Rachel smiled, revealing sharp teeth. Oh boy.
“I see. Anything else?”
“She refuses to eat her meals and is difficult for the tutors.” Wendy leaned forward and dropped her voice. “She claims to have seen the Devil and communicates with spirits. Girls are said to be more susceptible to possession during their change from girl to womanhood.”
It was unlikely Rachel was communicating with my uncle or had ever seen him. He didn’t sully himself with matters on earth. As for seeing spirits, that was a very rare gift that no one wanted, it made you an outcast among your own faction. They didn’t understand it, so declared it as unnatural. I clasped my hands together. “It is natural for children to test boundaries during this transition,” I told her. “Along with the rush of hormones, Rachel will have been dealing with the complexities of the blood cravings.” Before puberty, vampire children were fed a small amount of blood to keep them nourished, but their instincts to hunt and bite matured with the hormonal change and it could be a shock to a family. We often suppressed our own memories of puberty, the child and parents recalling very different experiences of the same time period.
Wendy leaned back and her eyes hardened. “I know my daughter, Miss Roberts, and she is not herself. I was told you could exorcise such demons from the flesh.”
Damn gossiping supernaturals. You do one exorcism and suddenly everyone wants one. I could no sooner cure someone of hormones than any human doctor. Perhaps I could regulate them though. “What kind of blood are you supplementing her diet with?” I asked. The different factions offered very different experiences. If you stuck with humans, then it was solid on nutritional value. However, if they had ventured to shifter or elemental blood, which had a drugging quality to it, that was dangerous and addictive.
“We have a variety of tutors, each of whom offer a bloodletting on a monthly basis.”
I glared at Wendy. “What faction?”
She swallowed as she put together what might be happening to her daughter, and it had nothing to do with the Devil. “Bryan is a shifter, he teaches her science and math. Jean is a vampire, who lectures her on languages, and Victor is an elemental, he delivers education on the world and politics.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. She hadn’t only hooked her daughter on one type of supernatural blood, she’d done all three. “We only drink human at meal times,” Wendy tried to reason. “My husband believes early exposure to the different types would make her less likely to become dependent on them.”
“You have basically made your child a drug addict,” I informed her. “You have her hooked on the equivalent of meth, ecstasy, and LSD. It is little wonder that she is acting possessed and speaking to imaginary demons? You should count yourself lucky that all she has bitten is the family dog.”
Wendy paled under her layer of makeup and darted her gaze to her daughter. “What do I do? Stop her feeding?”
I shook my head and Rachel snarled in warning. “Cold turkey for one so young is dangerous. You’ll need to wean her off the supernatural blood one faction at a time. I would start with the elemental. Gradually work down to half, then a quarter, then none. Then move on to the shifter, and finally the vampire.”
“That will take months.”
“A year,” I corrected. No point in sugarcoating it.
“Is there nothing you can do?” Wendy asked. “I’m not certain we can survive a year of Rachel being like this.”
Rachel twisted a lock of her hair between her fingers. The White Furry Menace slunk into the room and paused to eyeball my patient and her mother. Rachel hissed. The White Furry Menace’s fur stood on end and she arched her back, growling in return. I sighed. There was something I could do, but it wasn’t advisable, and it wasn’t pleasant.
“You are holding back,” Wendy observed. “There is something you can do for us. For my daughter.”
I leveled her with my hard assed Roberts’ stare. “Rachel has approximately three liters of blood in her body. In order to purge her of the effects of the supernatural blood she has ingested she would need a complete transfusion of human blood.”
“Easily done,” Wendy snapped, jumping on the fix she believed was easy.
“Twelve times,” I finished. “Over a one month period.”
Wendy’s eyes glazed over as she did the math. That’s right, I would need thirty-six liters of human blood. “And if I could provide the blood you can do the procedure?”
I sucked in a sharp breath. I didn’t want to focus on where she would be getting that amount of blood from when there was a national shortage in the hospitals. “I can complete the transfusions.” Wendy’s eyes lit up and she leaned toward me. I held up my hand. “The aim of the process is to tear the magic she’s ingested from the supernatural blood from her bones. It will be painful. She will scream, she will fight, and between transfusions she will waver close to death as her body fights to keep the magic and power it has become accustomed to.
“You have made your daughter an addict, Wendy. The road to recovery is difficult no matter the route you take, but the slow method is safer.”
Wendy blinked. “Are you sure she isn’t possessed?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes as I yanked open my desk drawer and grabbed a small glass vial filled with clear liquid. I uncapped it and threw it on Rachel’s face. She blinked. “Definitely not possessed,” I declared.
“What was that?” Wendy screeched.
“Holy water.”
I placed the now empty vial onto my desk and made a quick note on my pad to refill it later. You never knew when it would come in handy. Harry floated through the ceiling, sort of like a weird descending angel. He’s been experimenting with his entrances lately. The floating up through the floor was a classic. “Pineapples, Miss Roberts,” he exclaimed, pulling on his tie like he meant business.
I blinked. The last time he’d declared a pineapple situation was the explosion of shifters in my house that led to a Hell mouth opening on my lawn. I hoped it wasn’t that bad. Maybe we needed a pineapple rating? Ranging from one fordanger is lurking in the house,to five,everyone is about to die.
