I had no idea how I was going to smuggle blood out of a room where I wasn't the primary nurse-one that might, if Gina's guess was right, have guards outside the door by now. "If I do this, are we done?"

"Oh, no. You'll still owe me-but we can deal with those payments later." He holstered his weapon.

I inhaled. "Dren-tell me why?"

"If I told you now, I'd have to kill you, girl, and that's the truth." He pondered for a moment, for show, flipping the collar of his coat up against the dregs of the evening sun. "I would say I wouldn't enjoy it, but that would be a lie."

He tugged his hat brim lower and walked out into the last of the day.

f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k. I considered things on the elevator ride to Y4. Luckily, since I was coming in for the end of a P.M. shift, the locker room was empty. I checked the bathroom too, just in case, then made a furtive call.

"Daytimer central, here for all your nefarious deeds," a woman's voice answered me in a singsong.

"Sike? Is Anna there?" I said.

"She's in seclusion," Sike said. It sounded like she was packing in the background-drawers were being opened, and fabric rustled.

"Sike, I saw Dren."

"Really?" She made a thoughtful purring noise. "I haven't seen him in a while. How is he? Does he seem lonely?"

"He wants me to get him a sample of werewolf blood from the hospital."

"Hrmph. No accounting for taste." The sounds of packing continued.

"He says if I don't do it, he'll drain my brother." I couldn't tell her precisely what was happening on Y4 right now, but surely she understood why I'd called. Just because I wanted Anna to thrive didn't mean I wanted to be bullied by the whims of every other vampire.

"That sounds like a moral quandary for you." There was the sound like the closing of a closet door.

"It's not." I frowned at the locker room floor. Should it be more of one? It should, and yet-"Sike, after Anna's ceremony, will you all be able to protect me from him?"

She paused in her actions again, on the far end of the line. "I don't know. We'll need to talk to Anna. But-"

"She's in seclusion. Great."

"You'll have your answer in less than a week. And what's a little blood between friends?" Sike said, hanging up. Sike and I hadn't gotten along the past few times we'd met. I don't know why I'd thought this phone call would be an exception.

My phone's screen jumped to show me the time. I was late. f.u.c.k.

I changed scrubs and put my leftovers in the Y4 break room fridge, then ran up to trauma ICU, repeating a mantra to myself: Only four hours, holiday pay, only four hours, holiday pay.

It's always strange to be a float on another unit. I'd floated around enough to be able to find a saline flush within twenty feet of anywhere in the hospital, but each floor had its own peculiar habits, and its own people you learned you did not want to cross.

I knew from prior experience that the charge nurse for the trauma ICU was one of them. You know how some people played the game where they added the phrase in bed at the end of fortune cookies? You could add the phrase are you stupid? to everything she said. She just had that intonation.

I pushed through the doors and made my way to the charge nurse's desk.

"Edie Spence, I'm floating here tonight."

The charge nurse ignored me. "You're late." Are you stupid?

"Sorry. Traffic." We both knew on Christmas Day, it was a lie. She pointed without looking up.

"Your a.s.signment's on the board, your break is at nine. Don't be late, or you won't get it."

"Gotcha. Thanks."

I wrote down the room number I was responsible for and trotted down the hall.

Trauma was always loud-even louder than Y4, and the noise here was around the clock. I'd never been here before when there wasn't an admit going on, and someone being discharged to make room for someone new. There were the normal hospital sounds, machines, pumps, ventilators, but above and beyond that-chatting, crying, chat-crying. Visitors. They were what sucked most about coming in early. Visitors were never good. Even when they were happy there'd always be something. It was one thing to consider yourself a highly skilled waitress with access to narcotics-it was another for someone else to treat you like it. Repeatedly.

Still, it was Christmas. And sad things were happening here, by virtue of the fact that it was trauma. You could ask visitors to tone it down, but you could hardly throw them all out.

I made my way down the floor to my a.s.signment. I wasn't very surprised when my echolocation of the loudest visitors found them inside my room. Of course-because I was the float.

As a float nurse, you were either given the easiest patients because they didn't trust you, the hardest because they didn't care if you drowned, or the ones with the worst family members, because everyone else was over dealing with them. I stood in the doorway of my a.s.signed room and looked inside.

There were rosaries hanging on all the IV poles. An entire Latino family was in here, but most of the noise came from one older woman crying, wailing the ancient refrain of Why G.o.d, Why. Everyone at the hospital wanted answers from G.o.d, and He was never around to give them. She looked up at my entrance, and I could see where her tears and overzealous use of Kleenex had completely wiped away one of her makeup eyebrows. An older man was pacing beside her, and a younger woman stood at the head of the bed, petting my patient's cheek. The nurse I was replacing was across from her, programming an IV pump.

"h.e.l.lo?" I knocked on the doorway, and the nurse inside came out.

She kept her report brusque and devoid of emotion. Seen it all, done it all was the motto of the trauma ICU nurse. Innocent bystander syndrome. g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger fight. Gunshot wound to the spine. Paralyzed now, and losing sensation as the swelling continues. On pressors to keep his blood pressure high.

The trauma from the gunshot, the bullet's cavitations, or the subsequent swelling had done an odd number on his spine. It had already rendered him unable to move, and as his injury progressed his ability to feel was being stolen away from him, one centimeter at a time. The outgoing nurse and I checked the IV drips together and probed along his side. When we found the spot where feeling ended, we drew another dot with a purple Sharpie, like we were turning him into a connect-the-dots paper doll, one dot after the next. The wailing in Spanish didn't stop.

I took advantage of the old nurse leaving the room to leave myself, co-signing the chart, rifling through the history and progress notes.

