Gideon was wrestling with the nurses beyond. One of my P.M. shift co-workers yelped as he made contact with her ribs.
“Nobody get injured!” said the doctor, and the nurses stopped trying. Gideon pulled himself out of bed and stumbled, unable to see where he was at or where he was going.
“I promise he will be better off once relinquished into my care,” Sike said. “I have all the official paperwork.” She presented her papers again, folded neatly in two. “It’s signed in triplicate, in her blood. You have to comply.”
“He’s covered in wounds. Infection is a given—”
“He’ll get blood.”
We all knew she didn’t mean merely human. “Do it here then,” the doctor challenged her.
Sike frowned. “Fine. Leave the room. Now.” Sike turned toward me and handed me her lab coat, then pushed Gideon back to sitting. I made to follow my co-workers but she called after me. “Edie—stay.”
My curiosity had curdled to guilt and horror, but I did as I was told.
Sike sat beside him on the bed and blotted away the Betadine distastefully with the corner of a sheet. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a makeup compact, flipping it open to reveal what appeared to be a crème blush.
“Gideon, give me your hand.”
She smeared her right thumb in the substance, then ran it along the edges of his wounds. One knuckle at a time began to seal. Only the first knuckles remained on that hand. I wondered with a sick fascination what was left of the other one.
“Sike—what happened?” I didn’t want to see what was under the bandages covering his face. “And why?”
“Becoming a member of the Sanguine is not without trials.” She continued to paint what was clearly a vampire-blood-based substance onto Gideon’s hand, like a salve.
The enormity of his situation settled in. He had no fingers. Lord only knew what the gauze around his face was concealing. “Who did this?”
“If I knew that, I’d be killing them right now. Anna was asleep when he was damaged, and he did not see his attackers.” Finishing with his nearest hand, she reached up to unwrap his face. “He was her first daytimer. Her eyes, her ears,” she said, as his face was uncovered—his eye sockets were empty, hollow, and the shells of his ears were gone. “And now he is as helpless as a baby bird.”
“But why?”
“Because she chose him.”
“I thought they revered Anna?”
“Our kind buys reverence with fear.” She loaded up her thumb with the salve again and pressed it into the moist concavity of his eye sockets. I breathed deeply to keep my stomach straight.
“So the Rose Throne isn’t all one big happy vampire family?”
“The words happy and family do not belong in the same sentence as vampire.” She traced the outlines of his mutilated ears. “But this wasn’t us. The Rose Throne is pleased about Anna’s ascension. This was someone else.”
“Who? And why?”
“I’ll be trying to figure that out as soon as I leave here.”
I swallowed. I didn’t want to think of myself just now, but—“Whoever did this—could they come for me?”
Sike paused in her ministrations. “I suspect that this was done for show. Harming a daytimer’s much more of an affront than killing a mere human. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. “Somehow, your explanation doesn’t make me feel any more safe.”
“You don’t understand, Edie. Even without your badge, you wouldn’t. She can hear him inside her mind, crying.” Sike unwound his other hand and started to treat it. “Not killing him is worse than death, in this case.”
“Make him into a vampire then—” I prodded. It was what he’d wanted—what all daytimers did.
“With a human, vampire blood can only heal so much. And there are some things that becoming a vampire will not heal. You cannot regrow lost flesh—things lost in life, unhealed, stay gone. Would you want to live forever, like he is now?”
And I remembered Dren, eternally pissed at me for the loss of his hand, and his task for me tonight. I shook my head, and she nodded. “You see my point.”
Sike flipped her compact closed and pocketed it. Then she rewound the gauze around him, still bloody from the first time through.
“I can get you clean gauze, at least.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” She stood. “Gideon, follow me.”
Gideon stood and hobbled forward, like a stiff but obedient dog.
“Where will you take him?” I asked her, stepping out of their way.
She smiled cruelly. “Home.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Even if I had wanted to eat on my break, I didn’t have any time. The rest of Y4’s P.M. shift looked at me like I was some sort of traitor, which I supposed I was now. I put the trank gun away after taking out the darts, tossed Sike’s stolen lab coat into my locker, and went to wait for the elevator to head back up to trauma.
The doors opened and I heard steps from Y4 behind me. I hit the elevator’s CLOSE button and held it. I didn’t want to hear it from anyone else on my floor. At the last moment, a jacketed hand jabbed between the closing doors, sending them open again.
“Hey—” It was the were from this morning, the one who’d been leaning on my car. He shouldered his way into the elevator. I ran to the rear, putting my back into the corner. “No—look,” he said, then saw me and stopped where he was. “This is pretty threatening, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” My hands were up, pushing him away, even though I knew there’d be no way I could win a fight with him. He backed up, keeping his hands spread wide to hold the doors open.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” he said. I stood straighter and put my hands down. “I just didn’t expect for anything to ever happen to my uncle.”
I had no idea if Winter’s status had changed—I hadn’t looked at any charts on my way out the door. “I’m afraid I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know that you know.” He gave me an exhausted smile. “Thanks for keeping him alive, last night.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, unsure precisely what I was taking credit for when Gina’d done most of the work. He stepped back, then doors of the elevator closed, and the elevator rose up to the ground floor.
How lovely it was to sound honorable when I was 99 percent I sure would be bleeding his uncle tonight.
I would have sat down in the elevator to think, if it didn’t stink of were-piss from all the visitors that’d marked their territory as they rode up and down. A curl of gauze rode with me, Gideon’s, from his exit. It was half covered in blood and stuck to the floor. I’d probably stepped on it on my way inside.
I had no doubt that Dren would make good on his promise to drain Jake if I didn’t comply. Vampires were only honor-bound where other vampires were concerned—humans and daytimers were replaceable, as Gideon had found out.
It wasn’t the getting blood, so much as the not knowing what it’d be used for. Winter probably had enough blood now to spare—I knew we’d tanked him up with transfusions, ever since he’d been hit. But what would Dren do with the blood once I gave it to him? Dren was a Husker, a kind of vampire bounty hunter, which gave him some mandate to go around messing with people’s lives. I spent the duration of the elevator ride up pondering what Winter’s blood could possibly mean to him.
In the end, I supposed it didn’t matter—because what it meant to me was that Jake would be all right. I’d saved Jake from himself too many times for me to let him down now.
I walked into trauma past the charge nurse’s desk.