The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"Just another look around."

Rowan's manner with nurses was far gentler than ever it was with doctors. She had from the very beginning of her internship courted nurses, going out of her way to alleviate their proverbial resentment of women doctors, and to elicit from them as much enthusiasm as she could. It was a science with her, calculated and refined to the point of ruthlessness, yet as profoundly sincere as any incision made into the tissues of a patient's brain.

As she entered the first room now, pausing beside the high gleaming metal bed--a monstrous rack on wheels, it seemed--she heard the nurse coming behind her, waiting on her, so to speak. The nurse moved to lift the chart from its place at the foot of the bed. Rowan shook her head, no.

Blanched, seemingly lifeless, lay the day's last car crash victim, head enormous in a turban of white bandages, a thin colorless tube running into her nose. The machines evinced the only vitality with their tiny monotonous beeps and jagged neon lines. The glucose flowed through the tiny needle fixed into the pinioned wrist.

Like a corpse coming back to life on an embalming table, the woman beneath the layers of bleached bed linen slowly opened her eyes. "Dr. Mayfair," she whispered.

A lovely ripple of relief passed through Rowan. Again she and the nurse exchanged glances. Rowan smiled. "I'm here, Mrs. Trent," she said softly. "You're doing well." Gently, she folded her fingers around the woman's right hand. Yes, very well.

The woman's eyes closed so slowly they were like flowers closing. No change in the faint song of the machines that surrounded them. Rowan retreated as soundlessly as she had come.

Through the windows of the second room, she gazed at another seemingly unconscious figure, that of an olive-skinned boy, a weed of a kid, actually, who had gone blind suddenly, staggering off the platform into the path of a commuter train.

For four hours she had worked on this one, suturing with the tiny needle the hemorrhaging vessel that had caused his blindness, then repairing the damaged skull. In Recovery he had joked with the circle of doctors around him.

Now, her eyes narrow, her body still, Rowan studied his subtle movements in sleep, the way that his right knee shifted under the covers, the way his hand curled, palm up, as he moved his head to the side. His tongue darted over his dry lips, and he whispered to himself like a man talking to someone in his dreams.

"Doing just fine, Doctor," the nurse whispered beside her.

Rowan nodded. But she knew that within weeks, he would suffer seizures. They would use Dilantin to control it, but he would be an epileptic for the rest of his life. Better than death and blindness surely. She would wait and watch before predicting or explaining. After all, there was always the chance she was wrong.

"And Mrs. Kelly?" she asked. She turned to look into the nurse's eyes, forcing herself to see the woman clearly and completely. This was an efficient and compassionate nurse, a woman she rather liked.

"Mrs. Kelly thinks it's funny that she still has two bullets in her head. 'I feel like a loaded gun,' she told me. She won't let her daughter leave. She wants to know what happened to that 'street punk' that shot her. She wants another pillow. She wants a television and a phone."

Rowan gave the obligatory soft appreciative laugh. Barely a sound in the humming silence. "Well, tomorrow, perhaps," she said.

From where she stood, she could see the spirited Mrs. Kelly through the last pair of windows at the end of the ward. Unable to lift her head from the pillow, Mrs. Kelly gestured easily with her right hand as she talked to her grown daughter, a thin and obviously exhausted woman with drooping eyelids who nevertheless nodded repeatedly as she hung upon her mother's every word.

"She's good for her mother," Rowan whispered. "Let her stay as long as she likes."

The nurse nodded.

"I'm off till Monday, Laurel," said Rowan. "I don't know if I like this new schedule."

The nurse gave a soft laugh. "You deserve the rest, Dr. Mayfair."

"Do I?" Rowan murmured. "Dr. Simmons will call me if there's a problem. You can always ask him to call me, Laurel. You understand?"

Rowan went out the double doors, letting them swish shut softly behind her. Yes, a good day it had been.

And there really was no excuse for staying here any longer, except to make a few notes in the private diary she kept in her office and to check her personal machine for calls. Maybe she would rest for a while on the leather couch. It was so much more luxurious, the office of the official Attending, than the cramped and shabby on-call rooms in which she'd dozed for years.

But she ought to go home, she knew it. Ought to let the shades of Graham and Ellie come and go as they pleased.

And what about Michael Curry? Why, she had forgotten again about Michael Curry, and now it was almost ten o'clock. She had to call Dr. Morris as soon as she, could.

Now don't let your heart skip beats over Curry, she thought, as she took her time padding softly down the linoleumed hallway, choosing the cement stairway again rather than the elevator, and plotting a jagged route through the giant slumbering hospital that would take her only eventually to her office door.

But she was eager to hear what Morris had to say, eager for news of the only man in her life at this moment, a man she didn't know and had not seen since that violent interlude of desperate effort and crazed, accidental accomplishment on the turbulent sea almost four months before ...

She'd been in a near daze that night from exhaustion. A routine shift during the last month of her residency had yielded thirty-six hours of duty on call, during which she'd slept perhaps an hour. But that was fine until she'd spotted a drowned man in the water.

The Sweet Christine had been crawling through the rough ocean under the heavy, leaden sky, the wind roaring against the windows of the wheelhouse. No small-craft warnings mattered to this forty-foot twin-engined Dutch-built steel cruiser, her heavy full-displacement hull moving smoothly though slowly without the slightest rise through the choppy waves. She was, strictly speaking, too much f

or a singlehander. But Rowan had been operating her alone since she was sixteen.

Getting such a boat in and out of the dock is really the tricky part, where another crew member is required. And Rowan had her own channel, dug deep and wide, beside her home in Tiburon, and her own pier and her own slow and methodic system. Once the Sweet Christine had been backed out and turned towards San Francisco, one woman on the bridge who knew and understood all the boat's complex electronic whistles and bells was really quite enough.

The Sweet Christine was built not for speed but for endurance. She was equipped that day as she always was, for a voyage around the world.

The overcast sky had been killing the daylight that May afternoon even when Rowan passed under the Golden Gate. By the time she was out of sight of it, the long twilight had faded completely.

Darkness was falling with a pure metallic monotony to it; the ocean was merging with the sky. And so cold it was that Rowan wore her woolen gloves and watch cap even in the wheelhouse, drinking cup after cup of steaming coffee, which never fazed her immense exhaustion. Her eyes were focused as always on the shifting sea.

Then came Michael Curry, that speck out there--could that possibly be a man?

On his face in the waves, his arms out loosely, hands floating near his head, and the black hair a mass against the shining gray water, the rest just clothes ballooning ever so slightly over the limp and shapeless form. A belted raincoat, brown heels. Dead-looking.

All that she could tell in those first few moments was that this was no decomposed corpse. Pale as the hands were, they were not waterlogged. He could have fallen overboard from some large vessel only moments before, or hours. The crucial thing was to signal "Pan Pan" immediately and to give her coordinates, and then to try to get him aboard.

As luck would have it the Coast Guard boats were miles from her location; the helicopter rescue teams were completely engaged. There were virtually no small craft in the area on account of the warnings. And the fog was rolling in. Assistance would come as soon as possible and no one could say when that was.