A supremely awkward, at least for me, silence passed between us. “Sooo, I like them,” I said, winding up. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a kinky fascination with them or anything.” Wow. Pull up, Edie, pull up! “It’s just not a big deal, you know?” I finished, resolving not to talk again for as long as I could help it.
Ti nodded and kept looking out at the road. “Yeah, I do.”
We turned onto the highway and his attention to his driving saved me from myself.
“So what are you going to do after you drop me off?” I asked as we took the exit that would lead to County. I thought about the city as I’d seen it with the Shadows, like a map of a circulatory system sketched out, with the County Hospital as its living, beating heart.
“I’m going to go to Seventeenth and ask about the girls those vampires were interested in. If they picked them up, or took them to another location.” He shook his head behind the wheel, at me or the situation, I didn’t know. “Someone has to help you.”
“I’m not some sort of princess trapped in a castle. If that’s what you think, then I don’t want your help.” I didn’t mind help but I sure as hell didn’t want pity.
I saw his hands tighten slightly around the steering wheel, and his eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
“I choose to disagree with you,” he said, after a long pause. His reflection looked at me again. “On all points.”
Suddenly my badge under my shirt felt sharper than it had, and the seat belt felt too tight, and the car, which’d been just fine before, felt ten degrees too warm. I fidgeted in my seat and sighed. “It just feels weird, okay? To have people care. I’m not used to that.”
Ti pulled the car into the County’s emergency room drop-off roundabout. “I’m not sure what kind of feral child upbringing you had, Edie. But I want to help you. It doesn’t make me a bad person for wanting to help, or you a bad person for needing help. All right?”
I gathered my belongings off the El Camino’s floor. “All right.” I opened the door and rose up out of the passenger side, then quickly sank back down, with my purse and bag still in my lap, and shut myself in again. “So—was that a date?”
His eyebrows, or the places they would be when they grew in, rose. “Did it feel like a date?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Did you want it to be a date?”
Two could play that game. “Definitely maybe.”
He laughed, and reached his hand out behind my head, and pulled me gently toward him. It was awkward until our lips touched, and then it felt just fine. I swooned a little bit, falling forward some, almost into him. He caught me, his hand chaste upon my shoulder, and we parted. I reached for the door handle and let myself out quickly.
“So you’ll call me tomorrow morning and let me know what you found out, okay?” I asked, after I was safely outside.
“Yeah.” He shook his head again at me. “Take care of yourself, Edie.”
“I’ll try!” I said with a wave, then tried my hardest not to grin like a grinning fool until I’d turned to run inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I shoved my clothes into my locker and changed into my scrubs in record time, swiping my badge in just before the warning beep that meant they’d dock me a tenth of an hour of pay. Even running late and being dog—weredog!—tired, there was a spring in my step now, I’d admit. It was kinda nice to be kissed by someone, and not be sure about what would happen next.
“You’re far too chipper for someone who the vampires want to see in two nights,” Charles said, coming to stand near my desk by my patients’ rooms. I’d just gotten the world’s most random report from Floater Nick. He mostly worked the rest of the hospital, and only sometimes Y4, and I think the Shadows had mucked with his brain to remove sensitive information one too many times. He didn’t know where either of my patients’ IV lines were, but he’d made sure to tell me about a satisfying conversation one of them had had with his cousin on the phone, and the exact firmness of the other’s bowel movements.
“Thanks for bringing me down, Charles,” I said, checking over my patients’ medication lists for the night. It really didn’t matter what he said. If getting a scattershot report from Nick and knowing that some grumpy day shift person would come on shift in the morning couldn’t blow my mood, then nothing could.
“Earth to Edie,” Charles said, snapping his fingers.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
Apparently, “I was reminding you you were about to die” didn’t feel appropriate for Charles to repeat. “Nothing,” he said, and shrugged.
After assessments, Gina came over. “Too bad Ti’s gone, eh?”
“Oh? Yeah,” I agreed. My life was my life. Mostly. “Who’s in the corrals tonight?”
“A shapeshifter.”
“Into?” I prompted. She looked blank for a moment.
