A series of small photographs, each one half the size of a playing card, was loaded on the screen. Sebastian tapped the first picture, enlarging it, and then used his finger to swipe through them.

In each one, Ferreria, stripped down to his soiled boxer shorts, looked like someone who had been pulled from a major car accident. Beneath twisted limbs, swelling bruises, and open wounds, Sebastian could see the traces of how the kid had looked before—a grossly overweight Hispanic twenty-something male with at least three chins, thinning black hair, and a pair of man tits with nipples the size of pepperonis.

“Okay,” Sebastian said, placing the tablet on the counter. “Let’s see him.”

Maya flipped a switch.

Twenty-three-year-old Sixto Ferreria stood in the middle of the treatment room, drying himself off with a towel as he watched baseball highlights on ESPN. At first Sebastian thought the man had stepped out of the shower; a lot of clients opted for one instead of using heavy cooling blankets to cool down after a transfusion as their core temperature shot up. Ferreria had on a pair of gray boxer briefs. They were dark with sweat.

Maya said, “He has a slight fever from the transfusion, which, as we know, is normal, as is his excessive perspiration.”

What wasn’t normal—what made Sebastian’s eyes widen with shock and awe—was just how different the Ferreria kid looked now. Not only was the man up and walking—a miracle in and of itself—but the wounds covering nearly every inch of his skin in the photos were either completely healed or on their way to being fully healed.

On top of that, nearly all his excess fat was gone. The kid wasn’t going to be a bathing suit model, but he might have been twenty pounds away from it.

Sebastian snapped his attention back to Maya and said, “This is after one pint?”

“Half a pint, and seventy-two hours.”

Sebastian wanted to call bullshit. To achieve Pandora’s optimum benefits, a client would have to be given a full-body transfusion and then wait at least two weeks for it to work its magic. After that much blood and that much time, you might see an amazing transformation take place: wrinkles reduced, skin tightened, everything firmed up.

But this, what he was seeing right here, right now . . . it couldn’t be possible. The man looked like an entirely different person. Like he hadn’t been beaten nearly to death.

“Vitals?” Sebastian asked as he watched Sixto run the towel across his hair.

“His blood pressure is a bit higher than I’d like, but blood pressure usually spikes after a transfusion, because of the stress the body is put under. Again, that’s normal. He may experience some mild flu-like symptoms in the days to come. We’ll see.”

“And his heart?” Heart attacks were always the biggest risk factor in carrier transfusions, the new blood putting the heart under strain.

“Normal,” Maya said. “I performed an EKG, just to be sure. No complaints of heart palpitations or dyspnea—breathlessness—and no loss of consciousness or reported dizziness.”