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 pause in the doorway an extra second or two, both on their way out and on their way in. When you saw them above in County’s normal hallways and waved, they were usually polite in return, but their faces had that look of “Who are you?” that never reached any satisfactory conclusion. Sometimes I waved at them for the fun of it.
I ducked into the break room and surveyed the food-for-all left out from prior shifts on the small table.
“Awwww, you miss us,” Charles said from the door, peeking in.
I put on my best “hardly” face, borrowed from Shawn. “No. You guys just have the biggest refrigerator.” But he was already gone. I pulled a Diet Coke out of the fridge that I’d been holding in reserve, grabbed my PB&J, and followed him to the floor.
“So who’s here tonight?” I asked.
“Two motor vehicle accidents, one end-stage cancer, and one really advanced STD.” He jerked his chin forward. “Go check out the corrals.”
I did as I was told, walking around the nursing station toward rooms one and two. I waved to Meaty, who nodded without looking up. Turning the corner I found Gina with a large flowsheet spread out over two of our skinny desks.
“Whatcha working on?”
“The schedule.” She fluttered a stack of pink time-off requests, and I felt my stomach drop again. Just because they hadn’t deactivated my badge didn’t mean they weren’t going to shortly take it away.
“Am I back on soon?” I asked, glad my voice didn’t break.
“What, you miss us?”
The flush that I denied Charles, I let rise now. “No. My cat. Bills,” I stammered.
“Uh-huh.” She chuckled. “You’re on in two nights. And then I scheduled you straight through a week so you wouldn’t have to burn out your paid time off on your sick leave.”
Brillant! Not that I’d ever be able to afford a vacation, but I derived a certain satisfaction from accruing the hours. “Thanks, Gina, that’s great.”
“No problem.”
There was a rustling and then a scratching sound behind steel door number one. “Who’s on first?”
She pointed up to the closed-camera TV without looking.
I looked up and blinked twice. It isn’t every day you see something that you’ve never seen before. The daytimers and vampires—they look like humans. And high-level zombies (the Haitian-magic kind, not the grungy movie undead) and most of the weres I’d seen, when they visited, all looked human too. No one came in shaped like a wolf, though sometimes once they were here they ended up that way. Those forms were all on my radar, from walking down the street, movies, the zoo or the Discovery Channel. But what was on the camera’s circuit right now was something I was completely unprepared to believe existed.
A dragon.
It roiled around the steel-plated room, two sizes too small for it, overlapping its scaly self. It was a deep emerald green, like it was carved out of moving jade, and it didn’t have any wings, but it had four legs, a tail, and a snout that was muzzled.
“Sweet Jesus Jones.”
“Pretty awesome, right? They’re freaking rare.” Gina put her spreadsheet down. “I’ve only seen one twice before.”
My jaw was still dropped. “What—how?”
“Weres can happen in all sorts of forms. He, as a human, was in town on business. He doesn’t have any other members of his clan here for a safe house—they’re mostly seen in Europe and Asia. He noticed some problems with his parts”—her hand swirled over her lap, indicating her nether regions—“so he came in.”
“What’s he sick with?”
“Syphilis. Would you believe it? We’re treating him now, huge amounts of penicillin, and he’ll be fine, but you can see why we didn’t want him out spreading it on the streets.”
I snorted, remembering a youth misspent reading fantasy novels. “Yeah, just think of the virgins.”
Gina glared at me.
“You’re serious?”
“Totally. He probably wouldn’t get anyone pregnant in human form—the were dragons are pretty inbred. But he could totally transmit his disease, and he does have a genetic proclivity toward pretty young things. He’s very charismatic too. I talked to him some before his form came on. Lovely British accent.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Really?”
She nodded. “Why?”
I shook my head. The chances of me having recently slept with a charismatic dragon with an STD had just gone from absolute zero to something in the finite range. Compared to this, my angry Germanic mystery in pediatrics was boring.
Charles came around the corner. “Finding a virgin in this town must be pretty hard, charisma or no.”
Gina shrugged. “It does happen, you know.”
