Nightshifted (20 page)

“Heh!” My current life might be easier if I were, but Mr. Galeman didn’t look that edible to me. “No, I’m human. Totally, fallibly human.”

“I thought so at first. Then I thought my teller wasn’t telling so good,” he said, tapping his healing forehead. “So who was the vial of blood for, then?”

I considered telling him. It’d be nice to get everything off my chest. But—it wasn’t my place to share, or his place to have to listen. I inhaled and shook my head before exhaling. “You’re a patient. I try to make a practice of not sharing personal stuff with patients.”

Ti looked pointedly at the clock above the door. “I’m only a patient for a few more hours.” He walked around me, pulled out his visitor chair, and then went back to sit on his bed. “I’ve got some time to kill. And I’m already dead.”

I snorted at his bad joke, and then looked at him. He was serious. Maybe if I said it all at once, it’d sound less crazy. I looked over my shoulder to the open door behind me, and reached one hand back to shut it closed.

“It was for a friend. Who is a vampire,” I began. I looked past him, into the shadows his monitor cast on the wall, and wondered if the Shadows were listening in—though it wasn’t like they’d help me or Anna if they were.

“And your friend—is he in trouble?”

“She’s in trouble,” I corrected. “And I can’t find her.”

“Want to tell me the story?”

“Nurse-patient privilege. I can’t.”

His amber eyes scanned over me. “Miss Spence, if a vampire wants to find you, they will. It’s a talent they have.”

“Not if they’ve been kidnapped.” I looked up at him and found him staring straight at me. His golden eyes were thoughtful, set against his rippling dark-pool skin. I quickly looked down again, and then thought,
What if he thinks I’m not looking at him because of the scars?
—when I knew that wasn’t true. I tried to bring my gaze up, but he was still looking at me, and even though I knew it had nothing to do with the scars, and everything to do with the awkwardness of feeling someone else’s focused attention, I tried not to look away. I inhaled and pressed on. “I have to find her.”

“Why?”

I grimaced.
Because if I don’t, I’ll be dead?
I ignored his question and tried a different tack.

“Is being a zombie better than being dead?”

Ti pondered this and then answered, “I doubt it.”

“Ah, well,” I said, then I stood up. “Anyhow—you’ve got things to pack—”

He leaned forward to stand, I thought to see me out. But instead he seemed to come to a decision, like a light switch flicked on inside of him. “I know someone who might be able to help find your friend. Do you have something that smells like her?”

I nodded. I hadn’t even begun to think about how I was going to get her tears off my good coat. And I still had Yuri’s shirt, the one she’d cried on. “Who—and how?”

“Firefighter-friend privilege,” he said with a grin. “How can I get in touch with you?”

“Why would you want to get involved?”

“It’s what I do. I’m Bruce Banner, remember?”

“No one’s just good for goodness’ sake. I don’t believe in Santa and neither do you.” I crossed my arms.

Ti grinned. “Maybe because I’d like to take you to a movie sometime. It’d be harder to do if you were dead. Not impossible, but probably less fun.”

I stared at him. I’d never had a sober patient ask me out before. Much less someone whose name and health history I already knew. Mind you, he was a scarred-up zombie … but at least he wasn’t a doctor.

“You promise not to throw flowers at my car?” I asked.

“I swear,” he said, solemnly crossing his chest without asking why. He looked serious. He seemed serious. And I always had a pen in my breast pocket at work. I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and handed it over to him.

“All right. Help me out and it’s a deal.”

*   *   *

I ignored Ti’s room for the rest of the night—anything else I could say would seem anticlimactic. But Mr. Galeman kept me busy—his crit wasn’t low anymore, but all his other electrolytes were out of whack, booze not being the most nutritious diet. I replaced his potassium and phosphates all night long.

Gina rolled by while I was drawing up a syringe of magnesium, and ribbed me some about “Mr. Smith,” but I ignored it.

“Everything all right, Spence?” Meaty asked when I came back to the main station at the end of the night to finish up my notes.

I was deeply tired of Meaty asking me that. But as I looked up to glare, I realized that Meaty really meant it. Our charge nurse didn’t have many social graces, and asking “Everything all right, Spence?” was a way of saying “Hi, how are you?” or “What’s going on today?” and not meant to be overbearing or always checking in. At least not all of the time.

“I’m meeting with my lawyer when this shift ends, in an exceedingly nice area of town.” My little Chevy would definitely be out of place there.

“And what’s his plan?”

“Don’t know yet. I’ll know more tomorrow night, though.”

“You need some time off?”

I thought of Jake and shook my head. “Not yet.”

Meaty’s heavy eyelids lowered in disbelief. “All right. But let me know if that changes, okay?”

“Will do.” I dove back into my charts and wrote exceptionally thorough notes until Meaty turned away.

*   *   *

I thought about stepping into Ti’s room to say good-bye before I left, then thought better of it. If he’d call, he’d call. If not, I was better off not embarrassing myself. In the locker room I switched into clean scrubs, said good-bye to Gina and Charles, then stepped into the elevator alone.

I hate our elevator. It’s not just that it always smells like pee. It “takes off” and “lands” like an elevator should, but it doesn’t feel like it’s moving at all in between. I’ve timed it before; it takes forty seconds once the doors have closed for them to open again. That’s a long time for an elevator—especially when there are no numbers for any intervening floors. It feels like a prop from
The Twilight Zone,
which, considering where it’s taking me from and to, might not be far off.

