The Better to Hold You - By Alisa Sheckley Page 0,8
a little. I would never be able to lose control this way, with Hunter watching me, waiting for my response. He moved his fingers faster, mistaking my sounds for plea sure.
Cheating him, cheating myself, I cried out my dissatisfaction, and he was content.
THREE
I finally arrived at work two and a half hours late. Even though I'd called to explain, I felt conspicuously guilty as I moved through the vast white labyrinth of corridors. I kept wanting to announce to the people I passed in the halls that I'd left home as quickly as I could, borrowing thirty dollars from Hunter and leaving him to call my bank and the local police office. I hadn't wasted a single moment.
Aside from that little aberrant time-out as a slave girl.
I found my medical ser vices group S.O.A.P.'ing a few of the noncriticals. Dr. Malachy Knox, the staff veterinarian in charge of our unit, was holding a limp rag of a cat with the distinctive uremic smell of kidney failure.
“All right,” he said, “let's see what we've got here. Now, what does the S in S.O.A.P. stand for?”
Sam rolled his eyes at me: Even the Institute vet techs knew the acronym for Subjective analysis, Objective data, Assessment, and Plan. But that was Malachy's style—he drawled out his questions in his plummy British accent as if he thought we were all a bit slow. Of course, in Sam's case, he might have had a point.
“S stands for Subjective analysis,” said Sam. “My opinion? He looks half dead.”
“I'd list that as unresponsive.” Malachy glanced over at me. “Welcome to morning rounds, Ms. Barrow.”
I flushed, realizing that he must not have received my message. “I'm so sorry I'm so late, but my pocketbook was stolen on the train.”
Lilliana, my favorite member of the team, gave me a sympathetic smile, while the humorless Ofer pushed his glasses up on his nose like an officious gnome. Malachy just looked at me assessingly, his hands still stroking the cat's abdomen, feeling reflexively for the state of the cat's skin, the size of its spleen, its bowel loops.
As Malachy described what he was doing, Sam kept watching the older man intently as if he were expecting some sleight of hand. Even though Sam hulked a full seven inches over Malachy, and both men wore the AMI uniform of white lab coats and khakis, even a casual observer would have known which one was in charge.
The question of late was whether he would remain so. Dr. Malachy Knox, a.k.a. “Mad Mal,” was the Institute's resident rock star, a brilliant researcher with a reputation for thinking outside the box and using unorthodox methodologies. In vet school, I had studied his infamous experiments transplanting the brains of rhesus monkeys, and had been torn between horror and awe at the implications of his work. More recently, he had been involved in isolating the so-called lycanthropy virus, a rare disorder that caused some individuals' cells to behave like fetal or stem cells, rendering them capable of radical shifts in form and function. Despite the name, the virus did not actually turn the host into a wolf—or, at least, that was the prevailing wisdom. Malachy himself would only say that the virus manifested itself very differently in different hosts, and that canid DNA was among the most plastic in the animal kingdom. He also liked to point out that humans and wolves had been associating with each other since the days when our own DNA hadn't yet been fixed in its current arrangement.
I wasn't entirely sure what Malachy had done that had resulted in his ouster from the research unit and had brought him down to the far humbler position of, as he put it, “shepherding yearlings around.” But what ever it was, it had affected his health as well as his career.
Underneath his wildly curling black hair, Malachy's craggy face was pallid and drawn, and where his wrists were visible under his lab coat, they appeared almost skeletal. I knew for a fact that he was forty-six, but he looked a good decade older.
“Well, Ms. Barrow,” said Malachy, bringing my attention back to the here and now, “I can only assume that your current state of vague disinterest with our feline patient is the result of your brush with the city's underbelly. Although a countertheory might involve the fact that your husband has just returned from a long trip. He was in Romania, researching the legendary Un-wolves, was he not?”