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The walls in the surrounding corridor were made of stone, and the ceiling was so high above me that I had to crane my neck considerably just to look up. The cathedral ceiling was adorned with colorful stained glass, inlaid with brilliant, apocalyptic scenes of battles between angels, demons, and the beasts at their command. One was a gnarled wolf-like creature standing on its hind legs with a serpentine tongue dangling out of its jaws, still dripping with the blood of the dismembered bodies at its feet. In the next panel, an angel with a beautiful, youthful face was proudly holding the beast’s head in triumph as its body lay beneath his feet.
I gulped.
"This way," Arrow said, giving the pole an impatient jerk even though I had only lingered for a second. "The doctor needs fresh blood."
The doctor? I supposed it stood to reason that someone had to be responsible for overseeing the blood infusions, and it probably wasn't a cleric.
As I followed Arrow down the hall, we passed several nuns and priests, and I was beginning to realize that the adornment of their robes was a decent indicator of their rank within the Church. I wasn't even sure if all of them were hunters. The ones who came to take my blood weren't, or at least, Claudia said she wasn’t.
Arrow came to a stop in front of a pair of large wooden doors with stained glass windows set in the center of each. They were much too small for any glamorous scenes to be depicted within them, but they were splendid all the same.
Inside the clinic, there were no fewer than a dozen beds lined up against one wall, most separated by a privacy partition. There were several other doors, which I assumed housed patient rooms. Maybe even a laboratory.
For the time being, there only seemed to be one patient in the clinic, a young man wearing what I now recognized as the simple blue robes of a friar. Next to him was a man wearing a white doctor's coat, the first item of clothing I had seen that wasn't overtly religious in nature. He looked to be in his early- to mid-thirties, although it was difficult to say from his face alone. He had youthful, elegant features that were almost feminine, with jet black hair that fell well past his shoulders. His eyes were the color of stone, hidden behind a pair of perfectly rectangular spectacles with no rims.
He looked up from his patient, his eyes widening with concern as they fell on me. I couldn't really blame him. The clinic smelled strongly of blood, and most of it was coming from the young man on the cot at his side. One look at the hunter's pale face was all it took to know he was badly wounded. Perhaps even fatally so. His chest had been bandaged, but the wound had already bled through the white cloth strips.
"What the devil do you think you're doing?" the doctor demanded, turning toward Arrow.
"What do you mean?" he asked defensively. "You said to bring him for a live transfusion."
"Not conscious," the doctor hissed.
Arrow rolled his eyes. "Well, you should have been more specific. It's fine." He condescendingly patted the top of my head. "He's perfectly tame. Right now, anyway."
The doctor eyed me warily. "I've treated more than half a dozen bite wounds from him, so forgive me if I don't readily believe that."
"It's fine, he has the hots for Castor," Arrow said, earning a growl from me that wasn't quite voluntary. "He's on good behavior now."
The doctor raised an eyebrow, giving me another dubious look before he shrugged. "Chain him up, then. And hurry, this patient isn’t going to make it much longer at this rate."
Arrow looked at the hunter lying in the bed, but he didn't seem particularly troubled by the sight. Why didn't that surprise me?
I grudgingly followed Arrow over to the cot next to the hunter’s bed, and as clumsy as I was, I managed to climb onto it. He kept the rope around my neck, but soon replaced it with a metal chain. It didn't look like enough to hold me if I had an incentive to escape, but his eyes met mine, as if he was able to guess what I was thinking.
"That's silver," he said. "You try chewing through that and it's not going to be very fun for you."
Well, that figured. That wasn't his only security measure, though. He restrained me with two other chains secured to the stone wall, each one wrapped around one of my wrists, and pulled them tight.
He stood aside, folding his arms as he looked on in satisfaction. "Go ahead, Doc."
The doctor already had a needle ready. It was attached to a coiled tube that ran into a tall glass canister with several glass tubes coming off of it. There was a reservoir beneath the canister, and the blood seemed to flow through it by some mechanism that was part of the distilling process, I assumed. Another long tube came out of the base of the canister and fed into another needle fitted into the crook of the young hunter's arm. It looked like something out of an alchemist’s laboratory, and given the nature of the Church’s work, it probably was.
The doctor was understandably wary as he approached me, but I remained still and let him put the needle into my jugular. It was a vulnerable spot, and a growl escaped me in spite of myself. The doctor jolted, but he seemed to recognize it was involuntary and continued his work.
"I must say, he certainly is docile for an alpha," he remarked.
I wasn't sure if I should take that as a compliment or not. Arrow just snorted.
The transfusion wasn't painful after the first stick, but the boredom was. With nothing to do other than sit on the cot, trying to get comfortable, my thoughts wandered frequently. Each time they drifted too far and I recognized the telltale sign of the animal within slipping out into the dominant position, I would jolt myself back to alertness. It became a back-and-forth struggle that lasted hours until the wounded hunter began to moan and stir in his sleep.
At least they had taken enough blood that I could feel the beast’s resolve weakening again, and now, whenever I drifted off, it was sleep rather than madness that called to me sweetly. Eventually, I succumbed.
ChapterFive
CASTOR
It had been a few hours since I last checked on Bryson, the young hunter who’d been recently wounded, so once I finished my morning devotions, I headed back to the clinic. When I arrived, the shifter was sleeping soundly on a cot next to Bryson, restrained only with three silver chains.
