Page 102 of Booked for Murder

Until a mender could restore the critical artery, I would have to contain the blood, controlling every element of her respiratory and circulatory systems to keep her organs from suffocating while maintaining her blood pressure.

She had already bled enough she danced at death’s door.

I hated to lose. Tears burned my closed eyes, and I checked her blood again, cursing over our incompatible types.

To give her mine, I would have to change the very nature of my blood so it would be compatible with hers, else I’d kill her. I extended my reach, discovering a matching source nearby: Senator Maybelle’s contaminated blood.

I couldn’t purify the blood and keep the woman alive—and if I used it, my blood would become contaminated as well.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t win. Considering Senator Maybelle hadn’t died from whatever it was lurking within her veins, we wouldn’t die, not immediately.

A shortened life beat no life, and some choices weren’t choices at all.

Senator Maybelle no longer needed her blood. The woman struggling to breathe did. I oxygenated as much of the senator’s blood I could with the lingering air left in her lungs, siphoned the tainted, crimson fluid out through the hole in her heart, and eased it into my patient’s entry wound, making use of the hole in her aorta.

Over the years, I’d clocked in hundreds of hours controlling transfusions, and my magic remembered. Without any concentration required from me, it did the slow, tedious job of integrating the new blood to the woman’s body and keeping it within her arteries and veins where it belonged.

Drop by precious drop, I replenished the woman’s blood, taking care to introduce only what her body could accept without sinking her deeper into shock and killing her.

I turned my attention to the next victims, reaching out to determine who needed my help the most.

While both had been shot, neither would die, especially if I patched the holes until a doctor or nurse could tend to them. Neither required a transfusion, although both needed me to keep their blood contained.

I’d never tried to save three at once before while keeping most of my blood where it belonged.

As I expected, Senator Maybelle’s blood contaminated mine, and while my magic rejected the incompatible blood type, the hot, greasy, and slimy sensation seeped into my foot.

The magic within me surged, and it assimilated the substance, transforming it into fuel it used to redouble its efforts to save the three who’d been shot far worse than me. For a moment, I faltered, so startled I lost my hold on my ability to control blood.

My magic continued its work without me, and it transformed the slimy, greasy sensations into soothing warmth. I broke free of my astonishment, focused on my breathing, and concentrated, monitoring the beating of three hearts and encouraging their strained lungs to provide life-giving oxygen to the rest of their bodies.

Nothing else mattered.

Twenty-Two

Some things I could never forget.

Sometimes, life made no sense. Mine rarely made sense, and the times it did, I wondered when everything would fall apart. When volunteering in the hospital, I had been fully aware of my every action, especially when it came to the magic so many loathed and feared. With three people to keep alive, I abandoned the careful practices I’d cultivated, scrambling to do everything I could to keep them stable for as long as possible. The woman’s heart stuttered often thanks to her torn aorta and her erratic blood pressure. Every adjustment I made created some consequence or another. Sometimes, her blood pressure spiked, making her heart work harder to do its job. Sometimes, her blood pressure plummeted, likewise adding strain. The rare times I got everything right, I stole the few moments to confirm I hadn’t lost control on the other two victims.

Despite the long odds, I won the small battles along with the war.

Through it all, the contamination in my blood offered a soothing warmth, one that fed my desperate magic. A magic similar to mine encroached on my territory, and I pushed back, delivering the equivalent of a slap to the back of the hand. The touch turned tentative, and I waited, observing. Exsanguinators couldn’t mend bone or flesh, and when the torn aorta began to heal, I waited for the injury to close sufficiently to contain the woman’s blood before releasing my hold and redirecting my attention to her lesser injuries.

Menders could work better when they didn’t have to worry about blood loss, and nobody could prevent blood loss better than an exsanguinator.

If only the medical field embraced us rather than shunned us. I knew few names, but I remembered every life I had saved—and every life I’d taken to save another.

Some things I could never forget.

Time flowed differently when caught in magic’s gentle hold, but little by little, I withdrew my influence, allowing the bodies of the three victims to resume surviving on their own. When the woman no longer needed me, I allowed myself to relax, although I remained aware of her body, which still struggled to cling to life. The other two victims stabilized, and I pulled my influence away from them.

They didn’t need me, nor would they unless something went wrong.

Enough had gone wrong, but death had come calling, and I refused its call. I found comfort in the knowledge nothing I could have done would have saved the senator. Later, it would bother me I’d taken her blood without her consent, but she had no more use for it.

She came across as the kind to refuse to be a donor because she believed doctors would harvest her organs even if she had a hope of survival. I’d served on the front lines in trauma situations often enough to understand the truth.

No doctor wanted to lose the war against death. An organ transplant turned tragedy into hope, but I’d never met a good doc who’d liked admitting defeat in the first place. When transplants went well, such as the one with my adopted spleen, it helped ease the pain of the tragedy, but the tragedy itself remained.