“Oh, good, you’re here! What took you so long? Hurry, he’s over there! We think he was ejected when his car hit the tree.”
Jill caught his eye and jerked her chin toward the wreck. “Check for other passengers. I’ll get started with our flyer.”
Len nodded and handed her the other two bags after pulling out a flashlight. “On it.”
In the distance, police sirens wailed. Len jogged up to the car’s mortal remains, only to nearly stumble over his own feet as the twisted lines of metal resolved themselves into a sickeningly distinctive shape. Before it had kissed a tree at high speed, the unfortunate vehicle had been a 1973 Ford Mustang Sportsroof Fastback. In the shadows not being strobed by the ambulance’s red and blue emergency lights, his flashlight beam illuminated a distinctive custom paintjob in dark copper.
Len’s heart kicked painfully—as far as he knew, there was only one car like this in the city. He forced his feet into motion again, running forward. The front and back halves of the car had parted ways, leaving nothing that was recognizably a driver or passenger seat. Len made himself check the car’s remains carefully, as well as the area around it.
Mind in a haze, he stumbled back to where Jill and the homeowners huddled around a crumpled form on the ground. Bile rose in his throat at the inevitability of what he was about to find.
“Give us some space, folks,” Jill ordered. “Stand back, but keep the lights pointed at him.”
Len fell to his knees opposite her and forced himself to look down at Yussef’s slack face, pale in the yellow flashlight beams. He swallowed hard.
“Jill, I know this guy,” he said hoarsely. “He’s a friend of mine.”
Jill shot him a sharp, assessing glance as the cops hurried toward them. “You going to be able to keep your shit together? Because your friend needs you, and I need a second set of hands.”
Len nodded, feeling like his head wasn’t attached to his body properly. The irony hit him in the stomach when he looked down again and noticed the unnatural cant of Yussef’s neck.
“Good,” Jill snapped, all business. “Manual C-spine stabilization, now. We need to get him intubated and start neurogenic shock protocols. We’re looking at an unstable C-4 fracture at a minimum.”
Len’s hands moved on autopilot, cradling Yussef’s skull and supporting his mandible while Jill shuffled around to get a good angle with the laryngoscope blade.
“One male with severe ejection injuries,” she told the officers arriving on the scene, without looking up from what she was doing. “Someone get on the horn to Ascension. Let them know we’re bringing them a cervical spinal cord injury as soon as we can get him stabilized.”
She worked the trache tube past Yussef’s epiglottis and hooked up an Ambu-bag to the free end. “Breathe for him,” she told another of the cops, handing the self-inflating bag to the woman. “I need to get a cervical collar on him, then we’ll use a scoop stretcher for transport to the ambulance.”
Len tried to kick his brain into gear as he continued to stabilize Yussef’s head. Jill passed the cervical collar beneath his neck and wrapped it around, fastening it closed.
C-4 fracture, he recited silently. Respiratory difficulty likely, sympathetic nervous system often affected, resulting in hypotension and hypoxemia. Secure airway and begin ventilation. Assess for low blood pressure and bradycardia, administer fluid bolus.
Jill, of course, was way ahead of him, already pulling out her stethoscope. “Len. Get me an IV line while we can still find a vein.”
Len rummaged for a tourniquet and tied it off at Yussef’s left elbow. “Hang on, buddy,” he muttered. “We’ve got you.”
It took him three tries to get the needle inserted and the cannula in place. Len cursed himself silently the whole time.
Jill, on the other hand, didn’t bother keeping her cursing silent. “Shit. He’s rocking a flail chest on top of everything else. We need to strap him down and get him to Ascension, stat.”
Dread tightened the band constricting Len’s lungs. Jill had cut Yussef’s shirt open, and he watched as the Ambu-bag inflated one side of Yussef’s chest, while the other crumpled unnaturally around at least five free-floating broken rib sections.
Len shivered as a sense of something rushing past him like cool wind raised the hairs on his arms.
“Hold on, man,” he whispered hoarsely. “Stay with us, okay?”
