The God of the Hive by Laurie R. King Read Free Book Online

claustrophobic,” Holmes told her.
    She looked down at the face that lay inches from her knees, then up to the hatch atop the companionway ladder, held open on the deck as it had been since leaving Orkney. “I don’t carry chloroform in my bag.”
    “Not needed,” Damian replied, his voice gritty but firm.
    “Very well, we’ll make do with morphia.”
    “No!” both men said in the same instant. Her eyes went wide as she looked from Damian to Holmes.
    “Drugs are not a good idea,” Holmes explained, in bland understatement.
    “I see. So, no sedation, and I work with cold hands. Any other problems you’d like to tell me about? Haemophilia? Hydrophobia? St Vitus’ Dance?”
    “Just the bullet,” he assured her. She shook her head, and went back to her examination.
    At long last, the doctor was satisfied that she had all the evidence herfingers could give her. She arranged pillows and bed-clothes around her patient, shifting his limbs as impersonally as she would the settings on a tea-tray. Holmes went to check on the kettle.
    “Have you studied the sorts of wounds received in war?” he asked over his shoulder. He knew that she had spent time nursing wounds, but not where.
    “This is from a revolver, not a rifle or bayonet.”
    Which response probably answered his question. “I was referring to the dangers of infection following a wound with a fragment of clothing in it.”
    “This will be my first private case of a bullet wound,” she said, “but I worked as a VAD during the War. I have seen gas gangrene, yes.”
    “You must have been fifteen years old.”
    “Nineteen,” she said.
    When the water had boiled and the bowls and implements were clean, Holmes carried them over to the impromptu operating theatre. Dr Henning scrubbed her hands, leaving them in the bowl to warm while Holmes climbed onto the bunk, arranging his legs on either side of his son’s torso. When he nodded his readiness, the deft hands dried themselves on a clean cloth and took up the scalpel, suspending it over the lump beneath Damian’s skin. The boat tipped and swayed, riding out a swell, and at the instant of equilibrium, the fingers flicked down to make a precise cut in the flesh. Damian bit back a whine, but the cut was made, and in moments she was easing the bullet out as Holmes locked the young man’s arching body into immobility. The fingers staunched the blood, then reached delicately down to retrieve a clot of threads that had ridden the bullet through the body. They looked at each other over the bloody scrap, and smiled.
    Ten stitches, and four more to close the entrance wound in the front, then she was wrapping a length of gauze tight around Damian’s ribs. When they eased him flat again, he cautiously drew breath, and his mouth twitched with relief. He met her eyes. “Thank you.”
    “My pleasure,” she said.

Chapter 12
    I may have wrapped my arms more tightly around the child, following the realisation of our pilot’s condition. I know I prayed.
    We had been flying for a quarter hour or so when I became conscious that my lips were moving, and that the words they shaped were Hebrew: Yehi ratzon mil’fanecha , the prayer of the traveller begins. If it be Thy will, to lead us towards peace, to guide our footsteps in the way of peace, to have us reach our destination of peace . The repetition of shalom , meaning both peace and health, is said to calm the nerves. Mine could certainly use some calming.
    But how had Brothers followed us? The man was a religious charlatan, not some master criminal with a platoon of armed men at his beck and call. Yes, he had Marcus Gunderson, but I’d questioned Gunderson myself, at the point of a knife, and there had been no indication that he was one of a platoon of Thugees.
    Brothers’ mumbo-jumbo was the spiritual equivalent of eating an enemy’s heart. He believed that by spilling blood at carefully chosen places and times—lunar eclipse, summer solstice, meteor shower,