Immortally Embraced
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Authors: Angie Fox
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To my amazing street team members, especially Vanessa Primer and Rachel Flesher. Your enthusiasm and support are off the charts.
Contents
chapter one
Medusa, serpent-goddess, executioner of men, scourge of Kisthene’s plain, stabbed a clawed finger in my direction. “Tell me the truth, human,” she hissed. “No more lies.”
I straightened my spine and fought the urge to rub my temples in a most unprofessional way.
Why did the gods have to be so dramatic?
Medusa coiled on the examination table in front of me, wearing a light blue open-backed gown. She stared at me, her eyes glowing red as her clawed hands shredded the white sanitary paper.
“I am outcast,” she said in a gravelly voice. Her rattlesnake’s tail swished, nearly taking out my freestanding EKG unit. “I am the damned,” she declared, face twisted with fury. I held on to my clipboard as the examination tent vibrated with her power. “I am the destroyer!”
I nodded. Some patients took longer than others to adjust, but it didn’t change the facts. “You’re also pregnant.”
“Impossible,” she spat, even though we both knew that wasn’t true.
I made a few notes in my chart while she threw her head back and let out a screech that shook the tent.
Ouch. I tried not to wince.
In my professional opinion, screaming often did help.
“Doctor,” she hissed, smoke curling from her nose. For a moment, she was unable to form the question. Her perfectly sculpted brows knit as she brushed a hand through the wild mane of snakes on her head. “How?”
I gave her my most reassuring smile. “The old-fashioned way, I assume.”
She should know. The gorgon was nearly three thousand years old. And from what I’d seen of the ancient Greeks, they certainly knew how to party.
She drew her hands slowly, almost reverently down her green-scaled torso to the perfectly flat stomach under her examination gown. “I’m cursed,” she hissed, “I’m barren. My body is poison!”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Sure, my fingers went a bit numb when I was checking her blood pressure, but all in all she was far less dangerous than the ancient Norse dragon in need of an enema this morning.
That had taken us two doctors, three orderlies, a set of ambulance drivers, and Jeffe the guard sphinx. Although to be frank, all Jeffe did was warn us not to set the motor pool on fire.
I whipped out form 3871-K, which was actually a little slide wheel designed to help me calculate the gorgon pregnancy cycle. “I’d estimate you’re fifty-three days’ along, which is seven weeks and three days’ pregnant. Your gestation time is slightly shorter than the average human, longer than the average goddess.” I slipped the chart back into the pocket of my white coat. “Still, I don’t think we need to see you again until the end of your first trimester.”
I opened a drawer in the medical cart next to the examination table where we kept basics, including samples of prenatal vitamins. “Because you’re over thirty-five years old,” I said, handing her a pack, “we’ll want to do an ultrasound at your next appointment, along with a few other routine tests.”
The pale skin on her neck and arms flushed as she took it all in. She growled low. “My parents are going to kill me.”
Well, I couldn’t offer her any advice on ancient marine deities. Besides, the grin tickling at the sides of her mouth told me more than I needed to know. Once she recovered from the surprise, she’d be tickled pink. Or at least a light green.
“It’s just that”—her gaze wandered as she nibbled on a talon—“I haven’t talked to my mother since I turned her lover to stone.”
“About that,” I said, setting her chart on top of the medical cart. “You’re going to want to try to control your temper. Stress isn’t good for the baby.”
Medusa snarled at me, then caught herself. “I’ll try,” she muttered.
“Do,” I told her.
Ever since the cease-fire in the war of the gods, we’d converted our MASH unit into one of the premier (and only) supernatural clinics in the area. That was saying something, considering we were located in limbo, just north of a major hell vent.
We were known for taking in all patients, regardless of their origins or ability to pay. Which was the way it should be. It was also why we got the interesting cases.
“Go ahead and get dressed. I’ll see you in five weeks,” I told the gorgon. “The nurse out front will set your appointment.”
I ducked out of the examination room and handed the chart to our charge nurse, Holly, who was one of the only full humans in our unit.
She tilted her head, flipping her blond ponytail to one side. She’d gone from red streaks in her hair to pink. I liked it. It softened her up.
“Rough one, Dr. Robichaud?” she asked.
“Nah, everything’s going to be fine,” I replied. “Even so, you’ll want to keep your eyes averted when our patient comes out,” I warned her. Just in case.
Flesh-to-stone injuries were painful and time consuming to treat. We needed Holly on her feet.
I followed her to the front, where she had her desk.
We’d converted the surgery recovery tent into a makeshift clinic, with curtained rooms running the length of it—eight on each side. At the front sat the nurse’s station, which was basically a red metal desk with a portable file cabinet behind it.
“It’s quiet around here,” Holly said, slipping behind the desk and starting a new file for Medusa.
