grandfather stopped shouting. I heaved a sigh through pursed lips, and clicked onto the next page of celebrity gossip.
Two pages later, after reading about everyone who might possibly be pregnant any time this next century, the German began again.
“Shawn, get to sleep,” I muttered. And then I turned around. Quadriplegic patients weren’t known for their ability to hit the play button. I stood up and craned in his direction, looking for an adaptive stick that maybe he’d used with his teeth. The volume of the German voice increased.
I walked over. Shawn was completely asleep. There was only the small hiss of his ventilator pushing air through his trach. I turned the CD player—well out of reach of anything that Shawn could use—off. Its green “on” light went dark. I glared at it for a moment.
A woman wearing pink Hello Kitty scrubs knocked on the glass door. “Mind an early break?”
“Not at all.” I briefed her on both of my patients and took off for my one A.M. dinner.
* * *
I fished my badge for Y4 out of my back pocket as I walked back to the old building. As I neared the right elevator bank my stomach started to clench—what if it didn’t work? What if I stood out there, waving my badge around like an idiot, and it never worked again? No one would believe that I’d ever worked with vampires. I’d be condemned to pick up float shifts in the rest of the hospital for all eternity, the Flying Dutchman of RNs. I closed my eyes, shoved my badge toward the reader, and listened for the click.
I didn’t hear a click, but I did smell the sharp tang of fresh urine. I was home—or close enough. I opened my eyes, stepped forward into the elevator’s waiting chamber, and tried not to breathe while the elevator hurtled down.
“Why,” I asked myself upon exiting, gasping in fresh air, “must the elevators always smell like pee?”
Gina came out of the break room with a cracker in her mouth. She smiled at me around it, and I instantly felt relieved. “Hey, Edie—wait, you’re not on tonight, are you?”
“I’m picking up in Pedi ICU.” I shrugged with practiced nonchalance. “I’ve got a cat to feed, you know?”
“As your local vet nurse, I approve.”
I grinned at her. “Speaking of—why is our elevator a litter box?”
“It’s the weres, a territory thing. They can’t help it. Even in human form, when they visit during the days.”
I looked down at my shoes. I wore different ones on the floor, I kept them in the locker room. But I hadn’t considered the cooties I’d get on my real-life shoes, just by riding in the elevator to the locker room. “Ew.”
“You’d think the Shadows’d stop them, but no.” She shrugged. “I gotta get back.” She waved and went around the corner.
The Shadows this, the Shadows that—I’d asked Charles about them once, when our breaks had overlapped. He said they spent most of their time in the emergency department. He claimed one had touched him once, but he wouldn’t tell me more. They were a little like King Arthur, where the County equaled England, occasionally running in to rescue us, a threat to keep our assorted patient populations in line. Some help they’d been, though, back when I was accidentally killing someone.
I wanted to believe they were anthropomorphic, as I assumed I’d met one—the man who’d gotten me to sign the dotted line when I was first here with Jake. I hadn’t seen him since. But Charles said “they” (complete with scare quotes) lurked in the corners by our entrance door, screening visitors, unseen. Since that made them sound like omnipotent dust bunnies, I preferred the version of them in my own imagination.
We did have ancillary staff, and not all of them were permanent Y4 employees. I felt sure the daytime social workers were, the nursing managers, and of course the doctors and all us RNs. But the respiratory therapists that came through and an occasional extra janitor usually seemed to
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