As I gathered the papers, I tried not to read them. But it was easy to recognize the hospital's logo and lines of medical charges going down the pages. Even without focusing on the numbers, I could tell they were big. They owed a lot of money. Insurance wasn't paying enough, either. Apparently they didn't cover whatever "Horant Fay" was being treated for.
A morbid curiosity drew me to the "patient information" page. Horant was a 96-year-old male, which was apparently middle-aged for a sprite. The report said he'd been in perfect health before he was attacked by a dragon. He'd healed up pretty well after the attack, and he went home. Two days ago, he collapsed and lost any feeling to his legs.
Now he was in the hospital, paralyzed from the waist down. He still had dragon venom in his system, working its way toward his heart. If it reached there, his heart would be paralyzed, and he would die.
This had to be one of Kyton's relatives, maybe an uncle, but it sounded more like his dad. No wonder he hadn't looked good. No wonder Nissa was so angry. I was only part of it, but I was the only one she'd been able to meet. If she could've attacked the dragon instead, I was sure she would've. Not that she hadn't been right to be angry. I probably would've done the same thing in her place.
I had to do something to fix this. Kyton's dad wasn't my fault, but it could've been. If I'd transformed and gotten out of control before I knew what was happening to me, I could've attacked someone's dad or mom or sister or brother. If I didn't get myself under control, I still could.
This was just something I had to do, before something else triggered more scale growth or an attack reflex. Before it was too late to go back to being normal.
There had to be some kind of antidote for the dragon's venom, some kind of potion I could make. I flipped through the pages, scanning the treatment they had Horant on. Right now, all they could do was try to slow the spread of the venom with spells and potions. It wasn't doing much good. A handwritten note at the bottom of a page drew my eyes.
It was unmistakably a doctor's handwriting, as I could barely make out a single word. After a whole lot of brain-wracking, I managed to get the gist. There was an antidote, but the hospital didn't have it. Only private hospitals in huge cities that catered to the rich and famous had a dragon-bite antidote. Those types of hospitals didn't accept witches, much less Otherworlders.
I was pretty sure they would never send the antidote here, even if the Fays had enough money to pay for it. Apparently it was pretty easy to make, but the ingredients were beyond rare. Dragon's blood was the big one. Everything else could be synthesized or replaced by alternative ingredients, but dragon's blood was absolutely necessary.
Another note beside the first said even changeling blood was enough to seriously slow the venom, but it was even harder to get than dragon's blood because changelings looked human.
I might not have any practical experience with potion making, but I'd memorized tons of recipes, and getting changeling blood was one thing I could do.
***
Okay, I could do this. It was simple, just a mental wish. I did it all the time. These people were no dragons, just nomahus. They couldn't see through the thinnest of glamours. Unless one of them was a witch.
Just before the elevator doors closed, I hopped inside. The two white-coated men (doctors, according to their name tags) already in the elevator didn't give me a second glance. Not that it meant much. I was just in a normal elevator, nowhere restricted. I would find out soon enough if I was actually invisible.
As far as I could tell, I was using magic to make myself invisible. But camouflaging myself never worked well in lighted areas. It was worse in sunlight, but even electric lights could make me shimmer into view.
The elevator stopped on the second floor, and one of the doctors got off. Pressing myself into the corner, I caught the other doctor staring in my direction. He tilted his head from one side to the other and blinked, rubbing his eyes like he had something stuck in them. He must've had a little magic blood in him. Either that, or my glamour was worse than I'd thought.
Closing my eyes, I focused on strengthening my camouflage. The invisible cocoon around me felt almost solid by the time the elevator stopped again. I opened my eyes.
The doctor was back to ignoring me. He got off without looking my way. We were on the third floor, so I ran off after him. Back in the lobby, I'd checked the register, and this was the floor for the main blood lab. Hopefully, they would have what I needed to draw blood and test how pure it was. I'd brought my backpack--which hopefully had the ingredients I needed--and the paper from the folder that listed the ingredients for the potion.
A potion wouldn't do Kyton's dad any good unless I really was a changeling. And even if I was--which I unfortunately probably was--maybe my blood wasn't the same as a changeling who'd already started transforming. It might not be strong enough to work. Either way, I would see soon enough.
Keeping low against the wall, I followed the doctor through a keycard-guarded door. He definitely couldn't see me. Either that, or he would make a terrible security guard, because he didn't even seem to notice me following him. He ducked into a door halfway down the hall, but I kept going until I found room 321: Blood Lab. I peered through the window in the door.
