James Rollins - Blood Infernal

Once on the ground, Christian popped from behind the helicopter’s stick and went around to unfold a stretcher from a cargo hold. Sophia and Elizabeth helped get Jordan’s body off the backseat and onto the padded board outside. Erin followed them, trying not to stare at the amount of blood soaked into the aircraft’s seat and pooled on the leather.

Jordan, don’t die on me .

On the flight, Erin and Elizabeth had used a first-aid kit to clean and bandage the largest of the wounds. The countess had moved deftly, apparently experienced with treating battle wounds. But they ran out of supplies before they could finish covering his wounds. Afterward, Erin had wrapped his body with a red emergency blanket, but she checked beneath it periodically, quickly realizing even the smaller cuts weren’t healing this time. Jordan was dying.

Terrified, she climbed out and joined the others. She searched around, noting a small homestead beyond a fencerow. All its windows blazed with light.

Why did we land here?

“Jordan needs a hospital,” Erin demanded, expressing her confusion and frustration. “A team of doctors.”

“This’ll have to do.” Christian hauled up one end of the stretcher. “Nearest hospital is too far.”

Sophia took the other end, while Rhun secured the lion in his crate in the helicopter. Christian didn’t wait and headed toward the house. Erin had to run to keep alongside Jordan in the stretcher.

“Then where are we taking him?” she asked.

“A retired doctor lives here,” Christian called back to her. “A friend to the order. He’s expecting us.”

As they neared the front door, a grizzled old man opened it for them and gestured them inside. He wore brown corduroy pants and a blue plaid shirt. He had a shock of thick white hair and whisky-brown eyes under shaggy eyebrows. His lined face was grave when he looked at Jordan.

The doctor barked at them in French.

The Sanguinists hurried the stretcher through a rustic hall and into a back kitchen. Erin kept pace behind them.

In the kitchen, a cast-iron stove took up one corner of the room. Heat radiated from its surface, and a pot of water steamed on the stovetop. A stack of folded rough-spun towels sat on a chair, and on top of them rested a cracked leather medical bag. It looked like a movie prop and not something that could help them.

The Sanguinist lifted Jordan from the stretcher and onto the kitchen table.

Seeing Jordan under these brighter lights, Erin felt faint. The crimson lines had spread much farther by now, stretching across his chest, up his neck, and onto his face. Angry-looking curlicues looped over his chin and up to his lips. The lines stood out in stark contrast to his ashen face.

But at least, the smaller cuts did appear to be finally healing.

Then the doctor peeled back a patch of bloody gauze, and Erin’s stomach clenched. A deep slash extended from Jordan’s right shoulder to his left hip. It still gaped open, revealing bone and bloody muscle.

The doctor’s gnarled hands moved quickly as he washed Jordan’s chest with one of the towels, handing it to Erin when he was finished. She held the warm, bloody cloth in her hands, not sure what to do until Sophia took it away.

“Will he be all right?” Erin asked.

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor answered in English. “But I’m more concerned about the big wound there. It’s not bleeding much, but it’s not clotted either. It’s as if the blood vessels have closed down.”

“What can you do to help him?” Erin hated the note of hysteria in her voice. She took a deep breath to drive it down, needing to stay calm, for Jordan.

“I’m going to stitch up the arteries and close the wound. But he’s burning with fever. I don’t understand why. With this much hemorrhaging, his temperature should be plummeting. I’ll have to get it down.”

“No,” Erin and Rhun said at the same time.

“The fever is not caused by any disease,” Rhun explained.

“It’s something beyond physiology,” Erin added, trying to find the words to explain the inexplicable. “Something in his blood, something capable of helping him heal.”

At least, I hope so.

The doctor shrugged. “I don’t understand — and I’m not sure I want to — but I’ll treat him like a normal patient and see if he comes round. I can’t do anything else.”

As the doctor worked, Erin pulled the remaining chair next to the table and took Jordan’s hand. It burned in her palm. She ran her fingers through his short blond hair, his scalp soaked now with fever sweat.

Christian joined the doctor. “Let me help, Hugo. You know my skill.”

“I would welcome it,” the doctor said. “Fetch the instruments out of that pot of boiling water.”

Erin wanted to help, too, but she knew her place, holding tight to Jordan’s hand. Physically, the doctor was doing all he could, but she knew Jordan’s wounds went deeper than that. She traced her finger along the whorled line on the back of his hand, both hating that mark and praying for the power that ran through it to save the man she loved. She knew that same power could consume him completely, steal him from her as readily as death, but was that a bad thing for Jordan? He might be transcending his humanity and becoming wholly angelic. His transformation had never seemed to bother him like it bothered her. How could she weigh her selfish desires to keep him against his chance to become an angel?

The warning from Hugh de Payens echoed through her: Do not let him forget his own humanity .

But what did that mean?

Jordan drifted within an emerald fog, lost to himself, lost to everything but a faint whisper of melody. It sang softly to him, promising peace, drawing him ever deeper into its sweet embrace.

But the smallest sliver of him remained, a single note against that mighty chorus. It coalesced into a hard knot of resistance, around a single word.

No .

Around that word, memories aggregated, like a pearl forming around a grain of sand.

… arguing with his sister about who would get the front seat of the car…

… fighting hard to drag a wounded friend to safety as bullets flew…

… refusing to give up on a cold case, to find justice when all others gave up…

A new word formed out of those fleeting glimpses, defining his nature, a core from which to build more.

Stubborn .

He accepted that as himself and used it to struggle, to twist and kick, to search beyond the promise of the song, to want more than peace.

His thrashing stirred the fog — clearing it enough to catch a pinprick of reddish light in the distance. He moved toward it, sensing enough of himself now to add a new word.

Longing .

The fiery mote grew larger, occasionally wavering, sometimes disappearing entirely. But he focused on it, anchoring more of himself to it, knowing it mattered, even when the faint notes told him it didn’t.

Finally, that ruby particle grew close enough, steady enough, to discern a new noise: a drumbeat. It thrummed against the chorus, a counterpoint to those soft notes. That drum pounded and galloped, full of chaos and turmoil, everything that the music wasn’t.

A new word formed, defining its messy perfection.

Life .

He felt himself born again with that thought, a birth accompanied by lancing pain that shot through the fog and gave him limbs, and chest, and bones, and blood. He took those new hands and covered his ears as they formed, too, shutting out those sweet notes.

Still, that red drumbeat grew louder and louder.

He recognized it now.

A human heartbeat, fragile and small, simple and ordinary.