Two of the cops hurried up with the scoop stretcher as Len and Jill hooked up the saline bag to the I.V. line. Len took over the Ambu-bag, and Jill looped the I.V. across her shoulders to keep it flowing as the unis locked the stretcher in place beneath Yussef’s body and carefully lifted it. They headed for the back of the ambulance in a tight cluster, trying not to step on each other’s feet.
Len glanced at the tree as they passed it, and a jolt hit him in the chest. Pale and translucent in the dark, Yussef sat on the lowest branch, watching Len with dark eyes. His head was tilted at an odd angle. Len choked on a breath and dragged his eyes away—first to the still form on the stretcher, and then to the back of the ambulance. The back of his neck prickled beneath an unseen, accusing gaze.
He helped Jill strap Yussef’s body onto the cot in the back of the ambulance, bracing his spine with sandbags and towel rolls to stabilize it.
“You gonna be able to get us where we need to go without crashing this bus?” Jill demanded, sparing a moment’s attention from the blood pressure readout to rake hard blue eyes over his face.
“Yeah,” Len managed, since the alternative would be spending the ride in the back with his friend’s corpse, keeping its heart beating and air flowing through its lungs during the two-mile sprint to Ascension’s emergency room.
He made the seven-minute drive in four minutes, blowing through intersections and trying to ignore the images playing behind his eyes. Yussef laughing... Yussef angry... Yussef’s hands waving in the air as he enthused over cars or motorcycles or women. They pulled up to the emergency entrance and efficiently wheeled the cot inside, calling for a trauma nurse as they passed through the doors.
Len watched as Yussef’s body was taken away, disappearing into the hallway. He flinched hard when a hand landed on his shoulder. Jill stood next to him, her eyes reading too much from him.
“Take a few minutes, kid,” she said. “Get yourself together. I’ll hold the bus until you’re ready.”
He nodded and went outside, away from the waiting room full of coughing children and dull-faced drunks. Needing not to be there. Wishing desperately for a smoke.
Rosa Jimienez—the twelve-year-old girl who’d fallen from her parent’s balcony and smashed her skull—stepped out from the shadows, looking at him curiously from beneath the ruin of her right temple. Len started to shake, hurrying past and refusing to look. A flash of pale skin in the gap between the pools of yellow sodium parking lot lights drew his eye. It was Wild Bill, the old homeless man who’d finally drunk from the wrong bottle and poisoned himself with rubbing alcohol. The specter raised its hand and waved, smiling a gap-toothed grin at him.
A broken noise wrenched free of Len’s throat. He turned in the other direction and started to run, heedless of the honking of horns and the screeching of brakes as he sprinted into the street and kept going.
* * *
Len jerked awake, his heart pounding. He clawed his way into a sitting position, the blankets dragging at him like hands trying to hold him down. The room was dark, the only light coming from the glow of streetlights filtering through the blinds.
No. That was wrong.
It wasn’t the only light.
They were here.
Len swallowed hard, his gaze swinging around the familiar bedroom in a slow arc. Ghostly forms crowded the room... standing against the walls, sitting on the dresser. Young and old. Male and female. Fat and thin. Vacant, accusing eyes and horrific, bloodless injuries. Yussef stood by the door, head tilted quizzically on its broken cervical vertebra; one side of his chest caved in.
&
nbsp; They had returned to haunt him again—all the ones he hadn’t saved.
Bile rose in Len’s throat. He lunged for the bedside lamp with shaking hands, fumbling at the switch until a circle of warm light flooded the room. The figures remained—translucent and washed out in the sudden illumination, but still stubbornly clinging to reality.
SIX
“NO,” LEN SAID, squeezing his eyes shut against the vision of the people who’d died under his hands during his two-year stint in EMS. “You’re all dead. I tried to save you, but you didn’t make it. And now I hallucinate you sometimes, because I did too many drugs to try to deal with the stress, and it fried my brain.”
He cracked open one eye, confirming that the pale figures were still staring at him as if they expected him to do something.
