Page 1 of Venomous Heart
1
Ava
They’re just scared. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters.
Ava walked through the small medical triage room, her head held high and her gaze fixed firmly above the row of cots and the people lying on them. She could feel their eyes on her, hostile and angry. Ignoring them was second nature, but sometimes—though not often—it still hurt.
Like this morning.
She took out her compact screen containing the medical information of the new patient admitted to the clinic an hour ago. As she read, she tried but couldn’t contain the groan of frustration that left her lips at the few lines written down by the young girl who worked as her assistant. Around her, the patients fidgeted in their cots and Ava took a deep breath, then pasted her professional smile back onto her face. She couldn’t afford to make them any more suspicious of her than they already were. Once she reached the end of the long room lined with beds, she entered the small surgical unit.
There, on a steel table, lay a middle-aged man, his balding forehead beaded with sweat and his skin a sickly, ashen gray.
Pain contorted the man’s features and a terrible smell rose from whatever wound he hid beneath a heavy blanket. He had waited to come see her. Waited too long—until it was almost too late. They all did. None of them wanted to come to the medical clinic Ava ran just next door to the old mansion—the one that had belonged to Minister Knut a short month ago.
It was a miracle no one had died yet. And only a matter of time before one of them did.
“What is your name?” Ava looked down on the screen that contained the patient’s information—or lack of it.
“What do you need my name for? Just fix my leg and I’ll be on my way. It’s not my brain that’s broken.”
Ava sighed. So, this was how this man wanted to play it? Fine.
“Could have fooled me.” Her words came out harsher than she wanted them to. But she was tired after twelve hours of continuous work, and this latest patient’s hostility was getting on her nerves. “What kind of man doesn’t want to give his doctor his name?”
At her comment, the man’s watery blue eyes blazed with a hatred so intense, it made Ava uncomfortable. She was used to scorn, but this was different. This was deeper, more dangerous.
And this man wasn’t the only one. More and more humans were looking at her that way since the Eok warriors had come and freed them from Minister Knut and his Ilarian guards.
“I need it for my files.” She shook her head, trying to keep her voice and face as emotionless as she could. “I need to keep a record of what treatment I give you. You don’t want me to mix up your medication, do you? It would only take the wrong dosage of infection nanites and you’d be far worse off than you are now.”
She glared at him, long and hard. His washed-out blue eyes reduced to slits and his mouth pursed in a grimace in his dirty blond beard, but he nodded.
“Harl. The name’s Will Harl.”
“And what facility have you come from, Will?” Ava kept her eyes pointedly on her screen as she spoke. She knew his type, and he could make her lose an entire hour of sleep if she pushed too hard. Better just ask the questions she needed to ask and move on.
“Facility Twenty-One.”
Ava nodded, then added the information into her computer. She reached for his wrist, intending to take his vitals, but he jerked his arm away.
“Just fix my damned leg.” His putrid breath reached her face, hot and full of sickness. “I don’t want your filthy hands all over me.”
Ava paused, anger flashing bright red inside her. She knew she should stay calm, should ignore the insults, but she was just too damn tired. She turned on him, bending over him slightly. She sustained his hateful glare, answering it bit for bit with her most stern doctor-knows-best scowl.
“I need to take your vitals. Now, if you don’t want my help, just say so and I can come back tomorrow when you’ve died of septicemia.”
Guilt replaced her anger when she saw fear in his eyes, but she didn’t retract her words. It was the truth. When she reached for his wrist again, he didn’t protest. He might not like it, but she was his only option. There was no other doctor on Aveyn to see to the needs of a thousand people. This meant Ava had no respite from her work, and no respite from the scorn of those who crawled beneath her roof, desperate for relief.
It was a strange thing, to be so needed and yet so despised, but she was used to it. Still, being used to it didn’t mean she was going to accept being insulted so easily.
“People like you shouldn’t even exist.” His breath stank of fever but his expression hadn’t softened in the least. “You’re nothing but an abomination.”
Ava’s head tilted like he had slapped her.Abomination. Of all the things she had been called, this one hurt the most.
“You and that Cattelan mongrel. You’re both monsters.”
Anger flared inside her heart, fierce and hot. She could take the insults, the abuse, but never when they were directed at Uril. That child was no more responsible for the genes inside his cells than she was.