The mid-sized lab had two long tables in the middle, covered in large blinking machines and several centrifuges. Except for one brunette nurse in blue scrubs, the room was empty. I opened the door as little as I could and squeezed through. The door squeaked as it closed.
Frowning, the young nurse looked up from her work. When she didn't see anything, she went back to loading vials of dark blood into a centrifuge. I crept down the aisle, squeezing past the nurse and into a supply closet. The door was open, luckily, and everything was so well-labeled. It didn't take me long to find a needle and everything else I would need.
It was a good thing Grandma thought blood-drawing was an important skill for a witch, especially if they wanted to save money by collecting their own potion ingredients. She'd had me practice on me, her, and Jack.
Keeping the supplies close to me--and therefore invisible--I snuck back across the room to one of the machines that looked like an old-fashioned block TV. A manual lying next to it read "Blood-Typing: How to Determine Species and Variant."
The nurse cursed, making me jump. She was wrestling with the centrifuge and jabbing at the buttons like they'd personally insulted her.
"Stupid machine. What was that step again?" She opened the manual next to her workstation. "Oh." Cheeks reddening, she gently pushed a different sequence of buttons than before. The centrifuge whirred to life.
Keeping one eye on the nurse, I wrapped a tourniquet just above my elbow so the blood would pool in my veins. It'd been a little freaky the first few times, but I'd gotten used to it. I braced myself against the table in case I got woozy.
"This should be easier," the nurse muttered to herself. She brought a tray of blood-filled vials over to the machine I was standing next to. Holding up a vial filled with blueish blood, she opened the manual with her other hand. "Let's see, what do we have here?"
When she unscrewed the vial's cap, a fragrant bouquet of magic billowed out. I edged down the table, away from her.
"Eyedropper, eyedropper..." She peered over the table, but there weren't any eyedroppers in view. "Bryan's going to kill me if I don't get these done by break. Come on, Piper, pull yourself together." She put the vial down and ran to the supply closet.
The vial was in my hand before I could stop myself. Without the danger of being seen or hurting anyone, the blood was impossible to resist. I downed it in one gulp.
The nurse came back and stared at the empty spot on her tray. "What the-"
I placed the vial on the ground. Hopefully, whoever found it would assume Nurse Piper had just dropped it and the blood evaporated. Or something.
"I'm going insane." Piper massaged her temples. "Okay, vial one, take two."
I gave up on drawing my own blood for the second because she'd just opened another vial that was obviously Otherworlder blood. It was hard to concentrate, but I had to. She was blood-typing magic blood, which I would need to do in a minute.
But the smell... I leaned in close, trying to keep my eyes on the screen in front of her. Jerking the vial out of her hand wouldn't do me any good right now. I had to watch what she was doing, and as soon as her back was turned, I could take the vial.
Piper checked the manual for every step as she put a drop of blue blood on a slide and stuck it in the side of the machine. That looked simple enough. Using the machine wasn't as simple. Every step involved typing in a lot of medical jargon and numbers. Luckily, most of the numbers were in the manual, and the rest were self explanatory.
Piper read off the screen and scribbled on a chart attached to the tray of vials. "Okay, we've got a 19-year-old sprite. History says he was... ooh, that's harsh. What a funny name, though. Keetoon. Kaytoon? Oh, it's that Kyton boy. He's cute."
I raised my eyebrows at her. Was this the Piper Kyton had mentioned? Somehow, I couldn't see the two of them together. Not that they were together. Kyton said she wasn't even the witch he had a crush on, so I should stop thinking about that and start thinking about something important.
I scanned the lines of text on the screen. It was Kyton's medical history. He'd had his blood drawn because he wanted a venom test. Apparently, he'd told a doctor that he was bitten by a changeling. What if he was slowly being paralyzed, too?
"Good thing it was just a changeling." Piper whistled. "There's hardly any venom in the sample." She scribbled "clean of venom" on the chart.
I let out a deep breath. Good, Kyton was okay. Now I just had to do my best to save his dad. I was pretty sure I could use the machine after I'd seen her do it. As Piper slowly worked through the vials on her tray, I drew a small vial of blood from my arm. As soon as I pulled the needle out, silver scales spread over the tiny hole in my skin. Wonderful, now I really needed a jacket.
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