Revenant (5 page)

Blaspheme wanted to throw up. On the best of days hospital food didn’t sit well with her, but today… she had a feeling she’d be losing that bologna and salami submarine sandwich. Too bad about the fries, though, because they had been pretty tasty.

“Revenant,” she rasped. “Could I speak with you for a moment?” She glanced over at Gethel, who was still staring at her with crazed-out eyes. “Privately?”

“I’ve been looking for an excuse to get you someplace private,” he said with a raunchy smile, because naturally, he had to turn everything she said into something flirty, crude, or sexual.

“Please,” she ground out, hating that she had to resort to begging. “I need to talk to you.”

Abruptly, he went taut, his head came up, and he went into deadly serious mode. As he stalked toward her, eyes drilling into her, she braced herself for… for what, she didn’t know.
Violence
was the first word that came to mind, though.

To her surprise, he drew her aside and angled his big body so she couldn’t see Gethel. “You have my ear,” he said.

Holy… damn. That’s all it took to get him to talk? He needed a
please
? She’d have to remember that.

“Um… okay.” She blew out a long breath. “Look, I don’t know why you care about that… that… monster on the chaise, but —”

“I don’t care about her,” he interrupted. “If I had my way, I’d slay her where she stands. Or sits. She broke a million rules when she was Watcher for the Horsemen and that can’t go unpunished. But I have my orders.”

“Orders from…?”

She had a feeling she knew, so when he said, “The Dark Lord himself,” she just closed her eyes, as if doing so would block out the reality that she’d just waded, chin-deep, into the worst situation imaginable.

“I’m sorry, Revenant, but you’re going to have to find someone else to treat her. I can’t.”

“I want you.”

Gods, he was stubborn. “Even if she wasn’t the mortal enemy of pretty much everyone I work with, I can’t, in good conscience, treat her.”

“Didn’t you have to take some sort of oath to help everyone in need or some crap when you became a doctor?”

“That’s a human thing, not a demon one. And trust me, even human doctors would agree with me on this.”

He looked down at her, cold calculation in his eyes, and she wondered how far he’d go to convince her to treat Gethel.

“You don’t have to help her,” he said. “Just… give her an examination. Take some blood samples.” Leaning in, so close that his warm breath fanned her ear, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Wouldn’t the information you gather from an exam be useful to your colleagues?”

She inhaled sharply. Was he actually suggesting that she hand over test results to people who wanted Gethel dead? Who wouldn’t hesitate to use anything she told them to either locate Gethel or lethally sabotage her care? Hell, the stem cells she planned to harvest from Lucifer’s amniotic fluid could potentially be manipulated into powerful weapons as well.

Revenant’s suggestion was a good one, but she was pretty sure he was as evil as they came, so why would he say something like that? Maybe he was setting her up. But for what?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should discuss this with Eidolon.”

Revenant hissed. “I don’t like him.”

“I get the impression that you don’t like anyone.”

He ignored the jab. “I don’t want anyone else involved. Do what you have to do once we return to your clinic, but for now, it’s just you.”

Dammit. Craning her neck, she peeked around Revenant’s towering form. Gethel had gotten to her feet and was pacing around while she waited, and she appeared to be talking to herself. She was definitely one clown short of a circus. Or a massacre.

“Fine,” she growled. “I’ll do it.” But only so she could gather information. And stem cells.

Figuring she’d probably just made the biggest mistake of her life, she brushed past Revenant and ordered Gethel to sit. The fallen angel was surprisingly compliant, even leaning back against the cushions quietly as Blas kneeled on the floor and listened to her heart. Everything sounded normal, but the thing in her belly was a different story.

Little Lucifer’s heartbeat sounded like a growl. Blaspheme’s ears throbbed with pain as the sound reverberated through the stethoscope, and the longer she listened, the more painful it got. A warm trickle of blood dripped down her cheeks, but for some reason, she couldn’t move. Warm, stinging liquid filled her eyes, too, and then her mouth went dry as she opened her mouth to scream —

“Blaspheme!” A voice broke through her agony, and she felt herself being shaken as she sat on the cold tiles. Her stethoscope lay next to her, covered in blood, and then Revenant’s stern face filled her vision.

