* * *
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 O2. 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. ”