working out and not eating anything afterward.
Patient . . . he was looking for his patient. . . . No name. He had no name, but he knew the room.
As he came up to the suite closest to the fire escape at the end of the hall, a flush shot through his body and he found himself making sure his white coat was hanging smoothly from his shoulders and then doing a hand-pass through his hair to neaten it up.
Clearing his throat, he braced himself, stepped inside, and—
The eighty-year-old man in the bed was asleep, but not at rest, tubes going in and out of him like he was a car in the process of being jump-started.
Dull pain thumped in Manny’s head as he stood there staring at the guy.
“Dr. Manello?”
Goldberg’s voice from behind him was a relief, because it gave him something concrete to grab onto . . . the lip of the pool, so to speak.
He turned around. “Hey. Good morning.”
The guy’s brows popped and then he frowned. “Ah . . . what are you doing here?”
“What do you think. Checking on a patient.” Jesus, maybe everyone was losing their minds.
“I thought you were going to take a week off.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s . . . ah . . . that’s what you told me when you left this morning. After we . . . found you in here.”
“What are you talking about?” But then Manny waved a hand in dismissal. “Listen, let me get some breakfast first—”
“It’s dinnertime, Dr. Manello. Six o’clock at night? You left here twelve hours ago.”
The flush that had heated him up whirlpooled out of him and was instantly replaced by a cold wash of something he never, ever felt.
Icy fear bowled him over and sent his pins spinning.
The awkward silence that followed was broken by the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, people rushing by in soft-soled shoes, hurrying to patients or rolling bins of laundry along or taking meals . . . dinner, natch . . . from room to room.
“I’m . . . going to go home now,” Manny said.
His voice was still as strong as ever, but the expression on his colleague’s face revealed the truth in and around him: No matter what he told himself about feeling better, he was not what he once had been. He looked the same. He sounded the same. He walked the same.
He even tried to convince himself he was the same.
But something had changed that weekend, and he feared that there was no going back from it.
“Would you like someone to drive you?” Goldberg asked tentatively.
“No. I’m fine.”
It took all the pride he had not to start running as he turned to leave: By force of will, he kicked back his head and straightened his spine and put one foot calmly in front of the other.
Oddly, as he went out the way he’d come in, he thought of his old surgery professor . . . the one who’d been “retired” by the school admin when he’d turned seventy. Manny had been a second-year med student at the time.
Dr. Theodore Benedict Standford III.
The guy had been a straight-up hard-ass prick in class, the kind of fucker who liked it best when the students gave the wrong answer, because it provided him with an opportunity to dress people down. When the school had announced his departure at the end of the year, Manny and his classmates had thrown a going-away party for the sorry bastard, all of them getting drunk in celebration that they were the last generation to be subjected to his bullshit.
Manny had been working as a custodian at the school that summer for cash, and he’d been mopping the hallway when the last of the movers had taken the final boxes from Standford’s office . . . and then the old man himself had turned the corner and wing-tipped it out for the last time.
He’d left with his head high, walking down the marble stairs and leaving through the majestic front entrance with his chin up.
Manny had laughed at the arrogance of the man, undying even in the face of age and obsolescence.
Now, walking that same way, he wondered if that had been true.
More likely, Standford had felt as Manny did now.
Discarded.
SEVENTEEN
Jane heard the tearing sound all the way down in the training center’s office. The ripping woke her up, yanking her head off the pillow of her forearms and snapping her spine straight from its curl over the desk.
Ripping . . . and flapping . . .
At first, she thought it was a gust of wind, but then her brain clicked on. No windows here underground. And it would take a damn thunderstorm to create that much of a disturbance.
Bolting up from the chair and scrambling around the desk, she hit the corridor outside in a run as she gunned for Payne’s room. All doors were open for precisely this reason: She had only one patient, and although Payne was mostly quiet, if something happened—
What the
Jane skidded around the doorjamb of the recovery room and just about screamed. Oh, God . . . the
“Payne!” She rushed for the bed.
V’s twin was going wild, her arms flailing around, her fingers clawing at the sheets and also at herself, her sharp nails biting into the skin of her upper arms and shoulders and collarbones.
“I can’t feel it!” the female yelled, her fangs flashing, her eyes so wide there was white all around them. “I can’t feel anything!”
Jane lunged forward and grabbed one of those arms, but her grip slipped the instant contact was made, snapping off all those slick scratches. “Payne! Stop it!”
As Jane fought to still her patient, bright red blood spackled her face and white coat.
“Payne!” If this kept up, those wounds were going to be deep enough to show bone. “Stop—”
The Bic pen appeared in Payne’s hand from out of nowhere—except, no, it wasn’t magical. . . . The thing was Jane’s, the one she kept in the side pocket of her white coat. The instant she saw it, all the furious flapping morphed into a surreal slow-mo as Payne’s hand lifted up.
Her stabbing swipe was so strong and sure that there was no stopping it.
The sharp point pierced through the female’s heart, dead on, and her torso jerked upward, a death gasp shooting in through her open mouth.
Jane screamed, “
“Jane—wake up!”
The sound of Vishous’s voice made no sense. Except then she opened her eyes . . . to complete darkness. The clinic and the blood and Payne’s hoarse breathing were replaced by a black visual shroud that—
Candles flared to life, and the first thing she saw properly was Vishous’s hard face. He was right beside her, even though they hadn’t gone to bed at the same time.
“Jane, it was only a dream. . . .”
“I’m okay,” she blurted, shoving her hair out of her face. “I’m . . .”
While she propped herself up on her arms and panted, she wasn’t sure what was dream and what was real. Especially given that Vishous was next to her. Not only had they not been going to bed together; they hadn’t been waking up together either. She assumed he was sleeping down in his forge, but maybe that hadn’t been the