“What,” she croaked, “what happened?”

“Your ears were bleeding and you were crying. Are you okay?”

“I… I’m not sure.” Even now, her ears ached and the room spun a little, but at least she no longer felt like her head was a giant pressure cooker. “I won’t be doing that again.”

“My Lucifer wants to devour you,” Gethel said, the glee in her singsongy voice sending a chill down Blas’s spine. “As soon as he’s able, he wants to fuck you dead. He wants to rip you in two and —”

Suddenly, the fires in all of the hearths whooshed out and Revenant was on Gethel, tearing her out of the chaise and slamming her against a pillar with such force that the thing cracked around the middle like a spiral bone fracture. All around them the building shook, and as swarms of demon guards rushed inside the room, they exploded. Simply snuffed out of existence in poofs of red mist.

Gods, the power Revenant wielded… she’d never seen anything like it. Didn’t want to see it again.

“If I were to kill you and your wretched
vyrm
offspring,” he snarled, “I would suffer at Satan’s hands like no one ever has. But it would be worth it. I’m not afraid of suffering, Gethel. Remember that.”

Blaspheme shuddered, unsure if Revenant or Gethel and her unholy spawn frightened her more.

And wait…
vyrm
? Gethel must not have been fallen when she’d taken a roll in the hay with Satan. Would stem cells taken from a
vyrm
’s amniotic fluid or cord blood be as helpful to her mother as
emim
stem cells?

Gethel made a futile effort to dislodge Revenant, but he might as well have been made of stone for all he budged. Finally, he released his hold and let her drop to the floor. Then, in a gesture that shocked the shit out of her after just watching him go as cold and deadly as a shark, he held out his hand to Blaspheme.

Blas hesitated, and a flicker of what she could only describe as hurt sparked in his eyes before freezing into a shard of ice. For some reason, the idea that she’d hurt him – hell, that he could be hurt at all – assailed her with guilt.

She could hear her mother’s voice now. “
You’re too sensitive. Compassion will get you killed. Why couldn’t you have taken after me instead of your father? His angel goodness is bringing you down. You need to purge that weakness if you want to survive in Sheoul.
”

Yeah, yeah, so she had a heart. When you were in the medical profession, having a heart was a good thing. Sensitivity helped you to relate to patients.

It also made you get too close and take things too hard when the worst happened.

Still, she wouldn’t trade away her ability to sympathize with her patients for anything. It made her a damned good doctor, and it kept her going to work every day instead of sitting at home waiting for Eradicators to find her.

Just as she started to reach for Revenant’s hand, he pivoted away to go park himself against the pillar again. He wasn’t much for offering a grace period, was he? She had a feeling he wasn’t generous with second chances, either.

Sighing, she pushed up onto her knees and gestured for Gethel to return to the sofa. The female shuffled over, shooting glares at Revenant, but she kept her mouth shut. Good, because everything that came out of it was unpleasant. Even when she wasn’t being crude and downright scary, she sounded like she wanted to be. Like she was mentally inserting things like, “in your blood,” and “while you scream,” into each sentence.

Once Gethel was seated, all prim and proper in that filthy, stinking gown, Blas rummaged through the jump bag for a blood draw kit, cursing when she realized she’d left the portable ultrasound machine at the clinic. Without it to show the position of the fetus, she couldn’t collect stem cells.

Unless her damned X-ray vision decided to finally come back online.

She gave it a try, her body buzzing and her eyes throbbing as she focused, but aside from a high-def flicker of Gethel’s subcutaneous blood vessels, nothing happened. Not visually, anyway. The scar on Blaspheme’s wrist burned as she strained, as if it were an overheating hard drive.

Dammit! Didn’t it figure that the gift she used most in her profession would be one of the first to fail?

