I shoved my clothes into my locker and changed into my scrubs in record time, swiping my badge in just before the warning beep that meant they’d dock me a tenth of an hour of pay. Even running late and being dog—weredog!—tired, there was a spring in my step now, I’d admit. It was kinda nice to be kissed by someone, and not be sure about what would happen next.
“You’re far too chipper for someone who the vampires want to see in two nights,” Charles said, coming to stand near my desk by my patients’ rooms. I’d just gotten the world’s most random report from Floater Nick. He mostly worked the rest of the hospital, and only sometimes Y4, and I think the Shadows had mucked with his brain to remove sensitive information one too many times. He didn’t know where either of my patients’ IV lines were, but he’d made sure to tell me about a satisfying conversation one of them had had with his cousin on the phone, and the exact firmness of the other’s bowel movements.
“Thanks for bringing me down, Charles,” I said, checking over my patients’ medication lists for the night. It really didn’t matter what he said. If getting a scattershot report from Nick and knowing that some grumpy day shift person would come on shift in the morning couldn’t blow my mood, then nothing could.
“Earth to Edie,” Charles said, snapping his fingers.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
Apparently, “I was reminding you you were about to die” didn’t feel appropriate for Charles to repeat. “Nothing,” he said, and shrugged.
After assessments, Gina came over. “Too bad Ti’s gone, eh?”
“Oh? Yeah,” I agreed. My life was my life. Mostly. “Who’s in the corrals tonight?”
“A shapeshifter.”
“Into?” I prompted. She looked blank for a moment.
“Oh! No one. At the moment. It’s a weird case.” She glanced over her shoulder down to her side of the hall. The room that the weredragon had been in had supposedly been overhauled and strengthened. Still paid to be wary, though. Or were-y, as the case may be. “Weres only have one additional form. Any animal, really, only they just get one particular one. Werebats, werewolves, werewhatevers. A shapeshifter can only be other humans, and only replicas of ones that they’ve touched once before. To be honest, I think being a shapeshifter is more traumatic. Changing into fur is nothing compared to changing into other people. For example—this one’s lost his mind. For real.” She twirled her finger beside her ear.
I curled my lip. I felt bad for patients with psych issues, but they were draining to deal with. “I wish we had a psych ward for them.”
“We do. But he’s got a feeding tube in. He’d go over there with it, and the other patients might think they were helping him, by yanking the plastic worm out of his nose.”
I tried for a moment to imagine the Y4 version of a psych ward and utterly failed. And I thought we had it bad here. “So what’s he in with?”
“His technical diagnosis is schizophrenia, but I think he really falls under shapeshifteritis. Sometimes it’s a her. He changes back and forth a bit. He’s lost control.”
“How so?”
“It’s like having multiple personality disorder, with a different body for each personality. It takes a really emotionally and psychically healthy person to keep mentally stable—and they’re better off if they don’t touch too many other people, ever. It contaminates their DNA or something. He’s in restraints and isolation now, but it’s a little late.” Her lips pressed together in sympathetic pain. “He plucked out his own eyes. Said he didn’t want to see himself anymore.”
“Ugh.” I shuddered in revulsion. “Can’t he just shift them back?”
“Nope. It’s a conservation of mass thing. They can’t shrink down to become children again, for instance, or enlarge to become obese. But weres can go from human-sized to bear-sized, go figure.”
And I thought I’d had tough patients. Then again, it wasn’t like the shapeshifter patient could see Gina being disgusted, as long as she could keep her tone of voice straight. “That’s gotta be difficult.”
“You’re telling me. I have to do a dressing change on his mangled eye sockets every six hours. It’s fucking grim.”
“Well, let me know if you need help.” Night shift bore the brunt of things that were every six hours, hitting both midnight and six A.M. Nothing like having to do a dressing change right after and right before report.
“Will do.” She took two steps away from me, and then came those two steps back. “You know, you could pull his information up in the computer.”
“What? Whose?”
“Mr. Smith’s. I’m just saying.”
