Chapter 3
Frank
“Cantankerous Chuchunya, whining witches, and minging minotaurs,” I grouse from my leather desk chair.
The dust on my shelves sparkles in the sunlight.
I should dust them, but I’m never in here.
My OR is absolutely spotless, but this place?
Why bother? To entertain the annoying patient's families? “Whoever said monsters were fearsome obviously had never met one. I’ve never met such a bunch of complainers—”
“They are patients sick enough to be in a hospital,” Drake volleys back to me. She sips coffee from a Styrofoam cup with stains over the rim. I bet she’s refilled that cup at least three times today. “Pain makes monsters grouchy. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m not grouchy,” I bark, snapping my scissor fingers at her. “This is my natural charm.”
“Ignore him,” says Landyn to his phone. He’s kicking his leg over the arm of one of my visitor chairs.
That pose means he’s texting his latest conquest. “These board meetings always make him pissy. He doesn’t like hearing that the meat he tenderizes has thoughts, feelings, or a life force.
It messes with his illusion that he’s not working on living, breathing individuals. ”
“You make me sound heartless when I know you repaired mine all those years ago,” I sneer.
Landyn flicks me off without looking up from his phone.
I’m ready to get this meeting over with.
It’s obvious Landyn is mentally useless.
Drake is running on half the sleep she needs.
Where’s Bracken? He’s always late to the bullshit.
You would think, after all this time, he’d learn to schedule the births in this hospital.
Babies. Damn inconvenient. If they didn’t pad our bottom line, I’d ax the whole department.
I swear half the whining comes from the preggos.
Landyn laughs at his phone screen. Drake rolls her eyes, but I’m on one today. If he wants a fight, I’ll give him one. “At least I slice a piece of ass like a real surgeon instead of taking it in the supply closets,” I say.
Drake snorts coffee through her nose, staining her scrub shirt.
“Bracken’s late, so you turn your nastiness onto me. Is that it? Well, guess what? I don’t give a damn. You can’t bring me down. Not today. I’m too happy with Veronica—”
“You rat bastard! She’s the best nurse I’ve had since we opened Haunted Hospital! How am I going to replace her?” Drake yells as she mops coffee off her scrub shirt with a paper napkin.
“Why would you have to replace her?”
“Because they aren’t the same after you bed them,” she snaps. “Sometimes I hate you, Landyn.” She crosses her legs fiercely and bobs her foot with irritation. “A harpy. A harpy, Landyn. Couldn’t you keep it in your pants for a harpy?!”
“Obviously not,” I add, earning myself a glare.
“It takes two—”
“Shut up!” She screeches at him.
“I wouldn’t scream at him,” I say to take the temperature another notch. “He obviously likes screaming females.”
Landyn picks the cup of pens off my desk and throws them at me.
I open my arms so as not to accidentally poke his eyes out.
I want to fight, not to maim my best friend with my surgical instrument fingers.
Unfortunately, he’s content to kick over my chair.
I fall to my ass on my desk, sending my dictation board flying. It crashes into a thousand pieces.
“Sorry I’m late,” Bracken says as he flies through the door. “I can see I’ve missed nothing new. Drake’s pissed. Landyn’s tackled Frank. Glass and shrapnel everywhere.”
“We had to amuse ourselves somehow,” I quip from the floor on the opposite side of my desk, where I survey my broken equipment. “What kept you?”
“Business is booming in OB/GYN,” he says with more pep than someone should have this early in the morning. “We had a werewolf family from Grant’s pack—”
“The one with the human in tow,” I say, perking up. When Grant called about a possible three-stage J-pouch surgery, I nearly jumped for joy. A chance to operate on a human, not once but three times, to create a new lower-gi for them? Sign me up.
“Yes, she’s the reason I’m late,” he says, running a hand through his shaggy brown hair to make it stand up in all directions.
Poor man looks like he stuck his finger in a light socket.
“I had to keep the family busy while the orderlies captured her. Didn’t hear the announcements to put the hospital on lockdown? ”
“Yes,” Landyn says, taking the broken dictation board from my hands. “I assumed it was one of the werewolves tearing through the cafeteria. Didn’t the family bring like ten wolves to tour the maternity ward?”
“No, the human bit Liam and escaped through the air ventilation system. That was after she fought Bonk to escape from her wheelchair. Luckily, the werewolves were raiding the cafeteria while the chaos was upstairs. Liam backtracked to support Bonk and sports teeth marks for his troubles.”
“A human fought an ogre and won?” Landyn asks what we’re all thinking. Unless this lady was a ten-foot sumo wrestler, there’s no way she could overpower our biggest member of staff.
“No way,” Drake says, leaning forward in her chair. “I like her already. What? It was total bullshit that her pack leader picked for her to have surgery and arranged it with us. If you recall, I voted against it. Now I hope she gives you hell for trying to control her.”
“Mission accomplished,” Bracken says with a huff.
“I was pulled out of my consultation with the Magnolia family to keep her weresister from figuring out what was going on. The sister is about to pop with a litter of five. I didn’t want an emergency birth with that many puppies while the hospital was on lockdown because her human sister was crawling through the vents. What if she ends up in a vamp’s room?”
“Magnolia family?” My blood runs cold. It could be a coincidence.
Bracken knows we have a strict no-Fae policy in our hospital, but he loves to bend the rules.