“I’m going to get some blood samples,” she said, giving up before someone wondered why she was sitting there staring blankly at Gethel’s belly. “While I’m doing that, why don’t you finish telling me what’s going on with this pregnancy.”

Gethel shot a glance at Revenant, as if seeking permission to speak. At his stiff nod, she said, “Satan hired a sorcerer to cast a spell to grow Lucifer quickly. That’s why he’s so large now, but his growth has stopped. He was supposed to be born fully grown.”

Blaspheme froze as she tied the rubber tourniquet around Gethel’s biceps. “That… that would kill you.”

“Worth it,” she said dreamily. “But then the archangels fucked it all up. They tried to swap the child in Limos’s womb with the child in mine. Limos would have been the one torn apart by Lucifer’s birth, but they would have been able to slaughter him the moment he burst from her body. The only upside to that would have been that I would give birth to Limos’s child.” She grinned, flashing nasty sharp teeth. “It would have tasted… lovely.”

Blas jabbed the needle into Gethel’s vein with more force than was necessary. The fallen angel was the sickest, most twisted monster she’d ever met. And Blaspheme treated monsters every day.

As blood began to fill the vial, she glanced over at Revenant, who watched with cold detachment. Guess he was still pissed.

“Did you know about this?” she asked him.

Revenant propped his booted foot on the pillar behind him. “Do you remember when Limos was brought to the hospital a few weeks ago? When Eidolon believed her baby was dead?”

She couldn’t forget. It wasn’t every day a Horseman of the Apocalypse was brought into the ER. “That was the day I met you.”

The tiniest smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, it was.”

Obviously, he remembered asking her to give him a blow job in the hallway.
If you answer my question, I’ll let you suck my cock
.

Okay, so he hadn’t so much as asked as he’d offered up his dick like it was an Oscar statue or some shit that would be an honor to hold.

He’d let her suck his cock.

Let
her.

She growled as she detached the filled vial. “You’re such an ass.”

He waggled his brows, and so much for him being pissed. The guy changed moods like the wind changed direction during a storm.

“So anyway,” he continued, as if this were an epic adventure story and he were the deep-voiced narrator, “that day, some archangels took Limos’s child and tried to remotely swap it with Gethel’s. They failed, but their efforts interfered with the sorcerer’s spell and stopped Lucifer from being born full grown. Whatever they did also fucked up Gethel. Well, that and the fact that Reaver nearly killed her, and archangels sliced her wings off. Now she’s deranged, she looks like something a hellhound dragged in, and Lucifer is twice the size he should be.”

Blas suspected that Gethel had always been deranged, but she kept that to herself as she withdrew the needle from Gethel’s arm. The tiny puncture sealed instantly. “So what, exactly, do you want me to do?”

“Satan wants to make sure nothing is wrong with Lucifer.”

“And I want to survive the birth.” Gethel bared her teeth at Blaspheme. “Fix it.”

“Weren’t you the one who didn’t mind him being born full grown?”

“That’s different. If he’s born an infant, he’ll need a mother.”

Blaspheme blinked in surprise. She’d have pegged Gethel as the type of mother that left her kid in the car while she partied and picked up men in a bar. “Why did the archangels’ efforts fail?”

Revenant chimed in. “Because I bound Limos’s womb so it couldn’t support any child but her own.”

Gethel ran her tongue over her lips in a raunchy display. “Revenant is such a good little minion of evil.”

Yes, apparently he was. He said he hated Gethel, said he could kill her, but he’d saved Lucifer’s life. No matter what, she had to remember that he was working for Satan, and he wasn’t a good guy.

As if you’ve been a model citizen
. No, she hadn’t been. She’d been conceived in sin, and within moments of her birth, she’d been bathed in a double evil: the blood of a demon, a False Angel taken as an unwilling sacrifice. But she’d long ago chosen a life path that would honor her father… and the female her mother used to be. Blaspheme might have been born of evil, but she refused to let it define her.