Love Is in the Air (2 page)

Maria’s teasing halted, even though her lips curved into a perfect
O
.

The only things that appeared capable of movement were the hairs at the back of her neck. They bristled in a panic. Something was on the move as air brushed past her knee. With effort, she turned her gaze in that direction.

In the near-blinding flash of lightning, a figure lurked, wrapped in shadows that shouldn’t exist. The only clear feature she could make out was a pair of sapphire-blue eyes. Sal tried to focus, to see the face beyond the eyes, but her mind refused to obey.

Then, something glinted.

A knife. Raised above her best friend’s head.

CHAPTER 2

Sal tried to yell. She tried to push Maria out of harm’s way, but found herself bound to her seat.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The claps of thunder hit the doors, rattling the glass against their frames. Charts fell off desks. Vials of antibiotics shattered. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the lightning played itself out, and the ER plunged into darkness.

Finally, Sal’s pent-up energy found a release.

“Ouch!” Kazsa screamed as she drove the needle into his tender flesh.

“Maria, move!” Sal yelled, rising and tipping her stool over. The metal chair clanged across the room as she bolted toward her friend.

“Is this an earthquake?” Kasza wheezed.

Maria apparently thought so as she scrambled out from under a bank of monitors above her head. Once they didn’t come crashing down, Maria breathed a sigh of relief.

“It’s okay. It wasn’t the Big One. We’re good.”

But it wasn’t good. Not good at all. Although Sal’s fear wasn’t fueled by a seismic event, the terror felt just as big and even more pressing. A threat more personal than tectonic plates chafing against one another.

Sal flicked on her penlight and swept the area in a panicked search. The thin beam jiggled as her hand shook, the silhouette of the knife still sharp in her mind.

“Didn’t you see him?”

“See who?” Maria asked.

Sal didn’t have time to answer. She was too busy checking behind the bed and between the oxygen tanks. In the cluttered ER, there were so many places the attacker could hide. He could be anywhere.

“Isn’t anybody paying attention? That hurt!” Kasza grunted, trying to lean over his bleeding foot. But he couldn’t fold himself that tightly.

With precision, Maria swiped the blood away from the wayward needle prick as if it had never been there. “Yeah, why don’t you remind us what landed you here in the first place?”

Sal barely noticed Kasza’s cheeks become ruddy with embarrassment as she jerked back the curtain of the next bed to find the gurney empty, just as it should be. Everything appeared exactly as it should be, yet the hairs on the back of her neck refused to relax.

“How could you not have seen him? He was standing right behind you. Over you. With a knife.”

Maria didn’t take the news the way that Sal meant it. “Was he hot?”

“No,” Sal snapped. Could eyes
really
be that blue? “Well, maybe.”

Kasza propped himself up on one elbow. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I want—”

While Sal flashed her penlight under the EKG machine, futilely searching for the attacker, Maria snorted at Kasza. “Dude, while you were trying to cut your animal-style Double-Double burger in half, you dropped the knife and sliced your pudgy-ass ankle… I’m sorry, ‘cankle.’ So why don’t you spend your time reassessing both your In-N-Out eating habits and your knife-handling skills while we straighten this out?”

“I didn’t come to the ER for a life coach,” Kasza grumbled, but lay back in the bed.

Maria helped Sal move a bulky telemetry unit from the wall. Relief that her best friend had finally taken her concern seriously evaporated as Maria nudged her. “Well, was he hot or not?”

Sal loved the nurse beyond social norms, but right now Maria’s playful attitude grated on her frayed nerves. But instead of snapping, Sal just sighed. If she didn’t accurately describe the guy, Maria would never let it go.

“Look, he was tall…” That she knew for certain, yet it had taken an incredible effort to dredge even that much up. It was ridiculous. If she couldn’t remember him now, how would she describe him to the police?

“And?” Maria prompted.

Sal squinted, straining to reshape the memory. “Wide shoulders. And boots. Leather boots.”

“Dude! That guy can almost stab me anytime.”

Ignoring her friend, Sal tried to cobble those fragmented images into a whole person, but the picture wouldn’t coalesce. No matter how hard she tried, the details stayed fuzzy, incomplete.

“Um, can I get someone with more experience to finish?” Startled, Sal swung her penlight around, causing Kasza to shield his eyes. “Yeah, I’m definitely going to want a second opinion.”

