The Beast In The Castle

by Daniella Wright

  “Good job, everyone,” I said. We all began to disperse, some people checking patients, some going to the break room to get some shut eye, and others to get some type of nourishment. So far, residency had been one long attempt to keep myself functional, or so it seemed. This was when he walked up to me.

  “Excellent technique, doctor,” he said. He was dangerously good-looking: perfectly shaped facial features, deep blue eyes, and a smile that lit up his entire face. If I knew my body structures, what was hidden beneath the scrubs was an even better sight—a definite gym body, for sure. I needed to stay far away because this one was trouble, and he knew it. You could almost smell the confidence brimming from him. It smelled like expensive cologne—the good stuff that makes you want to devour the man.

  “Thank you,” I said, pleased to have been noticed. I removed my latex gloves, tossing them into the trash.

  “Mark Johnson,” he said, holding out his hand, which I made sure to shake firmly. My father had taught me at a young age that in order to impress people, you had to shake their hands firmly and confidently.

  “Samantha Hunter,” I replied, keeping my tone polite but distant. I did not want to give him the impression that I wanted or craved this attention. I had, only recently, gotten out of yet another in a string of catastrophically bad relationships. I couldn’t tell if it was my tendency towards social awkwardness that made my choice in romantic partners so poor, or if I was cursed with some damn awful luck.

  “I’m visiting from St. Elizabeth’s,” he said, mentioning a hospital that was located out in the suburbs.

  “Ah, welcome,” I replied coolly, heading to retrieve my abandoned coffee from the machine. He walked along beside me, his hands in his pockets, and his stride easily matching my own. I arrived to find my Styrofoam cup still on the counter beside the coffee machine. I picked it up and took a sip of the espresso. Cringing, I realized that it had grown cold while I had been gone.

  “Ugh. Awful stuff in this machine,” I cautioned him, raising my eyebrows.

  “It is pretty standard fare for Emergency Rooms,” he said. “So, what was wrong with the patient?”

  “It’s been the third case of severe anemia that I have seen in the past week,” I went on, since he seemed like he wasn’t going anywhere. “It seems…uncommon. Especially since the patient seemed to lack any sign of major bleeding. I mean, he was here to be treated for a concussion.”

  “No bleeding anywhere?”

  “Some minor cuts, but that’s about it.” He nodded, crossing his arms and rubbing his clean-shaven chin with one of his large, masculine hands. His nails, I saw, were trimmed immaculately; typical for a doctor.

  “Anemia itself is fairly common,” he replied, cocking his head to the side as though he were studying me. “It’s related, often, to diet, and environmental factors. Sometimes, even genetic. It can seem like these things can come in waves…it doesn’t mean that it is, statistically speaking, significant.”

  “You think so?” He nodded.

  “The important thing is that you saved a patient’s life. It’s a good thing that Linda Vista has plenty of blood on hand to transfuse with.” I nodded and took another sip of my cold coffee as he spoke. I gagged—the coffee in the ER machine is bad enough when hot.

  “Might I take you out for some at least decent coffee sometime?” he smiled. I laughed and nodded.

  “That would be great.”

  “Let me give you my number so that we can find a time when we are free,” he said, taking out his sleek iPhone in the fake marble case that looked a little too perfect. He handed it to me, and I added my number to his contacts. He nodded, placing the phone back into his pocket. “It’s been lovely meeting you, Samantha.”

  “And you, Mark,” I replied, watching him walk away. As I gazed at his back, I wondered at what moment I had gone from wanted to remain single to agreeing to a coffee date that was without a doubt just that—a date. I shook my head, groaning.

  Chapter Two

  “Car wreck,” the attending physician said as we both rushed into the exam room. The sounds of the ambulance siren could still be heard. The nurses were cutting open the young man’s shirt, freeing his body so we could find any signs of internal injury. He had a large injury to his temple. The physician opened his eyes, shining a tiny flashlight into them.

  “No sign of a concussion,” he said. “But he’s definitely unconscious.” He began to study the rest of the young man, handing me a pair of scissors. He looked at the x-rays of the patient that were along the monitor on the wall.

  “I don’t see that there are any signs of internal bleeding on the x-rays,” he mused. “Looking at him, it seems that the only damage is to the head. Check his legs for any further injury, and I will go and attend to the young lady who was in the passenger seat of his car.”

  “Okay,” I replied. The patient was covered in scrapes and bruises. I took up the pair of scissors, cutting along his pant leg. It revealed a pale, hairy, masculine leg. One of the nurses came in with his test results.

  “This patient has a very low red blood cell count,” she said, frowning.

  “What?” I looked at the patient. I had to admit, he did look rather pale and bloodless, but he didn’t have any major open cuts which would have bled enough to make him that way.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said in disbelief.

  “He’s anemic,” she confirmed in surprise. “Do you think that’s what made him crash?”

  “Could be,” I said, examining his leg. “Look at this.” I rotated the patient’s leg for her to see. There was a single injury to his otherwise unhurt limb. It looked like two large pin pricks on the pale skin of his leg. They were located on the inside of the young man’s thigh.

