brown was now pale with pain and blood loss. “What’s your name?”
The patient groaned. “Derc.”
“Listen, Derc. I’m going to repair this unsightly hole, but it’s going to hurt. A lot. Try not to move. Or scream like a cowering little imp.”
“Give me something for the pain, you fucking parasite,” he snarled.
“Doctor parasite.” Eidolon nodded at the equipment tray, and Paige, one of their few human nurses, handed him clamps.
“Derc, buddy, did you eat any of the Umber’s young before she caught you?”
Hatred rolled off Shade’s body as Derc shook his head, sharp teeth bared, eyes glowing orange.
“Today isn’t your lucky day then. Didn’t get a meal, and you aren’t getting anything for the pain, either.”
Allowing himself a grim smile, Eidolon clamped the damaged artery in two places as Derc screamed vile curses and struggled against the restraints that held him on the metal table.
“Scalpel.”
Paige handed him the instrument, and he expertly sliced between the clamps. Shade crowded close, watching as he shaved away the shredded artery tissue and then held the newly clean ends together. A warm tingle wound its way down his right arm along his dermal markings to the tips of his gloved fingers, and the artery fused. The baby-eater would no longer have to worry about bleeding out. From the expression on Shade’s face, however, he would have to worry about surviving more than two steps outside the hospital.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d saved a life only to have it taken once the patient had been released.
“BP’s dropping.” Shade’s gaze focused on the bedside monitor. “Could be shock.”
“There’s another bleed somewhere. Bring up his pressure.”
Reluctantly, Shade placed his large palm over the bony ridges in Derc’s forehead. The numbers on the monitor dipped, raised, and then stabilized, but the change would be temporary. Shade’s powers couldn’t sustain life that wasn’t there, and if Eidolon couldn’t find the problem, nothing Shade did would make a difference.
A rapid assessment of the other wounds revealed nothing to explain the drop in vitals. Then, just below the patient’s twelfth rib, a fresh scar. Beneath the razor-straight mark, something bubbled.
“Shade.”
“Hell’s fires,” Shade breathed. His gaze snapped up as he raked his fingers through nearly black hair that, at shoulder-length, was longer than but identical in color to Eidolon’s. “It might be nothing. It might not be Ghouls.”
Ghouls. Not the cannibalistic monsters of human lore, but the term for those who carved up demons to sell their parts on the underworld black market.
Hoping his brother was right but not ripped from the womb yesterday, Eidolon pressed softly on the scar.
“Derc, what happened here?”
“Cut myself.”
“This is a surgical scar.”
UG was the only medical facility in the world that performed surgery on their kind, and Derc hadn’t been treated here before.
Eidolon caught the pungent stink of fear. “No. It was an accident.” Derc clenched his fists, his lidless eyes wild. “You must believe me.”
“Derc, calm down. Derc?”
Monitor alarms beeped, and the baby-eater convulsed.