In her panic, Sal had forgotten she had a patient.

As confusion replaced terror, she went to sit down, but found her stool overturned a good ten feet away. How had it gotten way over there?

“Seriously,” Kasza said, “I don’t want her anywhere near—”

Luckily, Maria cut the patient off. “Don’t bother looking on your bill for this advice, because it’s free. Any refresher course will cost you, though.”

As the nurse stared down their upset patient, Sal righted her stool and sank down onto the cushion, shaking her head. She came from Welsh and Mexican stock. She should be hardier than this.

Maria continued full speed ahead. “First. Half of an animal-style Double-Double is still a Mr. Big and Tall warehouse full of calories and cholesterol. If you want to give your heart and us a break, take up water aquatics and salads.” Her friend took in a huge breath. “Second. She’s the best you got. The only attending physician who could make it in today is up in the ICU treating actual patients. So butch up.”

Sal couldn’t help but sense that Maria was talking to her as much as to the patient. However, she couldn’t shake this sense of imminent threat. Of what, Sal wasn’t quite sure. Her skin felt cold and clammy, as if she’d just awakened from a nightmare. Her body prepared for mortal danger, but the images that elicited such panic were beyond her grasp. The harder she tried to hold onto the memory of that single terrifying moment, the more slippery it became, like an eel slithering out of her grasp.

“Are we ready to begin, Dr. Calon?” Maria asked.

Sal couldn’t help but grin. Her friend had invoked the code. Whenever one of them wandered off topic, it snapped them back to professional mode.

“Why yes, Nurse Roder, I am.”

Maybe she hadn’t seen anyone at all.

Feeling almost normal again, Sal shook off her anxiety. She’d gotten so worked up, and for what? Just a trick of the light played upon eyes weary from working so many hours in the dim ER.

Confidently, Sal patted the patient’s leg. “Don’t worry. You’re in good hands. Two more stitches, and we’ll be done.”

Sal flicked her wrist, about to drive the needle in, when the ambulance bay doors burst open. Steel gurney wheels clattered against the tile floor at breakneck speed.

“Ouch!” Kasza squealed as Sal missed her mark yet again.

“Frank, we’re closed for traumas!” Maria yelled to the EMT.

“Tell that to this guy!” he shouted back, as he and his partner pushed the patient full tilt toward Trauma One. “He’s lost at least three liters!”

“He’s here!” the frail man yelled, thrashing against his restraints.

Sal felt herself stiffen at the hysterical man’s words. They rang of truth, although she was hard-pressed to say why. The guy sounded like every other tweaked-out meth addict they’d seen.

The man’s eyes rolled back in his head. “He comes for us all!”

CHAPTER 3

Sal stood motionless as the gurney hung a sharp right and skidded around the corner toward Trauma One. She should be running after it. Or she should be sewing up Mr. Kasza. Yet, she did neither.

When she didn’t react, Maria shouted to the closest intern, “Clipsham! Finish sewing this guy up.” The nurse turned to Sal. “Come on!”

Sal had to be shoved forward, but once her feet were moving, the adrenaline served as a tonic, flushing from her bloodstream whatever irrational fears her mind had conjured.

She summoned a smile when Maria said, “Man, now I’ve got a craving for In-N-Out. We should get it for dinner.”

As they caught up to the gurney, Sal shook her head. “Sorry. I’ve got my big date tonight, remember?”

“Well, if it’s not as ‘big’ as you recollect, you can always swing back by here. Or maybe we’ll do Fatburger. They’ve got bacon and that fried-egg thing to go on the cheeseburger.”

“Give me the cholesterol count on that one.” Buoyed by their shared enjoyment of Maria’s hypocrisy, Sal felt the terror-filled memory snap loose and sink from her consciousness.

They reached the gurney as it burst through Trauma One’s swinging doors. “Whatcha got, Frank?”

“Somebody sliced and diced this guy, bad. Head to toe.”

The sight of the injured man snuffed out any lingering cheer. Even in the flickering penlight, copious amounts of blood stood out starkly red against the man’s T-shirt. It lent the ER’s stagnant air a tang of iron. They could taste the man’s blood loss with every breath.

“Run, before he gets you!” the man screamed, his pasty lips pulled back into a snarl.