“Hell, finding a virgin in this hospital must be pretty hard,” Charles continued. I gave a nervous laugh.
“Since seventy-six here,” Meaty offered from around the bend.
The three of us looked from one to the other. Was that when Meaty had lost his/her/its virginity? Or the last time he/she/it had had sex? I shuddered. There were some things about your charge nurse that you didn’t want to know.
After an awkward silence, Gina cleared her throat. “Anyhow, move along, there’s nothing to see here. I’ve got scheduling to do.”
I went and sat back at the station for the rest of my break, eating dinner there like we’re not supposed to, and reviewing the charts of the patients that might be mine if they stuck around till I got back.
Chapter Thirteen
When I returned to pediatrics, the German was rising to a fever pitch.
“Did you turn that on?” I asked the Hello Kitty nurse who’d relieved me.
She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you’d put it on?”
I waved my hands. There was an effing dragon on Y4. Who cared about a broken CD player now? “I probably did and forgot. Did I miss anything?”
“Nothing, really. I charted your vitals and kept an eye on the fort.” She packed up her things. “Oh, a diaper change on the little one. Weighed seventy-five grams.”
Score! Only five more hours to avoid a diaper change for the rest of the night. It was hard to resist pumping my fist in the air in triumph.
“Thanks so much!” I said, and she waved through the glass door as she left.
I set up shop on the desk again, stethoscope, charts, pen, and notes just the way I liked, and then paced around the table to see where the CD player was set. I turned it off, flipped it over, and popped out the four double A’s.
“There,” I said, and set it back down.
I’d only taken three steps away when the German began again. I looked down at the batteries in my hand, and back at the CD player. The CD player’s on light was shining a defiant green.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
The only other thing on the table with the CD player was the telephone. And then it occurred to me—what the hell was he saying?
I picked up the phone and dialed the hospital translation hotline. I got their night message and waited on hold for an operator.
“Hello—I need a German translator, please.”
“One moment!”
There was hold music while the German continued. Would they be able to hear it too? It wasn’t just in my head, though, Hello Kitty had heard it—so had the P.M. shift nurse.
“Hello?”
“Hello—I have a German patient here, and I need to translate their questions. Can I put you on speaker phone?”
“Certainly.”
The translator on the phone sounded much more perky than I felt. Maybe she was in a time zone where it was daylight outside. I hit the speaker button and set the headset down.
The German continued. It rose and fell in inflection, always with the same serious tone, but now that I listened to it, it sounded like a Bible story, preachy and full of hidden meaning.
“Is this some sort of prank?” the translator asked. “Or a test?”
“What are they saying?” I pressed.
“I think they’re telling a story about Wayland the Smith.”
“Really? What kind of story is that?”
“You’re wasting my time—”
“Who else needs German translators this time of night?”
“I also speak Tagalog,” she huffed, then hung up.
I looked down at the little CD player that could. Well, well, Wayland the Smith. At least that was a start.
* * *
I made sure to catch up on all of my charting before hopping online for my current goose chase. I sat down behind the desk, double-checked that the charge nurse couldn’t possibly see me again, and did a search on Mr. Smith, Wayland the.
Through the County’s loose firewall, I found a few pages. It was an olden-times story, mostly myths, about a smith capable of producing great jewelry and weapons. An evil king wanted Wayland to work for him alone, so he captured the smith, then hamstrung him to trap him on an island. In retaliation, Wayland took the king’s sons, who’d come privately to him for their own work, and killed them and made their skulls into goblets and brooches from their teeth, sending these back to the king. In the end, he’d escaped captivity on wings he’d forged himself.
I could get the parallel between a mythical hamstrung Wayland and a quadriplegic Shawn; it was just a bit morbid, was all. I looked back at Shawn, the player’s green light illuminating his face. Maybe the CD was full of charming German folktales to tell kids at hospitals. Kids love being threatened with ovens for liking candy. But if it provided him solace, who was I to question? After Mr. November’s apartment, I was willing to believe in ghosts. I pulled the batteries from my pocket and set them back inside the machine. “Sorry about that, Grandfather.”
