Use it or lose it.
That was the rule with magic. Spend too much time away from established workings, and Hecate’s gift leached away.
I knew that. I’d learned it in the magicarium. I’d just never thought the restriction would apply to me.
A clinical part of my mind monitored my reaction to my failure. My heart rate rose. I started to hyperventilate, breathing too rapidly to allow my alveoli to perfuse oxygen into my bloodstream. My fingertips grew numb, likely a result of my hyperventilation.
My witchy soul screamed questions. How long had it been since I’d worked a spell? Organizing papers in my office. Reheating a cup of tea. Making my bed in my tiny bedroom upstairs?
But years of interacting with humans at medical school had retrained my witchy brain. I’d long since abandoned the everyday spells my arcane sisters took for granted, because I dared not risk exposure.
Still, I must have undertaken some major ritual recently. The magical year was filled with them.
Alas, I’d skipped celebrating Beltane with the Washington Coven just a few weeks before. Spring at the hospital was insanely busy, with hypersexualized dryads responding to rising sap by seeking mates (and occasionally breaking limbs), with bellicose centaurs fighting for territory as they started to rut (and occasionally breaking limbs), and with gnomes excavating substantially deeper tunnels once the danger of frost was past (and occasionally breaking limbs).
Of course, spring wasn’t just about setting bones. There were the usual challenges of vampires caught by the longer days and griffins brought low by the near-constant rainfall, and gargoyles worn out by the constant shifts in temperature.
Even earlier in the year, Ostara had been a hopeless cause for magic rituals because the sabbat had coincided with a full moon. A host of shifters had kept the ER busy for a full forty-eight hours, including an entire litter of first-time wolves who couldn’t manage their transition back to human form without a little pharmaceutical assistance.
Imbolc…
Yule…
Had I really not worked a spell since Samhain? I could remember arriving late for the Washington Coven’s rite on Halloween, and I’d left before socializing began. Surely, I’d spoken the ritual words with my sisters by sheer force of habit, even if I couldn’t remember invoking the Guardians or lighting candles. I must have asked Hecate’s blessing for the arcane new year. Hadn’t I?
As if he’d followed my grim calculation, a shiver ran down Musker’s body, starting at the crest of his sleek bald head and ending at the base of his spine. His tongue darted out over his lips. He leaned into me, pressing his whole body against my side, but I couldn’t say if he was seeking comfort or giving it. Or maybe he’d simply grown cold outside the hothouse of his adapted bathroom.
Before either of us could say anything, a tone shrilled from the speaker set against the crown molding in my office—three brief blasts, followed by a deadpan message: “Code Grey in the ER. Code Grey, ER. Stat.”
Code Yellow meant a patient was missing.
Code Blue meant an adult was in cardiac arrest.
Code Grey meant a security threat, a combative person with no obvious weapon on his or her person. Of course, in a hospital for supernatural creatures, obvious weapons were the least dangerous kind.
I ran for the Emergency Room.
Actually, I ran to the ER entrance—just across the lobby from my office. Before I could burst into the treatment area, I was stopped by my warder, Rebecca Sartain. “Let Security do their job,” Becs said.
Security was a hormone-addled centaur yearling and a senescent gargoyle. “We’re understaffed tonight,” I snapped. “Dr. Hart might need my help!”
“She might,” Becs agreed. “You’ll know for sure as soon as Mikaela and Jerome have things under control.”
“I’m the medical director of this hospital!” I raised my voice over a sudden crash in the ER.
“Of course you are,” my warder said, shifting her weight when I tried to push past her. She had six inches on me and fifty pounds, all of it muscle. If anyone else had tried to shove their way into the ER, Becs would have summoned her sword from the ether. But no warder ever pulled a weapon on her witch.
Rebecca Sartain followed rules a lot better than I did. Maybe that’s why we were best friends—opposites attract. Or maybe it was because I’d known she was a girl in boy’s clothing the first time I saw her at one of the awkward school dances held between her warders’ academy and my witches’ magicarium. Her buzz-cut hair and clenched fists hadn’t fooled me for a second. By the time we both graduated, there hadn’t been a shadow of a hint of an inkling of doubt about who I’d choose to protect me. I’d never considered anyone but Becs.
Now, I clicked my tongue like an exasperated teenager and craned my neck for a view into the ER. Another loud crash sounded from somewhere inside.
“Becs!” I would have reached for my power to emphasize my command, but I didn’t have that option. I resorted to pleading, “Please!”
Becs swore and gestured for Musker to fall in behind me. Summoning her sword, she led the way into the ER.
