Laughing at his tight-jawed silence, she seated herself on the bed beside him and removed his oxygen, then set to work shaving him, taking perverse pleasure in each keen stroke of the blade against his helpless throat.
"I could do it now," she whispered, her lips close beside his ear, the corner of the blade poised against the jugular.
"But you won't," he managed to reply with some conviction. "You dare not cheat your Patron. Not if you hope to survive."
She drew back, her eyes going colder, if that were possible, and the smile faded. She finished shaving him without further comment, her gaze unreadable, then proceeded to wet a fresh towel and rub him down with brisk and impersonal efficiency, loosing his restraints only long enough to turn him when necessary, sparing no part of him. The water in the sink was icy cold by the time she finished, and he found himself shivering despite his determination not to give her that satisfaction, though the cold rubdown did seem to clear his head a little - or perhaps it was the drugs continuing to wear off.
She had just tossed her towel in the sink when the door opened again to admit Mallory, carrying a tray piled with assorted items of an obvious medical nature, pre-packaged in plastic. Adam turned his face away, determined not to give the other physician the satisfaction of a reaction.
"He isn't giving you any trouble, is he?" Mallory asked, chuckling as Angela twitched the quilt back to her victim's waist and turned her back.
"Other than talking too much, no."
"I see."
Still smiling as he set his tray on the other bed, Mallory reached across to thumb shut the clamp on Adam's IV line, then popped open the packaging on a 100 cc syringe and plugged it into a sterile needle.
"You did ask to have him conscious while you prepared him," he said, fumbling at the cannula in Adam's wrist. "That suits me as well. Francis may not think it matters, but I don't like using blood that's tainted with too many drugs - and he's had quite a cocktail. This still won't be clean - but it's better than it will be after I've taken him down again. Will this be enough for you?"
"It ought to be. What about Francis?"
"I'll take care of his order next," Mallory replied.
Adam tried not to react as the young doctor withdrew the syringe, now filled with his blood, and handed it across the bed to Angela. It was harder to ignore the rustle of plastic packaging as Mallory unreeled the line from a plastic blood-collection bag and plugged it into the port from which he had drawn the first measure of blood - a far more serious bloodletting, unfortunately quite in keeping with what Adam imagined of the impending night's work.
"So, how're you doing, Dr. Sinclair?" Mallory asked, turning Adam's face toward him to shine a pocket torch in his eyes. "Hmmm, still pretty dopey, eh?"
He grinned as Adam turned his face away again, turning off the flash and slipping it into the breast pocket of his stylish suit.
"I'll be back to check him in about ten minutes," he said to Angela, before leaving the room.
Angela, meanwhile, had produced another towel, a sable artist's brush, and a small glass bowl from the leather satchel, setting the bowl on the sink while she removed the needle from the syringe and expelled the contents into the bowl. She was smiling a cold, hard smile as she came around to Adam's right again, the brush in one hand and the bowl of his blood in the other. She paused to pull the quilt lower on his loins before sitting again on the bed beside him.
"I am going to enjoy this," she said. The blood-red carnelian in her Lynx ring matched the blood she stirred with the brush. "I wonder whether you'll be able to guess what symbols I paint on your chest, to make you a fitting offering…."
He turned his head away from her in denial, only to find his face mere inches from the slowly expanding bag of his blood, fed from the scarlet line snaking to the cannula in his wrist. Dismayed, he realized that watching either procedure was likely to unnerve him; but he dared not close his eyes, lest her suggestion conjure the very symbols he knew could weaken what few defenses he might yet possess.
Any semblance of choice quickly became academic, for the clink of the brush being stirred in the bowl was followed by the faint, cold tracery of the sable brush against his skin. He stiffened, determined to resist; but unbridled by the drugs in his system, his imagination began to supply ghastly form to the patterns she began tracing out across each breast, down the midline of his chest and past his navel, up the sides of his throat, the brush strokes making his skin crawl with instinctive revulsion. Though a part of him vaguely recognized that his reaction was precisely what she intended, he could not suppress a growing mental image of hideous carrion insects crawling up and down the length of his body, seeking places to nest and feed.
Nausea rose up in his throat, and a profound shudder of revulsion racked him from head to foot, damped by the restraints at wrists and ankles. His empty stomach threatened to rebel, and he had to swallow hard to keep from retching. Angela laughed to see his shrinking abhorrence.
"I guess it must be true," she observed, "that the righteous can't abide the mark of the Beast any more than the Beast can abide the trappings of holiness. So much the worse for you - and so much the better for our purposes."
He fought down another shudder and looked away again, for he knew full well how open his weakened state had left him. Absurdly he flashed on the image of the patterns tattooed on Taliere's dead body - symbols to brand the dead Druid as the property of the deities he had served. And Angela was branding him with symbols no less potent for being merely painted, preparing him as an offering to unspeakable corruption and depravity.
He tried hard to put that thought from his mind, closing his eyes against the sight of what she was doing, lamely trying to turn his thoughts to an ancient plea for deliverance: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me…. A fifth-century interpreter of the Psalms had recommended the phrases as an impregnable wall for all those struggling against the onslaught of demons, an impenetrable breastplate and the sturdiest of shields….
At some point Mallory returned to seal off the first bag of blood and switch to a second, giving Angela's work an appreciative nod before going out again. By the time the second bag was nearly full, Adam found himself drifting in and out of consciousness again, weaker every time he surfaced - whether from blood loss or the drugs or the effect of Angela's rune-binding, he could not tell. A recurrent if scant source of comfort, if only temporary, was the certainty that Mallory would not bleed him dry, no more than Angela had been prepared to cut his throat prematurely: they needed him for their ritual. And perhaps help still would come - though he held out little real hope.
Perhaps twenty minutes passed while Angela completed her design. As she worked, herself becoming caught up in the spell she wove, she began occasionally to pass a hand more intimately along his body, adding to his dismay. Each instance was like an electric shock, startling him back to full attention, unable to ignore the assaults - though at least they broke his concentration on the symbols and lessened their potency, little though she realized that.
When she had finally finished and set her implements aside, she trailed a teasing hand down his belly to rest on his manhood, catching his gaze with hers when his eyes popped open in startlement, smiling as she slowly bent her lips toward his - and drew back at the sound of the door opening again. Her laughter grated like broken glass as she straightened, the offending hand drawing the quilt back to his waist as she stood.