The Monster MASH Read online

“So what’s next, Nurse Hume?”

  Nurse Hume simply stood there and waited, all the fire gone from his pale blond hair, pasty skin, and vacant eyes. He’d been here for decades. This place had turned the man into a total drone. Some days I wondered if Charlie were more alive.

  Well, I wasn’t going to let it happen to me. I wasn’t just going to stand here and yank out claws. I wasn’t going to spend my life tracking down lost horns and eyeballs.

  Or was I?

  Nurse Hume took the next set of charts and shuffled his way around the table. “X-rays indicate our next patient has ingested a horse.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He posted the images to the light board next to my table. “His colleagues bet him that he was not, indeed, hungry enough to eat the unfortunate animal. And so he did.”

  I stared at Nurse Hume. Then at the X-rays.

  “Son of a—”

  He cleared his throat. “As you can imagine, hooves and harnesses are not digestible.”

  “So this is my life,” I said to no one in particular.

  “I can’t imagine…” Nurse Hume began before his voice trailed away.

  “What? Do you want to say something to me?” Frankly, I wished he would. If Hume started getting opinions, there might be hope for the rest of us.

  “No,” he murmured. “Never mind.”

  Just when I was about to bang my head against the steel operating table, I heard a commotion on the far side of the tent.

  “We need a doctor, stat!”

  Ambulance workers loaded an immense New God Army soldier from a stretcher onto a table. He must have just come in. They were still cutting his uniform from his body.

  His face was hard. His jaw could have been cut from marble. He was well over six feet, with scars slicing across one crazy-wide shoulder.

  He had powerful arms, cut abs. He was like a Greek statue come to life. Only he was more. Much more. Even flat on his back, he was intensely powerful—striking in a way that went beyond mere physical strength.

  He was commanding.

  I stared at him, raw excitement thudding through me. I’d seen a lot of demigods, but none of them as astonishingly regal as this one.

  He was rough, dangerous.

  He was a work of art.

  My breath caught. He was watching me.

  I crossed the crowded ER, intimately aware that he never took his attention off me. It was as if he’d come to find me.

  Ridiculous.

  He needed me because I was there. Everyone else was busy with the greased-lightning victims. I was the only one who could handle this.

  “What have you got?” I glanced at a sandy-haired EMT.

  “Stab wound to the upper chest. Possible punctured lung.”

  Finally, a real case: a soldier who needed my skills, my expertise—me.

  No wonder it felt good.

  I ran through my mental checklist as I inspected the bronze knife lodged in his upper torso and took stock of his vitals.

  He must have gone down during the storm. His clipped brown hair still held water droplets.

  “What’s his pressure?” I could feel my fingers shaking.

  “Ninety-seven over fifty-six.”

  My patient fought for every breath, his impossibly blue eyes locked onto me.

  “I’m going to save you,” I told him.

  The soldier closed his fingers over mine and squeezed, leaving a smear of blood across my hand.

  “Get him over to my table.”

  I grabbed his file. His heart rate was dropping. Blood pressure down. He was hemorrhaging. I was glad to see Nurse Hume already at the table, prepping my instruments. “Patient is a male, mid-five-hundreds. Blood pressure’s down to eighty over forty. Pulse is up to one twenty-six. Hook him up to both blood and saline.” I took a final glance at his chart.

  Galen of Delphi. Rank: Lokhagos. Decorated unit commander and head of the Green Hawk Special Forces team.

  “You’re in good hands, Galen of Delphi.”

  He nodded, wincing against the pain.

  “Don’t worry,” I said for his benefit and mine.

  I could feel my blood pumping as I handed off his file.

  Metal-weapons wounds could be dicey. The commander’s head slammed against the table as he began to convulse.

  My gut clenched. “Let’s get a move on, people.”

  Horace posted the X-rays. The knife was dangerously close to his heart. And convulsions meant poison.

  “Get me one hundred twenty cc’s of toxopren.”

  The drug was highly toxic and flammable.

  Nurse Hume offered me a prepared injection the size of a horse tranquilizer.

