Chapter Six #4
This time the nod was enthusiastic. The soldier nearly ran out of the room to share the startling information with the others. Devon watched as Inez reached to shut the door, listening to the buzz of surprised voices for a moment before tuning them out.
Humans hadn’t yet been able to unlock the secrets of developing an antivenin for Morphate venom.
Most venom paralyzed prey for consumption, and this venom was no different.
However, Morphate venom was also a weapon.
It was meant to create the most agonizing stimulation of nerve endings possible, fluctuating in intensity and adapting like a virus so that the nerves in question never over-fired to the point of becoming insensate.
That would defeat the purpose of debilitating the enemy with pain.
The venom dwelled in the quick of their claws, ejecting the moment the nails came into contact with a certain amount of pressure.
Devon knew it didn’t take much at all, and that it was almost always guaranteed that if the claw broke skin, envenomation had taken place.
The severity of the envenomation was the urgent issue.
Cutting of the arms or the legs made for an agonizing but, generally, non-fatal experience.
The only time Morphate venom was fatal was a direct puncture of a vital organ.
The bleeding from such a puncture would be bad enough, but if envenomation began directly in an organ, the rapid necrosis of the tissue would almost certainly mean death.
The human inability to develop an antivenin didn’t surprise Devon.
Their scientists hadn’t yet figured out how many layers of deception there were in Morphate venom.
They didn’t know of the shifting chromosomes between male and female venom, or the gene that had adapted to its environment to make the best effective poison.
Then again, humans hadn’t entirely grasped that Morphates were dramatically different from one protocol to the next.
Devon hurried over to Liam, setting her supplies down on the nightstand.
She sat gingerly beside him on the bed, on, the side closest to the wound, watching him flinch as the bed shifted under her weight.
He was feeling pain all over by now, his skin crawling with it and his muscles cramping from poison.
The fever would nauseate and dehydrate him before long.
“Don’t worry,” she soothed in a whisper as he swung pained eyes in her direction, “it will ease soon.”
She reached for her toolkit, rolling it open over her lap once it was unsnapped. She took out a pair of alcohol swabs, a syringe, and a small sterile bottle of cloudy liquid.
Morphate antivenin.
She was perhaps uniquely qualified to have created it.
Before all of this had begun, when she had been human, she’d been a doctor of zoological study and husbandry.
Animals, their makeup, and the genetics that made them so different from one another had been her specialty.
She had been in high demand in the best of zoos and high-end laboratories back in her days as a human.
It was what had put her on Dr. Paulson’s radar in the first place.
When she had learned of his monstrous plans, she had refused to take part …
and had earned herself a place as one of his human lab rats for her trouble.
She had often replayed that encounter and her reactions in her head, often wondered about all the ways she could have responded differently, more cleverly, ways that could have saved thousands of humans from becoming what they now were.
But it was an exercise in futility; she’d come to understand that.
She could not change what had already happened by pounding her head into woulda-coulda-shouldas.
But she had the brains and the wherewithal to create countermeasures that would protect the more fragile humans the Morphates lived with.
The idea had not started with her, neither had the research, but she was the one who had succeeded.
All because she had courted the military and that military had told her about the claims of a Secret Service agent named Liam Nash.
She had gained the military contract to explore the truth of this claim and its effectiveness, and to develop a safe, efficient delivery system for use by soldiers and, perhaps more important, law enforcement nationwide.
She had explored and entertained the method that Liam and his people were using now, and had found it subpar and dangerous to the humans wielding the weapons.
She had noticed the radiation detectors they wore on their holsters, had no doubt that they had to undergo exposure treatments on occasion.
It worried her to think of them taking such risks.
She took out the needle and tubes necessary to start an IV on him. The antivenin couldn’t be introduced all at once, in an injection; she needed gradual access. Also, by starting a saline drip, she could try to head off the dehydration that often came with envenomation.
“Liam,” she said quietly, knowing his hearing was also becoming sensitive, “I have to start an IV drip and it might hurt more than normal, okay?”
