Malignant Magic Read online

  Malignant Magic

  Medicine and Magic Book 3

  SA Magnusson

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Author’s Note

  Also by SA Magnusson

  1

  The monitor beeped steadily, forcing me to pay attention to it. There wasn’t anything other than a sinus rhythm, not enough of a reason for it to chirp at me in the way it was. I groaned. It was that kind of day.

  “What’s the issue, Dr. Michaels?”

  I turned around as Dr. Olive entered. She was a young attending, relatively new to Hennepin General, and still felt the need to interfere, even with some of the upper level residents. Which I was—or should be, especially as I neared the end of my second year of residency. With only a year remaining, I would soon be out on my own. An attending. And I wouldn’t have to deal with people like Dr. Olive.

  “No issue. I think we have a pad that’s not quite right.” It was common enough for the stickers to disconnect and give errors like this. Besides, when the rhythm picked up on the monitor, it was nothing more than a sinus rhythm. Normal.

  “Are you sure? That monitor sound is worrisome for—”

  I reached beneath the man’s gown and pulled out the sticker that had come loose, holding it up for Dr. Olive to see before reapplying it. If it were up to her, she’d end up ordering a complete cardiac evaluation for nothing more than a sticker problem. It was attendings like her who made medicine expensive, the kind of cover-your-ass mentality that I really couldn’t stand.

  Dr. Olive looked up at the monitor as if she didn’t want to believe me, but it was nothing more than the same sinus rhythm I’d seen during every stretch that the patch had been working the right way. “What’s the story here?”

  I glanced around the room before my gaze settled back on our patient. He was an older man, dirty, and now that he was dressed in a hospital gown, it was hard to know just how filthy he’d been when he first arrived in the ER. The nurses had cut away his clothing, carrying it off for disposal rather than saving it for him. There wasn’t a point in saving it. Considering how nasty he’d smelled—and still did—it might have been better to have burned his clothes.

  “He was brought in by ambulance. Someone found him down in an alley and called it in. He’s been unresponsive since he got here, so not a whole lot of history out of him.”

  “My favorite kind,” Dr. Olive said.

  The comment made it hard for me to like Dr. Olive, though there really wasn’t anything about her that I did like. She had an arrogant streak that was wholly unearned, and she practically hated her patients. It made me wonder why she’d gone into medicine in the first place. While some patients could be a pain, most of them came in wanting to feel better. That was our job, and if we couldn’t do it, then we weren’t doing our job.

  “Vitals are stable. Initial labs are all normal. EKG has been unremarkable.” I handed the printout over to her and she scanned it before setting it on the counter. “I don’t have much of a diagnosis at this time.”

  “Probably a junkie. Let him sleep it off and send him back out on the street.”

  When she left, I turned my attention back to the man. We didn’t even have a name for him. Another John Doe. There were plenty who came into Hennepin General, most of them homeless or gang members who didn’t want to give their names.

  Out of curiosity, I reached through my connection to magic, loosening the knot that held it deep within me, and let it flow up from my hidden stores. In the last year, I’d grown much more comfortable using my magic, enough so that I no longer struggled to reach it. My connection wasn’t the same as mages, though my mother was a mage. Whatever type of magic I possessed—and I still didn’t know, despite the archer, Aron, trying to get me answers—didn’t seem to require spells.

  If only it had. Using spells might be easier. At least I would have someone who could teach. My grandparents were high level mages—not the middling mages I once had believed—and my grandmother even sat on the mage council. That connection should have been enough to help me understand my magic and learn to control it, but it hadn’t.

  Touching my hand to John Doe’s chest, I let my magic wash over him. It coursed out of me, flowing through him, and as it did, I felt the steady connection of it. During the last few months, I’d discovered I could use this sort of spell—or whatever it was, as it wasn’t really a spell—and detect where I needed to focus on finding what ailed my patients. It had helped save more than one person, preventing me from feeling the cold grip of death when it came.

  With this patient, there really wasn’t anything to detect. As my magic flowed through him, it stayed, lingering as it washed over him, but left me with no way of understanding what might have left him unresponsive.

  Maybe he wasn’t anything more than a junkie. Who was I to judge, if that were the case? And if he was, we could help clean him up, maybe send him off to a detox facility where he could get sober, and hopefully have a social worker figure out what he could do from there.

  As I released his hand, the monitor beeped again, and I glanced up at it, but it was nothing more than a premature beat. Those were common enough, and the sensitivity to the monitor made it difficult to know how excited to get by them.

  This time, I’d let Dr. Olive be right and let this guy sleep it off. We could find out more information when he came around.

  As I stepped out into the hall, Asher, one of the newer nurses—a younger man with blond highlights in his otherwise dark brown hair—came running. “Dr. Michaels. I’m so glad you’re here. We need you in Room Four.”

  Four was a trauma room. “What is it?”

