Andi knew an oxygenation alarm meant one of two things: a patient was scratching themselves and messing up the sensor, or they were decompensating—possibly dying. She reached the bedside a half second after Austin, who for once seemed totally stunned. He was mesmerized by the screen’s report of dropping numbers, turning white as a sheet.
She whirled and pounded her fists on his chest. “Get it together! Where’s your ambu bag? And your O2 tank?”
Her violence startled him to activity. He cursed and ran off for the crash cart he’d apparently put away. Andi looked around. If this house was as magic as she thought, couldn’t it just conjure things up? The cat ran in and looked at her expectantly—as did Damian.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his concern written all over his face. She ignored him.
“Suction?” she asked aloud, and heard something large land behind her. She turned and found an entire suction set up—canister, tubing, and all—and heard its portable generator start to whine. This house! She grabbed the end of the tube and stuck it into the patient’s mouth, hoping that if there was something in there blocking his throat, it’d suck it out. His saturation was in the seventies. If Austin didn’t hurry up….
At that moment, Austin raced in, shoving the cart ahead of him. He laced the oxygen tubing between the portable tank and the ambu bag that they’d start to use to breathe for the patient—if it worked. “Catch!” he said, throwing the ambu bag at her after it was attached.
She tossed the suction aside—it hadn’t seemed to help—and she put the mouthpiece around the patient’s mouth, jerking his chin up to clear his airway, and started squeezing. He was getting 100% oxygen now. If he was going to get better, now was the time to do it—and if this didn’t work… Andi looked back at Austin. “When’s the last time you intubated anybody?”
“Been a while,” he admitted, ripping through the crash cart drawers for the intubation kit.
“Grab the defibrillator pads while you’re there,” she told him. The patient’s oxygenation saturation was at 60% now—soon, the cells of his heart would start freaking out about not getting enough air.
Damian shoved forward. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“You sure you’re not a doctor?” Andi said, as sarcastically as possible. “Get out of the way,” she said, shoving at his hips with her own. He danced aside, and she yanked off the sheet she’d placed over the patient’s freshly-dressed chest in between squeezing the ambu bag.
His heart rate shot up, setting a different monitor blaring.
“Pads! Pads! Pads!” she shouted as Austin reached over to slap them on.
And then Damian grabbed her wrist.“Get back.”
She twisted to look at him in annoyance. “I am breathing for him. Until Austin hurries his ass up—”
He grabbed her shoulders and picked her up to set her behind him. “Fucking stop doing that!” she yelled and punched his arms. Everyone’s ability to pick her up any time they wanted to was entirely unfair.
But Austin was stepping away as well, his hands reaching behind him for a holstered gun she hadn’t clocked earlier.
“What?” she asked again, more quietly, stepping out from behind Damian where he’d placed her.
The men were watching something underneath the dressing on the patient’s chest surge—like a wandering hand.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Austin said. “Reinforcements!” he shouted to the room at large, although Andi had no idea what or who was listening.
“Back! Back! Back!” Damian said, and she knew from his gestures he meant her. Grimalkin’s ears flattened as he joined their line, hissing at the bed.
Andi swallowed. What…on…Earth… She realized then that the phrase Unearthly was right.
The dressing peeled aside and a small hand—a goddamned hand, although it had talons on the ends of each finger—reached out.
Another well-armed stranger ran into the room, as what was in the man’s stomach pulled itself out, bracing itself against his pelvis as it wriggled free.
Why aren’t you shooting? she wanted to scream—because what she was watching was so improbable it was bending her mind. The child-sized creature was all the shades of blue, covered in mucus; its face was missing eyes, and she could count its teeth at twenty feet. But below it, their friend was still—somehow—alive, or so the monitor claimed.
“Take it when you’ve got it,” Damian commanded as a dark-skinned man came in. He was wearing an armature across both shoulders to brace a silver weapon, and he had a sight-piece folded out in front of one eye.
“Charging!”
There was a high-pitched whine, and Austin looked warily at his comrade. “If you so much as singe a hair on my brother, Jamison,” he warned, his voice low.
The man with the gun nodded. “Understood. Firing!”
For a long second, nothing happened. And then what she could only describe as a beam of blindingly red light flashed out of the gun—turning it for a moment into almost a light saber—and it clipped the creature.
The monster screamed and jumped up to the ceiling, revealing a long tail behind it—how was it possible that entire thing was inside her patient?—then it started skittering toward them like a spider, making horrible sounds. She dropped down, covering her ears and shrieking as the thing’s mouth opened and a tongue as long as its tail dropped out, lashing toward the man with the weapon. Austin started emptying his handgun into it, while Damian shouted, “Jamison!” and bringing out a gun of his own.
