Nightshifted

* * *

I had both of Maganda’s patients. I always felt good about following her—she was tiny, Filipino, and full of energy. If there’d been anything pressing that needed to be done, she would have done it already. She reminded me of the nurses at my last job.

“Mr. Smith, you know him?” she asked.

“Had him the other night.”

She nodded, making her gold earrings jingle. “No change!” She passed the chart over to me to co-sign.

“And him?” I asked about room four, as I finished my nearly illegible “Spence, RN.”

“Not so good. Out of the woods now, but this afternoon? Full of trees.” She laughed at her idiom, and I grinned along with her.

“So, room four came up this morning with massive blood loss. At first, they thought he was just hypothermic, or hyper-ETOH, you know? But his hematocrit came back very low. Turns out he had no blood—and bite marks. He came down here, and we’ve been transfusing him all afternoon. Three units of packed red blood cells so far, and then I sent off a crit. Waiting on the results right now.”

I nodded. I could wait for test results. And I could hang more blood if his crit came back low again. Easy-peasy. “How’d he get like that, though?”

“Don’t know.” She handed over the chart, and I signed it.

“Was he a donor before?” I asked, looking past her into the room, where the dregs of a blood bag were running into the patient’s antecubital IV line.

She took the chart back and closed it. “Doesn’t matter—he is one now.”

I nodded and waited for her to walk away before flipping through the charts. As curious as I was to see Ti again—and I wasn’t sure why, I just was—I knew the fresh donor needed my attention first.

His initial ED report included this gem: “status/post rabid cat attack.” Really? That was the best cover we could use? I wrote down all the meds he needed, tucked my paper in my pocket, suited up on principle, and entered the room.

“Hello there, Mr. Galeman,” I said, smiling by the foot of the bed. Mr. Galeman’s chart said he was only forty, but a lifetime of sun had made his skin creased and tan, and he looked nearer to sixty to me. Not the kind of man you’d think a vampire’d have much cause to run into. But his neck had a pressure dressing taped thickly on it all the same.

“Howdy,” he responded, and then reached up to thump the yellow IV “banana bag” hanging over the head of his bed. “I don’t suppose this is beer?”

“Vitamins, not Thunderbird. Sorry, Mr. Galeman.” I took the stethoscope off its hanger. “I’m going to listen to your lungs now—”

“Please.” He flipped the sheets off his bed, revealing a barrel torso with scrawny legs beneath. I saw a plastic comb tucked into his sock, and bit my lip. He’d either been in prison or homeless. Maybe both. Only time spent without notable possessions or reliable pockets led to sock-carrying items. But he was too tan to have done time recently anywhere in our frigid state.

“Where do you live, Mr. Galeman?”

“Everyone calls me Gale,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning back into his bed as I pressed the stethoscope to his chest. I listened to him breathe, raspy and wet, the sound of years of smoking mixed with inclement weather.

“Where do they call you that?” I asked when I was through.

“At the Armory.”

I knew about the Armory. It was Jake’s home away from home. “Did someone tell you what happened to you?”

“Yeah. A rabid cat got me.” He shook his head in disbelief.

I feigned astonishment. “Really? Did you see it?”

“Well, it looked like a little girl. A cold little girl.”

I bit my lip to keep from showing any expression, and he continued, his voice slightly slurred. “But I drink a lot, sometimes. I hit Wally over the head one night, I thought he was a demon, and when I woke up, he weren’t one. So it must have been a cat that looked like a little girl.” He shrugged, as if this sort of thing happened often. Even without the Shadows interfering, as I was sure they’d do if we released him, he’d eventually think it was a cat. It would be just another example of the enormously bad luck (though it’d have nothing to do with the booze, of course not, not that, just like for Jake his fall never had anything, ever, to do with his heroin) he’d had his entire life that’d brought him to this state.

He’d never believe it was a nearly hundred-year-old, but nine-year-old-looking, vampire.

I finished my assessment with polite detachment, feeling for pulses, inspecting IV sites for signs of infiltration. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he wiped it away with one hand before shivering.

“Want some warm blankets?” I asked, not wanting to get into the classic signs of alcohol withdrawal with him. He was already getting sixty milligrams of Valium every six hours. Nothing else I could do.

“Sounds good,” he said, and nodded.

