Seeing his left hand reminded him of his right. His wrist hurt. He rolled his head back over the other way.
Tubes ran into and out of the demon’s hand that had been grafted to the stump of wrist. A circular affair of wires held the grotesque hand palm down and fingers spread like it was a piece of art. An ill-smelling poultice wrapped the sewn ends of flesh, but it was made of a clear jelly material that allowed him to see. The thread didn’t look like thread, but more like the sinew he’d seen when his biology class had dissected a cat in lab. The flesh, his own and the demon’s, were reddened from inflammation.
The Cabalists had done it. They’d reconnected Merihim’s hand to him.
“No,” Warren whispered hoarsely. The events in the building came back to him in a maelstrom of fear, pain, and loss. He could still feel the cold, cruel bite of the armored man’s sword cutting through his arm and feel the solid thump of the demon’s hand dropping onto his chest.
“Warren.” Naomi rose from the wingback chair she’d been sitting in beside the bed. She looked exhausted and concerned about him.
Kelli sat in another chair at the foot of the bed. Her eyes stared at him, but they were dark and listless, like nothing was going on behind them.
“What have you done?” Warren tried to lift his right arm but restraints held it down.
“It’s going to be all right,” Naomi said soothingly. “The doctor who reattached your hand said the surgery went well.”
“My hand!” Warren croaked. “That’s not my hand.” He remembered the Fetid Hulk eating his hand.
“It is now.” Naomi touched the back of the hand almost reverently.
Astonished, Warren realized he felt her soft fingers against the back of the demon’s hand. “Don’t. Don’t touch me.”
Naomi gazed at him curiously. “You felt that?”
Warren refused to answer.
Naomi pinched the back of his…the hand. The skin tone lightened, then resumed its natural color. But she’d pinched hard enough to hurt.
“Ouch,” Warren protested.
“You did feel that.” Despite her exhaustion, excitement filled Naomi’s features. “The physicians didn’t reattach any of the nerves. They were in surgery with you for almost eighteen hours connecting arteries and veins. They had to map a whole new way through the hand. I watched the procedure. I’ve never seen anything like that before. They figured they would reconnect the nerves if the hand survived transplantation.”
“They shouldn’t have done this,” Warren said. He tried to reach for the offensive hand but discovered that his left hand had been secured to the bed as well. “Let me go.”
Sorrow showed in Naomi’s eyes. “I can’t.”
“Let me go!”
Wordlessly, she shook her head.
Fighting back tears of frustration, Warren cursed loud and long. When he ran out of breath and strength, he stopped. He sucked in oxygen from the mask, getting a sudden rush that was akin to intoxication. He lay back on the bed, no longer able to strain against the bonds that held him.
“You had no right,” Warren whispered.
“Hedgar Tulane felt we had no choice. Merihim ordered us to do it.”
Merihim. Warren noticed how easily she acted as though she were on a first-name basis with the demon.
“He gave you a gift, Warren. Without his help, you had no hand.”
“That would have been better.” Warren closed his eyes and lay back, exhausted. In a matter of seconds, sleep claimed him.
Four days passed. During that time, Warren’s health improved. So did the health of the demon’s hand at the end of his arm. The physicians Tulane had brought into the manor house seemed satisfied and even surprised by his progress.
Truthfully, so far, Warren had been surprised and repulsed by the hand. But he’d been equally sickened by the way he’d been treated. The methods they’d used had been a combination of traditional medical efforts and Cabalist homeopathic remedies they had been using.
The “fish” in the IV bag hadn’t been fish at all, but a small species of demon now present in the River Thames. Some of the Cabalists believed that the snow had turned toxic from the Burn, and that new flora and fauna and life forms were showing up in the affected areas.
Experimentation with the secretions from the Nester demons, as they’d been termed so far, had revealed that the liquid they released held natural anesthetic as well as a healing effect.
Warren hadn’t believed that there were any demons that would be helpful to humans.
“They aren’t helpful,” Naomi said. “The Nester demons produce anesthetic to sedate their prey. Then they burrow into them and eat them from the inside out, starting with fats and unnecessary muscle tissue. They save the heart, lungs, and other vital organs for last. Their secretions also help their host bodies live while they’re being eaten, sealing off wounds and keeping the rest of the body healthy.”
One of the most horrific sights Warren had ever seen had come yesterday, when he’d finally been allowed up from his bed to walk around. Naomi had guided him down to the labs where they were working with the Nester demons because he’d wanted to know more.
There, suspended in a glass box in the middle of a large cave filled with strange-looking equipment that was an aggregation of cutting-edge tech and something from the nineteenth century, and attended to by a handful of lab assistants, a middle-aged man floated in water. X-ray machines showed the pockets of Nester demons inside him. His skin hung loosely on him, showing that all the fat had been eaten away. Most of the muscle tissue had disappeared from his legs.
“They’re not going to save him?” Warren asked.
“No,” Naomi replied. “They’ll learn more from him by observation.”
“He’s going to die.”
“If a research team hadn’t found him, he would have died anyway. And they haven’t been able to separate the Nester demons from the host without killing the host yet. Maybe before this man dies, they will.”
“And if they don’t?”
“There are other victims. They’ll observe them.”
Warren contemplated the man. Although
