Dr. North looked at Micah. «Did he just burn the ends or did you put in silver clips?»
«Both, and I was tested about six months ago and came up clean.»
«I've heard about using silver clips; are you aware that there've been two cases of silver poisoning from vasectomies like yours?»
Micah shook his head. «No, I wasn't aware.»
«You might let your doctor run a blood test for silver levels, just to be safe.» Dr. North looked down at me, and his face was all soft. Good bedside manner. He held up a chunky piece of plastic. «I'm going to run this over your skin. It doesn't hurt.»
I nodded. «You explained how it works, doc, just do it.»
He started running the chunky wand over my stomach, spreading the clear gel around as he worked. I watched the little TV screen behind him. He was glancing at it, too. It was gray, white, and black, and fuzzy. If it had been my television at home I'd have been calling the cable company and raising hell. The images seemed to make more sense to him than to me, because he'd glance and move the wand. Then he just started moving the wand without looking at it, looking only at the screen.
The tallest intern said, «Well, damn.» He sounded terribly disappointed.
North didn't even glance at him. He just said, «Get out.»
«But…»
«Now,» and my kindly doctor sounded as mean and serious as I'd ever heard him. He might have good patient manners, but I was beginning to get the idea that his bedside manner ended by the bedside. Fine with me.
«What's wrong?» Richard said. He was leaning over me, trying to decipher the images.
I asked. «What are you seeing that I'm not?»
«Nothing's wrong, Mr. Zeeman,» Dr. North said without looking at him. «And what am I seeing? Nothing.»
«What does that mean, nothing?» Micah asked, and for the first time I heard a thread of tension in his voice. That iron control, cracking just a little.
North turned back to me with a smile. «You are not pregnant.»
I blinked up at him. «But the test…»
He shrugged. «A rare, very rare, false positive. Anita, you're outside normal parameters on every other test we've run, why should we be surprised if a home pregnancy test gets a little confused with your internal chemistry?»
I stared up at him, not willing to believe it yet. «You're sure. I'm not pregnant.»
He shook his head. He put the wand back on my stomach. He made a slow circle of a surprisingly small area. «We'd see it here. It would be tiny, but we would see it, if it were there to see. It's not.»
«Then how did I come back positive for Mowgli and Vlad's syndrome?»
«I don't know for certain, but I would guess that the same enzymes the test looks for would come back positive if you yourself were a lycanthrope. It's designed to test human mothers, not mothers who are already lycanthropes.»
«What about the Vlad's syndrome?» This from the female intern.
North frowned at her. «We'll discuss the case when the patient has had her questions answered, Dr. Nichols.»
She looked suitably chagrined. «I'm sorry, Dr. North.»
«No, she's got a point,» I said, «what about the Vlad's syndrome?»
He touched my chin, moved my head so Requiem's bite marks showed. «Do you donate blood on a regular basis?»
«Yes,» I said.
«We're testing for enzymes in the blood at this stage, Anita. I've never read a study on what regular blood donation does to blood test results. We know it can cause anemia, but beyond that, I don't think anyone's really studied it.»
«May I ask a question, please?» It was the female intern, Nichols.
North gave her a cold look. «It depends on the question, doctor.» He said the doctor part like it was an insult. I was seeing a whole new side of my doctor.
«It's not about the pregnancy, but about the bite.»
«You can ask.» He made it sound like he wouldn't if he were her, but Nichols was made of sterner stuff, and didn't back down, though she looked nervous bordering on scared.
«There's a lot of bruising around the bite. I thought it was just two neat puncture marks.»
I looked at her. «You've only seen bite marks in the morgue, right?» I made it a question.
She nodded. «I took a preternatural forensics course.»
«What are you doing in obstetrics?» I asked.
«Nichols is going to be one of the first doctors we'll graduate with a specialty in preternatural obstetrics.»
I frowned at them both. «I'd think that would be a very limited specialty.»
«Growing every year,» North said.