“I can’t do anything for you now,” he told them. “And anyway, you’re not really here. I’m going to count to twenty. Please be gone when I open my eyes again.”
His voice shook on the last sentence, which made sense since the rest of him was also shaking. He squeezed his eyelids together and began to count, taking a slow breath between each number. “One.” Breathe in, breathe out. “Two.” Breathe in, breathe out. “Three.” Breathe in, breathe out...
When he reached twenty, he made himself open his eyes. The ghostly figures were gone. He was alone in the room, with the alarm clock flashing four twenty-three a.m. in stark red numbers beside him. Still trembling, he reached for his phone and unplugged it from the charger. The cord slipped from his numb fingers, falling into the narrow gap between the bed and the table. He left it there, out of reach.
Kat’s number rang and rang, but she finally picked up.
“H’llo?” Her voice was muffled, and sounded exactly like you’d expect from someone who’d just been unexpectedly awakened at four in the morning. “Len, that you?”
He clutched the phone to his ear, feeling the guilt at waking her swirl together with his growing need to drive downtown, find a drug dealer, and snort however much coke it took to stop caring about the last few minutes.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, the words coming out hoarsely. “I... uh. I had a bad night. I’m not okay. Can we meet?”
“Yeah,” Kat said, sounding a bit more awake. “Yeah, of course. Um... what time is it? Oh, okay. Donut shop, thirty minutes. I’ll see you there.”
* * *
Len slunk into the coffee and donut place thirty-one minutes later, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie with the hood pulled up to hide the disaster that was his hair. Kat was waiting for him at a table in the back corner with two cups of coffee. Her dark skin was free of makeup; her mass of black-tipped silver braids flattened on one side where she’d been sleeping on them. She was wearing roughly the same haute couture ensemble he was, except her hood was down.
“Morning, babe,” she greeted. “Sit down. Get some caffeine inside you.”
Len sat down and accepted the cup she pushed across the table to him. He scrubbed the heels of his hands over his face, avoiding the piercings in his eyebrow, nose, and lip with the ease of long practice. “Hey, Kat. Sorry about this.”
She made a sound of dismissal. “Hush, you. This is our deal, right?”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah, it is. Thanks for being here.”
He and Kat had struck up a casual friendship a few months earlier while working at The Brown Fox. The two of them were fellow strays with fucked up pasts; fellow queers with a history of highly questionable decision-making. What Len had come to think of as ‘the arrangement’ had developed organically over time. After Len had let slip the kind of flashbacks and PTSD episodes that sometimes plagued him, and how easily those flashbacks could tumble him back into drug use, Kat had said, “Next time it happens, call me. It doesn’t matter when, day or night.”
Len had thanked her and started to politely put her off, but she’d looked him in the eye and added, “That way, when it happens to me, I’ve got someone I can call, too.” From that day onward, it was an unspoken rule. He could always call her if the night terrors came and the drug cravings started to get the best of him. She could always call him if her thoughts started to head in the kind of dark direction that had led her to attempt suicide on two occasions over the past ten years.
Kat sipped her coffee and rested her chin on her hand. She still looked half asleep, her thin face bleary in the unflattering overhead lights. “Want to talk about it?” she asked.
Len closed his eyes for a moment, trying to decide if he did or not. “It was the dream with Yussef,” he said after a pause. “The one where the ghosts of all the people who died while I was an EMT show up to haunt me. Then I wake up, and they’re still there, even after I turn on the light.”
Kat nodded. “You’d think our damned ghosts would have the good manners to go away once we open our eyes, y’know?” She sipped again, her expression contemplative. “How are you feeling now?”
Len turned the coffee cup round and round in his grip, its contents sloshing. “Still shaky,” he replied. “Still in desperate need of something a lot more mind-altering than caffeine. And I’m not sure if I’d be less shaky or more if I knew for sure that ghosts weren’t real. Know what I mean? Because all this time I’ve been working on the assumption that it’s mental illness, but... what if it’s not?”
