Azrael narrowed his eyes and used a claw to pull down the doctor’s mask to reveal the man’s lips. The doctor trembled.
“You do not need to explain the science to me,” Azrael said. “I invented it. I know precisely what it does.”
The man bowed. “Yes, of course, Prophet. How foolish of me to assume otherwise.”
“How long until he’s complete?”
“He will need at least three more days, and more for recovery.”
“You have two,” Azrael said. “He will recover just fine.”
The Prophet left Murphy’s operating area and moved into another nearby OR.
There a single woman was strung up, red vines squirming into her nostrils, ear canals, and throat. She let out a whimper when she saw him.
“Please… help,” she managed to choke out.
“I am about to,” Azrael said. “You have been chosen.”
He glanced at a surgical tray beside where the woman was suspended. Everything had already been prepped by his assistants as instructed. The only thing he needed was the donor Variant organs, which were waiting on ice inside a cooler near the surgical tray.
“Chosen…” she said, coughing. “Chosen for—”
Azrael didn’t give her a chance to finish her words. He swiped at her abdomen with his claw. This was something human fingers definitely could not do. He relished the woman’s scream. Her face went white, and she squirmed a few moments before she passed out.
That was quicker than he would have liked. He began the tedious process of placing hemostats over severed vessels so she wouldn’t bleed to death. His preparations and the red tendrils roping through her body would keep her alive as he cut out a few of her organs to replace with the donor Variant organs his people had harvested.
After an hour of work, the curtains to his surgical room were peeled back.
“Prophet,” a rasping voice came. “You told me to meet you here, yes?”
Azrael didn’t have to turn his attention away from his patient to know who it was. He had told the monster to meet him here while he worked. “Yes, Elijah. I have a task for you.”
“I stand ready, master.”
“The general has failed me in Canada,” Azrael said, trying hard not to crush the woman’s intestines in anger as he extracted them. He finished pulling out a rope, snapped it in half, and flung it onto a metal pan. “Team Ghost escaped.”
“Shall I pursue them?” Elijah asked.
“No.”
Azrael licked the blood off his claws and turned to Elijah. The Scion was larger than most with bulging muscles pressing against the fabric of his dark clothes. He wore a ragged cape, and in one set of claws, he carried the front half of a human skull that he had fashioned into a mask.
He was one of Azrael’s first creations, a faithful servant, and had chosen the name Elijah after his rebirth.
Azrael picked up a small electric device from his surgical tray. “Do you know what this is?”
Elijah shook his head.
“It’s a GPS chip.” Azrael held the dime-sized device between his claws, rotating it to reflect the light. “The flexible microelectric arrays hanging off it harvest energy from the body to power it. This device helps me keep track of the faithful.”
He went back to the human woman. After cutting into her bicep, he sutured the device to the inside of her flesh and connected the array to her muscle.
“I have allies tracking our quarry up north, thanks to a device like this in one of our escaped Scions,” Azrael said. “So you will understand now why I’m less concerned about where these people go. We will always find them, so long as they have the tracked Scion with them.”
“Then what do you need from me?”
“I have different plans for you,” Azrael said. He finished suturing the woman’s bicep and turned toward her guts again. All this surgery was making him hungry, and he caught himself salivating.
“I live to serve,” Elijah said.
“You live because you serve.”
The woman started to wake, her eyelids fluttering. She groaned, blood dribbling down her open abdomen.
“Wha… wha…” she started to murmur.
She twisted her head enough against the tendrils holding her in place to see her stomach. Her mouth opened, and she let out a muffled scream.
This time, the pain wasn’t enough to make her pass out.
“You are almost there,” Azrael said. He placed a claw on her lips, and she writhed. “Patience.”
She thrashed against the vines holding her into place, moving enough that Azrael couldn’t continue the surgery.
No matter. It was time for him to eat anyway.
He picked up the length of intestine he had removed from her.
“Do you recognize this?” he held it up so she could see.
Her eyes bulged.
He took a bite of it, letting blood trickle over his chin. “You are delicious.”
She finally fainted again, and he finished his meal, throwing a scrap to Elijah. The Scion hungrily stuffed it into his mouth.
“I’m growing tired of these heretics,” Azrael said. “It takes too long to turn a person like her into a magnificent Scion like you.”
“Yes, yes,” Elijah said.
“Unfortunately, we have not located the humans who have infiltrated our network. They have built too many safeguards for our faithful to get past. I’ve been told it could take weeks to locate the humans. I fear that if we wait too long, they will regroup. And we have heard rumors that they have sought the assistance of other nations.”
“They will fail, master, we will stop them.”
“Indeed we will.” Azrael began suturing the woman’s abdomen together again. “I want the rest of the Allied States crushed before we have to deal with too many other nations of heretics.”
Azrael looped in the last suture and turned toward Elijah.
“What do you propose, Prophet?” Elijah asked.
“We have the advantage,” Azrael said.