It’s why I both love him like a brother and can’t let my guard down for a second.
All the Fae families are named after flowers…
but other families can be named after flowers, too. Am I paranoid?
“The vampires are in the basement with the morgue and the zombies, so I doubt she would crawl out of the shafts down there. Any human would avoid the smell of blood and death down there. It’s in our DNA,” Landyn says.
“I would be more worried about the other patients siding with her and giving us a PR nightmare.”
“I didn’t think of that. I’ll text Cathy about a possible press release…just in case,” Bracken says, whipping out his phone. The cracked screen sparkles as he taps on the screen.
I ask again, “Who’s the Magnolia family?”
“Cathy says she was on it from the second the alarms put us in lockdown. She’s a gem. We should give her something nice for Summer Solstice—anyone know what she does for fun?”
“What does a lady goblin do for fun?” Drake asks, draining the last of her coffee with a wince.
“Her favorite flowers are African violets. She’s on a roller derby team, and loves visiting wineries,” Landyn reads from his phone as he returns to his chair. He plants himself next to Bracken, smiling at his phone with his fingers flying.
Another sexy text message, no doubt.
“You banged Cathy, too? Cathy in the front office? How have the females of this hospital not ganged up on you for being a manwhore?” Drake rolls her eyes and crushes her cup in her fist.
“Magic touch,” he says with a toothy grin he must have learned from our were-visitors.
The man becomes more feral the longer we stay in the monster world.
Sometimes I wonder if he would have settled down and had a family if he’d stayed on the human side of things, but then I remember how he leaned on his photographic memory in medical school.
He never spent a night in his own bed, let alone one at the library studying.
Eek, that was ages ago…before I knew weres, Fae, and night creatures were real.
Simpler times…
“Who in the hospital haven’t you banged?”
“You,” Landyn says, rubbing his chin and looking toward the ceiling.
“Because there aren’t enough antibiotics in the world—”
“And I love you like a little sister,” he says, closing her mouth on the insult she was about to volley. “I want to walk you down the aisle…”
“Really?” she says, tearing up a little.
“…without the guilt of knowing your groom will never satisfy you as I did. I’d never doom you to a life of subpar sex.”
“You had me for a moment. I hate you!” She yells, throwing her empty Styrofoam cup at him. “Frank, skewer him!”
“He may have to get in line. I’m waiting for Bracken to tell me who the Magnolia family is,” I say in a tone that brooks no argument.
While the four of us are equal shareholders in Haunted Health, they know it's my surgical skills that keep us in business. My department buys their departments’ fancy equipment and specialized staff.
Monsters from all realms come to my OR—all realms except Magmell.
If the Magnolia family is a bunch of fairies and Bracken gave them false hope, I’ll…
I’ll…I’ll chop off his hair with my scissor fingers!
“The Magnolias are expecting twins. They need a hospital and have come to our realm to ask me to deliver the twins—”
“Which realm?” I say as the hairs on my arms raise in alarm.
“Frank, I know—”
“Which realm?” I repeat in a darker tone.
“They are Fae from Magmell—”
“I said no Fae. Not now. Not ever. We can’t help Fae,” I say, ripping my dictation box’s cord from its docking station and slamming it into the trash can with violence.
“You can’t help Fae,” Bracken says just above a whisper.
“And you can?”
“They want to deliver twins,” Bracken says with more heat. “I can do that without metal equipment. There’s no need to deny them when it will be perfectly safe.”
“Why do they want to deliver twins here? Think about it. Twins never happen in Magmell, so they come to us. Why? Because complications are likely—that’s why.
They feel safe here because I can perform a C-section with my eyes closed.
Unfortunately, my robotics would kill a Fae with one touch inside them. Tell them no. Get rid of them.”
“Do you forget that I’m as trained as you are? That I was your lab partner all through college and medical school? Yes, you are the surgical phenom…but that’s because we made you. You can do a C-section with your eyes closed, but guess what? So can I!”
“With what? Plastic cutlery? It’s not about your skills versus mine. It’s about not having the equipment and protocols to help them. What if someone accidentally uses a needle to start an IV or an epidural? Mother and twins would die instantly—”
“I will watch them twenty-four seven in a quarantined room with signs everywhere—”
“Since when is sign compliance one hundred percent?” I reply with an eye roll.
“Chances are the twins will need weeks of specialized nursery care. What if they need breathing tubes, heart valves, or some emergency replacement at birth? Do we let them die or attempt the surgery without metal? We don’t know what’s in the steel alloys of our equipment.
I doubt there will be time before she gives birth to find out—considering she already knows it's twins and got permission to come to our realm.”
“She’s due in three weeks, so the twins will be here any day now.”
“See? What safety protocols and training can you possibly do? Do you want one of us to kill a newborn? Say what you want, but I know that would destroy you.”
“We’re their last hope,” he says, dropping his head into his hands. “How am I going to tell them no?”
“Forward their email address, and I’ll do it.”
“You can’t crush their hopes of a safe delivery with an email, Frank,” Drake says, folding her arms across her chest. “I agree with you, but maybe they need a little—”
“Fine, give me the phone number of where they’re staying. I’ll call them and listen to their cries. Anything else? Or can I go find this human that’s avoiding my OR like it’s infested with vampire bats.”
“Meeting adjourned,” Bracken says to the floor. I hate dashing his hopes, but I’d rather do that than break his spirit.