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I wanted to believe they were anthropomorphic, as I assumed I’d met one—the man who’d gotten me to sign the dotted line when I was first here with Jake. I hadn’t seen him since. But Charles said “they” (complete with scare quotes) lurked in the corners by our entrance door, screening visitors, unseen. Since that made them sound like omnipotent dust bunnies, I preferred the version of them in my own imagination.
We did have ancillary staff, and not all of them were permanent Y4 employees. I felt sure the daytime social workers were, the nursing managers, and of course the doctors and all us RNs. But the respiratory therapists that came through and an occasional extra janitor usually seemed to pause in the doorway an extra second or two, both on their way out and on their way in. When you saw them above in County’s normal hallways and waved, they were usually polite in return, but their faces had that look of “Who are you?” that never reached any satisfactory conclusion. Sometimes I waved at them for the fun of it.
I ducked into the break room and surveyed the food-for-all left out from prior shifts on the small table.
“Awwww, you miss us,” Charles said from the door, peeking in.
I put on my best “hardly” face, borrowed from Shawn. “No. You guys just have the biggest refrigerator. ” But he was already gone. I pulled a Diet Coke out of the fridge that I’d been holding in reserve, grabbed my PB&J, and followed him to the floor.
“So who’s here tonight?” I asked.
“Two motor vehicle accidents, one end-stage cancer, and one really advanced STD. ” He jerked his chin forward. “Go check out the corrals. ”
I did as I was told, walking around the nursing station toward rooms one and two. I waved to Meaty, who nodded without looking up. Turning the corner I found Gina with a large flowsheet spread out over two of our skinny desks.
“Whatcha working on?”
“The schedule. ” She fluttered a stack of pink time-off requests, and I felt my stomach drop again. Just because they hadn’t deactivated my badge didn’t mean they weren’t going to shortly take it away.
“Am I back on soon?” I asked, glad my voice didn’t break.
“What, you miss us?”
The flush that I denied Charles, I let rise now. “No. My cat. Bills,” I stammered.
“Uh-huh. ” She chuckled. “You’re on in two nights. And then I scheduled you straight through a week so you wouldn’t have to burn out your paid time off on your sick leave. ”
Brillant! Not that I’d ever be able to afford a vacation, but I derived a certain satisfaction from accruing the hours. “Thanks, Gina, that’s great. ”
“No problem. ”
There was a rustling and then a scratching sound behind steel door number one. “Who’s on first?”
She pointed up to the closed-camera TV without looking.
I looked up and blinked twice. It isn’t every day you see something that you’ve never seen before. The daytimers and vampires—they look like humans. And high-level zombies (the Haitian-magic kind, not the grungy movie undead) and most of the weres I’d seen, when they visited, all looked human too. No one came in shaped like a wolf, though sometimes once they were here they ended up that way. Those forms were all on my radar, from walking down the street, movies, the zoo or the Discovery Channel. But what was on the camera’s circuit right now was something I was completely unprepared to believe existed.
A dragon.
It roiled around the steel-plated room, two sizes too small for it, overlapping its scaly self. It was a deep emerald green, like it was carved out of moving jade, and it didn’t have any wings, but it had four legs, a tail, and a snout that was muzzled.
“Sweet Jesus Jones. ”
“Pretty awesome, right? They’re freaking rare. ” Gina put her spreadsheet down. “I’ve only seen one twice before. ”
My jaw was still dropped. “What—how?”
“Weres can happen in all sorts of forms. He, as a human, was in town on business. He doesn’t have any other members of his clan here for a safe house—they’re mostly seen in Europe and Asia. He noticed some problems with his parts”—her hand swirled over her lap, indicating her nether regions—“so he came in. ”
“What’s he sick with?”
“Syphilis. Would you believe it? We’re treating him now, huge amounts of penicillin, and he’ll be fine, but you can see why we didn’t want him out spreading it on the streets. ”
I snorted, remembering a youth misspent reading fantasy novels. “Yeah, just think of the virgins. ”
Gina glared at me.
“You’re serious?”
“Totally. He probably wouldn’t get anyone pregnant in human form—the were dragons are pretty inbred. But he could totally transmit his disease, and he does have a genetic proclivity toward pretty young things. He’s very charismatic too. I talked to him some before his form came on. Lovely British accent. ”
My heart skipped a beat. “Really?”
She nodded. “Why?”
I shook my head. The chances of me having recently slept with a charismatic dragon with an STD had just gone from absolute zero to something in the finite range. Compared to this, my angry Germanic mystery in pediatrics was boring.
Charles came around the corner. “Finding a virgin in this town must be pretty hard, charisma or no. ”
Gina shrugged. “It does happen, you know. ”
“Hell, finding a virgin in this hospital must be pretty hard,” Charles continued. I gave a nervous laugh.
“Since seventy-six here,” Meaty offered from around the bend.