In the center of the room, a man snarled like a mad dog—a six-foot-tall dog with linebacker shoulders, an impressive five o’clock shadow, and a swirl of tattoos across his massive forearms. A pair of worn jeans sat low on his hips, his belt buckle glinting like the bow on a present for a very good girl. His tight black T-shirt spelled out every ridge of his abs.
The sudden giddy-up of my heart had nothing to do with the fact that Empire General’s newest patient was methodically trying to take out my security guards, turning a cluster of EKG leads into a whirling set of nunchucks.
Mikaela, the young centaur, tried to dart forward. She was intent on corralling the patient in Bay Three until he flicked the leads at her head, shouting a wordless syllable. Mikaela reared back. Bad luck landed her foot on the electrical cord of the abused EKG machine. Her teeth clacked shut as she sat down hard.
Jerome peered at his fellow guard through rheumy eyes. The gargoyle looked like he’d just awakened from deep sleep—which he probably had. He never made it through an entire night shift without a nap. Or two. Or three.
Now, he cleared his throat, making a sound like a fall of scree down a bare mountainside. He addressed his words to the rampaging patient. “You don’t want to hurt anyone, son. Just put those leads down. We’ve got doctors here who can help you.”
“Where the hell am I?” the man growled.
Jerome blinked, and for just a moment I worried he’d forgotten the answer. He should have retired years earlier, but financial planning was tricky for creatures who lived five hundred years. He needed the salary, and Empire General was supposed to be an easy job.
“You’re in the hospital, son,” Jerome finally rattled. “Best place for you right now in the entire Eastern Empire. We help people like you every day, um, night.”
Mikaela climbed to her feet, clumsy with the pain of her pratfall. Nevertheless, she started to circle around to the patient’s far side, probably planning to draw his attention so Jerome could jump him from behind.
The strategy was iffy from the beginning, doubly so because my geriatric gargoyle guard wasn’t jumping anywhere. The patient flicked his leads again, driving Mikaela back three whole steps.
The motion gave me my first glimpse of the man’s right side. More exactly, of the right side of his throat. And to be most precise, the torn and bleeding tissue around his mangled right jugular.
Realization dawned. Sure enough, I caught a whiff of cinnamon, likely from the dark stain across the front of his T-shirt. A rusty smear ran from the man’s mouth to his chin.
No. Not man.
Vampire.
The torn neck told me he’d been attacked by a vampire. The flaking residue around his mouth said he’d bitten back. He’d consumed vampire blood—enough to turn him from his human state. And the cinnamon-scented stain across his chest announced that someone had dosed him with Lethe, the elixir all vampires carried to force mere humans to forget they’d come in contact with the supernatural.
That gave the guy a chance to remain mortal.
Lethe slowed human metabolism. If he’d been dosed with enough… If he’d only swallowed a little blood… If the Lethe had kept the vampire contagion from reaching his heart…
There might still be time to dose him with Vitriol.
A thousand times more costly than plutonium, Vitriol was a brutal potion, made possible only by the rare cooperation of elementals. Gnomes mined the raw materials near veins of sulfur beneath extinct volcanos. Ifrit worked some obscure form of fire magic, converting pungent yellow chalk to a blazing potion. Sylphs stirred the brew with their strongest breath, cooling the philter until it barely flowed. Undines summoned water from the deepest lakes in the world, adding drop by precious drop until the potion was perfectly balanced.
Vitriol could stop a human from turning into a vampire.
The only catch—aside from an eye-watering price—was that Vitriol caused infinitely more pain than the slash of a feeding vampire. The potion ravaged its way through every major organ system, corrupting every cell in the body. Some patients who survived the physical effects suffered permanent emotional trauma, leaving them worse off than if they’d never been dosed.
Even I, rule-breaker extraordinaire, would never administer Vitriol to a weakened patient or a child. But the Adonis who was even now destroying my ER by shoving Jerome into a fully loaded crash cart? He was strong enough to survive the potion, if anyone was.
I lunged for the drug safe by the nurse’s station.
I’d rehearsed this drill. Every Empire General doctor had. With Becs and Musker at my back, I slammed my palm against the biometric lock. “Come on,” I muttered, as if the words would make the sensing mechanism work more quickly. When the electronics finally flashed green, I placed my eye against the retinal scan and counted in my head: One Mississippi Two Mississippi Three Mississippi Four.
The lock silently released. I tugged with desperate hands, forcing the lead-lined door to swing open. Following well-rehearsed protocol, I reached for the green vial, the one that was marked with a skull and crossbones and glowed with golden light from the life-saving elixir within.
But there was no golden light.
No skull. No crossbones. No green vial.
The safe was empty. Someone had stolen the only flask of Vitriol in all of Washington DC.