Like him, Kat had been pulled into the world beneath the world—the shadowy territory occupied by vampires and demons and Fae. It was part of the reason they’d connected so easily, even though Kat had so far managed to keep one foot anchored firmly on the shore of normalcy. Not like Len, who frequently seemed in danger of being dragged beneath the tide for good.
“Have you asked Leonides?” Kat waved a manicured hand. “About ghosts, I mean.”
Len frowned at the table. “No. I haven’t. Like I said, I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.”
“Fair,” she allowed. “Okay, so what would help right now? You want to tell me more about it?”
He grimaced. “Honestly? I think I’d rather be distracted. Can we talk about something else? How are you doing? Did you make a decision about bottom surgery yet?”
Kat sat back in the booth, going along with the subject change easily. “Yeah, I’m putting it off, I think. For now, at least.” She flicked a hand toward her chest. “The top surgery was great, and it’s helped a lot with my dysphoria. I think I want to give it a bit more time to settle.” Her tone turned wry. “Plus, y’know, if the world’s going to end, I’d rather not be stuck on bed rest when it happens.”
His own breath of laughter at the gallows humor took him by surprise. “Right? It’s like... ‘please reschedule all elective procedures until after the apocalypse.’ Christ. Our lives are whacked, Kat.”
She chuckled, then sobered—fiddling with the sleeve of her hoodie, not looking up. “Also, there’s something else. I’m seeing someone new.”
Len raised his eyebrows. In most circumstances, the correct response to a declaration like that was to act happy and offer congratulations. In this particular circumstance, since Len had personally taken a knife to the lung when Kat’s last boyfriend had broken his restraining order and come after her one night at the club, he felt a bit of caution was warranted.
“Oh?” he asked.
She shot him a glance from beneath her eyelashes. “I’m being careful. I... don’t think he’s a chaser. Not like Aiden was. He says he’s pansexual. He’s not ashamed to be seen in public with me. He didn’t try to jump into bed with me on the first date, or start quizzing me about my anatomy. I think... he might be the real deal this time.”
Please, Len thought to any deity that might be listening, please let this guy be the real deal for her.
Aloud, he said, “You know I don’t give relationship advice—not with my track record. But I’m happy for you, Kat. You’re gorgeous and awesome and strong, and you deserve someone who appreciates that.”
Kat peeked up at him, her expression caught between affection and the wary evasiv
eness common to people who almost never heard compliments. “One of these days I’m going to find you the perfect man and set you up, you know. Just wait and see.”
He made a noise of protest. “I’m not in the market, Kat—and besides, why would you want to do something like that to some perfectly innocent random guy?”
She shook her head at him, her earlier discomfort sliding away. “Listen to yourself, babe. You can dish out the compliments, but you can’t take them for shit.” With a final pointed look, she smoothly changed the subject. “So, did you get that email from Gina the other day? I was starting to think the insurance companies would never get their paperwork sorted out. Where do you think the new venue is likely to be? I hope it’s not too much of a commute...”
Len settled back, soaking up the small talk; some of the tension draining out of his spine as the minutiae of everyday life drove away the ghosts of the past.
* * *
An hour or so later, Len headed home, squinting against the glare of the rising sun. His burning need for a line of coke had subsided to manageable levels, though he was damned well going to raid his emergency smoke stash once he got back to the house—sacrificing a cigarette to the addiction gods.
He’d just about talked himself into tackling fall housecleaning a month early, figuring that inactivity would be bad for his mental state under the circumstances. In the absence of a regular job, it was the only thing he could come up with that seemed like a productive way to use up some time and energy. Plus, the house would be clean afterward. So there was that.
Morning traffic was still relatively light as he turned off Hampton Avenue, heading for the quaint little neighborhood east of Francis Park. The first inkling he had of something being wrong was a man running down the sidewalk with a toddler held under his arm like a football and an older kid hurrying beside him, hand grasped in his. Len’s pulse picked up, and he slowed the car as more running figures appeared ahead of him, some of them sprinting down the middle of the street.
Forsaken Fae: The Complete Series, Books 1-3 (Last Vampire World) Page 5