Page 2 of Shifter and the Succubus (The Pack #1)
Kathleen Jones was a new member of the staff. She was a brilliant surgeon and luckily had opted to live in the Shamat demon compound, which meant she was minutes away.
Sabrina hit the on-call beepers for several nurses with a terse message: 911 GSW.
“Follow me, Kyle.” She headed toward the triage room with Kyle right beside her. “What has Misha told you?”
“He was shot in the stomach,” Kyle read. “The bullet is still in there, and he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“How far away are they?”
“Ten minutes.”
“I’m going to set up the room for him.”
“What do you need me to do?” Kyle said.
“Jason’s blood type is A negative. We have some on-site, but we might need more.
Call Griffin and tell him we need him for a possible blood transfusion and to get here as soon as possible.
” Griffin was the same blood type. Plus as the leader of the Shifter Nation, Griffin would want to know what had happened to Jason since he counted him as pack. Even if Jason didn’t agree.
“Got it.” Kyle grabbed her hand. “He’ll be fine, Sabrina. He has to be.”
Sabrina squeezed Kyle’s hand before she turned away and headed into the triage room while she pulled out her phone and hit Dr. Jones’s name in her contact list. She’d been doing this for centuries.
She had lost others she cared about in the past. Why was she having a hard time pulling air into her lungs?
Shut it down. Lock it away. Shore up the walls.
Ten painful minutes later she stood with Kyle, two orderlies, and a gurney at the sliding doors to the hospital.
The team van careened around the corner and slammed to a halt in front of them.
The van door swung open, and Misha jumped out.
The look of wide-eyed fear on his face and the shock wave that reverberated from him punched Sabrina in the solar plexus, but she couldn’t panic. She was a doctor, damn it.
Misha scooped Jason up as if he were a child and not a full-grown man and placed him on the gurney and then pressed his hand to the sodden gauze on his stomach.
“Go!” Sabrina said. They all started to jog down the hall, the orderlies pushing the gurney. They wheeled him into the triage room, and her team jumped forward, pulling off Jason’s jacket and cutting off his shirt and attaching him to a BP cuff and heart monitor.
Misha, Jean Luc, Kyle, and Talia watched from the doorway.
“Where’s Dr. Jones?” Misha asked.
“She’s prepping for surgery right now.” Sabrina watched the monitors and didn’t like what she saw as her team got to work.
They started an IV. Jason’s energy was sluggish and pooled around his belly like the blood that he’d lost. “I am going to do a FAST scan to get some sonogram images before he heads to the OR. Do we know the type of gun used?”
“No. I didn’t see it. Jason did and the selfless fool jumped in front of me. I should have taken the bullet.”
She didn’t have time to argue about Jason’s foolishness right now as she ran the sonogram wand over his abdomen and recorded the images.
“Let’s get him ready for the OR and start moving him down the hall in the next minute.
” Her team nodded as they cleaned him up and stripped Jason so that the clothes and dirt were out of the way.
Sabrina turned to Misha and the rest of the team. “I’ll let you know what’s going on as soon as I can.”
Sabrina didn’t wait for a response. She didn’t have time to waste. The orderlies pushed Jason into the hall fifty seconds later—good that her team didn’t waste time. They arrived at the doors leading into the OR, and the orderlies handed off Jason to the surgical nurses, who took him inside.
Sabrina steered to the right and pushed into the washroom, where she found Kathleen scrubbing in for the surgery. She was focused, her energy pulled in tight.
Kathleen didn’t bother looking up, instead asking her questions as she used a nail pick to clean under her nails. “Status?”
“Male, late thirties with a gunshot wound lower right abdomen. He’s lost a lot of blood, and the bullet is still inside.”
“Scans?” she asked as she scrubbed her hands and forearms.
“Should be on your monitor in the OR in the next minute or so.”
“Species?”
“Human and shifter. But he doesn’t have any shifter attributes.”
Kathleen worked on her forearms. “Okay. Anything else before I head in?”
“I want to scrub in too.”
Kathleen looked up, her eyebrows rising slightly before she schooled her expression. “Is there a specific reason why you’re stepping into the OR with me?”
Sabrina hesitated and she never hesitated.
Kathleen’s eyes narrowed. “If I let you in my OR, are you going to be a problem?”
Sabrina looked straight at the surgeon. “No. We’ve got blood donors on the way here. Jason is A negative, and we don’t have a lot in stock.”
Kathleen grimaced. “We need their blood sooner than later. Can you track it down for me first?”
Sabrina nodded. She wasn’t surprised that Kathleen gave her something to do. She would have done the same thing in her position.
“Good. Let me get in there.”
Sabrina stepped aside as Kathleen backed into the OR. Sabrina could see the surgical room through the windows. The nurses already had Jason draped for surgery and the anesthesiologist had him hooked up to the monitors.
He was going to be okay.
Sabrina walked out into the hallway and flagged down a nurse to pull the additional A negative blood and take it to the OR stat. She then walked toward the waiting room to find Kyle and see where her blood donors were.
The outside door at the end of the hall slid open, and Kyle rushed toward her.
“Where’s Griffin?”
“He should be here in the next few minutes. Luckily he was home and not traveling. How is Jason?”
“Dr. Jones is just starting surgery. She’s one of the best surgeons I’ve worked with.” Which was why even though Kathleen was a shifter, she had recruited her to work at the demon hospital in the first place.
Footsteps echoed and Sabrina turned to see Griffin and his sister, Beatrice, jogging toward them. Sabrina braced herself. Shifter’s energy was powerful even in the calmest of situations, which this was not.
“Thanks for getting here so quickly. Jason is in surgery right now, and we’re going to need your blood,” Sabrina said.
Griffin nodded. “Tell us where you need us.”
“I’m the same blood type as well,” Bea said. “We figured the more blood the better, right?”
“Yes, let’s get some blood drawn.”
They followed her down the hall into a room where they normally drew blood for lab tests. Sabrina handed them off to the two lab techs that joined them, and they set Griffin and Bea up in the chairs and got to work.
Sabrina took a deep breath. Everything would be okay. Jason would be fine.
She wouldn’t accept any other option.