  Asher hurried along the hall. “We don’t know. It looks like an animal attack, but…”

  His face paled. Whatever had happened must have been awful. I’d seen plenty of animal bites—it was a pretty common complaint in the ER, so we got good at treating them—but the way he’d blanched suggested this wasn’t common.

  When I reached the door to Trauma 4, the now-familiar cold sense of death began to creep along my spine. It was weak, which meant we had time. I’d come to know that sense all too well, and I’d come to understand that when I felt it like this, we could usually save the person. Usually.

  Entering the room, I realized I wasn’t the only resident here.

  Jen glanced over at me, then nodded at Asher.

  I joined her at the bedside and looked down at the patient. He was a younger man, heavily muscled, and sleeves of tattoos covered his arms. Dried blood covered them. A drape covered his head and neck and Sue, a heavyset no-nonsense nurse I enjoyed working with, stood on the other side of it, likely scrubbing at the wound. “What happened?” I asked.

  “A mauling. Pretty gruesome. He was dropped off at the ER entrance.”

  “Vitals?” I asked, glancing over at her. She was in the same year of residency as I, so I wasn’t completely sure why Asher had come for me. Maybe it was my reputation. I often got involved in the trauma patients, mostly because with my connection to the sense of death, I could help, sometimes more than any of the attendings could.

  “Stable for now. A little hypotensive, but we’re pushing fluids.”

  I moved closer to Sue so that I could get a better look. She was working carefully, dipping a sponge into betadine solution to clean the wou
nd.

  “This isn’t good, Kate,” she said.

  She hesitated so that I could see. A huge chunk of skin had been torn free of the man’s shoulder, leaving muscle and bone exposed. This kind of injury would lead to nerve damage, and it was possible he would have enough vascular compromise that he’d lose his arm.

  The bite was extensive and serious, but I still didn’t know why Asher had come running for me. “Is he your patient?” I asked Jen.

  “I was there when the rig rolled in.”

  “Then you don’t need me.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  Jen motioned to the counter. A heap of bloody clothing lay there, cut away the same as John Doe’s clothing had been. Stuck to the top of it was a piece of paper.

  Curiosity compelled me over to it and I frowned.

  “This has my name on it,” I said.

  “Yeah. Someone wanted you for this guy. Do you know him?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I know of.” Taking a pair of medium gloves from the alcove on the wall, I slipped them on before reaching for the note. It was spattered with blood and I didn’t really want to touch it. Other than my name, there wasn’t anything else on it. “Did he have any identification?”

  “We didn’t really look,” Jen said. “A little preoccupied.”

  Returning to the bed, I looked at the man. Really looked at him. Other than the muscularity and the tattoos, there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about him. He had a plain-looking face. A flat nose. A scar stretched across one cheek, but it had healed well.

  And the chunk of flesh now missing from his shoulder.

  “Did you call surgery?” I whispered.

  “Already did. Trauma team is coming down, but I think we’re going to need specialists for this one. Christ, Kate, I’m not even sure where they’re going to begin. What do you think could have done this?”

  I peered over Sue’s shoulder again, studying the wound. It was deeper than it had looked at first glance. Thankfully it was the right shoulder. The left side would have risked the heart, especially with how extensive the wound was. Bone fragments protruded from it. Whatever had mauled this guy had splintered his clavicle.

  “We need ortho, too.” When Jen frowned, I pointed to the wound. “Open fracture.” I turned my attention to Asher. He was the one to have brought me into this, so he was going to help. “Page ortho on call. Let them know we have a trauma. We’ll need vascular surgery too.” I shrugged at Jen. “Can’t hurt to have them all called down.”

  When Asher left to call the specialists, another nurse hurried into the room and began helping Sue. Tamara wasn’t nearly as efficient as Sue, but better than some.

  The sense of cold along my spine hadn’t changed, remaining a faint trace, but enough that I knew that if we didn’t treat him right, this guy wouldn’t pull through. The blood pressure cuff cycled again, and once more it came back low.

  “Eighties systolic,” I said to Jen.

  If it continued dropping, we’d go from possibly going to fail to definitely going to die.

  “Should we give him blood?” she asked.

  “He’s your patient.” Jen was my friend and I was all too aware of needing to be careful not to step on her toes when it came to treating the patient. She was capable, too. Maybe not as comfortable in traumas as I was, but that came from my willingness to get involved in every trauma that presented. Sometimes to a fault, at least if you asked the attendings.

  She flicked her gaze to the note. “Maybe at first, but whoever brought him in wanted you to take care of him.”

  With a dropping blood pressure and the probable amount of blood he’d lost, giving him blood was reasonable. “Let’s give him two units.”

  “Well?” Sue snapped at Tamara.

  “I’ll get on it,” Tamara said, hurrying away, leaving Sue shaking her head.

  “Those new nurses…” she muttered.