  “It’s a double-puncture wound in the femoral artery,” I said. “Yet it’s clean.” I looked at the patient’s pant leg. There was no significant blood on the fabric where there should have been intense bleeding.

  “How recent?” the nurse asked me.

  “Very,” I said. “It hasn’t even begun to coagulate. It’s like it happened, stopped bleeding, and then he put his pants on and got behind the wheel.” I squinted at it. “It’s big enough that he definitely knew when it was happening. I mean, how could he miss it?”

  “It almost looks like a bite.” I turned to the nurse. I wondered at that. Could he have been bitten by a pet? A dog, maybe? “I want to just run to the medical library and see if I can identify the bite mark.” The attending physician stuck his head in the door.

  “Samantha?”

  “Yes?”

  “How is he?”

  “Low platelet count, but otherwise, he should be fine to be admitted into a room for observation for that head wound and the one on his leg.”

  “Anything serious?”

  “Just a puncture. Might be a bite.”

  “Get a specialist down to look, see if he needs a rabies vaccine.”

  “Okay.”

  “The passenger needs a transfusion. She’s lost too much from her injuries, and we’re low on our supply since it’s been such a busy night. Can you run to the blood bank and get us a fresh supply?”

  “Sure,” I replied. The nurse automatically began to call for a specialist to view the potential bite while I rushed off. As I left the room, I heard her mention to another of the nurses who had just walked in:

  “We’ve really had an uptick in the number of transfusions lately.”

  “It’s an ER, Mary. People mostly come here when they’re bleeding to death.” I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation. I, too, wondered if maybe there were more instances of anemia than usual.

  When I reached the blood bank, I found a man dressed in blue hospital scrubs inside, staring at the bags of blood through the refrigerator door. He had warm-toned skin, as though he spent a lot of time in the sun, but he had dark bruises beneath his eyes, as though he rarely slept. There was something off about him that I just could not put my finger on�
��not off, as in weird, but different, not your usual, run of the mill human being. I was sensing that something else was there. But I could not have told you what, as it was an experience that I had never had before.

  "Excuse me, can I see your identification?” I asked him as the door to the blood supply room shut behind me with a click. The sound my stomach feel a bit queasy. My heart pounded strangely in my chest. I tried not to show how intimidated I felt.

  “Oh, I'm fine,” he said blithely, looking into my eyes. A strange, tickly feeling ran through me as soon as we met eyes. He smiled confidently, and a chill ran down my spine, as though he were doing something to me; what, I didn’t know. I shrugged the feeling off. He was definitely not supposed to be here. I frowned.

  "No you're not. And I'm calling hospital security if you don't show me that you have a right to be in here.” I made sure to make my voice drip with superciliousness. He looked taken aback, as though he were seeing me for the first time. His eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  "How did you do that?" he asked me, his voice and his face both registered extreme shock.

  "Do what?” I snapped. I wasn’t here to play games. There was a victim of a car crash in the ER, possibly bleeding to death. Every second counted at that moment. “You still haven't told me who you are."

  His eyes widened. "You—it’s impossible!"

  "That's it. I'm calling security." I backed away from him. He must have escaped the psych ward.

  "Wait! You want to know why so many people are getting sick, don't you?" I looked at him, sighing.

  "This is a hospital. Of course people are getting sick. They come here when they get sick.”

  “But the increase…in the blood loss…unexplained anemia in otherwise healthy patients? Strange puncture marks?” That caught my attention. I crossed my arms to hide the shake of my hands. This guy was really throwing me off balance. “It's happened within the past ten days, right?” I was dumbfounded. How did he know?

  “I’m a detective…of sorts,” he said. “I’m working to find the party responsible.” As he said this, he stepped backward, placing one of his pale hands on the metal countertop…where there was an empty bag of blood. It looked like it had been sucked empty—like a child’s juice box drank dry. I wanted to gag, thinking about this man drinking an entire bag of blood. What sick, twisted…I took a step back.

  “What did you do?” I growled, grabbing the phone by the door off of its hook. An operator answered immediately.

  “Emergency,” the woman’s voice said. Before I could answer, the man rushed past me, knocking me off balance as he bolted from the room. He moved unnaturally fast, and when I looked out into the hallway, he was already gone. I frowned; I couldn’t remember actually seeing him cross the room. One second he was there, the next, he was gone.

  Chapter Three

  I stood, looking at the monitors that oversaw the entirety of Linda Vista Hospital with hospital security. The man, a bulky ex-cop, dressed in a black uniform and ball cap reading SECURITY in white letters, was frowning at me. He had a buzz cut, large beefy hands, and his face was slightly reddish. He was obviously a drinker when he was off-duty. Beer, if I had to hazard a guess.

  “Play the tape again,” he directed the lanky, nerdy kid who operated the monitors. The tape burred as it rewound, and then began to play again. The kid sucked his teeth audibly. There I was, walking into the blood bank, the cameras flickering and blacking out a minute later, and then my head, peering out into the hallway.

  “I see no man,” the ex-cop said bluntly.

  “But…he was there,” I said incredulously. “He was there before me. I saw him. I spoke to him. Did you go back far enough to see him enter?” The ex-cop shook his head.