“If you’re trying to poison me, you’re too late,” he quipped roughly, surprising her with his lucidity. She shook her head, asking herself what she had expected and why she should be so astonished. She turned the smile he’d earned on him and laughed softly.
“Actually, you may zink eet eez zee venom zat eez causing zis, Meester Bond,” she affected with exaggeration, “but eet wuz zee poizun leepsteeck from zee keess of my leeps zat haz done you in.”
“Your leeps?” Liam laughed, instantly scrunching his entire body in pain.
“Hey, easy does it,” she soothed with a soft laugh.
She waited a moment before pulling his arm over into her lap.
She gently stroked her fingers over the inside of his elbow and forearm, knowing the motion would calm any cramped muscles.
She listened to the change in his breathing, the exhalation that signaled his relaxation.
She tore open an alcohol pad and quickly swabbed a vein.
“I love buff men,” she remarked in mellow, distracting conversation.
“You never have to look for a vein. They are all nicely mapped out. Very juicy and almost impossible to miss.”
“And here most women just think it’s sexy,” he marveled.
“Bulging veins?” she quizzed doubtfully.
“No, buff men,” he chuckled.
She grinned as she worked with nimble, efficient movements, her warning turning out to be entirely unnecessary because next he knew she was taping the tubing down gingerly, trying to avoid the dark hairs on his arm.
“I,” she enunciated as she gave his arm a final pat, “am not most women.”
“Thank God for that,” he muttered, making her chuckle as she connected the long tubing to a large unit of saline.
She hoisted it up, taking down a picture in order to hang the plastic bag on the hook.
“Did I ever mention I find resourceful women a turn-on?” he asked as he watched her act with such efficiency and decisiveness, as if she did this sort of thing every day.
“You’ve mentioned nothing of the kind,” she noted.
“You know, you actually look like you know what you’re doing,” he remarked as his eyes narrowed on her with speculation. “Are you going to tell me you’re a doctor now, too?”
Devon contemplated her answer, knowing she couldn’t be honest with him. “I’m not going to kill you if that’s what you are worried about,” she teased, giving him a crooked grin.
“No. I was just curious. Where’d you learn how to do all this?”
“I was an EMT while I was in college,” she said with a shrug of a shoulder. “It paid the bills.”
“You mean you weren’t born into this?” He glanced up and around at the richly furnished and professionally decorated room. “How the hell old are you?” he demanded.
She laughed, flushing as she injected air into the antivenin equal to the amount she was going to withdraw.
She’d never administered it to someone of such a significant stature and weight before and she was going to have to make a calculated guess on the dosage.
Luckily, the calculations would also help her dodge the question he’d asked. “How much do you weigh?”
“About 236, I think. Are you going to answer me?”
“I don’t think I ought to. It’s rude to ask a woman that.”
Liam was on to her. Devon was incredibly good at lying, but he’d picked up her tell.
She didn’t like to lie, so she dodged or tried to be evasive first, trying to put off what she felt was a need to fib to him.
It was noticeable only because she was so quick to be blunt and truthful the rest of the time.
He tried not to frown when he realized she’d lied to him about being a medic.
Why would she do that? Where had these skills really come from?
What was she so reluctant to reveal? Or was that even it at all?
Frankly, Liam was in too much pain to fully trust his observations at the moment, so he relaxed and let her attend him.
He wasn’t worried she’d hurt him. She could just let the venom do that on its own if she wanted to.
Considering the present threat she was living under, he didn’t blame her for being naturally cautious.
All he cared about was that she was safe. That she was within his reach and right where he could see her. He was hurting like he’d been hit by a locomotive, but he could and would move if he had to for any reason.
He was just damn glad he didn’t have a reason.
“Shit,” he groaned irritably.
Devon injected the filled syringe into a short port leading to the I. V tubing near his wrist and looked up at him from beneath her lashes. He could see the worry and concern in her eyes.