Truth was, I was hiding.

In nursing school we went to some cultural cla.s.ses, but they weren't so much about learning about other cultures as they were Being Nice to people with different beliefs. That part had worked so well that I could now Be Nice to vampires, so surely I could deal with anything here. But part of me always remembered that time I'd asked a patient if he was frijoles, instead of frio.

I read the chart for a bit, trying to look official, and found out what I already knew: Javier Rodriguez, male, aged eighteen, was inside. And this would be the last night he had feeling below his neck.

I closed the chart, said a silent prayer hoping that the doctors had already answered all of the hard questions in eloquent Spanish, and went inside.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Javier had short dark hair and wide shoulders. He was dressed in a hospital gown and had a plastic collar on, protecting his neck from any pressure or torque.

Standing over him and stroking his hair was his sister-or maybe his girlfriend. She was strikingly beautiful. High, precise brows over wide, heavily made-up eyes; lips outlined in red, with the lipstick fading in between, from time spent kissing Javier's forehead. Her straight black hair spilled down the bed to his armpits.

"Hi. I'm Edie, I'm going to be your nurse for the next four hours," I said over the sound of his crying mother. He grunted.

I ran the blood pressure cuff, took his temperature, felt for pulses, listened to lungs. A small dressing beneath his right clavicle was stained with the color of old blood. I took a Sharpie and drew its boundaries, just in case it opened up again.

"Are you in any pain?"

Javier flicked dark eyes toward me, then back at the ceiling. "No. Never."

The woman standing beside him nodded and resumed petting him. His mom kept sobbing, wordless sounds.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" I asked him, then included the room at large.

"Cafe," said the not-crying woman. She was definitely the girlfriend. I knew from the way I saw her look at him now.

"Certainly," I said, and retreated out the door.

I walked down the row of other rooms on the trauma floor. None of them had happy people inside. That, multiplied by the time of year, made everything particularly grim. I went to the room labeled NUTRITION, like it was from Star Trek, and made an instant coffee. While I was loading up an extra Styrofoam cup with powdered creamer and sugar, the overhead intercom announced that visiting hours were over for the night.

The charge nurse called to me as I pa.s.sed her desk on my way back. "Hey, float. Send all those people home."

It took me a second to realize who she meant. "All of them? Can't someone stay?"

"We don't allow that here."

I frowned at her. She didn't look up to see it. "He can feel things now but by tomorrow morning, he'll be insensate," I said.

"So?"

Seen it all, done it all, are you stupid? I tried another tack. "It's Christmas."

"Only till midnight. Then it's December twenty-sixth."

"So someone can stay till midnight?" I asked, trying to work in some innocence and charm. I really didn't want to be the bad guy. Not this time.

She stopped typing and turned toward me. "One person. And that person better have a ride home, we're out of bus pa.s.ses."

I'd take what I could get. "Okay. Thanks."

She went back to typing on her computer, without response.

I slunk back to Javier's room with the good-bad news. "I got permission for one of you all to stay till midnight." I hated myself a little for hoping the designated visitor didn't wind up being his mom.

"Luz," Javier said, in a whisper. I was sure who he meant.

Javier's mother started crying again, and blotting at her face-at this rate, the other eyebrow didn't stand a chance. I stood outside the room while they said their good-byes. They hugged him. It would be the last time he was able to feel it. There was a knot at the back of my throat, and all the swallowing in the world couldn't get it to go away. I felt like I was spying, so I opened up my chart and tried to disappear.

"Pretty girl. Pity she's with him," said a person standing next to me. I startled and looked up.

Sike stood beside me. Sike was a Rose Throne daytimer, and while Anna trusted her, I did not.

In her day job, Sike was a model and as such professionally gorgeous, but right now she wore little makeup and her red hair was pulled into a high bun. A dour lab coat covered her slender frame's soft curves. The name VERONICA LAMBRIDGE was embroidered on the pocket over the words LABORATORY TECHNICIAN. I knew Sike was neither Veronica, nor a lab tech. She patted the white lapel. "Fits nice, doesn't it?"

I looked around at the floor. "You should have called."

"Oh, I'm not here for you." Sike smiled at me, and her face didn't match her tone. "Let's not be an idiot in public. I'm just your friend from the lab."

"Lab workers and nurses don't fraternize." I hoped that "Veronica" was merely off duty and not stuffed into a trunk. "If you're not helping me, then why are you here?"

"I need you to take me to Y4." She put her hand on my arm just as Javier's parents walked out, the father propelling the mother around my desk and toward the doors. We were both quiet until they pa.s.sed.

"I can't leave till my break," I whispered.

"When's that?"

"Nine. You've got an hour to kill."

It was obvious from her bearing that this was untenable. But there was no way she could drag me off in front of so many people without causing a scene. She wasn't a full vampire, just a daytimer, she didn't have look-away yet. She let go of my arm.

"Just go yourself," I said, ma.s.saging blood back into my tricep.

"I can't. The elevator doors won't open for me."

I pretended to read Javier's chart. "Has that ever happened before?"

"No."

Well. Saying that was not good was probably an understatement. "There's a lobby behind those doors. Go wait by the fish tank." She looked down at me, full lips pursed in frustration. "I'll come as soon as I can," I added.

"You'd better."

If it wasn't one vampire, it was another ... in a manner of speaking. I waited until I was sure she was gone, then went into Javier's room for his hourly feeling check.

"Can you feel this?" I poked the cap of my pen against the side of his ribs.

"No."

"This?" I asked, trying higher.

"No."

I looked up at his face and saw his jaw clench, between answers.