Chapter 17
Corbin
I sat at the kitchen table, tapping my foot distractedly. Sebbie had gone to work today, and he’d been there for six hours and forty-seven minutes.
Not that I was counting. Much.
We’d spent the last few days together for most of our waking time.
We’d walked through the forest, and Sebbie had asked me about my heritage and my beliefs.
He’d been fascinated as I described how everything had a natural essence, even rocks and soil.
I’d shown him my wild garden of herbs and medicinal plants, and we’d watched the sunset through the leaves of the trees in the forest.
I hadn’t quite figured out a way to stay over with him, but we’d met up each morning for breakfast, and we just hadn’t separated afterwards.
Sebbie had even taken an extra day off, using vacation time so that we could spend another day together.
We’d watched some of his beloved 80s movies, and I could see where the appeal was (especially with Sebbie quoting lines along with the movie).
We’d gone out to run errands, restocking his fridge.
We’d cooked dinner at his place, and we’d moved fluidly around one another in the kitchen, working together like we’d done it for years.
There had been kissing as well, of course.
And we’d ended each evening with a stroking session.
I was looking forward to getting my mouth on Sebbie, but he enjoyed our cocks together so much that I couldn’t resist doing that.
Seeing our size difference and watching his face as he was overtaken with pleasure was addictive.
Besides, we had time to explore everything that we might like.
We’d alternated between his house and my house, and we’d spent most of our time just talking.
I loved hearing about his work at the hospital, and he loved hearing about making jewelry, carving stones, and my medicinal plant work.
We’d spoken about our childhoods, and I’d even told him that my mother had died due to medical negligence.
I made sure not to mention anything that would date it, and he hadn’t asked many questions—he’d mainly been outraged on my behalf, ranting about doctors who didn’t do their job responsibly.
I could tell that Sebbie really cared, and it had eased something in my soul.
But today he’d gone back to work. I’d headed over for a very early breakfast before he started his long shift, and I’d offered to drop him at the hospital, which he’d taken me up on. Now I just had to wait until his shift was over to go get him.
Crow cawed from outside. She was as antsy as I was, and she hadn’t wanted to hang around in the house. Jude’s car was pulling up, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.
At least not until he walked in the house and dumped a body on the floor next to me.
“Surprise! I got you a gift!” he said gleefully.
I stared down at the man. He was alive but unconscious, his arms and legs zip-tied, and he wasn’t a rotten soul.
“Jude, if this is some bid to get the sheriff’s attention, then I’m telling Josh and Wilder.”
“It’s not! This is for you! I swear!” Jude protested, giving the man a little nudge with his foot.
The guy groaned but he didn’t wake up. He was a wealthy-looking, middle-aged white guy. He wasn’t rotten, but his soul wasn’t shining, either. My guess was that he was probably an absolute piece of shit. Still, we didn’t harm morally gray souls.
Well, we didn’t kill them, at least. We used them for information when we had to, but as far as I knew, we didn’t have any open cases we were looking into. Well, aside from the Nephilim cult thing, because there were probably more of them around. But this guy was not Nephilim.
“Is this for one of your marks? You need info?” I asked.
I sometimes forgot that Jude was also an assassin for hire.
He did it for fun as a side job, and it brought in some nice spare change.
It amused him, too, to go out and scope out things, to see who the actual victim should be.
Like if a guy was looking to murder his wife, he’d do the research.
If the guy was rotten—oops! He died instead.
If the wife was rotten, then she got killed and Jude got paid.
He tended to take bigger marks than that, though.
And he really only did the assassin thing when he was bored.
A bored Jude was never good.
Jude was continuing to nudge the guy with his foot—I think he was trying to make a pattern with footprints on the guy’s leg.
“Jude! Stop playing with your food!”
He looked at me and laughed, but he stopped nudging the guy. He picked him up and threw him over his shoulder, patting his butt.
“This,” he said, “is Reginald Dornham. The third, I believe.”
I was still clueless.
“Doctor Reginald Dornham.”
Realization dawned. Holy shit. Sebbie had been complaining two days ago about “Dr. Dickhead,” aka Dr. Dornham, who worked in the ER and was nasty as hell to all the nurses. Jude had been in on the conversation because we’d all been eating lunch together.
“You brought Dr. Dickhead for us to scare him a little and show him the error of his ways?” I asked.
Aww, Jude was trying to distract me so I didn’t obsess over Sebbie. That was definitely one of the nicer things he’d done for me.
“Well, I wasn’t gonna sit here and watch you mope all day.
Come on. We can make him feel like shit for being an asshole, maybe get him to admit to a bunch of wrongdoings, and then you can wipe his memory and I’ll bring him home.
It’ll be a nice diversion.” Jude patted the guy’s butt again and headed toward the basement stairs.
“Maybe he’ll even end up being a better person! ” Jude called out over his shoulder.
I snorted. It was usually hard to make assholes not be assholes, but we could try. It would be a nice way to spend the afternoon. Psychological work was always fun.
I was whistling when I drove to pick up Sebbie. It was already dark out, and Crow was following along overhead.
She was still a little bitter about not getting to eat any eyeballs.
She did peck at Dr. Dickhead’s face a few times and scare the shit out of him, though.
She didn’t like the fact that he’d been an asshole to Sebbie on more than one occasion.
Not only was he a pompous, arrogant, entitled piece of shit, but he was also homophobic, racist, and a misogynist. Basically, he thought he was better than everyone and made sure they knew it.
He’d definitely targeted Sebbie—he’d admitted as much—because Sebbie wasn’t afraid of him like most of the other nurses.
