Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fourteen days.
Three hundred and thirty-six hours since the moment Gemma had come back through the mirror into her normal life.
It’d probably been weeks for Skarde. She closed the calculator app and put the cell phone down on her office desk.
She shouldn’t have plugged in the numbers again.
The reminder pushed her overactive mind into further despair.
She massaged her achy feet. Lunch had come and gone two hours ago.
She’d forced herself to take this break in order to survive the last four hours of her shift.
It was a bad vein day for her, which meant she couldn’t hit a vein to place a catheter or draw blood from a patient, no matter how many times she had done so before.
Everyone had days when the blood gods hated them.
She put her head on the desk. Her mind worked circles around her trouble placing the catheter in her last patient.
Had it been the reason the stroke victim died?
Had she failed to get IV access fast enough?
She’d checked the DVD every single night. No new episode. A re-watch of all four episodes induced sobs by the end, so she stopped watching them.
A fellow nurse on the ward stuck her head into the shared nurse station. “Tough day?”
“Yeah.”
“Your hair looks good with the red highlights.”
“Thanks. I needed a change.” She didn’t lose any length when she had it highlighted yesterday. “I was stressed it’d be too bright, but it came out okay.”
“It’s perfect. Have you lost weight?”
“Maybe a bit.”
“Well, it works. I’ve got fifteen minutes to grab lunch. See you in a few.”
Gemma stared at the uneaten sandwich on her desk.
Her ass was way down from eating less, not that she’d been on a diet.
She simply had no appetite for anything.
Pining for him wasn’t healthy, as Val had pointed out yesterday—not that recognizing it as a problem helped.
She dreamed about him. Every time, the dream got right up to the moment when he’d almost have sex with her, and then it ended. It never moved beyond that point.
Her conclusion was she needed therapy to move past him.
Her first appointment yesterday afternoon hadn’t gone well.
The therapist seemed understanding right up until she admitted to being in love with a fictional vampire.
Then everything got weird. The lady made her say out loud, “Everything took place in my imagination.”
If only she was a loony tune with an overactive imagination, then this would be tolerable. She wrapped her fingers around the crystal still hanging around her neck.
She had been there. She pulled up her sleeve to stare at the scar where the arrow had pierced her upper arm. Healed, but real. Very real. Fantasies didn’t cause scars.
There was also the bracelet he gave her.
No matter the hurtful words he tossed at her, he’d gone to the dwarves to have them make this for her.
He’d once spoken of the dwarves, that he didn’t trust them, saying they despised vampires.
For her, he’d suffered their attitude. He’d faced VanFliet, whom he must’ve known lurked in the area.
She worried nonstop about the people she’d left behind, him in particular.
The healer instinct in her said Skarde needed someone to make him remember what it was like to have fun and live.
She wasn’t exactly a theme park tour guide overflowing with infectious positivity, but something about Skarde brought out the lighter side of her own personality.
She’d never in her life had a frank conversation about the craziness of her boobs, not even with Val.
One wardrobe malfunction in this world and she’d hide in embarrassment.
She’d also never talked dirty simply to see if she could get a guy off.
Beep. Beep.
Her desk phone flashed a call from the main ER floor.
Back to work. She answered the phone.
“Gemma, sorry to interrupt your lunch, but there’s a patient who came in and he’s asking for you,” the supervising nurse on the ER floor said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Motor-vehicle accident. He’s nuts and won’t let anyone touch him but you. He’s bad. Hurry. Curtain six.”
“On my way.”
Maybe it was someone from her building, not that she was buddy-buddy with any of her neighbors. Maybe it was an old patient she’d connected with. Who else did she know well enough for them to request her?
She navigated the busy floor to the area reserved for trauma patients.
Two nurses and one of the interns stood around the bed, waiting to stabilize a pale man she gauged to be in his early twenties.
One of his arms appeared to be broken. Glass was still strewn in his hair.
Deep cuts shredded his face and nose. His head looked swollen and bruised.
“Don’t touch me,” he gasped as one nurse reached for his arm. “Gemma Leight. I need Gemma.”
“I’m here,” she announced as she moved closer. “Do we know each other?”
His clear brown eyes locked on to her. He grabbed her wrist and rolled it while murmuring what she recognized as a spell. It didn’t seem malicious. He touched the exact spot Fontaine had lit up. Thank God, it didn’t glow. That she’d never be able to explain to her cohort. “The medicinal.”
Said as fact.
His gaze filled with relief as it met hers.
Her gut cramped. Friend or foe? “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Who is he?” the intern asked her.
Someone from another realm. Probably a warlock or mage.
Gemma shrugged a silent I-don’t-know.
The guy pulled her close and rasped out, “They’re here. Assassins. They’re dangerous. I jumped over here to warn you, but they’ve killed me.” He drew in a deep, shaky breath. “You’re our last hope. You have to go back. The vampire is in trouble.”
“How do I get to him?” she whispered without a shred of doubt the patient meant Skarde.
“Don’t let them have it. Don’t let them get—” He grabbed her hand as his pupils dilated, his breaths stopping.
The monitoring machine they’d managed to hook up to him cried out a warning as the man’s blood pressure dropped and he went into atrial fibrillation.
On autopilot, she helped perform CPR. Drugs were pushed. A tube was shoved into his throat and breaths were given. But it was useless. He was already gone.
As his limp hand slipped from hers, she felt something still in her hand. A small piece of paper. The one on which she’d written her name when messing with Skarde’s feather quill. On the other side of the paper was written: Don’t let them get the crystal.