Changing the Future

Chapter 58

"God damn it, Nico," I swore as I snapped my fingers, countless wires leaping into position on his limp body, giving me his vitals. I quickly set Nico up on an IV and sped up his blood work, wincing when I noticed his white blood cell count. 

Preparing for the worst, I grabbed an ultrasound, poured the blue gel over Nico's abdomen, and moved the wand around, deeply troubled by the amount of free fluid I saw on the monitor. Whatever he'd been fighting didn't let him walk away without some serious damage.

I'd managed to force some more ambrosia down Nico's throat as well as infuse his IV with nectar, but I knew I'd still have to act if I didn't want Nico to die in front of me. I hung a unit of blood – which some of the skeletal guards had managed to get for me, though I don't know where they got it from – and set the transfusion rate, impatiently pacing back and forth as I waited for another minute to see if anything improved.

By the way, the answer to my inquiry was no, causing me to sigh in exasperation as I pulled my hair up into a bun, pulled a surgical mask over my face, and added some morphine and sedatives to Nico's IV as I picked up a scalpel.

"I apologize for this in advance," I said before bringing the scalpel down onto Nico's stomach.

0o0o

Hades found me six hours later, his face paler than usual when he saw me covered in blood. I'd wanted to get changed earlier, but I got distracted by sanitizing the rest of my surgical tools.

"Please tell me that this is not your blood," Hades gulped as I tossed my bloodied face mask and gloves into the nearest garbage can.

"Nope, not mine," I assured him, reaching up to let my hair down as I was beginning to get a headache. "It's Nico's."

"What?"

"Yeah, he got hurt pretty badly. I managed to fix him up, but it was...messy to say the least."

"Do you know what hurt him?" Hades demanded, his expression so dark that it rivaled Erebus himself.

"Well, it's something that uses brute force," I started to explain, waving for Hades to follow me towards the infirmary, where Nico currently resided. "Luckily for Nico, I didn't find any traces of any kind of poison, so that rules out a lot of monsters, believe it or not. From all the evidence – his wounds and his story, that is – I believe he was hit by a car."

Hades gave me an incredulous look. "You seriously think my son was hit by a car? Of everything he's ever faced, a car is what brought him closest to death?"

"Yup."

The god of the Underworld pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head in exasperation. "Just take me to see Nico. I don't believe this."

I shrugged. "Believe whatever you want to believe, Hades, but I'm telling you someone almost ran Nico over."

When we got to the infirmary, I pulled out some of Nico's x-rays and sonograms and placed them against the white board, grabbing a marker and circling some key injuries on the pictures. Then I rummaged through my bag until I found some of my notes from my time under Apollo's mentoring until I found x-rays and sonograms of car crash victims. I threw those onto the board as well, marking the similarities between the photos.

"How are you sure that this wasn't some Cyclops hitting him with a club?" Hades asked, unable to peel his eyes away from the images I had on the board.

"Because then his ribs would've looked like this," I said, shifting over the images and placing one of a victim who'd learned the hard way what a club to the ribs could do.