say?'
The nurse stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face him. 'I didn't say anything. Sir.' That last word sounded sharp enough to cut.
'I think you did,' Michael said. 'You called her a fang-banger.'
The nurse smiled coldly. 'If I muttered something under my breath, sir, that shouldn't concern you. You and your — girlfriend — ought to do your business in the waiting room. Or the blood bank.'
Michael's hands curled into fists, and his face went tight with rage. 'It's not like that.'
The nurse — her nametag said her name was Christine Fenton, R.N. —outright sneered at him. 'Yeah, it never is. It's always different, right? You're just misunderstood. You want to hurt me, go ahead and try. I'm not afraid of you. Any of you.'
'Good,' Michael said. 'You shouldn't be afraid of me because I'm a vampire. You ought to be scared because you just trash-talked my girlfriend to her face.'
Nurse Fenton flipped him off and kept walking.
'Wow,' Eve said. She almost sounded like herself again, as if having somebody diss her had helped, like a slap in the face. 'And people treated me bad when I dated Bobby Fee. Well, at least he was breathing. Mouth-breathing, yeah, but — '
Michael put his arm around her, still staring after the nurse. He had a frown on his face, but he forced it off to smile at Eve and plant a kiss on her forehead.
'You need some rest. Let's go back to the waiting room,' he said. 'I promise not to embarrass you any more.' He guided her that direction, and threw a look back. 'Claire? You coming?'
She nodded absently, but her mind was somewhere else, trying to sort through data. Fenton. She'd seen that name before, hadn't she? Not the nurse, though, she'd never met her before and now really didn't look forward to ever seeing her again.
Claire realized she was standing alone in the hallway, and shivered. While this was a modern building, not nearly as nasty as the old, falling-to-ruins abandoned hospital where she and Shane had been chased for their lives, it still brought the creepy. She threw one last, aching glance at the frosted glass doors that read SURGICAL AREA - ADMITTANCE TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She couldn't see anything beyond except vague moving shadows.
She followed Michael back to the waiting room. Richard Morrell was gone, which was good, and Claire sat in silence, rubbing her hands together, still feeling the phantom slickness of Shane's blood on her skin.
'Hey,' Michael said. She didn't know how much time had passed, just that she was stiff and sore and tense. She looked up into his crystal-blue eyes, and saw strength and kindness, but just a little bit of a glitter that didn't seem ... natural. 'Rest. I can almost hear the gears grinding in your head.' Eve was asleep in his lap, curled up like a cat. He was stroking her dark hair. 'Here,' he said. 'Lean in.' And he put his arm around Claire, and she leaned, and despite everything that had happened she felt warm and safe.
It all fell in on her then, all the fear and the pain and the fact that Shane had gotten shot, right in front of her, and she didn't know how to deal with that, didn't know how to feel or what to say or do and it was all just ...
She turned her face into Michael's blue silk shirt and cried, silent heaving sobs that tore up out of her guts in painful jerks. Michael's hand cradled her head, and he let her cry.
She felt him press his cool lips to her temple when she finally relaxed against him, and then she just slid away, into the dark.
###
Claire fought her way, panicked, out of a nightmare, and into another one. Hospital. Shane. Surgery.
Eve was shaking her with both hands on her shoulders, babbling at her, and she couldn't follow the words, but the words didn't matter at first.
Eve was smiling.
'He's okay,' Claire said in a whisper, then louder. 'He's okay!'
'Yeah,' Eve said, the words tumbling out in a confusing bright flood, way too fast. 'He's out of surgery, it was touch and go, he had a lot of internal bleeding, he's going to be in ICU for a few days before they let him come home, and he'll have a temporary bracelet, you know, the plastic kind?'
Claire tried to literally shake the sleepy fog out of her head. 'Plastic — wait, don't you always get one of those in the hospital? Like an ID tag?'
'Do you? Really? How weird. Oh. Well, in Morganville you leave it on when you leave, and it protects you for up to a month after surgery. Kind of like a temporary vampire restraining order.' Eve actually bounced up and down. 'He's going to be okay, oh my God, he's going to be okay!'
Claire scrambled out of her seat, grabbed Eve's arms, and the two of them bounced together up and down, then fell into a hug and squealed.
'I'll just — let you guys do that,' Michael said. He was sitting in the chairs watching, but he was smiling. He looked tired.
'What time is it?' Claire asked.
'Late. Early.' Eve checked her skull watch. 'About six in the morning. Michael, you should get home, it'll be dawn soon. I'll stay here with Claire.'
'We should all go home,' Michael said. 'He's not going to wake up for hours yet. You could change clothes.'
Claire looked down at herself, and grimaced tiredly. 'Yeah, I could,' she admitted. Shane's blood had soaked into her patterned tights, and she thought Michael could probably smell it. She could even smell it, a musty, rotten odor that made her gag. 'Eve? You want to go too?'
Eve nodded. The three of them walked out of the waiting room and down the long, empty hallway toward the elevators. They passed the front desk, where Nurse Fenton glared at them. When Claire looked back, as they waited for the elevator, Nurse Fenton was dialing the phone.
'Why do I know that name?' she asked, and then realized, duh, she was with two Morganville natives. 'Fenton? You guys know anything about her?'
The elevator arrived. Eve stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby, and she and Michael looked at each other for a second.
'The family's been here for generations,' Michael said. 'Nurse Charming out there's a new arrival. She came to TPU for school, married into the family.'
'You met her husband,' Eve said. 'Officer Fenton, Brad Fenton. He's the one who — '
'The one who showed up when Sam was attacked,' Claire blurted. 'Of course! I forgot his name.' Why did that still leave her vaguely uneasy? She couldn't remember anything that Officer Fenton had done that had made her think he was anti-vamp; he'd acted quickly enough when Sam was in trouble. Not like his wife, who clearly wasn't as open-minded.
She worried about it for a while, but couldn't see any real connection, and there were other things to think about. After all, Shane was okay, and that was all that mattered.
###
A shower helped, but it didn't banish the dull ache between Claire's eyes, or the strange gray cast the world had taken on. Exhaustion, she guessed, and stress. Nothing looked quite right. She changed clothes, grabbed her backpack, and went back to the hospital — this time, taking a cab, despite it being broad daylight — to wait for visiting hours to start in ICU. No sign of Jason, but then, she hadn't expected him to be that obvious. Or that stupid. He'd managed to get away with it this long.
But then again ... He really hadn't struck her as all that far-thinking, either. More of a want-take-have kind of guy. So what did that mean? Was Eve right? Was this a giant official cover-up, and Jason had been given free rein to run around town raping and killing and shooting as the mood moved him? She shuddered to think.
Nurse Fenton was, mercifully, off duty when Claire arrived. She checked in with the younger, nicer lady at the desk, whose name was Helen Porter, and went to find the least uncomfortable chair in the waiting area. The building wasn't completely lame; there were laptop connections and desks, and she set herself up there. The wireless was crap, but there was a LAN connection, and that worked fine.
Of course, the filters restricted where she could go on the internet, and she quickly grew frustrated trying to find out what was happening in the world outside of Morganville ... more of the same, she guessed. War, crime, death, atrocity. Sometimes it hardly seemed that vampires were the bad guys, given the things people did to each
