He gave a slow nod and went back to taking long pulls on her wrist. Closing her eyes, partly because the room had begun to spin, she focused on feeling around inside Con’s veins. Shadowy black-and-white pictures formed in her head. She could see individual blood cells rushing through the narrow vessels, and with them, the virus. New cells joined the rush; hers, she was sure. Almost as though the presence of the fresh cells prodded Con’s, his cells attacked the virus like a pack of wolves taking down an injured deer.
“It’s working,” she whispered, hoping the boys didn’t notice the way her speech was a little slurred.
Con’s draws began to ease off.
“Keep going. You need more of my blood to join the fight.”
He grunted, a sound of refusal, and his fangs began to slide from her flesh. She grabbed his head and forced him to stay, though it took a lot more effort than it should have. “Almost, Con. We can kill it off—”
“Sin!” Eidolon’s strong fingers pried hers from Con’s scalp. And maybe she shouldn’t have noticed how silky his blond hair was, but for some reason, she did. “He has to stop.”
“Just a little longer…”
Rearing back, Con tore away from her. His eyes were swirling pools of molten metal, the carnal hunger there giving away both his fear that he’d gone too far and his desire to go further. Eidolon clapped a palm over her bleeding wrist even as she lunged forward, desperate to get Con to take more blood. She needed more time to study how the virus survived, how it died…
“We can’t stop now!”
Con swore, grabbed her hand, and for a moment she thought he was going to continue, but instead, he peeled her brother’s hand away even as Eidolon fired up his own gift to heal her and swiped his tongue over the punctures. Before her eyes, they sealed up, and an irrational fury grabbed her.
“You idiots!” More spots gathered in her vision and her head spun as she lurched to her feet. “The virus is going to rally in him. It’s going to…”
“Shit!” Con’s voice and arms closed around her as the floor fell out from beneath her.
“So, you’ve been feeding for a thousand years, huh?” Eidolon’s sarcastic drawl grated on every one of Conall’s nerves as he carried Sin to the nearest exam room and laid her gently on the bed.
Thing was, Con had no excuse. Sure, Sin kept encouraging him, telling him they were almost there, but worse than that—terrifyingly worse—was that hunger for her had overridden common sense, and he’d fed for longer than he should have.
He was just glad he hadn’t wrestled her to the floor and tried to take a lot more than blood.
“Heal her,” he snapped, his anger at himself putting a caustic note in his voice that Eidolon didn’t deserve. Still, the doctor merely shrugged as he gathered IV supplies from the cabinet next to the bed.
“My power knits tissue and bone together. It doesn’t make blood.” He lined up the supplies on a tray and wheeled it toward Sin. “We’d need Shade for this. He can use his gift to force the marrow to produce blood faster.”
Con brushed her glossy hair away from her face, which was far too pale.
“Then get Shade,” he pressed. Sin wasn’t in danger, but he didn’t like how her vibrance had been literally sucked out of her. But this wasthe first time she’d ever been quiet. He should be grateful.
“He’s off for a few days.” E gestured to the cabinets behind Con. “Toss me a Ringer’s.”
Con fetched a bag of IV saline solution and lobbed it to the doctor. “So call him in.”
“Runa’s sick, and he can’t leave the triplets.”
Con’s breath lodged in his throat. Shade’s mate was a turned werewolf. “It isn’t SF, right?”
Eidolon inserted a needle into a vein in Sin’s left hand. “Thank gods, no. It’s a mild stomach virus.”
“Good.” Con would hate to see anything happen to the female who had made Shade a lot more agreeable to work for. And speaking of work… “You going to call Bastien back in, now that you know the virus isn’t affecting the pricolici?” Bastien, a born warg who had been run off by his pack decades ago because he’d been born with a club foot, had devoted his life to UG, and Con knew the forced “vacation” had to be killing him as much as it was Luc.
“Hell, yeah.” Eidolon gestured to gauze wrappers on the floor. “The janitorial department is falling apart without him.”
As Eidolon hooked the bag of saline onto a stand, Sin moaned, and her eyes opened. “What… what are you doing?”
“Hold still,” Eidolon said. “Our boy here got a little carried away with his meal.”
She smiled weakly. “That’s ’cuz I’m so sweet and irresistible.”
Con snorted. “Not the words I would use for you.” Well, irresistible, maybe, but there were a lot of less complimentary words that fit her, too.
“Ass,” she muttered. She lifted her hand and frowned at the line connected to it. “Hey, knock it off. I don’t need this—”
Con gripped her wrist and pushed it back down to the mattress. “Yeah, you do. I took too much blood.”
Eidolon shot her a stern look. “If you had banked more of your blood like I asked you to do, I could be putting it instead of saline back into your veins.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I heal fast.”
“One benefit of being a Seminus demon,” Eidolon said as he jacked up the head of the bed so she could sit.
“There are more?” Sarcasm dripped from Sin’s voice, but Eidolon ignored her to check his beeper.
“I have an incoming trauma. Con, stay with her until the bag is empty. When you’re done, hit the lab. I’d like a blood sample from you. I want to see if you have any antibodies in your system now. And you”—he pointed his finger at Sin—“be good.”
Sin rolled her eyes, but at least she didn’t snark back at him. Instead, she waited until the doctor left, and then she turned on Con, a little bundle of ebony-eyed fury. “You idiot!”
She was sexy when she got worked up. “I said I was sorry for taking too much blood.” Actually, he hadn’t, but he felt a little bad about it, so he figured that counted.
“You should have taken more. You could still be contagious.”
“It’s not worth killing you over.” Not that killing her wasn’t tempting.
“Well, duh. But chugging another pint of blood wouldn’t have killed me.”
“Yeah, it would have.” He dug through one of the drawers for a phlebotomy kit. “Why haven’t you banked your blood like E wanted?”
“Who are you? My dad? It’s none of your business.” She shifted on the bed, the seductive rasp of her tight leather pants against the sheets making his cock twitch. Con might not like her, but his dick wasn’t so judgmental.
“If you’d done it, I could be drinking it now instead of waiting for you to produce more blood.” He pulled up a chair with a frustrated yank, sat, and rolled up his shirt sleeve.
“I’ll see if I can speed things up just for you,” she said wryly. “And in the meantime, be careful that you don’t run around spreading disease.”
“Ironic thing to say, coming from you, don’t you think?” He snorted. “I think I can manage to not bite or fuck a warg for a few days. And do you really care?”
Crimson splotched her cheeks, and he caught the scent of irritation coming from her. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m thrilled that the virus is killing people. Yay, me.”
“Why did you start it, then?”
“I was bored. There hasn’t been a good pandemic since the Spanish flu in, what, 1918?”