“Sike, I saw Dren.”
“Really?” She made a thoughtful purring noise. “I haven’t seen him in a while. How is he? Does he seem lonely?”
“He wants me to get him a sample of werewolf blood from the hospital.”
“Hrmph. No accounting for taste.” The sounds of packing continued.
“He says if I don’t do it, he’ll drain my brother.” I couldn’t tell her precisely what was happening on Y4 right now, but surely she understood why I’d called. Just because I wanted Anna to thrive didn’t mean I wanted to be bullied by the whims of every other vampire.
“That sounds like a moral quandary for you.” There was the sound like the closing of a closet door.
“It’s not.” I frowned at the locker room floor. Should it be more of one? It should, and yet—“Sike, after Anna’s ceremony, will you all be able to protect me from him?”
She paused in her actions again, on the far end of the line. “I don’t know. We’ll need to talk to Anna. But—”
“She’s in seclusion. Great.”
“You’ll have your answer in less than a week. And what’s a little blood between friends?” Sike said, hanging up. Sike and I hadn’t gotten along the past few times we’d met. I don’t know why I’d thought this phone call would be an exception.
My phone’s screen jumped to show me the time. I was late. Fuck.
I changed scrubs and put my leftovers in the Y4 break room fridge, then ran up to trauma ICU, repeating a mantra to myself: Only four hours, holiday pay, only four hours, holiday pay.
It’s always strange to be a float on another unit. I’d floated around enough to be able to find a saline flush within twenty feet of anywhere in the hospital, but each floor had its own peculiar habits, and its own people you learned you did not want to cross.
I knew from prior experience that the charge nurse for the trauma ICU was one of them. You know how some people played the game where they added the phrase in bed at the end of fortune cookies? You could add the phrase are you stupid? to everything she said. She just had that intonation.
I pushed through the doors and made my way to the charge nurse’s desk.
“Edie Spence, I’m floating here tonight.”
The charge nurse ignored me. “You’re late.” Are you stupid?
“Sorry. Traffic.” We both knew on Christmas Day, it was a lie. She pointed without looking up.
“Your assignment’s on the board, your break is at nine. Don’t be late, or you won’t get it.”
“Gotcha. Thanks.”
I wrote down the room number I was responsible for and trotted down the hall.
* * *
Trauma was always loud—even louder than Y4, and the noise here was around the clock. I’d never been here before when there wasn’t an admit going on, and someone being discharged to make room for someone new. There were the normal hospital sounds, machines, pumps, ventilators, but above and beyond that—chatting, crying, chat-crying. Visitors. They were what sucked most about coming in early. Visitors were never good. Even when they were happy there’d always be something. It was one thing to consider yourself a highly skilled waitress with access to narcotics—it was another for someone else to treat you like it. Repeatedly.
Still, it was Christmas. And sad things were happening here, by virtue of the fact that it was trauma. You could ask visitors to tone it down, but you could hardly throw them all out.
I made my way down the floor to my assignment. I wasn’t very surprised when my echolocation of the loudest visitors found them inside my room. Of course—because I was the float.
As a float nurse, you were either given the easiest patients because they didn’t trust you, the hardest because they didn’t care if you drowned, or the ones with the worst family members, because everyone else was over dealing with them. I stood in the doorway of my assigned room and looked inside.
There were rosaries hanging on all the IV poles. An entire Latino family was in here, but most of the noise came from one older woman crying, wailing the ancient refrain of Why God, Why. Everyone at the hospital wanted answers from God, and He was never around to give them. She looked up at my entrance, and I could see where her tears and overzealous use of Kleenex had completely wiped away one of her makeup eyebrows. An older man was pacing beside her, and a younger woman stood at the head of the bed, petting my patient’s cheek. The nurse I was replacing was across from her, programming an IV pump.
“Hello?” I knocked on the doorway, and the nurse inside came out.
She kept her report brusque and devoid of emotion. Seen it all, done it all was the motto of the trauma ICU nurse. Innocent bystander syndrome. Gangbanger fight. Gunshot wound to the spine. Paralyzed now, and losing sensation as the swelling continues. On pressors to keep his blood pressure high.