Demon's Dream

"Dad! When did you get here?" Kevis looked up from his comp-vid—he was completing notes on a patient. He entered the last bit of information and stood to greet his father.

"Kev, I have a patient I'd like to put in your clinic," Karzac said, walking in to sit beside his son's beautifully polished wood desk. Kevis, a physician for the past thirty years, ran a private clinic for patients with difficult mental problems.

"Dad, surely not one of the Saa Thalarr," Kevis sat down again and hit an electronic key on his deskcomp. Kevis looked very much like his father—nearly six feet tall with light-brown hair and green-gold eyes. He'd opened his private clinic twenty years earlier on Refizan, his father helping financially. Kevis was doing very well for himself.

"No. Not one of those. And I think when we get her, the Larentii will have already made a great deal of progress in her treatment. What we really need for her, I think, is peace and quiet, where there isn't anyone troubling her with something that needs to be done. She hasn't had a vacation in years, has been attacked and made very ill recently and there are other circumstances that have affected her. She almost killed herself three days ago."

"Is there anything unusual about her?" Kevis lifted an eyebrow at his father. He suspected that the prospective patient might not be completely human.

"She's High Demon, son, and hasn't been treated well for a very long time."