Nightshifted (9 page)

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
₂
. 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.

“Fuck.” I leaned over. “Shawn. Wake up. Shawn.” I touched his shoulder, then realized my mistake, and began tapping at his cheek. “Shawn!” I hissed, whispering as loud as I could.

“Wha?” One eye blinked open.

“I’ve got to move you.”

He closed his eye again. “Then move me already.”

“No, not like that. Like off the bed.”

Now both eyes opened. “Why?”

“I can’t really explain it. But you and I and the baby—we’ve gotta get into the bathroom over there.”

Confusion crowded his features together. “Is it a tornado?”

That was a more plausible reason than any other I had. “Yes. It’s coming fast.”

I grabbed the pediatric ambu bag off the wall, and assembled it, swallowing hard. Last time I’d done this … but this time would be different. It had to be. I put the bed on max inflate, and shoved a side rail down.

“I can’t breathe for you while I move you,” I said while popping the vent off his trach and replacing it with the ambu bag. “So I’m going to hyperventilate you now.”

His eyes were large and frightened. The German rose around us as the temperature did, encouraging me to quicker action.

“Okay. On the count of three, here we go!”

I put the ambu bag down and leaned backward.

Shawn wasn’t thin for his age. And he couldn’t help me move him at all—he was the proverbial sack of potatoes. I hauled him out of bed like a rag doll, and lurched into a squat under his new weight.

“Come on!” I said as much to myself as to him. I staggered back till the curtain ended, and then went quickly toward the bathroom on the baby’s side of the room, as far away from his wall as I could get, dragging him in a duck walk, my calves screaming in pain. When we got there I pulled him through the door, and dropped him on the ground, panting. I gave him two long puffs of air before hauling him until his legs were inside and I could close the door.

“I’ve gotta go get the baby now, okay?” I told him.

“I thought you were kidding,” he whispered around his trach.

“I wish.”

Two more puffs from the ambu bag, and then I went outside. The CD player’s light was shining a furious red behind the curtain in Shawn’s corner. I grabbed the baby and turned the oxygen and her monitor off, carrying her quickly into the bathroom, locking and closing the door behind me. We waited.

I alternated between breathing for Shawn and the baby, and all the while it was getting hotter.

There was a thump from outside the bathroom. I flinched, and Shawn’s eyes went wide. The handle started to turn.

“Float nurse? Are you in here?” The locked handle shook. “You’d better be in here!”

“Shit.” I heard a scraping at the outside of the lock. There was nothing in a hospital that couldn’t be unlocked. Except for the were-corrals on Y4.