by Cassie Black
"We've been called," he said. I nodded, understanding immediately.
"I've asked a couple of wolves to keep an eye on you. I would really appreciate it if you would let them take you to the witches," he said carefully.
"I'll be fine at work," I told him, touched by his anxiety. "They can take me there after work."
His expression softened as he smiled with relief. "Thank you, Liv." He turned to summon two big men across to where we stood. I hadn't noticed them standing near an SUV with a crumpled bumper. Another man leaned against the SUV, arms folded across his chest, bigger even than Hugo, and just as dark. Cade, I thought. He smiled and nodded at me.
"Aaron, Joe, this is Olivia."
"Hi," I said, and lifted a hand in a brief wave. They both inclined their heads in acknowledgement. I turned back to Hugo.
"Be careful," I told him, suddenly and irrationally worried for his safety.
"You too, my little love," he said softly, and he leaned in to kiss me. "Be safe."
I stood flanked by those two big and less than chatty guys as Hugo and Cade climbed in the car and drove off. Joe and Aaron accompanied me to the doors of the ED and then indicated somehow that they would be waiting outside for me until after my shift. That's how I interpreted the shrugs and gestures, anyway. They could have been telling me that they were going for cream and scones for all I knew. Either way they stayed outside as I walked in to start my working day.
For some bizarre reason the ED was half empty when I arrived that morning, and it actually stayed like that for a couple of hours. I wondered if the two wolves at the door were keeping people away.
It was some time before lunch and I was just about to reduce a dislocated shoulder in one of the resus bays when someone outside screamed. I waited for the screaming to stop, while I continued to mix up a solution of ketamine and propofol that I was planning to use to sedate my patient. Reducing a shoulder is nowhere near as easy as they make out on TV, and doing it without good analgesia and sedation was just cruel. The scream stopped, but then another started. I looked around to see that the nurse had abandoned me, and the patient was looking more nervous than ever. I covered the needle on the syringe and jammed the whole thing in my pocket, reluctant to leave a dangerous cocktail like this lying around. I smiled reassuringly at the man on the trolley bed and went to see what was happening, and find out if I could help.
I walked straight into it. Two big guys who looked just like Aaron and Joe were being wheeled into a couple of adjacent bays. They were pale and covered in blood, and both had huge lacerations across their bellies with bowel protruding through. I stood horrified for a second, wondering what the hell could have done this to two shapeshifters who were allegedly almost indestructible. Two more senior docs had been summoned, and they had started working on the wolves already. I asked one then the other if they needed any help, but they smiled at me and shook their heads. I was relieved, to be honest. I had never worked on anyone I'd actually known, and even though my acquaintance with those two was of short duration, I still knew them. I stood back and watched as the monitoring equipment was attached to them, and noted that they were both pretty stable. I sighed with relief. It looked like they were probably going to be OK. I turned to head back to my patient with the dislocated shoulder, remembering the ketafol in my pocket.
I had almost made it to my resus bay when a man I didn't know stepped out in front of me. He was tall, with thick dark hair, and nice looking, but he had a creepy grin and an air of menace around him that I couldn't quite define. He stared at me with a frightening intensity for a couple of seconds. I stepped backwards, instinctively trying to put some space between us. He sniggered and then he suddenly reached out and grabbed me by the neck with his left hand and swung me so my back was jammed against the wall opposite the resus bay.
"Hello, bitch," he drawled in a tone that made me feel sick with fear. "I hear you've been screwing Hugo Grantham. Has he given it to you doggy style yet?"
I said nothing. My mouth was dry, and his grip on my throat made talking impossible anyway.
"You smell gooood," he dragged the last word out as he shifted his position so his body was pressed up against mine. "Good enough to eat. Spread your legs, bitch." I shook my head at him and tried to glare my disapproval as I started to feel faint from lack of blood going to my head. I remember wondering where the hell everyone had gone, and knowing at the same time that they were looking after the wolves on the other side of the ED. I was in deep shit, and I knew it.
