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 c*ck 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 f**k 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?”
“Son of a—” He wrapped a rubber tourniquet around his biceps. “Just once, can you give me a straight answer?” Working with angry, jerky movements, he clamped one end of the tube in his teeth and tugged it tight.
Sin squeezed her eyes shut, and for a heartbeat, a startling shadow of vulnerability darkened her expression. But so quickly Con doubted what he saw, she opened her eyes and locked on him with that death ray of hers. “Killing is what I do. Do you really think I need a reason to start an epidemic?”
Jesus effing Christ. He had never met a female—or male, for that matter—with such a thick wall around them. Swearing to himself, he inserted a needle into the median cubital vein in the crook of his elbow. “I actually do think you need a reason. You might be an assassin, but I haven’t met an assassin yet who didn’t plan every kill very carefully.”
Surprise flickered in her cool black eyes at his assessment. “Most people think we run around killing all willy-nilly.” “Most people are morons.” He reached for a vacutainer, a tube for gathering blood. “Most hunters, whether animal, human, or demon, are selective and careful about their prey. You get caught or injured, and you’re dead. Hunting is a matter of life or death if you need to eat.”
“Like you.”
“Like me.” He eyed her, wished she’d stop squirming and making obscene rubbing sounds on the sheets. “Even in warg form, I’m careful about what I catch.”
“I thought werewolves do kill all willy-nilly.” The way one corner of her mouth turned up in an impish smile told him she wasn’t completely serious.
“Pricolici wargs and dhampires maintain control. It’s the turned werewolves you have to watch out for, but usually only the newer ones. The older that wargs are, the more they can control themselves during the moon phase. Younger wargs do tend to kill without a lot of skill or forethought.” Young wargs were the ones who tended to get nailed by The Aegis, and the ones who had given all werewolves a reputation for being monsters. On the other paw, the older any warg was, the less “human” he became. There was definitely a trade-off. Control while in beast form came with a loss of connection with humans while in the human body.
He pushed the vacutainer into the holder, and blood began to fill the tube. Sin frowned. “Uh… do you need help with that?” “Nah. I’m good with one hand.”
“No doubt you are.”
He smirked, amused by her presumption. “I have no need to be. Females fall at my feet.” Sin hadn’t exactly fallen at his feet—no, she’d tried to kick his ass when they first met. But she’d eventually caved. Of course, as a succubus, she could very well cave to every male who crossed her path. And why that thought made him suddenly grumpy he had no idea.
“The day I fall at your feet,” she drawled, “is the day I give up pizza.”
“Pizza?”
“Mmm, love it. All kinds. Thin crust, pan crust, the works, just cheese… yum.” She rubbed her flat belly, and Con had to clench his fist to keep from reaching over and joining the action. “Stomach’s rumbling. Need pizza.”
“Tell you what. You explain to me why you started the epidemic, and I’ll bring you a pizza when I come back from the Council meeting.” He also made a mental note to call Luc with an update about SF. Con had promised the warg that he’d keep him up on the latest news.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “It was a hit gone wrong. I was supposed to waste this werewolf, so I channeled my gift into him. It usually kills quickly, but I was interrupted by Idess.” “Lore’s mate? Why would she interrupt?” Con remembered the first time he’d seen the gorgeous angel who gave off a glow of pure goodness, even though rumor had it that she was human now. Idess had been brought in to the hospital by Lore after a battle in which they’d tried to kill each other.
Now they were mated, happy, and practically inseparable. Sin waved her hand. “Long story. But basically, she was all angel-fied at the time, and she was protecting the guy.” She cast a sideways glance at him. “It was that first victim you brought into the hospital. Remember when I was waiting around the ER?”
Hell, yeah, he remembered. He’d brought Chase in, and Sin had been hovering. He’d left the dying werewolf in a trauma room and paused outside the door to write up the paperwork. Sin had been there.
She cleared her throat. “Hey, how is the warg?”
Con looked up, startled to see the incredibly hot female standing in front of him. “Dying. Why?”
“No reason.” She rubbed her arms, which were covered by her denim jacket sleeves. “What’s wrong with him? Was he in an accident? Is he sick with something?” “You’re kind of nosy.”
She shrugged. “Just a concerned citizen.”
He watched her for a moment, letting his enhanced vampire and warg senses reach out to detect her species. Her high temperature and low heart rate indicated demon blood, but she smelled slightly human. So demon and human, but what kind of demon? Whatever she was, she bled like everyone else. The scent came to him on a raft of air, making his mouth water and his fangs drop. As a paramedic, he’d trained himself to ignore the tantalizing scent and sight—Doc E frowned on his medics attacking patients for food—but for some reason, he was reacting to this sexy creature. “You should get your leg looked at.”
Frowning, she looked down at the spot of blood that had seeped through her jeans. “It’s no big—” He didn’t wait for her to finish. Hunger had hijacked his body, and if he didn’t get the hell away from the little temptress, he’d soon be feeling the effects of the Haven spell when he jumped on her. Quickly, he handed the clipboard to a nurse and headed toward the parking lot.
“So,” he said, “you tried to kill that warg with your gift, and he survived long enough to infect others.”