  Both armies liked to poison their weapons. They usually used the blood of Medusa, or spittle from Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the underworld. I’d even seen them use Britney Spears perfume. We actually preferred that last one. It smelled nice and it wouldn’t kill any mortals on staff.

  The commander thrashed harder as I injected him with toxopren. Soon his entire face went red.

  Toxopren burned as it neutralized the poison. The commander was lucky he was delirious. It was the kind of pain that made even the gods scream.

  But that was the least of my worries. The poisoned blade was designed to split as it came out—over and over again. The shards would slice him apart, from the inside out, until he was well and truly dead.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Horace said.

  “Don’t you have some chariots to bless?”

  I rubbed at the trickle of sweat working its way under my surgical cap. Focus. Of course I knew what I was doing. I’d looked this man in the eye and told him I’d pull him through. I just needed to concentrate.

  The commander thrashed on the table.

  “Hold him steady,” I said. “I need him motionless.”

  It took both ambulance drivers to pin his arms and legs down.

  I double-checked my grip on the leather handle of the knife and used the nervous tension to help me focus. The blade was millimeters from his heart. One wrong twitch and he’d be dead. One really bad move, the knife would shatter and we’d both be dead.

  “Okay.” I cleared my mind and tugged at the blade.

  My stomach churned as I felt a droplet of sweat snake down the side of my face. I held steady, my fingers working the poisoned knife.

  “Halfway there. We’re doing good.” Bracing my left hand against the closing wound, I extracted the knife with my right. I kept my grip steady and followed the entry trajectory, until a piece broke. I watched it snap and disappear.

  “Damn it!”

  His vitals plummeted. I tossed the remains of the dagger into a silver-lined tray. “Give me suction.” I needed to see where the piece went. “Now.”

  The heart-rate alarm sounded.

  Nurse Hume dabbed blood away from the wound. Too slow. I yanked the suction tube out of his hand and did it myself.

  “Stay with me,” I ordered.

  I needed to see where it went. He wasn’t even thrashing anymore. One piece of the blade would kill him.

  I saw it under his skin, inching down his chest, toward his stomach and bowels. It could just as easily nick the liver.

  “Scalpel!”

  “You can’t just cut him open,” Nurse Hume protested.

  “You got a better idea?” I snapped.

  Of all the times for him to grow a pair, this wasn’t it.

  The scary thing was I had no idea if it would work. But I didn’t have any other options. Not to mention his original knife wound was still bleeding out.

  “Stay with me,” I repeated like a mantra.

  With my scalpel tip, I followed the bulge of metal under his skin until I got about half an inch ahead of it. Then I sliced. Blood pooled in the wound. I spread my fingers and put pressure on either side as the tip of the shard emerged. I seized it. The deadly metal ground against my thin latex gloves.

  Not a good idea.

&nb
sp; I tossed the splinter into my tray. “See if I got it all,” I ordered Hume as I suctioned more blood and felt for any remaining knife fragments.

  A shrill alarm sounded as my patient flatlined.

  “No, no, no, no.” My mind raced.

  Shocks didn’t work on immortals. Adrenaline didn’t work. His body had to heal itself, and now there was no more time.

  His spirit began to rise from his body. “Stop!” I needed a minute more, maybe less. “I need more time.”

  The commander’s spirit blinked at me as if wondering where he was. I stared at him, throat dry, heart pounding. When he’d arrived on my table, I’d held his hand and told him I’d save him.

  His spirit didn’t show the blood or the gaping knife wound. He was healthy and strong. I took in the scar that cut across his right eyebrow, the sharp lines of his face, the vivid blue of his eyes, and was wrenched by a gut-deep pull, so shocking and so utterly right it left me breathless. I stood frozen as we watched each other for a long moment.

  Then he began to rise.

  “No!” I grabbed for him. I don’t know what made me do it. Pure instinct, or more likely fear. All I knew was that I could not lose this man. Not when we’d come so close.

  “Get back in there!” I needed one more minute. One more and I’d save his life.