“Oh! No one. At the moment. It’s a weird case.” She glanced over her shoulder down to her side of the hall. The room that the weredragon had been in had supposedly been overhauled and strengthened. Still paid to be wary, though. Or were-y, as the case may be. “Weres only have one additional form. Any animal, really, only they just get one particular one. Werebats, werewolves, werewhatevers. A shapeshifter can only be other humans, and only replicas of ones that they’ve touched once before. To be honest, I think being a shapeshifter is more traumatic. Changing into fur is nothing compared to changing into other people. For example—this one’s lost his mind. For real.” She twirled her finger beside her ear.
I curled my lip. I felt bad for patients with psych issues, but they were draining to deal with. “I wish we had a psych ward for them.”
“We do. But he’s got a feeding tube in. He’d go over there with it, and the other patients might think they were helping him, by yanking the plastic worm out of his nose.”
I tried for a moment to imagine the Y4 version of a psych ward and utterly failed. And I thought we had it bad here. “So what’s he in with?”
“His technical diagnosis is schizophrenia, but I think he really falls under shapeshifteritis. Sometimes it’s a her. He changes back and forth a bit. He’s lost control.”
“How so?”
“It’s like having multiple personality disorder, with a different body for each personality. It takes a really emotionally and psychically healthy person to keep mentally stable—and they’re better off if they don’t touch too many other people, ever. It contaminates their DNA or something. He’s in restraints and isolation now, but it’s a little late.” Her lips pressed together in sympathetic pain. “He plucked out his own eyes. Said he didn’t want to see himself anymore.”
“Ugh.” I shuddered in revulsion. “Can’t he just shift them back?”
“Nope. It’s a conservation of mass thing. They can’t shrink down to become children again, for instance, or enlarge to become obese. But weres can go from human-sized to bear-sized, go figure.”
And I thought I’d had tough patients. Then again, it wasn’t like the shapeshifter patient could see Gina being disgusted, as long as she could keep her tone of voice straight. “That’s gotta be difficult.”
“You’re telling me. I have to do a dressing change on his mangled eye sockets every six hours. It’s fucking grim.”
“Well, let me know if you need help.” Night shift bore the brunt of things that were every six hours, hitting both midnight and six A.M. Nothing like having to do a dressing change right after and right before report.
“Will do.” She took two steps away from me, and then came those two steps back. “You know, you could pull his information up in the computer.”
“What? Whose?”
“Mr. Smith’s. I’m just saying.”
“You mean Ti?” I asked and grinned at her, maybe a little too widely. “That’s creepy and stalkery, and completely unethical—not to mention a violation of patient privacy laws.”
Gina rolled her eyes, then looked at me more closely again. “You—you already went on a date!”
“Who, me? No.” I shook my head in an exaggerated fashion and laughed.
Gina clapped her hands together. “Charles owes me twenty dollars.”
“You were taking bets?” I forced another laugh as my stomach clenched. Maybe Ti dated a different nurse every time he came through? “On what?”
“How fast you two would go out. Charles thought you’d spend more time being depressed and withdrawn. What with the…” and Gina gestured over her head, indicating perhaps the bad-news cloud that must follow me around. “But I figured you for a fast mover.”
I snorted. “Um, thanks. I guess.”
“Not like that.” She paused for a moment, choosing the right sentiment. “I think you’d rather live your life than wish you’d lived it, you know?”
Not entirely inaccurate. “Yeah, I do. Thanks,” I said, and smiled.
* * *
My patients were easy. One eight-year-old kid—he of the bowel movements—whose parents were on guard at his bedside. He had a high fever, had gotten dehydrated, and was here for antibiotics and supervision. He was asleep in his bed, but both of his parents were up, watching the late-night infomercials. I did a quick blinking thing, and realized that while both parents glowed, the child did not. As far as I could tell—and I wasn’t well-versed on my new superpower just yet; thanks for not giving me an instruction manual, Shadows—they were daytimers, but their son was entirely human. Either he’d have to be given transfusions of vampire blood to jumpstart the gene that would set him on his vampiric path—gee, you should be meaner to other kids on the playground, here’s some steak tartare?—or else he would be made a donor for the rest of his life. Like I would, assuming that I lived.