Free Lynn Viehl - Darkyn 1 - If Angels Burn (v1.1) by If Angels Burn Page B

widened as she watched her now rock-steady hand stretch out, and her own voice say, “Scalpel.”
    Fear and doubt simply went away as she began to operate.
    Peeling back Cyprien’s scar tissue had to be done in sections, but she knew the severed blood vessels would seal off themselves and the flaps would heal out of place. Testing a theory, she created a tiny flap, watched it heal, and then abraded the underside of the flap and the foundation site. Once both sides were raw, she quickly pressed them back together. With his healing, the reattachment was almost instantaneous.
    “
Oui
,” Cyprien’s assistant breathed.
    “Shut up.” With ruthless efficiency Alex sliced off Cyprien’s featureless face, pulled it out of the way, and began the work to repair the massive damage to his skull.
    Distorted bone stretched from his upper cranium down to the mandible, but his eyes were intact and the pupils reacted to light. His irises were an odd color, blue with a brown rim, like turquoise inlaid in antique gold. One part of her mind was screaming that he could see, hear, and definitely feel everything she was doing to him.
    Something else kept her in RoboDoc mode.
    Alex snapped out orders to Éliane for instruments as her hands flew. The bone healed a little slower than his tissue, but still required her to operate at top speed. As she excised and grafted, she began to create new surfaces that meshed and hardened beneath her fingertips. It was more like sculpting marble than operating on bone. She rebuilt each zygomatic arch, each lateral orbital rim, and reinforced the nasion.
    Once Alex had extended the length of his cheekbones and got to the upper mandible, she discovered two unusual bilateral abscesses in his upper palate that appeared to be congenital.
    “He has two holes in the top of his mouth,” she said as she probed them. “Was he born with a cleft palate?” From the wholesale scarring of his face it was impossible to tell if any had been there before. The knight in the painting had had no such defect.
    “His
dents acérées
,” Éliane said. “You must not close them.”
    “Right.” An invisible string made Alex’s head bob, and she moved on to repair the damage to his jaw.
    The remnant part of her that had been shrieking to stop finally quieted. Which was good, because his jaw had been shattered and had healed over in five separate places. Collectively, a real bitch to put to rights. Once the bones were finished, she used the abridgment method to reattach Cyprien’s face and went to work erasing his facial scars.
    Her patient never twitched a muscle.
    Hours, days, or weeks later, she put the final tuck in one corner of Cyprien’s new mouth, waited for it to heal into place, and then set aside her scalpel.
    “Give me some saline on a sponge.” When the blonde handed it to Alex, she began wiping the blood and bits of bone from his newly healed skin. When his face was clean, she looked at her assistant. “Well?”
    “
Magnifique
.” Éliane’s thin face was deathly pale, but Phillipe looked ready to keel over. The blonde said something in rapid French to Phillipe, who nodded and trudged upstairs. “Doctor, we must bring him back to us. Call his name.”
    “Mr. Cyprien—”
    “Michael.”
    “Michael,” Alex repeated dutifully.
    The eyelids she’d remade for Cyprien blinked, and then opened. The dark lashes springing from the eyelid follicles she’d recovered and reimplanted were a bit thick, but they framed his aquamarine eyes nicely.
    “It is over?” He sounded as tired as Alex felt.
    “
Oui, maître. La chirurgie était un succès
.” Éliane touched his face. “
Vous êtes vous-même encore
.”
    Cyprien reached up and took her hand away, and then gazed at Alex. “Do I look like the man in the painting?”
    She should have been exhausted, grouchy, and ready to deck someone. “You look fine. Normal.”
Gorgeous
. Alex, however, was about to drop, and not from fatigue. The smell of