  My fingers closed around his, and I gasped as pure energy streaked through me.

  Holy mother of god. My pulse pounded in my ears, my entire body quaked, but I didn’t dare let go. I held the man’s soul in my hands.

  He radiated strength and honor. Yet he was damaged, torn with pain and regret. His innate power washed over me, along with a terrible aching loneliness.

  His jaw tightened as he stared down at me with tender ferocity. This immortal warrior. This man who was half god.

  The heat of him slid over me, every cell in my body aware of the pull. I felt my own self reaching out to him, tangling with him. In that moment, I was helpless, innocent and wide-eyed as I hadn’t been in so long. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to lose him as his strength, his sorrow, his utter goodness pulsed through me.

  This was a man who deserved a second chance, who deserved to be seen, to live. Raw energy tickled my fingertips as I lifted my hand to caress his ghostly jaw.

  Gods in heaven! What am I doing?

  Horror crashed down on me. This had to end. Now. I held on tight and flung him back into his body.

  “We have a pulse,” Nurse Hume announced.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Doctor?” Nurse Hume called.

  My head pounded. Crisp power sizzled over my skin. I’d felt him. I’d touched him. I’d never touched a spirit before.

  What did I just do?

  “Doctor, he’s bleeding out.”

  Of course he was. He almost died.

  What was I saying? He did die.

  “Clamp,” I said automatically, numb from shock. I worked on his chest wound first, checking to make sure the vital organs were intact, cutting away the tissue burned black with poison, stitching the muscle and flesh and skin back together.

  Focus on the task at hand.

  Don’t think about what just happened.

  Because it scared the hell out of me.

  Chapter Two

  I burst out of the OR without even bothering to rip the plastic covers from my military boots and nearly tripped as the stifling heat of Limbo hit me square in the face.

  Yanking off my surgical mask, I used it to wipe the sweat that was already beading on my forehead. Steam rose off the ground as the heat from Hades burned off the last traces of an early-morning rain.

  I’d saved Galen of Delphi.

  He’d live, with no lasting complications from the poison or the knife that had almost killed him.

  But at what price?

  Would he remember what I did?

  I knew I’d never forget.

  A bone-deep shiver shook me to the core. What if Galen of Delphi decided to come after me? The desert vistas of Limbo left absolutely nowhere to hide.

  I jumped as an EMT bounded up next to me. “Nice work in there, Doc.” It was the sandy-haired ambulance driver who had held the legs.

  “Thanks,” I said. I kept my face neutral and my mouth shut. If anyone asked anything, I’d deny it. Sure, I might have acted funny, but no one else would have been able to see the spirit. I’d saved Commander Galen’s life. End of story.

  Now I only had to hope and pray that he wouldn’t remember.

  A wide desert stretched beyond the tents of our MASH unit, the bare, red landscape littered with rock. My stomach tightened as I focused on a spot where palm trees clustered. Colorful birds dived among that narrow strip of paradise.

  The tropical gardens bloomed over hell vents, tempting the foolish.

  Gods. They tempted me. A long drop into hell seemed a lot more pleasant than answering for what just happened.

  I’d never forget the way Commander Galen had looked at me—so ardent, so powerful. So achingly alone. I knew how he felt. At least when it came to being by myself in a crowd.

  Loneliness was simply a part of war.

  It was something I’d learned to accept. It shouldn’t even bother me anymore.

  Shake it off.

  The ambulance driver had fallen into step at my side. “Are you okay, Doc?”

  “No,” I said, taking a hard right, making my way for my tent.

  My mentor in medical school had possessed the gift. He’d sensed it in me and sought me out. Dr. Levi believed it was a blessing to connect with recently deceased patients. He’d even helped some cross. But he’d been careless. The gods discovered him.

  Goose bumps skittered up my arms when I thought about what they did to him.

  I wondered if the gods would have been so vengeful if it weren’t for the prophecy attached to this particular gift.

  Then again, if doubts were donuts, we’d all have a Krispy Kreme hangover.

  I suddenly felt very tired.

