Chapter 162 - Good News, Everyone

All romantic thoughts left my head when we got to the place, replaced by a feeling of dull detachment that covered me like a shield and protected me from the sights and sounds and smells of the hospital. I disliked them with passion at the best of times, avoided as much as I could the bleached walls and the memories they brought. This time, it was even worse, because the place was packed to the brim.

"What… what should I do?" Panda asked me. She stood with a clueless and greenish face, staring owlishly at the few afflicted who sat in waiting chairs in the vestibule.

They were fine enough to sit, so I'd say they were on the better side. Calm, too. Some quietly talked, some busied themselves with phones, some just sat with bored expressions. Not so calm was the personnel: nurses and doctors running around. Some were witches, most weren't.

"Find the person responsible for organising grunts and ask this question to him," I told her. "And we were told to report to…"

"Me," a tall woman in a hospital coat and with a no-nonsense expression on her wrinkled face marched up to me and Ghost, gave a wary glance at JJ, who imitated my shadow, a bland one to Panda, and focused on Ghost. "Good to see you again, even in such circumstances." A shadow of a smile graced her face. "How's your memory these days? Remember me at all?"

"Ah," Ghost had decency to look sheepish, "Maybe?"

The shadow of a smile on the woman's face lost the smile and became just shadow. "Not surprising, I guess. I'm Lera, and I'm working with the chief physician of the clinic. You can consider me his magical counterpart. Either way, I've been waiting for you two long enough. There are patients whose afflictions are too delicate to be treated by average healers. I will show you the way. You," she pointed at Panda, who immediately stood straighter, "walk with us for now. You," she turned to JJ, "try anything funny and I will burn you into a crisp."

He just raised his hands in a silent "who, me?" gesture.

The rest was routine. I and Ghost got out assignments, all complex and delicate operations, mostly on the brain—the most complex and delicate part of both body and aura. Panda got whisked away to the chief of grunts, after which I only saw her in glimpses.

JJ found his niche, too—he slithered away from the witches' eyes and wandered the halls with calming smiles and placating words for the most agitated patients. He came by more often, with the purpose of having some of that for me—or, occasionally, a couple of drinks and snacks for both me and Ghost. Like that, hours passed on-shift, and I had a special appreciation for people who worked like that for years.

After I and Ghost fixed a mess inside the head of one particular person with a really nasty case of synaesthesia (he registered words as tastes and colours, shapes as numbers, and heard auras, which he wasn't supposed to register at all), JJ came by again—it's like he knew when exactly we finished—and we all took a five minutes break.

I didn't have time to check on the news from the outside, but it wasn't the same for the patients. Two of them, teens waiting their turn with less proficient healers, sat together in a hospital bed and commented on the news articles they read from their shared tablet. One teen was a witcher, a weak one judging by his well. Another was just a human, but with similar enough face to be the witcher's sibling. They were connected by a long, fleshy cord running between their necks.

Their conversation caught my ear.

"Do you think they would get rid of the demon before tomorrow?"

"Maybe. If they made to stop hurting people, they can make him go the hell out of here."

"Not made, convinced. Didn't you read? It says, convinced!"

This caught my attention. "Convinced, you say? Does it talk?" I came closer to catch a glimpse of what was on their tablet. "What's the latest news?"

They shrunk a little at my approach, huddled together. "Cool stuff. Coolest stuff! Princess Sofia is on her way from Moscow, and the demon speaks Latin, because someone at some point had summoned him before, and they convinced him to lay off the mutations, and ghouls, and all. But he doesn't want to go out of the city."

"I bet they'll just kill him after all. The vamps, I mean. I mean, the vampires." The witcher gave JJ a cautious glance. "Or maybe it will be Princess Sofia who does that. She's cool. I mean, they can't just throw the demon back. They'd have to get another sacrifice. That's the basic magic stuff, one gate in, one gate out. We all got taught, just so we wouldn't think of doing anything stupid."

"That's nasty." I nodded gratefully to the teens and went back to my own company. "So the demon is stuck there unless another witch dies."

"Another reason summonings were outlawed almost unanimously by witches and vampires both," JJ said. "But there was a time when finding both witch sacrifices wasn't that much of a problem, as shown by the fact that this particular demon was summoned to Earth twice. It was, though, certainly before I was born. At that time, the Commandments were already in power."

This all, and just the stench of antiseptics and medicine in the hospital, made it hard for me to feel any better about the end to the additions to the list of the demon's victims. In this atmosphere where even JJ looked grim, Ghost's smile looked out of place.

"I wonder what the demon wants here," he said. "He must want the city for something if he's so adamant about staying, isn't it? If he stopped attacking people. He's supposed to be a good one, for demons. An angel, that I remember. Does he just like our city this much?"