“I’m hanging four units off the top, unless anyone’s got a problem with that,” Maria more announced than asked as she squeezed past them to the cold storage.

Given that her friend could run a code better than most interns, Sal only added, “Let’s order a blue plate special to go with that blood.”

Paul, their slightly effeminate—yet highly efficient—trauma nurse, organized the stream of other nurses, interns, and med students that followed the wounded addict like hyenas to a kill.

Examining a profusely bleeding wrist wound, Sal was surprised to find the cut so superficial. It barely rated paper cut status. Somehow, though, it had cut down to the artery. If she’d been shown the wound without the volumes of blood, Sal would have bet a month’s salary that the tiny nick would heal without even a scar.

And there wasn’t just one such injury. There were nearly a dozen thin-edged wounds that cut into the worst possible blood vessels. One transected the jugular, and another, the cubital artery, with more scattered over the body. Nobody hit this many major vessels by chance.

“Somebody really wanted to bleed this guy dry,” Paul commented, voicing Sal’s concern.

“Hey, maybe your mystery man is a vamp!” Maria said with a wink.

Frank snorted. “A really wasteful one.”

The EMT was right about that. Blood saturated the man’s clothes.

“Maria, does the pattern remind you of anything?” Paul asked.

“These are our last two bags of O negative.” Maria finished hooking up the pint of blood to the rapid infuser before she answered. “Damn, but it does. Those boring-ass slides from ‘history of phlebotomy’ class.”

“Want to fill the resident in?” Sal prompted.

Paul nodded toward the wounds. “These cuts are placed in exactly the same pattern that medieval physicians used to blood-let.”

Maria nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah. Something about how the cuts represented the five alchemistical axes,” Maria added. “Or Hogwarts’ lines or—”

“Got it,” Sal said before Paul could go into a rampage over Harry Potter getting more press than Tolkien. “Do we have a central line in yet?”

One of the interns who Sal didn’t yet know by name shook his head.

“His pressure is for crap. He’s never going to survive this much blood loss.”

True, what poured out of the victim’s veins was now more Lactated Ringers than blood. That didn’t mean they couldn’t turn the tide, though. This wasn’t the Dark Ages. They had more than poultices and potions to counter this man’s mortal wounds.

“Maria?”

“On it,” the nurse said as she nudged the intern out of the way.

“But I was—”

“Giving up on him,” Sal said, catching the younger doctor’s gaze. “I don’t care how bad he looks. I don’t care what his vitals are. As long as the patient has a heartbeat, we work our asses off. Understood?”

“Yes. Of course. Can I try again, then?”

“No,” Sal and Maria said in unison. Normally they were all about the instructing. Working at a teaching hospital, Sal felt it was important to instill in her students a respect for the nature of disease. Medicine was not a panacea, but a mechanism to help the body’s own healing potential.

But with this much blood loss? They didn’t have a moment’s leeway.

They needed the
A
team on this one, and way more O-negative blood.

Sal instructed the intern, “Go downstairs and get another six units.”

The guy just stood there, flustered.

“Down in the basement. The blood bank. Go!” Paul barked.

Finally, the intern’s feet worked, and he rushed toward the stairwell.

“I’m in!” Maria announced as she pulled the central line’s guide wire out so fast that it whistled past her ear. “Let’s hook up that second bag.”

The patient grabbed Sal’s wrist. “He’s here!”

Whether it was the man’s chilling tone or the movement along her peripheral vision, gooseflesh raised along Sal’s collar. Instinct snapped her head to the right. Just outside the trauma bay’s door, the edge of a coat disappeared around the corner.

A leather coat.

CHAPTER 4

At the sight of that damned coat, Sal’s memories flooded back. Still, they were more a jumble of images than a coherent picture.

Sal turned to Maria. “Did you see him that time?”

“Hell, yes! That was a Grade-A piece of ass.”

Maria’s sarcastic tone rang false. There was nothing lighthearted or trivial in Sal’s recollection of this man. Dread constricted her stomach.

Sal called to an orderly walking past the trauma room, “Get security!”

“Why?” Maria asked. “So they can charge him with illegal hotness?”

“Hey,” Frank exclaimed. “That’s what you used to say about me.”

“That’s when you still fit the description,” the nurse teased.

Sal couldn’t take their banter. “Could we please stay focused?”