"Your guard doggies turned out to be quite a useful distraction," my assailant smirked. He reached behind him and pulled a knife out from wherever it had been hidden. Probably a sheath of some sort, I thought, desperately trying to distract myself from the paralysing fear that gripped me. He grinned evilly, and plunged the knife into my left thigh, just lateral to the bone. I gasped as the pain seared through me, and almost collapsed against him. The only thing holding me up was his hand around my neck.
He sniggered again and used the opportunity to push a leg between my thighs, and he let go the knife and slipped his hand under the elastic waistbands of my scrubs and my panties. I was so focused on not fainting from the pain that I hardly noticed him roughly insert a finger inside me. He removed it and sucked on it, grinning. Then he reached down and pulled the knife from my leg.
"You're coming with me, bitch," was the last thing I heard before I passed out.
VIII
I woke up lying across the back seat of a moving car, a blanked draped across me, and a pillow under my head. I noticed that straight after the pain hit. Actually, my leg hurt like buggery, so I had to try and focus on something else to stop the pain from becoming overwhelming. So I focused on the blanket, an unexpected kindness.
I wondered then if I'd already been rescued, and my rescuer was now driving me home. Pain intruded again so I sat up, hoping a change in position would stop the throbbing. No luck there. It became worse, an all encompassing screaming agony that made me feel nauseated and lightheaded. The driver of the vehicle came into focus in front of my swimming eyes. Same dark thick hair as the man who had stabbed me. What were the odds of this being a different person?
Pretty high, as it turns out. Stratospheric even. He turned his head to glance contemptuously at me, and then turned back to watch the road and the other traffic. I glanced out of the window and saw that we were travelling along some major highway that I didn't recognise. Pine trees lay just beyond the grass hugging the road, rows and rows of pine trees. Beyond them were more bloody pine trees. Not a single proper landmark in sight. I had no idea where I was, but I had a bloody good suspicion I was heading into the arse end of nowhere.
"Feel free to try and attack me now, bitch," the man sniggered, his eyes following me in the rear-view mirror. "You won't get far, but I'll enjoy it. Not as much as I'm going to enjoy fucking you soon, but feel free nonetheless."
I said nothing for a few moments. I had deduced that in all probability this maniac had to be a wolf or a vampire. Who else could overwhelm and gravely injure two men who were supposed to be more or less indestructible? And from the way he spoke of Hugo and the two shape shifters he'd assaulted, I was leaning more towards a diagnosis of vampire. Seriously what other doc in the world was forced to come to conclusions like this one? Everyone else was diagnosing haemorrhoids and sprained wrists, and here I was, the unluckiest woman in the world, about to be raped by an invincible sadist.
I adjusted my position, feeling the pain less as the adrenaline kicked in. Thank God for catecholamines, I though fleetingly as something else intruded on my consciousness. The bulky syringe in my scrubs pocket nudged my hip, demanding my attention. I put my right hand into my pocket and wound my fingers around it as I recalled its contents.
Two hundred beautiful milligrams of ketamine with two hundred equally delightful milligrams of propofol. Enough to anaesthetise a few humans. I went over the figures in my mind. One milligram per kilo of propofol to knock out a hum
an. One to two milligrams per kilo of ketamine. Together you needed half the dose. So for a one hundred kilo man, twenty five to fifty milligrams to make him sleep. Occasionally they stopped breathing, which was a recognised side effect to propofol especially, and which was why we only used it in resus where we had the equipment to breathe for the patient when they couldn't breathe for themselves. I had two hundred milligrams of each, enough to knock down two hundred to four hundred kilograms worth of humanity. I wondered if it would affect a vampire. I looked at the head in front of me and shuddered. It was worth a try.