  “There was only you.”

  “What about the empty bag?”

  “There is saliva…with an anticoagulant mixed in, which strange,” the ex-cop said. “But it’s funny how the cameras failed when this individual should have been either coming or going.”

  “And there’s no evidence of anyone going in,” the kid piped up. I glared at him, and his head sunk between his shoulders.

  “Well, I certainly didn’t drink the blood,” I said, my eyes wide. The ex-cop looked at me strangely.

  “We didn’t say that you had. But you are the only person to have gone in there for several hours.”

  “And there’s no other jump in the tape?” I asked, not ready to just let it go.

  “Well,” the kid said. “There is that.” He pointed. The time stamp read several minutes before I entered. There was the briefest jumps in the tape. I smiled triumphantly.

  “There, see?”

  “He might have some gadget that we don’t know about,” the kid said.

  “What’s he doing in the blood bank, then?” the ex-cop said, shaking his head. “I just—I don’t know that a psych patient would have something like that. And we never admitted anyone into the hospital on the grounds of an investigation of any sort.”

  “But you admit that there’s a chance,” I said.

  “The smallest. However, it’s just you on the tape, Doctor.” The ex-cop was looking at me strangely. I could tell that he was a person for whom the truth needed to be tangible. The man that I had encountered was operating on principles that were outside of the realm of the natural.

  Chapter Four

  As I walked back to the ER, I heard someone behind me call my name. I turned, brows raised, to find Mark walking toward me, trying to catch up.

  “Samantha, are you all right?” His face was etched with concern. I sighed, crossing my arms. I had sent the fresh supply of blood to the ER before I had gone over the tapes with security, so I was not in any particular rush at that moment.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I was exhausted, and far from fine, but I wasn’t about to start admitting to things in front of a guy that I had the feeling that I was going to want to be impressing soon.

  “I heard that you were attacked in the blood bank,” he said, coming closer and placing a hand on my arm.

  “I think he was just someone from psych that escaped,” I admitted, my attention on his hand—it was surprisingly…cold.

  “Did he say why he was there?”

  “He said he was a detective,” I said, laughing a little. “He said that he was looking into the increase in cases of anemia and unexplained blood loss. But the kicker is…he had just finished sucking down an entire bag of blood.”

  “Oh, really? What did he look like?” I was a little thrown off that he wasn’t as disgusted by this information as I was. To be honest, he looked a little…excited…and most certainly not concerned about my welfare at all. This was a decidedly disappointing turn of events. Feeling a little like I'd been slapped in the face, I thought for a moment.

  Just then, a code was called over the intercom.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’d better go.” I waved to him and raced down the hallway, my thoughts reeling and a deep sense of disappointment pooling in my stomach.

  Chapter Five

  Exhausted from my twelve-hour shift, I slipped my front door key into the lock. I twisted it, hearing the lock click. I flung my apartment door open and walked in, shutting and locking the door behind me. My apartment was my pride and joy—the fact that I could finally afford a luxury apartment with clean white walls, hard wood floors, and large, clean windows that faced a park was truly a wonderful accomplishment. My feet ached in their white New Balance sneakers, and I was positive that my knees were about to give out. I needed food—real food, and not the microwaveable meals that I had been living off of, but I needed sleep more. I dropped my bag on the floor by the door, and then looked up to find the mysterious man from the inside of the blood bank, sitting on my couch.

  I screamed. Faster than was visible, he bolted over to me, covering my mouth with one of his hands. He had been seated on my couch one second, and the next, he was pressed up against me. His skin was hot and dry. I had never felt someone feel so hot—it was li
ke the desert sun, or a furnace glowed within his core. I wondered if something was wrong with him. That would explain the dark circles beneath his eyes.

  Up close, he was attractive in a rugged way. His lips were masculine, yet pouty—I wanted to kiss them, make them flush from the friction of my own lips against his. His features were sharp—predatory. Everything about him betrayed the fact that there was an inner strength to him—something unusual. His skin smelled masculine—musky and spicy, clean. He hadn't shaved in a few days, leaving a healthy growth of stubble across his cheeks and chin. I wanted to rub my hands over it; I wanted to feel the grasp of it against my skin. It spiked in an attraction that I felt shocked me into silence.

  “I’ll let you go if you promise not to scream,” he whispered, and I nodded, eyes wide. He didn’t release me yet, speaking to me in an undertone. “Just listen to me for ten minutes. If you don’t like what I have to say, I will leave and never bother you again.” We looked into each other’s eyes for a second before I nodded. He let me go, stepping back a short way.

  “My name is Jared Hamilton,” he began. He kept his eyes on me, studying my reaction to everything that he said. “I am a vampire hunter. The being who is responsible for the sudden rise in blood-related illnesses and injuries in your Emergency Room is a rogue vampire whom I have been hunting for months.”

  “Vampires,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” And yet, I realized, I believed him. He shook his head.

  “Vampires and other supernatural beings are very real, Samantha,” he said. “You need to come to terms with this. You need to be aware enough to protect yourself because if I’m correct, then you have a very dangerous supernatural being very close to you while you work.”