  “Who do you think this is?” Jen asked as I continued to examine the man. There were no other injuries I could identify. Just the massive hunk of flesh missing, but that was enough. “Maybe a relative of someone you’ve taken care of before?”

  It was possible. In the two years I’d been in residency, I’d taken care of quite a few people, so I could imagine that some of them would want to have me taking care of their loved ones, but it was the other possibility that troubled me.

  Could someone have wanted me for my magical connection?

  I let magic wash over the man.

  When it did, I almost gasped.

  There was power within him.

  Most of the time when I used magic to probe for injuries, the sense of whatever injury or illness someone had was all I ended up with. With him, it was more than just an awareness of his injuries. They were there—the wound on his shoulder unlike anything that I’d ever felt when probing with my magic—but there was the power, an energy, that surged beneath the surface along with it.

  Was he a mage?

  That didn’t fit. Mages would have healed themselves, at least, as much as they were able to do so. And if they weren’t able to heal themselves, then another mage would have attempted to do it. That meant it was probably another sort of magic.

  The bite was important.

  It was too violent to be a vampire bite. I’d never seen them firsthand, but all the stories of vampire bites made it seem as if they would be little more than puncture wounds, nothing more than that, and certainly nothing like this violence.

  There was another magical creature that it could be, and one I’d had some experience with.

  “Kate?” Jen said.

  I glanced back at her. “What is it?”

  “What are you doing?”

  I couldn’t remove my connection to magic, not wanting to separate from it until I knew for sure whether this man was a shifter. The magic didn’t have anything familiar to it, but then again, I don’t know that I would have recognized it anyway. When I’d been around the shifter pack the last time, I hadn’t known anything about my magic.

  “I was just—”

  The blood pressure cuff had cycled again and began beeping.

  Now his pressure was even lower.

  “We need that blood,” Jen said.

  “Would you mind going to see what’s holding Tamara up?” I asked. I hated to ask that of her, but I felt that I needed to remain here with him. If something happened while I was gone, I’d feel responsible, even if there wasn’t anything that could be done.

  And there was something more I wanted to try, but doing so might seem strange to Jen. For that matter, it might seem strange to Sue, though I doubted she’d say anything.

  If only Derek were here. After the last attack, he’d moved west, wanting a new start. He claimed I didn’t need his protection anymore. I missed having him around, if only because he understood the magical world. Without him, there wasn’t anyone in the ER who knew what I was.

  “Sure.”

  When Jen was gone, I turned my attention back to the man, letting my magic flow through him. The wound—the bite, probably from another shifter—was more than a bite. His magic seeped out of it. If I could somehow seal that off, maybe he could heal himself.

  I wouldn’t have much time.

  Between his dropping blood pressure and the fact that others were around—including the specialists we’d had Asher call down—there wouldn’t be a lot of time to try anything. It was a good thing I didn’t mind pressure.

  Pushing my magic out, I tried to wrap it around the wound. Doing so was similar to creating a barrier, and I had some experience with that. Holding my magic in place prevented more of his from pouring out, but I didn’t know how long I’d be able to hold it. And he needed me to do more than hold it. He needed me to prevent more of his magic from leaving him.

  Could I push my magic into a barrier and tie it off?

  That might give him the necessary time to recover. If nothing else, it might keep him
from dying.

  Cold surged in my back.

  Nope. Not that much time left.

  The monitor beeped, but I ignored it. I didn’t need the monitor to know that something was changing. And it was more than about his blood loss. This was his magic, and if I couldn’t stop it, he wouldn’t survive.

  Maybe holding onto the magic and tying it off wasn’t enough.

  Could I use my magic in any healing way?

  I’d never tried. When I’d used it on patients before, it had been only to diagnose what was wrong so that I could guide more conventional therapies, but with this shifter, a conventional therapy wouldn’t be enough.

  How could I heal him?

  I didn’t know enough about that kind of magic.

  Voices behind me caught my attention. I’d need to work quickly.

  Squeezing his hand, I pushed my magic out and then pulled it back.

  Something changed within him.

  The cold eased.

  I did it again.

  Once again, there was something that changed, though I had no idea what it was. The cold in my spine eased even more.

  It was working.

  “What do we have here?” a deep voice called from behind me.

  One of the specialists.

  Another push with my magic followed by a pull.

  It would have to be enough.

  I released his hand and turned. Dr. Bavhish glanced at me before dismissing me. Vascular surgeons were arrogant like that, but then they weren’t nearly as bad as neurosurgeons.

  “A mauling. We’ve got blood on the way but with the amount of bleeding and the likelihood of vascular compromise, we thought it would be best to get you involved early.”

  Dr. Bavhish grabbed a pair of gloves from the wall and pushed Sue out of the way to examine the wound. Two surgery residents trailed behind him, though I didn’t know either of them. Dr. Bavhish’s nose wrinkled when he looked down at the injury, and he poked at it for a moment, his finger digging deeply into the wound before he stepped back and snapped his gloves off.