I wasn't sure that we’d really changed him—changing someone’s core personality took a lot more than a few hours of forced soul-searching. Still, he’d be leaving the nurses alone now, Sebbie especially.
I drove and thought about my abilities and how I’d eventually explain them to Sebbie.
I couldn’t change people. I couldn’t alter memories.
Not significantly. I could plant suggestions, though.
Give people warnings. The doctor would feel uneasy about picking on the nurses.
A guy like him would probably rationalize it, though.
He’d probably decide they weren’t worth the effort and that was why he decided to stop wasting time making their lives hell.
I could plant warnings and ideas when I wiped a person’s memory, and that was what I did—wiped them.
The doctor would lose today. He’d wake up at home and he’d come up with some reason why he’d stayed home.
Probably illness, and he’d remember being sick.
The brain was interesting like that. I wiped memories, but I didn’t need to create new ones.
The brain did it for me. It created vague recollections and explained what happened. I’d seen it a million times.
Sometimes I could really get inside a person’s head, but that was major work, and it didn’t feel nice for the person. I saved that for hellbound souls only. It also came with a risk of a stroke, and as much as the doctor was a dickhead, I didn’t want to go off killing Sebbie’s colleagues.
At least not yet.
Josh drilled it into all of us that consent was important, and killing (or torturing) someone a person knew was something that generally required their approval.
It had been an interesting conversation.
Most of us didn’t understand why we couldn’t just teach everyone who had ever hurt our human packmates a lesson, but apparently our humans didn’t think that was a reasonable course of action, especially if the assholes weren’t rotten souls.
If they were hellbound, we would take action.
Even Josh agreed that we would just be doing our jobs at that point.
I parked in the hospital parking garage and got out of the car. I knew Sebbie said he sometimes had to work a little after his shift to do charts, so I decided to walk in to meet him. I texted him to let him know, and he gave me a thumbs up and smile emoji.
Apparently, Sebbie had called down to the security desk, because they let me in with a visitor badge with no issues, directing me to the hospice wing.
When I got off the elevator, it was easy enough to follow the signs to his wing and spot the nurse’s desk.
Sebbie was sitting behind it talking to another nurse.
“Corbin!” he said, obviously happy to see me.
I walked over and leaned on the counter. “Hey.”
Yeah, yeah, probably not the most eloquent greeting. But saying I’d missed him like hell and had counted the minutes until I could see him was probably a little much.
“I’m just finishing up, and then I’ll be ready to go, if you don’t mind?” he asked.
“Of course. Take your time,” I told him.
The woman he was with chimed in. “You can always go find the cafeteria. They have a frozen yogurt machine that’s awesome. We actually, amazingly, have some decent food here.”
I smiled at them both. “Okay. Text me when you’re done.”
Sebbie smiled back at me. The urge to grab him for a kiss was strong, but I knew that wasn’t even remotely appropriate. He bit his bottom lip between his teeth, which only made the urge to pull him across the counter even stronger.
“Oh my god, you two,” the nurse said, fanning herself with a clipboard. “Get out of here before you set the place on fire!”
Sebbie laughed, and I smiled at the joy in it. He obviously liked this coworker. I gave him one last look and turned to head out of the wing.
I contemplated the cafeteria for about three seconds, but then I decided I had better things to do. Sebbie worked here, after all. Might as well explore a bit. I headed to the elevator, figuring I’d start on the first floor and work my way back up.
Hellhounds had differing abilities in hunting hellbound souls.
Dexter, for example, could smell a rotten soul on a breeze from blocks away.
He just went out and drove around to look for his prey.
Liam’s specialty was computers; he could tell from a person’s digital footprint what their soul was like.
Atlas and I were more intuitive—we got a sense of where we were needed.
We tended to be more discerning in our victims, as well.
We would dispatch any hellbound souls we happened upon, but we did prefer to hunt a certain type.
Now was not the time for discernment, though. I got off on the first floor, extending my senses out, looking for the rot that characterized someone truly evil. I didn’t have to work one floor at a time, but it was far easier to focus my senses that way as I looked and smelled for rotten souls.
I wanted to be sure that Sebbie was safe at his place of work.
Even as I had that thought, I realized the total absurdity of it.
Sebbie was a grim reaper and ferryman—he did not need protection. He could more than handle any hellbound souls he came across, as he’d proven in the past.
Still, I thought about him actually dealing with those hellbound souls.
He liked when “nice people” appeared in his “dream,” and I had the idea that anyone he disposed of might end up in that place of his.
Perhaps it was better if I dealt with any hellbound souls before he could.
I would spare him the obvious distress it caused him when “not nice” people showed up.
I worked my way briskly around the first floor. I didn’t need to go everywhere—I just needed to get a general scope of the floor, senses open for rot. There was none, which was rather surprising since this floor housed the ER, and so there were a lot of people in and out of the building.
The second floor was also clear.
As was the third, the fourth, and the fifth. I skipped Sebbie’s floor—no rot there—and worked my way to the top of the hospital.
I was done in under thirty minutes. Because not a single hellbound soul was in the hospital.
Not one.
That should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Because hospitals inevitably contained hellbound souls. It was like going to a huge concert—you were going to have a rotten soul or two when you gathered hundreds or even thousands of people in one place.
Evil people got injured, too.
Only there were none here. I headed back to Sebbie’s floor, and while I was in the elevator, I got a text from him saying he was done.
My thrill at getting back to Sebbie was only slightly tempered by my current concern. Was it really likely that there wasn’t a single hellbound soul in the hospital, or had Sebbie inadvertently already taken care of them?
And if so, how would I talk my way into staying with him tonight? Because I didn’t want him alone if he had to deal with hellbound souls.