  No wonder. We’d been in surgery for almost ten hours. I squinted against the twin suns of the in-between worlds. Our MASH unit had been on this blighted spot for almost a year, long enough for us to set up regular supply routes, postal service, and badminton courts on the edge of the tar swamp. In retrospect, that might not have been the best idea.

  Ambulance workers in maroon jumpsuits unloaded boxes of medical supplies into the triage locker while a maintenance worker hummed “Puttin’ on the Ritz” as he raked fresh dirt over spilled blood. I wondered just how long he’d been with us.

  I nodded as I passed them and resisted the urge to check on a few patients in the recovery tent. If I could, I would have kept going until I made it back to New Orleans.

  Ah, what I’d give for a plate of Dad’s boudin balls, served up crispy and hot with a side of crawfish étouffée.

  Instead, I reached in my pocket for a half-eaten PowerBar and chased it with a stick of Fruit Stripe gum.

  It was better than what I’d find in the mess tent.

  I made my way south through the red canvas compound until I came to a series of low hutches that made up the officers’ quarters. They were basically wood frames draped in canvas.

  Oh yes, I was done with delusions of grandeur.

  Which I supposed was fortunate, since I’d made it to my military hovel away from home. I banged open the door of the asylum I shared with a moody vampire and a vegetarian werewolf.

  Clotheslines crisscrossed the ceiling, and if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn somebody had been cooking Beefaroni. My roommates had the back two cots, which normally boasted a lovely view of the tar pits. This morning, the light-blocking shades were down, lanterns blazed, and my vampire roommate was still awake. Arguing.

  “All I’m saying”—the undead Marius bit off every word, his layered blond hair falling in his eyes—“is get it out of my face! It stinks!” Dramatic as ever, he yanked a black silk handkerchief off the clothesline and stuffed it under h
is Roman nose.

  I eased onto my cot by the door and shucked off my boots.

  Marius had a pathological need for privacy, which was impossible to pull off in a MASH unit. There were times I felt sorry for him, and then he’d open his mouth.

  Rodger, who’d been lounging on his cot, sat up on his elbows. “You’re saying my wife stinks?”

  Marius towered over him. “Whatever she put in that bottle sure does.”

  “Rodger—” I began, wondering if I really wanted to get between a high-strung vampire and an emotional werewolf. I was used to crazies, growing up around a large Cajun family, but I’d never had to live with them.

  Rodger leapt up and shoved a cloudy pink bottle at the vampire, who backed away like it was holy water. “This is her scent. My mate’s scent. And I’m going to put it wherever I want.” He swiped a handful over his barrel-shaped chest and through his wavy auburn hair before he began sprinkling it over his cot and the bookcase next to it.

  At least now I knew what smelled like Beefaroni.

  Marius bared his fangs. Rodger snarled. At least they wouldn’t eat each other. Marius was allergic to werewolf blood, and last I heard, angry vampire didn’t taste nearly as good as tofu.

  “Hey, that’s my table!” Marius shrieked as Rodger dumped large wet splotches onto an old wooden door that they’d laid between two sawhorses.

  “Oh yeah?” Rodger slammed the perfume down. “Half this table is mine.”

  “I know.” Marius looked angry enough for heart palpitations—if his heart still beat—as he gestured toward the photo frames, Star Wars figurines, and handwritten letters strewn across Rodger’s half of the knotted wood board.

  “I am a vampire. I can smell. Everything!”

  “Then stop dousing yourself in Drakkar.”

  Marius whirled and stalked for his own cot on the opposite side of the table. “Oh, for the days when I could brood in peace! I had minions and a loft full of black leather furniture. I had a grand piano, mirrored walls and ceilings, crystal wineglasses. Orgies with sweet desirable mortals!” His voice shook. “Now I get a tent full of puppy pictures and a nail salon in the corner.”

  “Hey,” I said, reaching for my towel and my shower kit, “don’t bring me into this.” Besides, two bottles of half-dried OPI was not a nail salon. Unlike Rodger, I didn’t get care packages.