* * *
I’d spent another lovely hour trying to reach the end of the Internet with an accompaniment of German when the phone on the baby’s half of the room rang. I looked at the receiver in disbelief as it rang again. It had to be a wrong number. Surely the call wasn’t for the eight-month-old. I walked across the room and picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Edie—it’s Gina.”
“Awww, so you guys miss me?” I teased.
“Edie, it got out.”
“What did?”
“The dragon.”
I looked around the room, with its cheerful pink paint and my peaceful sleeping patients. It seemed so safe. “Is this some sort of hazing? Because I’m new, I get it but—”
“It tore off its muzzle and melted a hole in the back wall.”
Just then, the fire alarms went off. The red lights set into the hallway ceiling began flashing, and nurses up and down the hall began fire safety routines. I heard and felt the thunk of closing doors.
The intercom coughed to life above. “Fire on floor seven, building M.”
“Oh shit,” I whispered.
“I think his transformation kicked the syphilis up a notch,” Gina continued. “He stopped responding to verbal commands an hour ago. If I had to guess—and remember, I was never a reptile expert—I’d say he’s got syphilitic insanity. I gave him a lot of tranquilizers when he started getting restless. They should slow him down.”
“Anything else?” I hid my conversation from the nurses in the hall by ducking behind the privacy curtains.
“He’s coming up your stairwell,” Gina went on. “He could just want to get outside the building and fly off, but I thought you should know. The Shadows are on it, regardless.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She paused, and I thought I could hear her swallow. “Good luck.”
Chapter Fourteen
I closed the doors to my rooms, per fire safety protocols. Most fire alarms were drills. But hospital protocols weren’t set up to take care of dragons. Fire-breathing dragons. Fire-breathing insane dragons.
And … syphilis? Really? Like Al Capone? I paced around from one room to the other. Sure, nurses were all trained on STDs. That hadn’t stopped me from having unwise and unprotected sex with a British stranger two nights ago, though. Shit.
I looked from Shawn to the baby. Both of them were technically virgins. And both of them needed oxygen to survive. There were mobile tanks for times like these. I went out to the charge’s desk.
“Shouldn’t we move them down the hall?”
“It’s probably burning popcorn on the Med-Surg wing,” she said coolly.
“Are you sure?”
She sat straighter before responding to me. I could tell I was close to getting yelled at. Maybe afterward, one of the Betty Boops would offer me a lolly. “Just stay in there till it’s over.”
I walked back and looked like I was doing patient care for the baby, closing the curtains to give myself time to think. Where should I go? What should I do?
Surely the Shadows would take care of things, quickly. They would, right? Which actually was my second problem. If the dragon did come here—was coming right past here, according to Gina’s implications—I couldn’t react ahead of time. If the Shadows were coming, and they were going to fix things, they might not erase everyone’s memory about how that float nurse panicked and covered herself and her patients in water before pushing them up the hall without O. If I panicked now over nothing I’d never get to work in PICU again, or any other floor, for that matter. Hospital gossip travels faster than stat drugs down an IV line. And really, where could you go to hide from a dragon, anyhow?
A fresh string of German startled me. I looked over and saw the small light on the CD player glowing yellow. I walked toward it and noticed that as I did so the temperature in the room shifted, becoming warmer. I paced back—cooler. Toward Shawn? Warmer. Downright hot. We didn’t have radiant heaters overhead here to malfunction, and there were no air vents nearby jetting out warm air. The scent of burning plastic began to permeate the room. If the dragon were just in the stairwell, we’d be fine. If it wasn’t, though—I ran to both sides of the room and hauled the curtains closed.
“Everything all right in there?” my charge yelled through the door. I barely heard her.
“Fine!” I shouted back. “Just have to clean him up is all!” How close was the dragon? I poured water into a plastic tub, then splashed it onto the floor. It went everywhere—and at the metal seams where the floor met the wall behind Shawn’s bed, it hissed into steam.
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