“Charging!” the other man shouted back, and again that high-pitched whine. Andi fell to her knees—all the better to hide from whatever the fuck was happening, anything to get away from her rising sense of terror.
And then the patient’s monitor began beeping ominously. A small geyser of red started shooting out of the hole the monster’d left behind—a severed artery. The monster was swiping at them, swinging from the ceiling like some demented spider-creature, leaping from bookcase to bookcase—its tail and tongue swirling around it. They tried to take shots without hitting one another in the enclosed space, waiting for the laser beam weapon to charge, and then it ran across the ceiling into a hall.
“Goddammit!” Damian cursed.
“Stay human!” Austin shouted. The three of them chased after it, followed closely by the cat.
“Grimalkin!” Damian shouted, but his castle’s avatar was already on it, rearranging the house’s alignment so the hallway they were in connected with an empty garage—an almost smooth cube of a place, with no furniture to hide behind. The lurker ran in—dodging shots from Austin’s gun—snaking up and down the wall. Damian lined up beside Jamison, ready to protect the man from the monster as he readied his weapon. “Why’s it taking so long?” Damian demanded.
“I’m charged, but I’ve gotta wait for the barrel to cool down so the metal won’t deform.”
“That’s unacceptable,” Damian growled.
“It’s physics!” Jamison shrugged, making the armature around him bob. “I’ll work out a way to cool it off, next rev—now that we know that it works.”
Damian grunted. Jamison’s weapon was the runner-up project to gate sealing and the culmination of years of high-level experiments on killing Unearthly creatures. Because if they couldn’t get ahead of the gates opening, the next best solution was to be able to obliterate whatever came through from the other side. The knowledge that there was only one of him and a near-infinite amount of Unearthly ready to pour through if the gates ever stayed open weighed on him—just as he knew it did the other gatekeepers. If they could finally get it right—get it down to a one-shot, one-kill situation—then he would never have to worry about someone else getting hurt like Michael or Zach again. But what the fuck had happened to Zach? How the hell had the lurker gotten in?
“Ready!” Jamison shouted, kneeling down for a better shot. The lurker reached the end of the garage and twisted back—looking for an escape—and then all three men watched the creature disappear.
It didn’t evaporate entirely, but it changed all of its colorations to merge perfectly with its surroundings, and since everything in the room but them was a sterile-white, it was impossible to see. “Grim!” Damian shouted, jumping in front of his people, letting his dragon rise up inside.
Ceiling, left, his dragon noted, then strained against his will. Free me, it commanded.
“Upper left,” Damian grunted, holding his dragon back with a, No. “Quickly,” he warned his men.
Jamison and Austin did as they were told, as Grimalkin paused behind. A door to the left opened up, summoned by the housecat, and swung open loudly. Damian saw the ripple of the lurker running out against its trim. Jamison took his shot—and a good patch of the ceiling. But no blue creature appeared in the falling rubble.
“Fuck! Where next?” Austin shouted, running in.
“Charging!” Jamison said, heading right after.
The men ran after it, and Damian had no doubt that Grimalkin had sent them into a room with better visibility. He ran for the door as well.
His dragon chose then to attack. Free me! it demanded, struggling to take over. Damian caught himself against the door’s side and held a fist to his stomach.
This was the real reason they needed the weapon.
Because someday the dragon in him would escape, and he wouldn’t be able to fold it back inside himself again.
“Cut it out!” he growled and ran after his men.
Andi wondered momentarily where the house would take them, and then she ran for the bed. The center of her patient was open and raw and flooding with blood, but he was breathing now, so that was good, at least? If somehow birthing whatever-the-fuck that thing was hadn’t killed him, she’d be damned if he died now.
She balled up the remains of the dressing from earlier up in her hands and leaned into the wound and would’ve sworn she saw something inside of him shimmer like a mirror for a second before bloody cotton covered it up.
A lot of things glistened inside people—under the right light—though. When you didn’t have the right words on hand, you reached for metaphors. She’d seen lung tissue flutter like butterfly wings and exposed fat that looked like pillow stuffing. Whatever it was, she knew one thing, that if she stopped applying pressure and keeping what little blood the man had left inside him and circulating, he would die. His death was not worth her curiosity.
She leaned harder, putting her whole weight into him, replacing her hands with elbows, until she could get enough leverage on the bed to clamber onto it so that she could kneel over him, pressing down on him like she could push death itself away if she only tried hard enough.