This morning I stepped into it, the doors closed, and—time passed. A lot of time. Longer than forty seconds, by the time I started counting again, and longer than twenty seconds after that. The lights went off, and my badge began to glow.
Not this again.
Anxiety rose in me like a startled bird and I dropped my coat. My heart sped up, so loud in my chest I could feel it in my throat, and I couldn’t count seconds anymore, only heartbeats, faster and faster. I put a hand out and felt where the metal puckered at the seam of the doors and I wasn’t sure if I wanted them to burst open and free me, or stay closed and keep me protected from whatever was—

The elevator dinged. I jumped backward and crouched in one corner. The interior lights came on, blinding me, casting whatever was outside the doors in black.

“Come out, human,” said a voice. “We will not harm you.”

The voice was fractured and disjointed, like an approximation of human voices, gathered up piece by piece and rudely taped together for a TV serial killer’s type of prank.

“Who’s we?” I shouted from inside.

“You know who we are,” it said.

I was afraid they were right.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I leaned forward and hit the “door close” button repeatedly.

“Come out,” the voice repeated more sternly.

I cast one arm up over my eyes to let them adjust. Outside looked like a cave, with an arched ceiling, and a velvety black floor. When I stepped out, the elevator’s doors began to shut behind me. I whirled, and shoved my hand between them, where the motion sensor ought to be, but they were determined to close. I yanked back just in time. The elevator sat there, out of place at the bottom of a shaft of rock.

“Where are you?” I called out and took a step forward. The carpet beneath my feet rippled and deformed. Oh, God, it was water. Or worse. “Shadows?” I yelled, my voice rising.

As my eyes got used to the dimmer light, illumination blossomed up from the ground, faint and delicate, crazy jagged lines and solitary winking lights. They came into resolution in the same way that sometimes you can’t see the stars till you’re out of the city, and then you wonder how you missed so many of them before. Farther out, in what I guessed was the middle of the cavern, was a solid mass of glowing light, a little flat sun. It pulsed.

“You brought me here—why?” I asked aloud.

“This is our home,” the voice said. I heard the sound of liquid pouring next to me and I turned to my right. Twenty feet away stood a creature made of the dark liquid, still streaked with luminescent stars. It looked like the Blob, and it extended a pseudopod toward me.

I stepped backward, holding out my glowing badge. “Send me back to the lobby, now.” The memory of them crawling over me, touching me, made my skin shiver. I didn’t want to go back to wherever they’d sent me inside myself. Helpless, lost, unwhole.

I didn’t want a Shadow touching me. Not ever, ever again.

“I will not touch you here, human. Not yet.”

“Keep out of my head.” I kept my badge out, for whatever good it was doing. “Why’ve you brought me here?”

“Because we have need of you.”

“What, you want to tell me how worthless I am again?” I let my badge drop against my chest. “I remember what it felt like last time, don’t need a repeat performance, thanks.”

The creature rippled and deformed, snaking in and out of itself, shimmering lights playing across it.

“If we wanted to destroy you, we would have already. So believe us that you still have some use.”

I crossed my arms, suddenly aware that it was freezing down here, wherever this was, and my coat was still in the elevator. “You’re going to have to explain more than that if you want me to agree.”

“We could crawl inside your head and make you but a shell of yourself, a puppet of meat, for which we keep the only strings.” It paused to let the impact of this settle in. “Please stop trying to be brave, and become the pathetic creature we both know you to be.”

My short nails bit against my arms. “Fuck you.”

The Shadow-thing laughed with other people’s voices, loud and long, before continuing. “This hospital is built on a place for gathering powers. Before it was a hospital, it was a church. Before it was a church, it was a burial ground. And before that, perhaps even passing dinosaurs walking above dipped their heads in sorrow.”

I nodded like I understood—but really I just wanted it to stop talking with that broken voice. “So?” I asked, when the last reverberation had gone away.

“There are lines beneath the County, Nurse Spence. They channel what we use as food into us, here. For us, they are like the circulatory system you know so well.”

“You don’t send out oxygen or nutrients or unicorns or rainbows. You’re a bottom-feeder, and you only send out shit.”

The Shadow let loose another mocking laugh. “Then think of us as a sponge, or a parasite, or even a baleen whale. Whatever you require in order to understand.”

Halfway through its speech I put my fingers in my ears. It only let me better hear the pounding of my own heart and didn’t block the Shadow-voice out at all. I gave up. “What’s this have to do with me?” I prompted.

It extruded an arm and gestured to the floor. “This is a map of all available energies.”

All I could see were stars and whorls and bright excited jumping lines. They looked like words written in an ever-changing language that I would never learn to read.

“A man dies near Broadway, shot by his ex-wife.” A lit spot on the floor, no wider than a pencil, rippled and raised. “A political rally, where people hope and hate in equal measure.” A thicker piece of light pulled up from the floor, maybe the width of my fist. “And lastly, here. County Hospital. Two thousand people—not so very many—but they are always in perfect agony, hoping not to die, and dying regardless.” The flat sun I’d seen before rose up like a tombstone. It beat like a glowing heart.

I stepped backward and the floor rippled. Like a heavy stone dropped into a still pond, those ripples carried out and over to the short pillar of light, coursing up its length on one side and down on the other, in blissful ignorance of physics.

But not everyone at County died. Surely not— “You don’t change patient outcomes, do you?”

“We don’t need to. This is the County’s hospital. The people who come here cannot go anywhere else. They wait too long for medical attention, and when they receive it, even should they live, they often wish to die along the way.” The creature made its way out, warping the field of lights along the floor—lights that I now understood represented combined pinpricks of human suffering and pain. “It is not a thick conduit—not like a war might bring, or the weight of crushing tyranny—but it is steady. It has lasted so far. It will continue.”

“So why do you need me?”

“We would like you to transport us.”