When Villains Rise (Market of Monsters #3) - Rebecca Schaeffer Page 0,97

with a piece of duct tape to keep the blood in and the air out. The person on the other end of the line was calm and collected even as they said things like “punctured lung” and “sucking wound” and “critical condition.”

When the EMTs finally came, they hauled Kovit onto a stretcher and calmly wheeled him to the elevator bank. The police had arrived at some point, not that Nita cared. She just hoped no one decided to shoot him again because he was a zannie.

She choked on the thought and stuck close to Kovit, praying that they’d help him, that the people here were anti-DUL, that they’d let him live.

One officer came over to talk to her, but paused when he saw Kovit’s face, doing a double-take. Kovit had been recognized. His hand went to his weapon, but another man put his hand on the policeman’s arm.

“Didn’t you see the notice this morning? The DUL is temporarily suspended pending investigation.”

Nita had won. She’d gotten the DUL suspended. Kovit being alive wasn’t a crime anymore.

A part of her wanted to laugh at the irony of it all. So much time and effort fighting to get the DUL suspended, all her manipulations and plans finally came to fruition.

But it was too late.

What did it matter now? Maybe the hospital wouldn’t legally be allowed to kill him, but he could die in surgery anyway, and Nita would never know if it was murder or not. No one would.

Nita had won everything and somehow lost what she was fighting for in the first place.

She linked her bloody fingers through Kovit’s limp ones, not knowing if she was trying to comfort him or herself as the policeman joined them with the EMTs in the elevator.

Part of her wanted to scream at the EMTs. They were so calm and slow and methodical and slow and she just wanted them to move faster, help him more. But they remained slow and steady as they all climbed into the ambulance and sped toward the hospital.

The officer tried to ask her a few basic things while they were in the ambulance. Did Nita know who shot Kovit? No, it was someone in the room next door. The officer nodded like he expected as much and remained silent. The EMTs cut Kovit’s shirt off and exposed the gaping hole in his chest. They shoved tubes down his throat with sharp precision and connected him to an IV drip.

“Do you know his blood type?” one of the EMTs asked her.

Nita stared at him for a moment, and then touched her bloody hand to her mouth, making Kovit’s blood a part of her, letting it dissolve on her tongue. And when it was a part of her, she could identify it, she could manipulate it, same as any other part of her body.

“B positive.” Her voice was hoarse.

He made a note, and Nita swallowed her panic, a desperate idea taking form. “I’m type O negative. Does he need blood?”

He did indeed need blood, and they set up the transfusion bag as the ambulance screamed toward the emergency room.

Nita wasn’t actually O negative, but she could manipulate her body to be anything, and she changed her blood as it filtered into the bag, hoping desperately that all those fools on the black market were right, that consuming her body really did give a person immortality or faster healing or anything remotely useful. She’d never wanted any of the marketing scams around her to be right before, but at this moment, she wished she were made of magic, that everything said about her was true, that it was within her power to save Kovit.

Drops of her blood filtered into his veins, but his eyes remained closed, and his wound remained open and vicious.

At the private hospital the policeman had insisted the ambulance go to, the halls were sterile and strangely empty, making it feel creepy and haunted. Nita had expected a big crowded hospital with thousands of people and beds in the hall, overworked and underpaid staff. This place gleamed with money, and a small part of Nita wondered how she was going to pay for this. But that was a problem for later, and she shoved it aside.

Nurses wheeled Kovit away, right into surgery. Nita grabbed the doctor as he followed beside Kovit, and she whispered, “Will he be okay?”

The doctor looked at her, and she knew, she just knew, in that moment, that Kovit would not be okay. That no one