“I like quiet. Quiet is good.”
Peace had broken out exactly three weeks, one day, and six hours ago. It was an uneasy truce. We all knew it wouldn’t last. Still, at the MASH 3063rd, we were going to take what we could get.
The younger gods had revolted against the older gods right around the time Troy had fallen. Before this month, neither side had even called for as much as a cease-fire in the last seven hundred years.
A lot of them didn’t want peace now, but my hot Greek boyfriend and I had fulfilled a prophecy and screwed them over on it.
Ha.
Holly had refilled her M&M jar, the foul temptress. I stole a handful.
The prophecies came in sets of three, and shockingly enough they were about a healer who could see the dead. Me. They gave nebulous warnings about disasters and opportunities, sending me scrambling as fate came crashing down. If I passed the test, we were spared. For a while. If I failed, well, let’s just say it hadn’t happened. Yet.
To make things worse, my involvement had to be kept secret from everyone, including my closest friends and colleagues. The gods had outlawed my particular gift. Exposing myself would mean a slow, painful death. If I was lucky. More likely, I would be tortured eternally by something creative and mythical, like being tied to a rock while a python devoured my small intestine or set on fire upside down while spiders nested under my toenails.
Still, I was glad I’d taken the latest risk and bought us a little peace. At the moment, patients were living instead of dying.
If they survived their injuries, immortals healed fast. The last of our soldiers in recovery had gone home a week after the cease-fire began.
So we’d adapted. We’d changed. Now we were treating real problems, instead of endless battle injuries. We were making these creatures’ lives better. As far as I was concerned, that was the way things were supposed to work.
Of course there was no telling when the gods would start up again, or who would fire first. I leaned against the edge of the desk, finishing off my M&M’s.
Holly eyed me, as if she knew what I was thinking. “The colonel has us stocking up on everything.”
“Good.” We’d kept our heads on our shoulders this long by being prepared, fast, and more than a little lucky.
Unfortunately, luck can only get you so far.
* * *
Once Medusa had made her way out, with her vitamins and all of her questions answered, I signed out of the clinic. Technically, I’d been coming off duty when I’d grabbed her chart. Still, it seemed like the gorgon had needed a friendly female ear. Or at the very least, someone who wasn’t squeamish around snakes.
I banged out the door and into the heart of the MASH 3063rd. I’d gotten into medicine to make a difference, to treat the creatures that others couldn’t—or wouldn’t.
Then representatives from the new god army had showed up at my door. I’d been drafted, forced to leave my practice in New Orleans, for this.
It was hard to believe sometimes that it had been only seven years ago. Most days, it seemed like a lifetime.
The suns were setting low over the limbo landscape, throwing off brilliant oranges and purples. A wide desert stretched beyond the tents of our MASH unit.
Underfoot, and as far as the eye could see, the bare, red landscape was littered with rock.
It was how I’d pictured Mars as a kid.
The entire place was flat, save for the cemetery. We had a hard time digging into the limbo rock, so it was more efficient to make a dirt hill for the bodies.
“Hold up!” I heard from two buildings down. Shirley was stubbing out a cigarette in front of Colonel Kosta’s office. She worked as the company clerk, and the commander’s private secretary. “Have you heard?” she asked, red hair sticking every which way out of her bun as she jogged toward me.
“What? That the USO is sending us a Sycion lyre quartet?” I’d heard. “I wish the gods would appoint somebody new to the entertainment committee.” I’d settle for anybody whose idea of a good time went beyond lutes, fire eating, and ancient plays. My life was already a Greek tragedy.
“No.” She stopped in front of me, her eyes swimming with sympathy. “Galen just got called back.”
Cold apprehension seized me. Hell and damnation. I knew this was coming someday, but that didn’t stop my stomach from turning to lead. Galen of Delphi was the commander of the Green Hawk Special Forces team and, well, let’s just say we’d been enjoying the break in the fighting a little more than most. He was on leave from his unit, due to a paperwork mistake that I’d hoped it would take the army a long, long time to rectify.
My throat felt tight. “Where is he?”
She glanced toward the shadows past the cemetery. “I think he went out to Father McArio’s.”
Our unit chaplain. “Okay, thanks.” I headed straight across the common area. Father lived past the graveyard and through the junk depot, in a little hutch on the very outskirts of camp. He claimed to enjoy the solitude. I suspected he was secretly ministering to the lost souls of limbo.
I scrambled up the rise toward the cemetery, almost thankful for the energy burn. My mind was racing. It was too soon to lose Galen. We’d barely dated. I didn’t know where this was going.
Wooden grave markers of all shapes and sizes stood at attention. These were the doctors and the nurses, the mechanics and the clerks. People like me, who would never make it out of limbo. Not unless the war ended for good.