“You mean Ti?” I asked and grinned at her, maybe a little too widely. “That’s creepy and stalkery, and completely unethical—not to mention a violation of patient privacy laws.”
Gina rolled her eyes, then looked at me more closely again. “You—you already went on a date!”
“Who, me? No.” I shook my head in an exaggerated fashion and laughed.
Gina clapped her hands together. “Charles owes me twenty dollars.”
“You were taking bets?” I forced another laugh as my stomach clenched. Maybe Ti dated a different nurse every time he came through? “On what?”
“How fast you two would go out. Charles thought you’d spend more time being depressed and withdrawn. What with the…” and Gina gestured over her head, indicating perhaps the bad-news cloud that must follow me around. “But I figured you for a fast mover.”
I snorted. “Um, thanks. I guess.”
“Not like that.” She paused for a moment, choosing the right sentiment. “I think you’d rather live your life than wish you’d lived it, you know?”
Not entirely inaccurate. “Yeah, I do. Thanks,” I said, and smiled.
My patients were easy. One eight-year-old kid—he of the bowel movements—whose parents were on guard at his bedside. He had a high fever, had gotten dehydrated, and was here for antibiotics and supervision. He was asleep in his bed, but both of his parents were up, watching the late-night infomercials. I did a quick blinking thing, and realized that while both parents glowed, the child did not. As far as I could tell—and I wasn’t well-versed on my new superpower just yet; thanks for not giving me an instruction manual, Shadows—they were daytimers, but their son was entirely human. Either he’d have to be given transfusions of vampire blood to jumpstart the gene that would set him on his vampiric path—gee, you should be meaner to other kids on the playground, here’s some steak tartare?—or else he would be made a donor for the rest of his life. Like I would, assuming that I lived.
I wondered if they wanted differently for him, like Anna’s parents had wanted differently for her, but it wasn’t exactly a subject I could broach. Telling them to give the kid more fiber to eat was one thing—asking them if they wanted out of the system would be another. I stayed there staring for a moment too long, wondering if there was some sort of vampire and vampire-related-humans underground railroad that could help either them or me. When the mother glanced over, I pretended to be watching the same juicing infomercial they were before making my escape.
The second patient had recently been ICU level, but was now on the mend. Three stab wounds to the chest and a shattered kneecap that probably didn’t get busted on its own. But his daytimer body was taking care of business, with the help of a few small vamp blood transfusions, just a cc or two at a time. He wouldn’t get off the phone, too busy making deals with his bookie, so I took his temperature in his armpit instead of his mouth. Maybe that’s what’d gotten him into this mess. I wasn’t in the mood to fight him on it, regardless.
I was finishing up all my charting, taking enough time to keep my handwriting legible, when I heard “Edie—come into the break room now!” in Meaty’s nursing voice.
I jumped up and looked around. Everyone else on the floor was gone. Oh, shit.
I ran into the break room and saw Gina, Charles, and Meaty standing there, around … a commemorative cake. It was shaped like a coffin, frosted by hand, and my name was scrawled across the top in blue icing.
Perhaps in any other setting it would have been morbid or tacky—no, it was still morbid and tacky—but I could tell from the expectant looks on their faces that it was morbid and tacky with love. Tears welled up. I looked from one to the other of them. “Thanks, guys. Really. You’re too sweet.”
“Well, you know—” Meaty said, and shrugged.
“Gina did all the hard work. I just tasted this part back here, for quality control,” Charles said, pointing to a discreet finger swipe in the icing on the cake’s far side.
Gina stuck her tongue out at Charles. “Hey—have I told you you owe me twenty bucks?”
“What flavor is it?” I asked quickly, hoping to deflect attention.
“Twenty bucks, eh?” Charles asked, looking askance at me. I started blushing furiously.
“How did you spend twenty bucks on cake mix?” Meaty wondered aloud. “You’ll have to spot me. I’ve only got a five.”
