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"Stephan is where he belongs-"
"My dear, I had no idea you knew him. Catya told me."
"I...did." But maybe she shouldn't have mentioned that to the female.
"Dearest Virgin Scribe, why didn't you say?"
"Because I wanted to honor him."
Havers removed his tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Alas, that is something I can understand. Still, I wish I had known. Dealing with the dead is never easy, but it is especially hard if they are of personal acquaintance."
"Catya has given me the rest of the shift off-"
"Yes, I told her to. You have had a long night."
"Well, thank you. Before I leave, though, I want to ask you about another patient."
Havers put his glasses back on. "Of course. Which one?"
"Rehvenge. He came in last evening."
"So I recall. Is he having some difficulty with his medications?"
"Did you by any chance see his arm?"
"Arm?"
"The infection in the veins on the right side."
The race's physician pushed his tortoiseshell glasses up on his nose. "He didn't indicate that his arm was giving him bother. If he wants to come back in and see me, I'll be happy to look at it. But as you know, I can't prescribe anything without examining him."
Ehlena opened her mouth to argue when another nurse poked her head in. "Doctor?" the female said. "Your patient is ready in exam room four."
"Thank you." Havers looked back at Ehlena. "Now do go home and have a rest."
"Yes, Doctor."
She ducked out of his office and watched the race's physician hurry off and disappear around the corner.
Rehvenge wasn't coming back in here to see Havers. No way. One, he'd sounded too sick to, and two, he'd already proven he was a hardheaded idiot when he'd deliberately hidden that infection from the doctor.
Stupid. Male.
And she was stupid as well, considering what was banging around in her head.
Generally speaking, ethics were never a problem for her: Doing the right thing didn't require thought or a negotiation of principles or a cost-and-benefit calculation. For example, it would be wrong to go into the clinic's supply of penicillin and lift, oh, say, eighty five-hundred-milligram tablets.
Especially if you were giving those tablets to a patient who had not been seen by the doctor for the ailment being treated.
That would just be wrong. All the way around.
The right thing would be to call the patient and persuade him to come into the clinic and get seen by the doctor, and if he wouldn't get his ass in gear? Then that was that.
Yup, not a lot of complications there.
Ehlena headed for the pharmacy.
She decided to leave it up to fate. And what do you know, it was cigarette-break time. The little BE RIGHT BACK clock read three forty-five.
She checked her watch. Three thirty-three.
Unlatching the counter door, she went into the pharmacy, beelined for the penicillin jugs, and shook out those eighty five-hundred-milligram tablets into the pocket of her uniform-exactly what had been prescribed for a patient with a similar issue three nights ago.
Rehvenge was not going to come back to the clinic anytime soon. So she would bring what he needed to him.
She told herself that she was helping a patient and that was the most important thing. Hell, she was probably saving his life. She also pointed out to her conscience that this was not OxyContin or Valium or morphine. As far as she was aware, no one had ever crushed up some 'cillin and snorted it for a high.
As she went into the locker room and picked up the lunch she'd brought but hadn't eaten, she didn't feel guilty. And as she dematerialized home, she felt no shame in going to the kitchen and putting the pills in a Ziploc bag and tucking them into her purse.
This was the course she was choosing. Stephan had been dead by the time she got to him, and the best she'd been able to do was help wrap his cold, stiff limbs in ceremonial linen. Rehvenge was alive. Alive and suffering. And whether he was the cause of it or not, she could still help him.
The outcome was moral even if the method was not.
And sometimes that was the best you could do.
Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
By the time Xhex got back to ZeroSum it was three thirty a.m., just in time to close the club. She also had a little work to do on herself, and unlike zeroing out the cash registers and sending the staff and the bouncers off into the night, she couldn't wait on her personal biz.
Before she'd left Rehv's Great Camp, she'd gone into a bathroom and put her cilices back on, but the f**kers weren't working: She was buzzing. Twitchy with power. Right on the edge. For all the good they were doing, she might as well have been wearing a pair of shoelaces tied around her thighs.
Slipping in the side door to the VIP section, she scanned the crowd, well aware that she was looking for one male in particular.
And he was there.
Fucking John Matthew. A job well-done always made her hungry, and the last thing she needed was proximity to the likes of him.
As if he felt her eyes on him, his head lifted and his deep blue marbles flashed. He totally knew what she wanted. And given the way he discreetly rearranged himself in his pants, he was ready to be of service.
Xhex couldn't stop herself from torturing them both. She sent him a mental scene, drilling the image right into his head: the two of them in a private bathroom, him up on the sink and leaning back, her with one foot planted on the counter, his sex deep in hers, the two of them panting.
While he stared across the crowded room, John's mouth parted, and the flush on his cheeks had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the orgasm that was no doubt pounding up his shaft.
God, she wanted him.
His buddy, the redhead, snapped her out of the madness. Blaylock came back to the table with three beers hanging from their necks, and as he took a look at John's hard, sexed-up face, he stopped short and glanced over at her in surprise.
Shit.
Xhex waved off the bouncers who were coming up to her and walked out of the VIP section so fast, she nearly bowling-pinned a waitress.
Her office was the only place that was safe, and she headed there at a dead run. Assassination was an engine that, once she turned it on, was hard to slow, and memories of the kill, of the sweet moment when she'd met Montrag's eyes with her own and then taken his sight from him, were juicing up her symphath side. Burning off that energy, taking herself back down, required one of two things.
Sex with John Matthew was definitely one of them. The other was much less pleasurable, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and she was about to take her lys out and go to work on all the humans in her way. Which wouldn't be good for business.
A hundred years later, she closed her door on the noise and the cattlelike crush of people, but there was no relaxing in her barren haven. Hell, she couldn't even calm herself enough to tighten her cilices. She paced around the desk, caged, ready to boil over, trying to get herself level so she could-
With a roar, the change thundered down upon her, her visual field flipping into shades of red like someone had just put a visor down over her eyes. All at once, the emotional grids of every single living thing in the club popped into her brain, walls and floors disappearing and being replaced by the vices and the desperations, the angers and the lusting wants, the cruelties and the pain that were as solid to her as the club's structure had once been.
Her symphath side had had it with the let's-play-nices and was ready to make hides out of that herd of simpering, strung-out humans outside.
As Xhex took off like the dance floor was on fire and she was only one with an extinguisher, John sank back down into his banquette. After what he'd seen in his head dissipated, the pinprick tingles over his skin started to fade, but his erection was having none of the oh-well-maybe-another-time.
His c**k was hard in his jeans, trapped behind the button fly.
Shit, John thought. Shit. Just...shit.
"Way to cock-block, Blay," Qhuinn muttered.
"I'm sorry," Blay said as he slid in and passed out the beers. "I'm sorry... Shit."
Well, didn't that cover things perfectly.
"You know, she's really into you," Blay said with a hint of admiration. "I mean, I thought we came here just so you could stare at her. But I didn't know she was looking at you like that, too."
John ducked his head to cover up his cheeks as they waaaaay surpassed the red of Blay's hair.
"You know where her office is, John." Qhuinn's mismatched eyes stayed level as he tilted back his freshie and drank hard. "Go there. Now. At least one of us can get a little relief."
