I finished the last of the medicine and put the glass on the table. “I want my lollipop. I’ve earned it.”

Doolittle reached into his bag and offered me a choice: grape, watermelon, or orange. No-brainer. I took the watermelon and stuck it in my mouth. “So why does she have fangs?”

“It’s some sort of magic augmentation,” Doolittle said. “Perhaps it’s a creature we’ve never seen before.”

“Her fang span is similar to the bite wounds on Raphael’s employees.”

Doolittle nodded. “Similar, but unfortunately we can’t know for sure, because we don’t have her head.”

“Also, there were multiple bites of varying sizes on their bodies,” I said.

“Which means her friends are still at large,” Raphael finished.

“People walking around with venomous fangs,” I interrupted. “How is that even possible?”

Doolittle glanced at me with a wry smile. “How is it possible that we grow fur, fangs, and claws?”

Touché.

Doolittle checked my blood in the test tube and took a fat leather roll from his bag. “The blood coagulation is still abnormal.” He unrolled the leather kit on my desk. Odd metal instruments gleamed, each in a neat leather pocket. It looked like the kind of toolkit a medieval torturer would carry around. Doolittle’s hand paused over the scalpel.

“You’re going to cut me, aren’t you?”

Doolittle nodded. “That purple swelling on your arm is the accumulation of dead Lyc-V combined with trapped venom. We must purge it from your system. Do you remember how to push silver from your body?”

“Yes.” Not something you’d forget.

Doolittle pulled up a chair and sat next to me so our eyes were level. “I need to make a cut on your arm and insert a needle into the muscle affected by the bite. The needle is made of a silver alloy.”

It would hurt. Oh yes. It would hurt like hell.

Raphael reached over and covered my hand with his.

“We must give it a few minutes for your body to react,” Doolittle said. “Then I want you to concentrate on pushing the needle out. This will stimulate blood and lymph flow to the wound and expel the poison. If we purge the poison, your chances of survival will be significantly higher.”

The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on their ends. I was tired, so tired, and my body felt like it had been beaten with a sack of rocks. The mere thought of silver needles made me want to cringe.

“You can do it,” Raphael said. “Stop being a baby about it.”

“Screw you.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Come on, tough guy. Show me what you’ve got.”

I clenched the chair’s armrests. “Do it.”

Raphael put his hands on my right shoulder, pinning me to the chair. Barabas clamped me from the left.