Next thing - where to inject? Ideally these drugs should be injected into a large vein, and slowly, to avoid irritation of the vein and the pain that accompanied that. Ha, I thought. That was so obviously not an issue here. Venous access was going to be an issue here. I considered stabbing him through the seat, but rejected that idea almost immediately. My needle was never going to be long enough to penetrate the driver's seat back as well as the layers of muscle below. And there's a lot of bone in the back of the thorax - ribs, scapulae, spine. Unless I was very lucky, I wasn't going to hit any big blood vessels that way either. Crap idea.
So that left only the neck. I had always laughed at the way people on TV just randomly injected into someone's neck, amazingly hitting the underlying blood vessels with unerring accuracy. I was an ED doc, and knew all about blood vessels and anatomy, and I still used an ultrasound to insert central lines. And occasionally, despite all of this, the veins remained stubbornly elusive.
I conjured up a picture of the anatomy of the neck vessels in my mind, and decided to use the internal jugular approach, but angle it straight downwards, hoping to hit the carotid, that big artery carrying blood straight to the brain. Usually this would be a disaster in a patient, but here it was a target, an aspiration. The more this guy bled the better.
Now, how to distract him. He was strong and fast, and I knew I had little chance of sticking that needle in his neck and depressing the syringe plunger as fast as possible unless his attention was focused on something else. Now what would distract this freak long enough for me to do what needed doing? What floated his boat?
Obvious answer. Me. Or certain parts of me, anyway.
I grinned to myself, and started easing the trousers of my scrubs down over my hips, and along my thighs. Instant reaction from the front.
"What are you doing?" he wanted to know. It seemed we were making progress in our relationship. He hadn't called me bitch.
"I'm looking at the stab wound in my leg," I told him in a sullen and subdued voice.
"I had to make sure that you screwing the dog hadn't affected the way you taste. You wouldn't open your legs without a bit of motivation."
What was this. Was he trying to explain? I said nothing, just eased my trousers right off. I looked at the wound. It was about four centimetres long, and clean. It was still oozing blood, and I wondered what I could use to apply pressure. Blanket? Yuk. Who knows where that had been. I looked down. White cotton undies, nice and sensible for an eight hour shift in ED. Probably a pretty good dressing under these particular circumstances. I started easing them over my hips too.
"What are you doing now?" came another demand from the front.
"Using my panties to stop the bleeding."
Silence for a few seconds as I pulled them all the way off. I lifted one leg to pull my foot through, and he hissed.
"Jesus."
I adjusted my position to remove the undies from my injured left leg, allowing my thighs to fall apart as I pulled them over my left foot.
"Jesus," he said again, his eyes in the rear-view mirror wild and excited. The car started slowing. "Give me your panties now."
"I can't. I have to use them to stop the bleeding," I tried to explain.
"Fuck the bleeding, bitch. Give them to me, or I will make you bleed some more in a couple of seconds."
So much for the progress in our relationship. I balled my panties up into my right hand, and eased the sheath off the needle with my other. I hesitated, wondering if I could do this. Wondering what he would do to me if it failed. Probably not much worse than he was going to do to me anyway.
I leaned forwards and placed my panties in his outstretched palm. He snatched them from me, and held them in his fist for a moment, as if wondering what to do with them, and then he held them to his nose, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. As soon as his eyes had shut I had started moving, and as he inhaled I plunged the needle into the space just above his clavicle and started depressing the plunger with my left hand, fast as I could. He jerked in his seat, but I hung on, pushing as hard as I could on that syringe, and watching the level of the thick white liquid sink as it flowed into his body.
The car slowed even more, and he swivelled around and tried to bat me away with his right hand. I felt the blow land on my shoulder, and allowed my body to be flung against the door next to me, but I clung to that needle with both hands, still pushing, and viciously cursing the viscosity of propofol. And then I felt something give, and the fluid flowed faster, and my attacker's movements slowed, and then they stopped and he slumped in his seat. I paused, then shrugged and depressed that plunger until every last millilitre was gone. I leaned over him to try and steer the car, but it had already driven onto the grass verge, and had been stopped by the trunk of a pine tree. Big surprise there.
