“So where’s your house?” He peered at us through his rearview mirror.
“What?”
“Your house. It’s around here somewhere, right?”
I tensed in the backseat, and then hissed in pain. “I thought you were taking me to the hospital.”
“Oh, I can’t. The weather’s just awful.” The limo began to slow.
I looked out the window. It was snowing, but no more than it’d been an hour ago, and the road ahead of us was empty. In other circumstances, it would have been pretty in the moonlight. The driver braked the limo to a stop.
“I can’t drive in this ice, lady.” His reflection frowned at me. “I don’t want to get trapped down here in this weather. You need to make up your mind.”
“What are you talking about?” I leaned forward, gritting my teeth, and Gideon grabbed my hand. The driver reached to put the limo in reverse.
“Never mind. We’re here.” I opened my door, hopped out, and Gideon followed. The limo driver did a U-turn in the middle of the intersection and drove away.
“Maybe I can change into a were, heal up, and then get shots,” I muttered to myself as we hobbled on our way in. Gideon offered me his arm, and I took it. “This is bullshit.”
It was eerie in the moonlight, walking in the middle of the road. A crunching sound began ahead of us, and I kept waiting for headlights to shine and force us to dive away. The crunching sound continued until we crested a small hill, and then its source was revealed.
People were hobbling toward us. Some of them had walkers that they were using in the ice. Others had crutches, wheelchairs, knee braces, walking alone or in pairs, pushing strollers, clutching one another for support.
They weren’t on the way to some fabulous New Year’s Eve party—they were leaving County, in nothing more than hospital gowns. It was a mass exodus, and we were in their way.
Gideon put his arm out and buffeted most of them aside. I tried to get some of them to talk, but they were as silent as the weres had been the night before—no, just this afternoon.
“Something’s wrong, Gideon,” I said. Gideon turned and looked at me with his eyeless-camera-lensed face. From somewhere near his chest, Grandfather said,
I was pretty sure he was agreeing.
County loomed on the horizon as we I neared. Hundreds of people passed us—I saw employees in their number. Lab techs with coats on, nurses and doctors in scrubs. I hoped none of them had left anyone behind in surgery.
In the moonlight County’s squat cement exterior made it look like a factory. I remembered a simpler time at another hospital, when I’d worked aboveground, and I’d check for lights in certain rooms as I walked in to work my shifts—a light on meant my prior night’s patient was still alive. I wasn’t sure what the lights inside County stood for now.
Gideon and I hobbled to the emergency entrance doors together. The doors slid open, and boy did the heat feel good. Gideon pulled his hat lower as the security officer arrived. It made sense—if I saw me wandering in from the street, looking like this, I’d wonder who got shot.
“Miss, I’m afraid we can’t see you tonight.” The officer blocked my path.
“I’m in need of emergency medical treatment.” The magic words that should get me through the door.
He stared over my shoulder, as if I weren’t even there. “We’re full—”
I pulled my badge out from my pocket, bloody lanyard and all. “I’m a hospital employee.”
“Then you know. It’s a Code Triage, we can’t take any more—” He kept talking. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t me. “You’ll have to go to another facility.”
Behind him, nurses and doctors and their assistants, my distant co-workers, were hustling a critical-looking patient out the door. That almost never happened. We were a level one trauma center. We could do it all. We didn’t discharge vented patients at—I looked up at a clock—three A.M.
“I’m going to my home floor. I work here.” I held up my badge in his field of vision. It glowed briefly before dimming again.
“Please go to your home floor to help with the immediate evacuation,” the officer said. I nodded.
“Will do.”
As much as it hurt me to walk, we took the back way, through the empty halls, so we wouldn’t be confronted again before we reached Y4.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Gideon and I could hear howls when the elevator doors opened. He helped me limp toward the double doors.
Meaty looked up from the main desk as I came in. “Edie? Are you okay? You look like hell.”
Gina came around the corner with a smile for me, and then pointed at Gideon. “Who’s he?”
“A friend. It’ll take too long to explain.” I hobbled over to the desk. Gideon took off his hat and started walking around the unit, looking at things.
“What’s going on?” Meaty asked as I slowly sat in a chair.
“The whole rest of the hospital is evacuating up there. It’s Code Triage—they’re not taking new people in, and they’re sending everyone inside out.”
Meaty said, “Tell me everything. Now.”
I whitecapped my past two days of events. They didn’t need to know about Gideon or Veronica, sex with Lucas, or the details of the whole ordeal I’d just been through. But they deserved to know why I had blood on me. It would be enough.
“So I came here to get were-shots, only then I saw all the chaos up above—”
“Did they get you?” Gina asked.
“Define
“Shit,” she cursed. “On a full-moon night? You’re going to need the full series.” She stood and went over to the Pyxis to pull out meds.
Meaty sighed deeply. “Protocol says to lock the doors and sit tight. Access to our floor is regulated anyhow —it’s not like they can come barging in.”
“Even when the Shadows are gone?” I asked Meaty.
Gina interrupted. “The Shadows are gone? What?”
Meaty looked away. “We thought it best not to tell anyone.”
I didn’t remember getting a vote, but it was spilled milk now. Behind us, in the newly expanded were-wing, the full moon was working on its children. In between howls, I could hear scrabbling claws, digging at tile—and the occasional thump as a wolf-person threw itself at its room doors. I wasn’t so worried about what might barge in, as what was trying to barge out.
“Who’s watching the zoo?” I asked.
“Rachel,” Gina answered, returning with a box of shots. I pulled out my cell phone.
“Do I have permission to call friends?”
“Are you sure they’re friends?” Meaty asked.
“After the night I’ve had, they’d better fucking be.”
I didn’t call, I texted—Sike, then Lucas.
Sike responded shortly. “On my way.” From probably phoneless and definitely thumbless Lucas, more silence.
Gina stabbed the first were-vaccination into my upper arm, smack into my deltoid muscle.