I retrieved a stack of warm blankets and returned. “You ain’t got nothing to drink here?” he asked as I unfurled them. “Nothing at all?”

I shook my head. If they’d given him a choice between death due to blood loss on the street versus being here with no booze … I could guess which one he’d have actually picked. Or at least which choice he’d be picking two days from now. “Not a drop, Mr. Galeman, not a drop.”

“Hmph.” His left and IV-less hand found the pressure dressing at his neck. “Sure was a pretty cat, though.”

I kept a compassionate smile pasted firmly on my face. “I’m sure it was.”

* * *

I backed out of the room and waved at Meaty. “Bathroom break!”

Meaty nodded, and I made my escape from the floor to the locker room, hauling my phone out from my purse and dialing Jake as soon as the locker door closed behind me.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up…” Sure, Y4 could protect my brother from the ravages of heroin. But what if he was bleeding out in a gutter somewhere?

The dial tone stuttered, and I expected a disconnect—cell phone signals wherever Y4 was was spotty—then heard “Yahlo?” from a sleep-filled voice.

“Jake?” I blurted. “You okay?”

“Sissy? Sissy—Jesus, Sissy, yes, I’m fine.”

“Really?” I asked. What else could I ask him? Check yourself for puncture marks, you sure no one’s bitten you lately? Seen any rabid cats?

“Sissy—what time is it?—of course I’m fine.” I could hear him waking up as he spoke, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Everyone else’s turned in for the night. You know they close the doors at eight P.M.”

I knew he’d be one of the many men in a cot-lined room. Had Mr. Galeman been in the Armory when he’d been bitten? Or outside of it, only to come in later and collapse from the cold?

What did it matter, anyhow, now that Anna’d been kidnapped?

“I just wanted to make sure you were safe, Jake, was all. It’s going to be cold tonight.”

“It’s always cold at night in the winter,” he retorted. “Lemme guess, you’re treating some junkie right now, nearly OD’d, and you’ve got a case of the conscience?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I’m fine, Sissy. I appreciate you checking up on me, but it’s not necessary, really.” His voice dropped even lower. “I’m still superman.”

I sat down on the changing bench in Y4’s small locker room. “Yeah.”

“K. I gotta sleep some. Eight A.M. comes up fast, you know?”

“Yeah.” I’d be in front of a vampire lawyer by eight A.M. It did seem to be coming on quickly. “Love you, Jake.”

“You too, Sissy,” he said, and hung up.

* * *

I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet once for pretense, and then I looked at the sink with its faucet. I turned both hot and cold on.

Where are you, Anna? I thought. I concentrated on the water, the sound of it, watching it swirl down, trying to do whatever it was I’d done before that’d mesmerized myself last time. Come on, Anna, come on.

Someone tried the locked door behind me, and I heard a muffled, “Sorry!”

Dammit. “It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t. I dried my hands off and went back to the floor.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“So what’ll they do for Mr. Galeman?” I asked Meaty when I returned.

“Paul will get him to sign some paperwork in the morning. He’ll make some calls—we have to report the bite to the Thrones, after all. Either they’ve got someone in from out of town who doesn’t know the rules, or they’ve got someone on their team who isn’t playing by them.”

I’d figured those parts out already. “But what’ll really happen to him?”

“He’ll be a registered donor, once we find out who to register him to. Or we’ll keep him here till he heals up, and the Shadows’ll fix him before he leaves.” Meaty indicated this fixing by rubbing fingers and thumbs together industriously, then squinted at me. “He’s not in thrall to the vampire, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I was just curious. Thanks.” I didn’t envy anyone a Shadow “fixing.” I looked down at the floor, at the narrow shadow cast by the nursing station’s ledge, and thought that I could see them there, dark and swirling, just waiting for a chance to be set free. I shivered, much as Mr. Galeman had, then I gathered myself and my thoughts. I still had one patient left.

I remembered to knock before opening Ti’s door for once.

“Come in,” Ti said. He was out of bed, wearing normal clothing, wandering around the room with a patient-belongings bag in his hand. He wore jeans and a T-shirt—Y4 was temperature controlled—and I couldn’t help noticing how snugly his shirt fit against his muscular arms. I shook my head at myself—patients should never be out of gowns. It made it hard to remember what team they were on.