And then there was a scrabbling behind her. She could hear shouts, hissing, the shots of a gun. Movement burst into the room, something running across the ceiling that she knew she didn’t want to see, and tumult behind her.
“Andi, get down!” Damian shouted. But she knew if she did, the man would bleed to death. “NOW!”
Andi ducked but didn’t move. She felt the swipe of a tongue sweep across the back of her neck and the hot breath of whatever it was that’d escaped. She closed her eyes and prayed not to die.
“Girl, stay down! Eyes closed!” the dark-skinned man commanded. It looked like one of his arms was entirely metal? But how? Andi did as she was told, and then she heard the strange charging whine sound of the monstrous gun that he wore. A burst of energy shot over her head, light flooded into her eyes—even through her closed eyelids—and an inhumane squeal started and ended abruptly as something wet and disgusting fell onto her, knocking her farther into her patient’s guts, before sliding off her back to land on the hardwood floor with a thump.
The lurker was dead—no thanks to him—and Damian ran forward, ready to lift Andi off of Zach. Blood covered her from her hands up to her elbows, and the blue grease of the lurker slicked her now from the top down. He could read the anger and fear on her face where he could see it between her wet locks of hair and watched those attributes merge into a magnificent ferocity that drew him to it like a flame.
“Come down off of there at once!” he commanded, reaching for her.
She made a sound at him—a snarl—that clearly meant get away. “If I move, he’ll bleed out and die.”
He looked to Austin for confirmation of this fact. He was ripping through the drawers of the cart he’d wheeled into the room—a lifetime ago, it seemed—opening the plastic wrapped IV bags with his teeth before hanging them and squeezing them with his own two hands so that the fluids inside them would rush into Zach more quickly.
Andi watched Austin with wide eyes. “What the fuck are you doing? You have to call 911!”
“No!” Austin shouted. “He can handle it.”
“He doesn’t need fluids! He needs blood!”
Austin flung his arms wide. “How the fuck would we explain this to anyone?”
“Do you want your brother to die or not?”
And then both of them looked to Damian for a decision. “Call 911,” he commanded.
“D…we can’t trust hospitals. You know that. And…this is going to get us crushed…” Austin pleaded.
“I’d do no less for you,” he said with a tone that broached no discussion. “Keep him alive until they get here.”
“Fuck both of y’all,” Austin muttered, looking between him and the girl, but he reached for his phone and dialed.
Damian turned to Jamison, who was practically dancing with excitement. “It worked! I knew it!”
“It did,” Damian said. Just like he’d wanted it to—just like he’d paid for.
His young techmaster inhaled to say something else, but his eyes flashed over to Andi first.
“Whatever you want to say, say it,” Damian said, studiously not looking at Andi himself. The less he thought about her, the better; he already had far too much on his mind.
Jamison ducked over to where the girl couldn’t see him, eclipsed by Damian’s larger presence. “We, uh, still need to test it on bigger creatures. Just to be certain.”
Code-words for: Will this really kill me? Damian knew. His dragon growled a challenge inside him, from where he’d hidden it away.
Damian nodded. “Indeed.”
Austin finished his phone call and was loudly discussing what to do next with Andi, the monitor was beeping incessantly. Grimalkin was pacing from wall to wall, hissing disapproval at so much destruction in his house, and Jamison had pulled out some sort of half-divining-rod-half-game-controller-like device to wave over the lurker’s corpse.
Damian toed it, watching a tentacle-like arm flop while grinding his teeth together. How the hell had it gotten in? What if he hadn’t been there? And the gun hadn’t worked?
Could he have lost all of them?
He looked over to where Andi was, appearing largely unfazed despite being covered in body fluids, talking loudly to Austin about what she thought would help next.
Could he have lost…her?
He kicked the lurker in earnest and watched it slide across his floor, into a door Grimalkin conveniently opened and then closed, making its corpse disappear. “We also need to solve the question of how the fuck a portal opened endangering everyone IN MY CASTLE.”
He hadn’t meant to shout the last three words, and yet he had. Everyone else in the room snapped to silence, except for the monitor.
See? his dragon laughed at him. You can’t even control yourself. How can you hope to ever control me?
That’s what the gun is for, Damian snarled back.
You wouldn’t dare, the dragon challenged.
Try me.
But instead of surging up to wrestle, his dragon roiled back inside him, feeling suffused with mirth. Damian inhaled and exhaled slowly as Jamison stood.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said and went to run his gizmo over Zach’s body on the bed. And there, despite his best efforts not to, Damian’s eyes met Andi’s.
Whatever else was happening at that moment fell away. All the noise and commotion seemed to hush, and it was just him and her—a dragon-shifter and a gore-covered goddess.
