Page 27 of Bound By Fire
Three or four seconds tick by, and his flanks keep twitching.
Shit!
His back leg jerks, claws scraping the padded surface beneath him. He’s still trying hard to wake up.
Craaaap!
The drug finally hits, and his breathing slows, and his flanks stop jumping. The beast under my hands goes still.
I push out a heavy breath.
“He’s down,” Hannah says. “His pressure is holding. We’re good.”
“Good. Stay on him. We need to finish up. Lena, suction.”
I start on the repair, putting in a series of sutures. They will close the wall. I work as quickly as I can.
“Last one,” I say, setting the final throw. “And…tied.”
“Pressure holding,” Hannah reports, giving me the rest of his stats.
“Releasing the clamp,” I tell them.
I open the jaws slowly. The vessel fills. The repair holds.
I let out a breath.
“Okay,” I say. “That was the part that was going to kill him. Now that he is stable, we can tackle everything else.”
It takes another two hours. Patel scrubs in partway through and takes over the broken wing. Lena handles the abdominal closure under my supervision.
When I step back from the table, my gown is soaked through from the chest down. My headlamp battery is on its last red bar. The monitors are showing numbers that make me hopeful.
“The patient is stable,” Hannah says with a tired smile.
“Thank you. All of you. That was beautiful work.” I strip off my gloves, drop them in the bin, and pull off my mask. “Lena, walk the post-op orders through with Dr. Patel. I want our patient in the monitored recovery bay.” I give the rest of the instructions. “Call me if his stats start to trend down.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Thank you, team.”
“Excellent job, Doc,” Brody tells me, smiling.
Out in the corridor, Carla is waiting on one of the benches. She has been there, I suspect, for most of the surgery, even though I told her she could go home. She stands up when I come out, and her eyes do that quick head-to-toe check she does whenever I come out of a bad one.
“He’s alive,” I tell her.
“I heard.” She nods. “Onyx’s brother arrived a little while ago. He’s in the family room. Do you want a minute before I bring you to him?”
I look down at my bloody gown, at the smears of blood across the fabric from where I’ve pressed my arms against my own sides during the long closure.
“That would be a good idea.”
She turns to go, then pauses.
“Dr. Keller?”
“Hmm?”