Charles and Gina went back to the floor soon after, and Meaty followed them, leaving me to eat alone. The cake was a delicious chocolate with blackberry filling, and I realized it was the second time I’d had cake that night. Usually I’d feel guilty, but hey, if this particular cake was accurate, I might as well eat up. My patients were fine, anyhow. I wondered who Ti was out there scaring by being a frighteningly scarred-up and pissed-off zombie, and if Sike and Mr. Weatherton, Esquire, were doing anything at all yet on my behalf.
Leaving half of my piece of cake behind, I trotted back to where my phone was in the locker room and made a phone call. This time Sike recognized my number.
“Nothing yet,” she said, and hung up.
“But—” I stared at the “call ended” symbol on my phone. No way. I was beginning to wonder if Mr. Weatherton’s services weren’t some sort of time-wasting ruse. I redialed Sike to tell her so.
“I told you—”
“Look, I just want to know—”
“We’re working on it,” she interrupted me. We were both silent on the line, and then she took a deep inhale. “If you hadn’t killed Yuri, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
I couldn’t refute that. She hung up on me again, more slowly this time, and I didn’t wonder until afterwards how she’d known Mr. November’s real name.
I went back to my half-eaten piece of cake, and shoved most of it around my plate. If the day had come that Edie Spence was too depressed to eat an entire piece of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting— Meaty opened the break-room door, interrupting my personal pity party.
“I have something for you,” Meaty said, distracting me from my thoughts. Meaty produced a small glass vial from a breast pocket and I took it. The fluid inside was clear, and the sterile cap was gone, but the rubber stopper was still in place. There wasn’t a label, but I could feel the ridge of tackiness that indicated where there had once been one. It was about the same size as the bottles for intravenous Protonix.
“What is it?”
Meaty looked directly at me while answering. “It’s pope water. Don’t ask where I got it.”
I’d inhaled to ask exactly that, but stopped.
“What’s it do?”
“It’s a hundred times more potent than normal holy water. You apply it topically. On them, not you.”
I held up the little vial and looked at Meaty through it. Even distorted by the fluid, Meaty’s pale face was serious. “Save it for a rainy day, okay? Go put it in your locker.”
I nodded and turned to do as I was told. But I refused to believe that we had a pope in a decantable jar somewhere downstairs. “Meaty—” Telling a nurse not to ask something should be considered an act of cruelty and be covered by a convention of war.
“Don’t ask,” Meaty repeated.
“All right, all right.” I put the med in my locker, then returned to finish my cake.
When I got back to the ward, someone was shouting. Their voice was muffled through the doorway, but I could see Gina watching her monitors closely.
I walked over and followed her gaze.
“I’ve got it under control, Edie,” Gina said, glancing at me. “This one doesn’t breathe flame.”
I peered up at the monitor with her. The cameras inside the room were focused on the patient. He was androgynous from where I sat, with close-cropped hair that wasn’t parted. The dressing to his eyes covered up most of his face. He wore the County-issued blue-scramble puke-stain-minimizing gown that everyone had. He continued to yell—now that I was close enough, I could hear what he was saying.
“Who am I? Tell me who I am!”
His yells were plaintive and frightening at the same time, like they’d taken a page from the Shadows. “What kind of meds can you give?” I asked.
She gestured to her chart. “Haldol. In intramuscular injections, mostly. Hard to keep an IV line in an unwilling shapeshifter.”
The shapeshifter was writhing in his restraints, his body changing shapes. The monitors and cameras weren’t HD, and so I watched his fingers appear to pixilate and then resolve again, as he tried on all sorts of different forms. They went black-skinned for a moment, and I gasped in surprise.
“Pretty cool, eh? Like a human kaleidoscope.”
I nodded and kept watching as Gina went to the medication machine and then came back with a small bottle and a big syringe. “It’s time for another shot of Vitamin H,” she said, holding up the bottle. “And I don’t mean biotin.”
“How can I help?”
“You can cover me.” She opened up the drawer of the isolation cart that had the tranquilizer gun in it. “After the Haldol kicks in, we’ll do the dressing change.”
“We?” I asked. “I meant for all my helping business to be out here. In the vicinity of your chart.”
She snorted and handed me the gun.