Nightshifted (Edie Spence 1)

He pulled into the emergency drop-off, and came around to open the door for me. “Glad you lived, kid. ”

“Me too. ” I staggered up, standing on the curb in the cold. I paid him, then he was gone.

Only the fact that I was already standing kept me up. There were other people outside this late, well-bundled smokers leaning on IV poles, security officers making a perimeter sweep. I was safe in the umbrella of the drop-off’s light—safe from everything but my own stupidity. I could feel cold in my hand now, and I didn’t know if it was from the outside or internal. The narcotic effects of vampire spit were definitely wearing off. I stared up at the oddly clear sky, watching the barely waning full moon sail overhead, when I heard a double honk.

“Sissy!” Jake hollered, from the window of a cab.

I walked over as he got out. His pupils were wide and as he gestured I noticed his hands were spastic. My flaky Jakey, coming to the rescue. I’d have gone off on him, only it seems we’d both made bad choices recently. And really, the fact that he’d had his phone on him and he’d answered my call while he was slightly high or trying to become so was impressively functional. Behind him, inside the car, the cabbie loudly demanded his fare.

“Ten thirty-five!”

“Sissy?” Jake asked. He was closer now; I hadn’t seen him leave the cab—I’d been staring at the cab’s fuzzy snake-eye dice instead—but now Jake was standing beside me. “Sissy, what happened?”

“Ten thirty-five!”

With my good hand, I turned over my keys and the cash I had left. Hopefully it was enough, I couldn’t do math right now. “Watch my cat. You can eat all my food. Whatever you do, do not let Minnie out. ”

Jake nodded. After a second thought, or maybe a fourth, I handed him the small video camera. “Pawn this too. ”

He nodded again, and walked back to the cab. Before he got in, he turned toward me, eyes wide and bright. “Sissy—what happened?”

“Don’t ask,” I said, and turned toward County. There was a pause, then I heard the cab door open and close solidly behind me.

I didn’t walk toward the emergency department’s doors, though they automatically slid open as I passed. I went for the County’s true doors, to the lobby that smelled like piss and diluted bleach in turns. I waved my badge at the guards and went into the depths of the hospital, up corridors and down stairwells, into an elevator that sank into the earth without seeming to move until it dinged and coughed me free. The final set of doors swung outward toward me, like welcoming arms, like one-way valves, like cilia moving mucus. Like mental impairment due to shock due to blood loss, I’d bet. I stumbled forward.

Meaty saw me first, as I held up my mutilated hand in response to his/her/its raised eyebrow.

“Room three. Now. ”

CHAPTER SEVEN

When they were done with my hand and had weaned me off the IV pain meds, Meaty pushed a bariatric cardiac chair into my room. In a world where night shift time served = time to eat = girth = experience, Meaty knew all about everything.

“You want to tell me about it?”

It was the first time anyone had asked, except for Charles trying to get me to bring visitors down. I’d balked at the thought of bringing Jake in; he’d be like a kid in a candy store with other people’s meds, without supervision. Plus, how would we explain the howling?

But you didn’t last long as a nurse if you told your charge nurse no. So I shared from the beginning, until the part that was known, me, here, with a messed-up hand. The scars across the back of my left hand were already tightening—thanks, hack from plastics—and I rubbed them with a grimace.

“You were under a compulsion,” Meaty said.

“A what?”

Meaty settled down farther in the chair. “A compulsion. Vampires use them to order their servants around. ”

I sank back farther in my bed. “It didn’t feel like that. ” What it felt like, was like every other bad decision I’d ever made. I’d had a lot of practice.

But was it bad? I’d saved that girl, Anna, right?

Meaty ignored me. “Most daytimers can’t use compulsions, but maybe he was on the cusp. ”

I looked down at my hand again, and thought about going home soon, the mountain of cat litter that surely needed changing, and how my house would now smell like black tar and pot. “I don’t think it was a compulsion. If I could go back in time, I’d probably do it again,” I said, more to myself than him. “The saving the girl part, not the killing him on accident part,” I amended.

Meaty rocked forward to leverage off the chair. My audience was over. “Compulsion, guilt, pick your poison. ” Meaty shrugged. “You make a better nurse than a patient. You’re discharged, go home. ”

* * *

I barely had my legs out of the bed when Gina arrived with a patient belongings bag. She wandered around the room, gathering my things.

I pulled my jeans and boots on, but instead of wearing my sweatshirt, I wrapped another gown around my back, and put my bloodstained coat on top. I knew I was a sight, but Gina had the kindness not to say anything. Between my week’s worth of bedhead, and the bloodstained sweatshirt in my bag, I knew I looked like every other patient released from emergency psych that A. M. But I left my room and tried to walk toward the hallway door with a little dignity regardless.

“Hey, new kid!” Charles called out, as my hand touched the button for the automatic door.

I turned around. “My name is Edie,” I enunciated slowly.

He grinned. “I know. Welcome to Y4. ”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I tried calling Jake twice from the pay phone by the Charlie Brown Christmas tree that’d been erected in the lobby during my stay. It wasn’t real, but someone had hung a pine-scented car deodorizer on it, in addition to the Christmas ornaments from 1973. I ran out of quarters, and my phone was out of juice, but a transit pass came free with discharge. So I bussed home, very conscious of the other bus patrons’ stares. I walked from the bus stop up to my door, glad I hadn’t had to make a transfer, and knocked on my own door before unlocking it.

“Jake?”