Page 85 of Booked for Kidnapping

“We all know you don’t watch television,” my mother scolded, but she hugged me and kissed my cheek again. “I’ll let you off lightly this once.”

“Thanks, Mom.” I stretched, and I winced at the snap, crackle, and pops from my spine. “How are you feeling, Mr. Hampton?”

“I’m doing fine,” he replied with a smile. “Thank you. I will discuss with Dr. Castor what a fair rate of payment is for your work, and then you can give that money to Bradley so you can have a stock portfolio of your own. I could tell when you were working on the worst spots. I could feel the difference.”

Before I could indulge in even more panic or anxiety, Dr. Castor checked his blood pressure. “You’re on the low end of a healthy blood pressure, so we’ll take care with weaning you off the drug. We’ll measure closer to when you’re due to take your next dose and see how you fluctuate. If you stay on the high end of the healthy spectrum, we’ll do the minimum we should wean you on and have you off the prescription within a month to be on the safe side. Miss Janette, I’ll take the liberty of updating his medical file, as your lack of a medical license would be problematic. I’ll sign off that the severity warranted your assistance, which will remove most of the issues.”

“Janette, please. Thank you, Dr. Castor.”

“Of course. I’m glad to help. How are you feeling? Do you need to eat again? How fatiguing is that level of work?”

My stomach opted to answer for me in a loud, rumbling growl, and I sighed at its shameless ways. “It’s not that fatiguing, but I could eat.” Aware I was surrounded by people who would call me out in a heartbeat, I added, “I can always eat, however, as I’m a stomach with legs.”

My mother laughed, as did everyone else. “It’s true, Dr. Castor. If she’s asleep, bless her sweet heart, she can be lured just about anywhere with the right food, but you can’t let her get a hold of the plate. She will sit down and begin to eat. When she’s that tired, she won’t even care if she has utensils.”

“It won’t take but a few minutes to fix something up in the kitchen, and I’d put meat out to thaw once I had a headcount. I do quite enjoy cooking, and it’s rare enough I get to cook for guests. It’s delightful when I can cook for someone who enjoys spice as much as I do.”

“Janette lives for spice,” Bradley said, and he got up and held out his hand. He helped me to my feet and pulled me towards the hallway. “After watching her cook, I’m really glad I had someone who loves to cook design our kitchen. I need lessons now.”

I gaped at him. “What?”

Dr. Castor chuckled and joined us, gesturing towards her kitchen. “Your fiancé, upon watching me cook, realized he might be able to do similar with some effort on his part. As you were busy, I began teaching him the basics of Spanish cooking. Your mother also helped in the kitchen once she arrived, as she wants to learn my spicy secrets.”

I could only see benefits with my mother learning spicy food secrets, and if Bradley learned how to cook spicy food, I’d be set for life. “Can you teach the hopeless? I’m even more hopeless than Bradley. My mother tries, but I’m hopeless. I mean, beyond the very basics. I can handle the extreme basics. I have been generally successful at not starving to death.”

“Not starving to death is an important skill,” the woman conceded, and she guided us into a spacious, modern kitchen with a Spanish flare connected to a cozy, rustic-styled dining room my mother likely adored, as it would fit well in her farmhouse. “Please sit and relax. I’d rather not have to treat you for overexertion of your abilities, and your physician has expressed concerns.”

“It wasn’t all that straining, just time consuming and tedious. Even lower-rated exsanguinators can learn how to do that if given the opportunity. I figure anyone with over a 30% aptitude rating can likely master that trick. It was one of the first things I learned how to do on humans, as there are plenty of people who have build up without a real option to get rid of it, so they’ll agree to the waivers, especially after having suffered a heart attack. In the emergency room, once the life-threatening aspect of treatment is over, everyone I worked with had to sign a waiver because I count as an experimental treatment. During the actual emergency, it was kept quiet, because nobody wants to lose a patient on the table. Once the patient stabilized, the family of the patient or the patient would have to authorize my work. They usually avoided trying to get authorization unless it was something like cholesterol because I’m far more reliable than the standard treatments.”

“And your work only takes a few hours compared to the years it often takes for the non-surgical methods to work.” Dr. Castor bobbed her head and went to check on the meat.

As the kitchen island had stools, I selected one on the end so I could watch the woman cook. “How much do you think a hospital would charge for the work I did today?”

“Right. You never went to medical school, so you didn’t get to learn about billing, ethics, and insurance companies. Assuming I had the appropriate talent to do the work, which I don’t, the hospital would probably bill a quarter of a million dollars to the insurance company, of which I’d receive seventy-five percent of the payment, with the hospital receiving the remainder to cover the use of their building. The insurance company would refuse to pay out a quarter of a million, likely settling on one-fifty. If I were billing directly, I’d bill a hundred thousand for the work, unless the patient was a rich bastard who wanted immediate treatment, in which case I’d bill a quarter of a million, same as the hospital. Twenty-five thousand an hour for my work is not unheard of, especially when dealing with touchier work. Considering how intensive cholesterol removal can be—and that there are so few magical talents that can actually deal with it—you’d probably be in a position to charge forty thousand an hour.”

My eyes widened. “Forty thousand an hour?”

“It’s a little higher pay grade than being a librarian,” she replied in an amused tone.

“Yeah. One’s per hour, the other’s per year, thereabouts.”

“You could save a lot of lives doing one cholesterol treatment a month. As you haven’t seen his medical record, you won’t have to worry much about the cholesterol rebuilding.”

I frowned. “I won’t? Why?”

“The core problem has already been treated. He had undiagnosed chronic kidney disease, which was responsible for the heightened buildup of cholesterol. That has since been rectified. While he’ll need to be screened for future problems, his medical file indicates his physician believes a mixture of magical and mundane treatments has reversed the disease. The cholesterol problems were likely linked to that.”

I glared at all of the Hamptons in the kitchen, settling on Bradley as my last target. “So help me, if you’ve inherited that nonsense from your parents, we’re going to have words. It’s bad enough you’re severely lactose intolerant.”

Dr. Castor joined me in giving Bradley the stink eye. “I shall put in a recommendation to have your small intestine fully checked. Those intolerances can be a problem in the small intestine, and some of them can be resolved with appropriate medical care. I’ll put in a recommendation for a specialist.”

Bradley held up his hands in surrender. “I’ll even go with minimal complaint.”

“But why forty thousand an hour?” I blurted.

“Society is not fair, nor is life, and the rulers of the roost base things on what they can afford. They care nothing for the little people beneath them. Unless you open a private clinic, the hospitals set the price for care in cahoots with the health insurance companies, and they have all turned medicine into a for-profit business. That’s part of what makes what you’ve done in the medical world so special. The hospitals can’t charge for the work you’ve donated through volunteering. You’re not on their payroll, and they have rules about donated time and services. They also can’t refuse patients in the emergency room, no matter what their insurance status may be.”

I could do the math just as well as the next person; if more people with my magic volunteered in the emergency rooms, we’d save lives and make a difference—and potentially change how the entire medical system worked. “So the best thing is for me to just keep volunteering in the emergency room?”