He answered on the first ring. “What do you need?”
“You, Trick, Will, and Picasso,” I barked. “I need your blood. It’s gonna be vein to vein, so I want you all scrubbed in and clean as a whistle.”
“On it,” he muttered just before the line went dead.
I started for the bathroom, calling over my shoulder, “Get D cleaned up. Then I want you to go in and assist Freya.”
“Yes, Sir,” Gopher replied.
Within minutes, I was washed up, scrubbed in, and heading through the doors to the operating room.
It was fucking bedlam.
Sophie sat astride Iceman with her hand inside his chest, manually massaging his heart. There was blood everywhere, including on her, but the determined glint in her eye that I caught when her face whipped around to throw me a glare made me smile inwardly regardless.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she demanded.
Oh, and did I mention? Sophie Woods was one ballsy bitch.
“I literally got out of surgery forty minutes ago,” I told her, heading toward the table where Iceman lay. “In that forty minutes, I did a half-hour bike ride in half the time it should’ve taken me, checked on our other patient, organized a flow of blood for Ice, and scrubbed in.”
“Lazy fuck,” she muttered.
I barked a laugh. “Do you ever give it a rest?” I asked good-naturedly.
“No!” she clapped back. “I don’t. That’s why Iceman’s still alive, so stop your yapping and start stemming the internal bleed that I can’t patch up ‘cause I’m too busy performing open cardiac massage to keep my friend’s heart fucking beating in his goddamned chest.”
“Alright, alright.” I moved toward the bed, picking up the suction tube and using it to clear away the pool of blood in his chest so I could take a look.
“I’ve plugged the hole,” Sophie told me, “But he’s got a bleed that I didn’t have time to locate because he crashed. Plus, I’m running out of extra blood, fast.”
I jerked my chin in Diablo’s direction, who stood back watching the scene, his eyes glued to Iceman’s white face. “Come here, bro, and hold out your arm. Gonna do a vein-to-vein transfer. Do you know what that is?”
A small grin lit across his face. “Yeah, Doc. I’m familiar.”
“You squeamish?” I asked.
“You seen my room?” he shot back, coming to stand beside me and holding his arm up.
I rolled my lips together to stop myself from laughing. Instead, I concentrated on making an incision in Diablo’s vein and slipping a tube through. Quickly, I set up the blood transfusion, and after a few minutes, watched as D’s life force flowed into Iceman.
Immediately, the angry beeping of the heart monitor began to slow, and I watched as Sophie carefully climbed off Iceman’s chest.
I cocked at eyebrow at the other doctor. “Did you teach Freya that move?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Not teach exactly, but she’s seen me do it. I’m small in stature, Bones. I can get better leverage on a body by straddling it than leaning over it. The first thing I learned in trauma surgery was to do whatever it took to gain the advantage.” She picked up the suction tube and cleared away the new pool of blood that had appeared beside Iceman’s lung.
I reached up to the surgical light head and angled it slightly to the left of the organ. “Right there,” I murmured, pointing to a tiny tear on the side of the tissue. “There’s your bleed.”
Sophie’s fingers moved deftly as she worked. It took a few minutes to stem the blood flow, then she inserted a chest tube to remove any excess air before checking the site again.
“Looks clear,” she murmured. “Not gonna close him up though. Not until we’re certain that we don’t have to go back in.”
I nodded my approval before turning to Diablo, who remained standing beside Iceman while his blood dripped into the brother. “How you doing there?”
“Good,” he replied nonchalantly.
For a second time, I rolled my lips together.
