Page 33 of Omega's Flight
"Hi, I'm Bram. I'm in nursing school right now." He turned to Adelaide. "We're going to do an ultrasound?"
She nodded. "And a few other things. He's dehydrated, but his blood pressure is still high." They shuffled into the elevator, the five of them crowded into the space with barely enough room for everyone. "We'll give him some fluids and let that run, then later on when he's hydrated we can do the ultrasound."
"Can I do the stick?" Bram asked, practically quivering with eagerness.
"No!" Holland and Bax exclaimed together. And Adelaide said, "If he was feeling well, I'd say yes. But we want this to be as easy as possible on him."
"Yeah, all right," Bram said, but his disappointment was obvious to everyone in the car. "I just need the practice."
"You haven't even gotten to that part of school yet," Adelaide reminded him. "Give it time."
"You showed me how to do it last summer," Bram reminded her. "And you know what the competition is like at school. If I'm not twice as good as anyone else, I'm practically failing."
Adelaide opened her mouth, Cas assumed, to tell Bram not to be ridiculous—not an unusual conversation to have with the young omega—but then she closed it again. "I'll see if I can find some people who need some regular blood tests done for you to practice on. But if they say no, you drop it, understood?"
Bram nodded eagerly, and then the elevator door opened, putting an end to that conversation.
C H A P T E R 2 4
C as carried Raleigh in through the clinic doors, then followed Adelaide past the desk where the records were kept and into a narrow hallway punctuated by several other doors. The antiseptic overwhelmed everything, though underneath it Cas smelled the mixture of sweat and blood and piss that no amount of perfume or cleaner could hide. They really did need a hospital, a real one, designed and built for things like this.
Adelaide ushered them all the way down to the end of the hall. "Put him in the bed here," she said, and disappeared back up toward the office. Cas did as he was asked, carefully laying the strange omega on the padded bed.
"Here," Bram said, bustling around the other side as he unfolded a blanket. "Keep you warm. It's not that cool here, but if you're dehydrated, you'll have trouble managing your body temperature." He covered Raleigh's feet and legs with the blanket, then gripped the other omega's hand. Cas thought it was comfort until Bram said, "Yeah, you're cold. I'll get another blanket."
"Thank you," Raleigh whispered. "This is nice." He ran his hand over the knitted blanket on his lap. "It's warm. Did you do something?"
"Another of Adelaide's toys," Bram replied with satisfaction. He bent down to get another blanket out a stainless steel cupboard. "This keeps the blankets warm, so when someone's cold or in shock, it helps them keep their blood pressure up and regulate body temperature." He almost chanted the words as he unfolded the blanket, as if he were repeating something he'd been told. "Here, feel better?" He tucked the blanket around Raleigh's upper body, smoothing it carefully down around his sides.
On impulse, Cas reached out to touch it. It was warm. Warm enough that he side-eyed the cabinet and wondered briefly how much they were and how hard they were to get. Realistically, probably too much and too hard and he was too old now for Midwinter Wolf, sadly. He suppressed a sigh—it had been a nice thought, for that fraction of a second—and turned his attention back to the situation at hand.
Adelaide came back, carrying some tubing and a plastic bag of liquid in her hands. "Raleigh, I'm going to put an IV into you, give you some fluid that doesn't need to go through your stomach. And I'm also going to give you something through it to help calm the nausea, okay?"
Raleigh nodded, but didn't say anything. His eyes were large and dark, fixed upon Adelaide like she was some rescuing angel and all Cas's sense of humor evaporated like water on pavement in July. No one should look that scared.
She patted the sickly omega's leg. "I'll just get this set up."
It only took a few moments before the bag was hanging from a hook at the end of the bed and the tubes were dangling from the bottom of the bag. Adelaide shook out another package with something medical inside it, tearing it open and extracting a needle with its own narrow tubing hanging from the end.
Raleigh swallowed and looked away. The movement dragged Cas's attention away from what Adelaide was up to, back to the worried looking omega. "You okay?"
"Yeah." But he didn't look okay.
"Just a big mosquito bite," Adelaide said soothingly as she got everything set up, but it was obvious to Cas that the words were doing nothing to soothe the man in the bed.
"Here, hold my hand," Cas said gently, and reached for Raleigh's. The omega's hand was like ice and, without thinking, Cas wrapped both of his around it to share his own body heat and firmly ignored that creeping sensation at the back of his neck that said he was doing something wrong by offering comfort to another alpha's omega.
Raleigh swallowed again. "Thank you." His voice sounded shaky, but he stared into Cas's eyes with determination. "If I throw up on you, I'm sorry."
"I've been thrown up on by bigger guys than you," Cas joked and winked. It made Raleigh laugh, which was what Cas had intended, and the sudden movement of Adelaide's hand as she pushed the sharp point through Raleigh's skin and into the vein went unnoticed by its victim.
With a few quick movements, she had everything attached and then Bram was laying strips of white medical tape over the tubing, carefully fixing it in place. In the background, Cas heard Adelaide tell him, "Just remember when you get to this part of your course that you have to pay attention to how they do it, and do it their way, even if it's different from mine. Especially if it's different from mine. Got it?"
"Uh huh," Bram replied and then he nudged Cas out of the way to do something that raised the head of the bed a little. "I can get a TV for you, if you want," he told Raleigh. "Gonna be boring being stuck here for a while. You can't get up until Adelaide says."
"Can someone check on the pups for me? I was going to stop by after I ate." Raleigh's face twitched like his stomach had just done something unpleasant and instinct plus memory made Cas look for any available garbage can.
"Sure." Bram grabbed for the small plastic bowl that Adelaide had put her garbage in, emptied it onto the desk and casually slid it onto the bed next to Raleigh's hand.
