Moonshifted(29)
“Pretty girl. Pity she’s with him,” said a person standing next to me. I startled and looked up.
Sike stood beside me. Sike was a Rose Throne daytimer, and while Anna trusted her, I did not.
In her day job, Sike was a model and as such professionally gorgeous, but right now she wore little makeup and her red hair was pulled into a high bun. A dour lab coat covered her slender frame’s soft curves. The name VERONICA LAMBRIDGE was embroidered on the pocket over the words LABORATORY TECHNICIAN. I knew Sike was neither Veronica, nor a lab tech. She patted the white lapel. “Fits nice, doesn’t it?”
I looked around at the floor. “You should have called.”
“Oh, I’m not here for you.” Sike smiled at me, and her face didn’t match her tone. “Let’s not be an idiot in public. I’m just your friend from the lab.”
“Lab workers and nurses don’t fraternize.” I hoped that “Veronica” was merely off duty and not stuffed into a trunk. “If you’re not helping me, then why are you here?”
“I need you to take me to Y4.” She put her hand on my arm just as Javier’s parents walked out, the father propelling the mother around my desk and toward the doors. We were both quiet until they passed.
“I can’t leave till my break,” I whispered.
“When’s that?”
“Nine. You’ve got an hour to kill.”
It was obvious from her bearing that this was untenable. But there was no way she could drag me off in front of so many people without causing a scene. She wasn’t a full vampire, just a daytimer, she didn’t have look-away yet. She let go of my arm.
“Just go yourself,” I said, massaging blood back into my tricep.
“I can’t. The elevator doors won’t open for me.”
I pretended to read Javier’s chart. “Has that ever happened before?”
“No.”
Well. Saying that was not good was probably an understatement. “There’s a lobby behind those doors. Go wait by the fish tank.” She looked down at me, full lips pursed in frustration. “I’ll come as soon as I can,” I added.
“You’d better.”
* * *
If it wasn’t one vampire, it was another … in a manner of speaking. I waited until I was sure she was gone, then went into Javier’s room for his hourly feeling check.
“Can you feel this?” I poked the cap of my pen against the side of his ribs.
“No.”
“This?” I asked, trying higher.
“No.”
I looked up at his face and saw his jaw clench, between answers.
“This?”
“Sí.”
I marked it. Another half a centimeter of feeling, gone. It was like he was slowly drowning, no way to turn around, walking farther and farther out into an inexorable sea.
“Is there anything—” I began, because I had to.
“Just go,” his girlfriend said, then added, “Please.”
I nodded, and did so.
* * *
I noted his new loss of feeling in his chart. The charge nurse came by, I thought to break me early, but she handed me a printout from a news website instead. Two Injured in Drug Deal Gone Bad, said the headline, and beneath it, One died en route, and one went to County, in critical condition. I folded it in half, and stuck it under the chart, realizing how easily their problems could have been Jake’s. Thank God that at his worst, he was always a user, not a dealer, at least not that I knew. Okay, so maybe I did look at our shared cell phone bill some—but only to see if he’d been dumb enough to use it to make too many calls to strange numbers.
An hour is a long time, sitting outside of someone’s room. On Y4, I could have made myself useful, restocking things, making bedrolls, reading charts, but here I didn’t know the flow, and didn’t want to get in anyone’s way. I doodled some in the margin of my non-official report sheet, sketching a flaming heart. When I heard a strange beep from inside the room, I looked up. Luz was texting on her phone, and she walked toward the door.
“I have to answer this.”
“Just pull the curtain. You can talk in the room.” There were NO CELL PHONE signs up all over, but nurses and doctors talked on them all the time—I hadn’t seen an iPhone make anyone’s pacemaker give out yet.
“No. I have to go.”
I stood in her way. My break was starting in fifteen minutes. Sike needed me, for some likely unpleasant reason, and I needed Sike for some guidance. But if Luz left now and there was a break relief nurse sitting out here when she tried to come back who wasn’t a softie like me, chances were she wouldn’t get to come back at all.