A bored Jude was never good.
Jude was continuing to nudge the guy with his foot—I think he was trying to make a pattern with footprints on the guy’s leg.
“Jude! Stop playing with your food!”
He looked at me and laughed, but he stopped nudging the guy. He picked him up and threw him over his shoulder, patting his butt.
“This,” he said, “is Reginald Dornham. The third, I believe.”
I was still clueless.
“DoctorReginald Dornham.”
Realization dawned. Holy shit. Sebbie had been complaining two days ago about “Dr. Dickhead,” aka Dr. Dornham, who worked in the ER and was nasty as hell to all the nurses. Judehad been in on the conversation because we’d all been eating lunch together.
“You brought Dr. Dickhead for us to scare him a little and show him the error of his ways?” I asked.
Aww, Jude was trying to distract me so I didn’t obsess over Sebbie. That was definitely one of the nicer things he’d done for me.
“Well, I wasn’t gonna sit here and watch you mope all day. Come on. We can make him feel like shit for being an asshole, maybe get him to admit to a bunch of wrongdoings, and then you can wipe his memory and I’ll bring him home. It’ll be a nice diversion.” Jude patted the guy’s butt again and headed toward the basement stairs. “Maybe he’ll even end up being a better person!” Jude called out over his shoulder.
I snorted. It was usually hard to make assholes not be assholes, but we could try. It would be a nice way to spend the afternoon. Psychological work was always fun.
I was whistling when I drove to pick up Sebbie. It was already dark out, and Crow was following along overhead.
She was still a little bitter about not getting to eat any eyeballs.
She did peck at Dr. Dickhead’s face a few times and scare the shit out of him, though. She didn’t like the fact that he’d been an asshole to Sebbie on more than one occasion. Not only was he a pompous, arrogant, entitled piece of shit, but he was also homophobic, racist, and a misogynist. Basically, he thought he was better than everyone and made sure they knew it. He’d definitely targeted Sebbie—he’d admitted as much—because Sebbie wasn’t afraid of him like most of the other nurses.
I wasn't sure that we’d really changed him—changing someone’s core personality took a lot more than a few hours of forced soul-searching. Still, he’d be leaving the nurses alone now, Sebbie especially.
I drove and thought about my abilities and how I’d eventually explain them to Sebbie. I couldn’tchangepeople. I couldn’t alter memories. Not significantly. I could plant suggestions, though. Give people warnings. The doctor would feel uneasy about picking on the nurses. A guy like him would probably rationalize it, though. He’d probably decide they weren’t worth the effort and that was why he decided to stop wasting time making their lives hell.
I could plant warnings and ideas when I wiped a person’s memory, and that was what I did—wiped them. The doctor would lose today. He’d wake up at home and he’d come up with some reason why he’d stayed home. Probably illness, and he’d remember being sick. The brain was interesting like that. I wiped memories, but I didn’t need to create new ones. The brain did it for me. It created vague recollections and explained what happened. I’d seen it a million times.
Sometimes I couldreallyget inside a person’s head, but that was major work, and it didn’t feel nice for the person. I saved that for hellbound souls only. It also came with a risk of a stroke, and as much as the doctorwasa dickhead, I didn’t want to go off killing Sebbie’s colleagues.
At least not yet.
Josh drilled it into all of us that consent was important, and killing (or torturing) someone a person knew was something that generally required their approval. It had been an interesting conversation. Most of us didn’t understand why we couldn’t just teach everyone who had ever hurt our human packmates a lesson, but apparently our humans didn’t think that was a reasonable course of action, especially if the assholes weren’trotten souls. If theywerehellbound, we would take action. Even Josh agreed that we would just be doing our jobs at that point.
I parked in the hospital parking garage and got out of the car. I knew Sebbie said he sometimes had to work a little after his shift to do charts, so I decided to walk in to meet him. I texted him to let him know, and he gave me a thumbs up and smile emoji.
Apparently, Sebbie had called down to the security desk, because they let me in with a visitor badge with no issues, directing me to the hospice wing. When I got off the elevator, it was easy enough to follow the signs to his wing and spot the nurse’s desk. Sebbie was sitting behind it talking to another nurse.
“Corbin!” he said, obviously happy to see me.
I walked over and leaned on the counter. “Hey.”
Yeah, yeah, probably not the most eloquent greeting. But saying I’d missed him like hell and had counted the minutes until I could see him was probably a little much.
“I’m just finishing up, and then I’ll be ready to go, if you don’t mind?” he asked.
“Of course. Take your time,” I told him.
The woman he was with chimed in. “You can always go find the cafeteria. They have a frozen yogurt machine that’s awesome. We actually, amazingly, have some decent food here.”
I smiled at them both. “Okay. Text me when you’re done.”
