old. She doubted that he could even track anything with his gaze yet.
In less than two days, at least according to her internal body clock, Aryal went from a beach in Numenlaur to surgery in Manhattan.
Her arrival at East Manhattan Medical went by in a blur. In her Wyr form, her body and wingspan were much too large and unusual a shape for an MRI scan. Nurses x-rayed images of her wing joints in sections.
Then she met with the surgeon, who was a sharp-eyed Wyr falcon named Kathryn Shaw with thick chestnut hair, honey brown eyes, and a blaze of Power that was as sharp as a scalpel in her nervy, slender body.
Dragos kept Kathryn on retainer to treat high-level staff when needed, and Aryal already knew her. Kathryn had worked on all the sentinels at one time or another over the years, for injuries sustained on the job. That familiarity, along with the fact that the surgeon was both female and avian comforted Aryal immeasurably. Maybe her wings couldn’t be repaired, but at least she knew that this surgeon would feel any failure instinctively deep in her gut.
The pre-surgery consult was brief and to the point.
“Hi, Aryal,” the surgeon said. “I hear you’ve had a rough trip.”
“You could say that,” she said through clenched teeth.
The other female was obviously too intelligent to offer to shake the stressed-out harpy’s taloned hand. Kathryn scanned Aryal’s wings magically for a long moment, her gaze turning internal while her expression remained professionally neutral.
Quentin never left Aryal’s side. While the surgeon examined her, he gripped her wrists and talked to her telepathically while she flexed her hands and suffered the invasion of someone else’s Power coursing through her body. The harpy hated it and had to fight to keep from lashing out.
“I won’t go under,” Aryal said. She stared fixedly at Quentin. “I can’t.”
“You know that’s not a good idea,” Kathryn said. “I have to advise against it. It will be safer for you and for everybody else if I put you under a general anesthetic. Otherwise you are going to be fighting your instincts throughout the entire surgery.”
“No,” growled the harpy. The thought of going blank while someone cut into her body made crazypants want to come out to play again. “You will use a local.”
Kathryn and Quentin looked at each other. The surgeon asked, “Can you control her?”
“Of course I can control her,” said Quentin nastily. “Every time she lets me.”
Kathryn took the reprimand with a steady silence. She looked back at the harpy, her falcon’s gaze piercing and calm. “The only way I’ll consider it is if you’re heavily sedated,” she said. “If you endanger either me or my team, I will stop working on you immediately and you won’t get me back to the table. You must keep yourself under control. Understood?”
The harpy bared her teeth and hissed. “Understood.”
“See you in the theater.” Kathryn walked away, muttering under her breath, “God help me, I’m actually going to operate on a harpy while she’s still awake. Somebody better give me a medal for this.”
“Coward,” the harpy snarled after her.
“I think she’s probably the opposite of a coward,” Quentin told her. “Anyway, I’d go easy on her if I were you. You
His grip on her wrists was so tight that her hands were beginning to go numb. Only then did she realize she was struggling against his hold. She forced herself to quit. She couldn’t bear to look over her shoulder at her wings spilled lifelessly down the exam table, or she might start struggling again.
Then they waited, and waited. Aryal fisted her hands in the hair at the nape of her neck, held her head and closed her eyes while Quentin paced the examination room. She could hear people talking through the doors. They sounded like they were arguing, although she couldn’t hear what they said. She could recognize the voices though. One of them was Dragos. The other was Pia.
So much came back around to Pia.
Then a third voice joined the other two. Kathryn. The harpy’s gaze went to the scars on Quentin’s face. The muscles in her body were strung tight, but she forced herself to be still and wait.
Finally a nurse came to tell them it was time, and led the way to the surgery room. Aryal limped down the hall, wrestling with panic the whole way.
Quentin stalked beside her. They had both showered at the hospital, and while the harpy refused to don a hospital gown, he wore scrubs. As he had dropped a few pounds in Numenlaur, he looked sharper than ever, the strong elegant bones of his face standing out under the pitiless hospital lights.
They had barely touched down in New York and people were already staring at him in shock and awe. Most of them were women.
The scars on his cheekbone and brow gave a remarkable illusion, as if half his face was masked, and if that wasn’t an example of how blind fate could still on occasion strike with immaculate accuracy, Aryal didn’t know what was.
To Aryal’s eyes, he had always looked dangerous. Now even the thickest, most insensitive of idiots could see it too.
“Are you going to want plastic surgery?” she asked.
He gave her a blank look. “Why?”
“The scars on your face,” she said.
He shrugged, patently indifferent to the idea. “If I were to take the time to do anything, to tell you the truth, I’d rather finally get a rooftop garden over my apartment.”
One corner of her mouth lifted, because she loved the scars.
She said, “Good.”
Then they arrived. The nurse pushed open the doors for them and they walked into an alien place filled with medical machinery, an operating table and more masked people. Two of them, off to one side, were Pia and Dragos.
The harpy stopped and scowled at them. “What are you doing in here?”
The dragon looked at her, his gold eyes mesmerizing.
Ah. It was going to be that kind of sedation. She had wondered, since adrenaline would have helped her to throw off any medication before they could possibly be done with the surgery.
She gave herself over readily to the dragon’s enthrallment, and climbed on the table to lie on her stomach, placing her forehead in the headrest as instructed. They wheeled tables in on either side of her to spread out her wings.
Quentin sat cross-legged on the floor so that he could look up at her. He took her hands again in an unbreakable grasp. “Hold on to me,” he said. “Don’t let go.”
“Okay.” She struggled not to hyperventilate.
Power filled the room from more than one person, and she lost sensation from the neck down. The harpy cried out as a blind animal panic tried to take her over again, and the dragon whispered.
Vaguely she could sense tugging on her body. The smell of her own blood filled the air. They had cut into her. Then came other sounds, like a tapping of either a chisel or a small hammer.
The surgeon said in a cool, calm voice, “I’m going to have to break this again.”
She was lost in a nightmare, lost …
He had a surfeit of his own Power, and his words penetrated both her panic and the dragon’s beguilement. As she looked at him, he stroked her face, and she knew that he would do anything he had to so that they survived.
Her lips shook.