I retrieved my undies, and dressed hurriedly, weighing up my options. Leave him in the car and run? I wouldn't get far. And if he woke up, he would come after me. I tried the back door. Locked. So I clambered over the front passenger seat and climbed out of the car. Limping like a crazed zombie, I dragged myself around the car, and pulled Creepy Vampire out, dumping his body on the grass. He was heavy, but I had adrenaline and gravity on my side. I stepped on him as I got in the car, breathing a sigh of relief as the engine coughed into life first time, and reversed. I can't be one hundred percent sure, but I think I may have driven over some part of the vampire. Either way there was a bit of a struggle getting over some obstruction and I had to accelerate slightly. OK, a lot. Must have hurt.
I turned the car in the direction we had come and accelerated out of there. I glanced in the rear-view mirror as I drove away. The vampire lay where I had dropped him. I wondered if he was dead.
With any luck he would be.
IX
I managed to find my way back to the hospital, and drove to the patient's parking lot, gleefully taking a ticket and knowing that this was one that was unlikely to be paid. I climbed out and limped carefully up to the doors to ED. My leg was starting to throb like mad again now that the adrenaline had worn off. It had also stiffened up in the drive back to the hospital. I should probably have stopped at the local police station, but I had decided to go straight to the hospital. They could call the police from ED if they needed to, and I wanted painkillers.
There were a couple of police cars parked out front, and I knew they'd be inside either talking to the shape shifters or accompanying some violent drunk while the ED staff treated whatever wounds he had sustained from his most recent altercation.
I was greeted at reception with consternation and surprise.
"We thought you'd just left," the receptionist on duty told me. "Simon has already phoned around to get someone else to cover the rest of your shift." Simon Alexander was the senior consultant for the day, and basically in charge of the ED. He was a nice enough person, but did tend to jump to conclusions. Clearly.
"You OK?" the receptionist asked, probably noting my dishevelled appearance and pale face. I was starting to feel lightheaded just standing there.
"Not really," I smiled wryly at her. "Some nutcase stabbed me in the leg and then he kidnapped me. I'm probably going to need some sutures. And I will definitely need to speak to one of the coppers who are here."
Her mouth fell open in surprise, and then she started calling out to the nurses in the main department, and a few moments later I found myself lying on a trolley, and being wheeled
into a bay. I lay back, exhausted, and let them get on with it. My bloodied scrubs were cut away to reveal the leg wound, which had started oozing again, and was looking inflamed around the edges. Melissa had pushed her way into the cubicle, four tablets in a tiny plastic cup clutched in her hand.
"Take these, Liv. What the hell happened to you? We thought you'd just walked out after those two guys were brought in. Simon said you'd taken one look at them and turned white as a sheet. I was surprised. You'd never done anything like that before. And now I hear that you were stabbed and kidnapped? My God, are you OK?"
"I'm fine, Liss, but I need to speak to the police as soon as possible. The laceration can be sorted out after I've spoken to them. How are those two guys, by the way?"
"Them? They're fine. Simon got the surgeons to take them to theatre, and they washed the small bowel and stuck it back in and stitched them up again. No internal injuries, fortunately. They're in the ward right now."
"That's great news," I smiled at her. "Policeman?"
She grinned at me. "Still so bossy, I see. I'll go and get one. Shouldn't be hard to find. This place is crawling with the buggers now. They're trying to figure out who did this to those two guys."
"I might be able to help them out there," I said. Her eyes widened and she nodded and disappeared through the curtain that was draped around the bay. I closed my eyes, suddenly very tired.
I heard the curtain rails rattling as someone stepped into the cubicle, and opened them again, expecting Melissa or a policeman. Instead, Hugo stood there gazing down at me, his face pale and haunted. I smiled at him and held my hand out. He grabbed it and held it in a vice like grip.