Page 48 of Soar

“Do dragons get colds?”

He laughed a little easier this time. “Not ice dragons.”

Fuck that. He’d never heard of any dragon catching a cold. It just didn’t happen.

But deep down, he knew this wasn’t a cold. He also knew it was getting worse, not better. It wasn’t about adjusting to his new scenery or his new life here with Salem. This was about being away from his clan—exactly what Rodrigo had been worried about from the very beginning.

And while he was being painfully honest with himself, there was also a chance Salem’s continual denial about them being mates was having a negative impact. But what the hell was he supposed to do about it?

Leave Salem?

Fat fucking chance. No dragon left his mate. He wasn’t worthy of having a mate if he was willing to leave him unprotected. He didn’t deserve to have a mate if he wasn’t willing to put up with a little magical inconvenience.

No, he would just have to find another way to get his magic working and stir his dragon from its lethargy. Because if he didn’t, he could die the next time he tried to use his magic to save people.

It should have been a simple procedure.

That thought kept repeating in Salem’s head like a mantra, even as machines blared out warnings, people scrambled around the table, and something like panic shot up his spine. It should have been a simple procedure. He shouldn’t have a twelve-year-old girl crashing on his table when all he was supposed to do was come in here and take out a damn appendix.

All of his experience, training…it started clicking over in his head even as he tried to diagnose the problem. She was crashing, not breathing. He’d barely gotten her open, the laparoscope cued, when she’d crashed so suddenly.

“Beth, did you check if she was allergic to anesthesia?”

Beth had ten years under her belt as an anesthesiologist and didn’t make rookie mistakes, but he had to check because right now, anything could be the culprit.

“Yes, she wasn’t allergic.”

Shit, so it wasn’t that.

“Pull out,” Salem commanded sharply. “Tape those incisions shut, I don’t need her hemorrhaging blood—shit!”

Her pulse flatlined.

Salem leapt into doing CPR, both palms flat on her sternum as he pulsed. One, two, three—come on, kid, come on—four, five, six—do not fucking die on me—seven, eight, nine?—

For all of his experience, despite his training, there was so fucking little he could do right now, other than perform CPR and pray. Even his magic was no help here. There wasn’t a single fucking spell he knew to magically get this girl breathing again, her heart beating. What was even the use of magic if he couldn’t save one child?

Her pulse leapt back up, jerky, but at least there. She sucked in a ragged, full breath, then another, coughing a little around it.

Salem disengaged, sweat beading his forehead, his own heart going a mile a minute.

Beth had already shut off the anesthesia flow; the other nurses assisting removed the robot and taped the incisions shut. Surgery wasn’t happening today, not until they knew what had caused this madness. Salem was just glad they were only delaying a surgery and not prepping for a funeral.

He watched the monitors like a hawk, and while her numbers weren’t great, she at leasthada pulse on the screen and not a flat line. Frankly, he wasn’t going to rest easy until those numbers improved.

“What the hell happened?” His fellow surgeon, Tren, looked at him, a mirror of all the confusion he felt, a hard tic in her jaw. “This should have been an easy in and out. Beth, you sure this wasn’t an allergic reaction?”

“I tested her,” Beth insisted. “The kid’s got weird allergies as it is, I wanted to make sure she was fine. And she should have shown a reaction before even making it to the room.”

That was true. They started all medicines and fluids a few minutes before wheeling into surgery to make sure there wasn’t going to be a reaction before cutting people open. If Beth had gone the extra mile and tested her as well, then it likely wasn’t because of the drugs.

Salem had become a pediatric surgeon for one simple reason: He liked kids. He wanted them to grow up to be healthy adults.It was simple as that. To see a child under his care nearly die shook him to his core, and to say he was upset was a very gross understatement. His whole being trembled. Part of him was angry.

“Salem…you don’t think the parents fed her something, do you?” A dark frown swept over Tren’s face. “They better not have.”

Tren was one of the best surgeons they had in this hospital and Salem had always enjoyed working with her. She was a month out from completing her residency, and he hoped to keep her once she was done, mostly because she thought things through like this. And he saw her point almost immediately.

If the appendix hadn’t burst—and they’d be seeing very different symptoms if it had—and if she wasn’t allergic to the anesthesia, then what options were left?

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