“This is different.”
“Really? How? You’re putting your friends and this hospital at risk, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but…” Blaspheme trailed off. But what? But nothing. Oh, gods, she was as bad as her mother, wasn’t she? Eidolon had assured her that staying here would be fine, and she’d been so eager to save her own skin that she hadn’t even argued beyond a token protest. “You’re right,” she said. “We can’t stay here. But we aren’t putting anyone else at risk, either.”
Deva shook her head. “How did I manage to raise you to be so scrupulous? You’re half fallen angel, love. Act like it.”
“You used to be an angel once,” Blas pointed out. “Don’t you remember that at all?”
“I remember it being very boring. There’s a reason I tried to shake things up amongst the archangel ranks.”
“Tried to shake things up? You got yourself kicked out of Heaven!”
Deva hurled the remote across the room, shattering the thing in a fit of temper. “You don’t know what it’s like there,” she said, lisping a little as her fangs elongated with her growing anger. “The angelic hierarchy is all-important, and heaven forbid someone try to rise above their station. Some of us wanted more power, and Raphael was going to give us that. If not for his buddy, Stamtiel, giving me a suicide mission that got me caught, we’d have brought about a revolution.”
This was the first Blaspheme had heard of an archangel’s involvement in the plot her mother and father had been mixed up in. Leave it to Deva to crash spectacularly.
“Boy, when you do something, you do it big, don’t you?”
Deva shrugged and settled back against the pillows now that her fit was over. “What is it humans say? Go big or go home?” She gestured to the destroyed remote. “Be a good little imp and get me a new one.”
Blaspheme threw her hands up in defeat. “I give up. I have to go to work. Don’t leave the hospital, and please try to stay in the room.” The last thing Blas needed was her mother wandering around the clinic and causing trouble. “I’ll be back later.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” Blas admitted. Gods, she hated the wait-and-see approach, which was funny, since that was what ninety percent of being a doctor was about. Wait and see how a patient would respond to treatment. Wait and see if surgery was a success. Wait and see if your patient died because you couldn’t do enough for them.
“I think I should go crash with friends, and you should stay here. I can’t be here, Blas. This place is too… sterile. And smelly. And it’s full of annoying sick people. How can you stand it?”
Maybe her mother staying with friends wasn’t such a bad idea. “Look, Mom,” she said as she shrugged into her lab coat, “we’ll talk about it later. I have to go.”
She snatched up her stethoscope, cell phone, pager, and purse and darted into the hall, closing the door firmly behind her. She really could take only so much of her mother. A little Deva went a long, long way.
Taking a deep, relaxing breath, she started toward the clinic’s Harrowgate. Since she had almost an hour before her shift started, she wanted to do some research into the information Eidolon had given her yesterday. UG’s library was extensive and eclectic, filled with not only medical texts, but also mystical texts and nonfiction books related to the demon realm. Eidolon especially liked to collect books specific to individual demon breeds and species. The smallest detail could mean the difference between life and death during an emergency.
Her pager beeped again, and she nearly fumbled it as she juggled her stethoscope and the little device. When she saw the screen, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Revenant is here. Again. He wouldn’t wait and we couldn’t stop him. He’s loose in the clinic.
Loose. Like a wild animal. Only far worse.
“Blaspheme!”
Her heart skipped a beat at the too-familiar voice from behind her. Dread and excitement dueled within her as she turned around to see him at the far end of the hall, dressed from head to toe in black leather. Goth boots with thick soles added another couple of inches to his already towering form, and the weapons strapped to his body sent a message that if you weren’t intimidated enough already, it was time to roll over.
His lustrous ebony hair flared out behind him as he walked, and she self-consciously reached back to her own heavy, wet rope hanging down her back.
Her heart thumped harder with every step closer he came. How could she be happy to see him but at the same time be nervous as hell? As for him, she had no idea what he was thinking. His expression could have been carved from stone, and the wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes behind a shield of black.