Are you okay? he mouthed at her, unable to imagine that she could be.
Her eyebrows rose, betraying the utter absurdity of the question given the situation, and a sarcastic smile played at the edges of her lips.
Fuck, no, she mouthed back at him. But I’m all right.
He wanted to lunge in, grab her, and swoop her up, to take her someplace far away from here. But before he could even think to act, a group of uniformed men was clattering in behind a gurney.
“What the fuck happened here?” one of them asked.
Andi watched with increasing disbelief as Damian explained his friend’s wounds away as tiger disembowelment—and Grimalkin changed his form into one, going from a small Siamese into a three hundred pound black and orange striped beast in half a second.
“Fuck!” one of the paramedics shouted, spotting him.
“Run along, Stripey,” Damian told the tiger, and it did. “He’s usually very well behaved,” Damian told the paramedics. “You’ll find we have the appropriate wildlife permits.”
The rest of everything was explained—somehow—by Austin’s training and their quick thinking. Of course, they’d intubated the man. Of course, they’d put IVs into him. Of course, an eccentric billionaire would have all the tools and equipment for keeping himself alive nearby—of course, of course, of course. But the absent Mr. Blackwood “senior,” she pieced together from overhearing their story, wasn’t here presently—also, of course. He was off doing business in Dubai. She overheard Damian give the paramedics his own name though as Damian Blackwood the Third—the elderly billionaire’s “useless” younger cousin, according to her pre-job internet searches.
Listening in, Andi had a strong nursing hunch that Mr. Blackwood “senior” didn’t actually exist.
“We’ve got him, Miss,” one of the paramedics said, placing his hands over hers, preparing to take over pressure-duties.
“Really?” she asked, then shook her head at herself. She could barely handle what had happened; there was no need to tell anyone else about things. Andi pulled her hands back like she was doing a magic trick and dismounted the bed. The rest of the paramedics buckled him in, and she thought to ask, “Where are you taking him?”
“General,” the medic closest to her answered.
Another of them said at her expression, “Don’t worry, it’s a trauma center. They’ve seen worse.”
She already knew that. General was her home away from home. Her last shift seemed so long ago, and her next shift—fuck, no. She was calling in sick tonight. She’d been awake for over twenty-four hours, had had her life threatened at least twice, and had met a real-life dragon. A girl needed time to adjust.
“Hey,” Damian said from beside her. Austin was trailing after the men. She had a feeling he’d cop a ride in the ambulance, the stranger-with-the-metal-arm was gone as was the magic-cat, and something had happened to the blue-monster-thing when she hadn’t fully been paying attention.
“There’s not an older version of you running all this somewhere, is there,” she stated flatly.
He shrugged, not looking caught in the least. “No. Whenever we need the ‘elder’ Blackwood to go out, we slap some magic on my friend whose life you just saved, and he pretends to be an older version of me.”
“Why?”
“Because that way, everyone pays attention to him, and no one gives a shit about me.” His voice held a deep tone of irony as he went on. “Everyone knows I’m just the asshole. Go ask Google.”
Andi felt her eyebrows rise. Damian was the asshole who was also a dragon who had saved her life—before threatening to erase her memories. She looked up at him and caught him staring at her again—probably afraid she’d tell someone his secret—and she suddenly felt swamped by exhaustion. “Take me home?”
He nodded quickly. “Of course.”
Together they walked to the front of the house and out the main door. The fountain was fixed. The van had disappeared. And now they were heading toward a garage—not the one she’d wrecked before—and Damian used his handprint to unlock it. The white door rose up, revealing the sleekest looking car she’d ever seen inside, low-slung and gold, as shiny as an icicle. She didn’t recognize the make, but she saw the logo on the side.
“Pagani?” she asked aloud.
Damian snorted. “It means expensive, in Italian.” He moved to hold a winged door open for her, and she looked down at herself.
It was at this point she realized she was in shock. Because normal Andi would’ve never stood for this, being covered in human blood—and who knew what else from that monster-thing—down to her toes, definitely under her fingernails. Normal Andi would’ve been finding a vat of alcohol sanitizer to bathe in. As it was, she just asked, “And your expensive upholstery?”
He shrugged with a small smile. “It’s seen worse.”
She didn’t fight him on this. She just sank inside and let the buttery leather interior catch her, putting her seat belt on and curling up into a ball against the door. A pierced golden coin hung from his rearview mirror on a satin ribbon instead of fuzzy dice—because of course it did. She watched it sway back and forth as he drove and she let the hypnotic motion of it lull her into sleep.