Chapter Three
SLOANE
The Next Night
Blood seeps through my fingers in a raging torrent.
I press down harder on the gunshot wound in the kid’s abdomen, my gloved hands slick and warm, the crimson pooling faster than I can control it.
He can’t be more than nineteen. His eyes are wide, pupils blown with shock and terror, mouth working soundlessly in a futile search for air.
“Stay with me,” I tell him, my voice steady even as my heart hammers against my ribs. “You’re gonna be fine. Look at me. Look at me!”
But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking past me, through me, at something I can’t see. Something only the dying can witness.
The emergency room is chaotic tonight. Saturday nights always are, but this one is different.
Worse somehow. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, casting everything in that sickly greenish glow that makes living people look half dead.
Somewhere behind me, a woman is screaming about her daughter.
Metal clatters against tile. Someone is coding in bay three.
The monitors are shrieking their discordant symphony of failing vitals.
And beneath it all, there’s that smell.
Copper, antiseptic, fear, and sweat, so thick I can taste it on my tongue.
“Sloane, we need you in three!” Kevin shouts from across the floor, his scrubs already painted red. Dr. Kevin Mercer, my favorite attending, is the only one who doesn’t treat nurses like glorified waitpeople, even if he does make googly eyes at me occasionally.
“Little busy here, Kevin!”
“She’s got about ninety seconds before she flatlines, and you’re the only one with hands free.”
I glance down at the kid beneath my palms. His pulse is thready, fading. But the bleeding is slowing. Not because I’m doing anything right, but because there’s almost nothing left to bleed.
Dammit, he’s already gone.
The thought hits me cold and certain, the way it always does. I don’t know how I know. I just do, and have done, since I was a kid.
Some people get feelings about the weather or traffic.
I get feelings about death.
So goddamn macabre.
“Take over,” I bark at Tam, one of the newer nurses hovering uselessly by the supply cart. She startles, then rushes forward as I step back, peeling off my gloves with a wet snap.
I’m already moving toward bay three before she asks what to do.
The woman on the gurney is maybe forty, face the color of old newspaper, lips blue-tinged. Clearly an overdose. Her daughter is at her bedside, seventeen, maybe eighteen, mascara tracking black lines down her cheeks.
“Please,” the girl begs, grabbing my arm with trembling fingers. “Please don’t let her die. Please! She’s all I have.”
I meet her eyes, red-rimmed, desperate, drowning in despair, and something in my chest cracks open. Not sympathy, something deeper, something that hurts.
“We’re doing everything we can,” I tell her, even though we both know it’s a lie. Even though I can already feel that cold certainty settling in my bones like a winter’s frost.
She’s already gone too.
Kevin is at the woman’s head, bagging her chest manually, counting compressions under his breath. Another nurse, Suzie, is pushing meds through the IV. The monitor flatlines with a long, unbroken whine that never gets easier to hear.
I step up to the bedside and place my hands on the woman’s chest, feeling for the lower half of the sternum, preparing to take over compressions.
The moment my skin makes contact, heat floods through me.
Not normal heat.
Something else.
Something starts deep in my core and rushes outward as though I have wildfire in my veins. My vision whites out for half a second, and I swear I see a woman with dark hair and eyes resembling bleeding rubies, reaching for me, saying my name as though it is a prayer.
“Sloane!”
I blink, and the vision is gone.
Kevin stares at me, concern creasing his forehead. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.” My voice sounds far away, as though I’m hearing it through water.
I shake my head, clearing the fog. “Let’s go.
One, two, three…” I start compressions, falling into the rhythm that’s been drilled into me since nursing school.
Thirty compressions, two breaths. Thirty compressions, two breaths.
The woman’s ribs crack under my weight, and I push down the nausea that always comes with this part.
You never get used to the feeling of breaking someone to save them.
Except she’s not being saved.
The monitor stays flat.
Another round.
Another.
Another.
“Sloane,” Kevin says quietly. “She’s been down for eleven minutes.”
“One more round.”
“Sloane—”
“One. More. Round!”
He sighs but doesn’t stop me. I keep going, sweat gathering at my hairline, my arms burning, while behind me, the daughter sobs somberly, each one spiking straight through my skull.
She’s gone.
I know it.
But I can’t stop.
Because if I stop, the girl loses her mother.
If I stop, I’m the one who decides when someone’s life ends.
And I’ve had enough of death deciding things for me.
‘Sloane,’ I hear a woman’s voice in my ear again, closer this time, as though she’s standing right behind me, and I snap my head around.
“Time of death, 22:47,” Kevin announces.
I turn back to look at him, my heart racing in my chest, my breathing rapid as I blink a few times, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. My hands still on the woman’s chest. The sudden silence is deafening, broken only by the daughter’s wail of grief.
I step back, my arms dropping to my sides. Someone covers the body with a sheet. Someone else is ushering the daughter out, her screams fading down the hallway.
I stand there, staring at the shape under the white sheet, and I feel nothing.
No. That’s wrong.
I feel everything.
I just don’t show it.
“Go take five,” Kevin says softly, his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been on for twelve hours.”
“We’re slammed.”
“We’re always slammed. Go,” he orders.
I don’t argue. I peel off my gloves, more blood, always more blood, and head for the staff break room.
My legs feel disconnected from my body, as though I’m being puppeted through the motions.
The break room is blessedly empty, and I collapse onto the ratty couch that smells of old coffee and someone’s forgotten lunch, dropping my head into my hands.
I’m so fucking tired.
Not just tonight-shift tired. Soul tired. The kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.
I close my eyes, and immediately the nightmares begin flickering behind my eyelids.
Always the same woman. Dark hair spilling over pale shoulders.
Eyes that burn red and gold. She’s standing in a room made of shadows, calling my name, her voice layered with something ancient, a darkness flowing through her.
‘Sloane. Sloane. Come home to me.’
I jerk awake, my heart pounding. “Shit!” I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars. “I need a vacation.”
Or therapy.
Probably therapy.
My phone suddenly buzzes in my pocket, and I dig it out.
Priya: Kid from bay one didn’t make it. Sorry.
I stare at the screen until the words blur.
Another death.
Another failure.
Another set of eyes I’ll see when I try to sleep.
I shove the phone back in my pocket and stand, my body protesting every movement. I need to get back out there. People are still dying, and apparently, I’m the only one twisted enough to keep showing up for front-row seats.
As I’m pushing through the break room door, I nearly collide with Suzie.
“Hey, girl,” she says, catching my arm to steady me. “You look like hell.”
“Feel like it too.”
“You heading home after shift?”
I glance at the wall clock. 23:15. Another forty-five minutes and I’m free. “That’s the plan.”
“Want to grab a drink? A bunch of us are hitting up that new place downtown… Sins & Spirits? Supposed to be biker-owned or something. Bit rough, but the drinks are strong, and they’re cheap… score!”
The name slams into my chest.
Sins & Spirits.
I’ve heard it before.
Seen it mentioned in police reports when trauma cases come through with connections to gang activity. Dangerous, violent, and the kind of place respectable people avoid.
So why does something in me lurch toward it, dragged by a force I can’t resist?
“I don’t think so,” I say, even as my pulse kicks up. “I’m exhausted.”
“Come on. One drink. You need it after tonight.”
She’s not wrong.
But that pull, that inexplicable, irrational pull toward a place I’ve never been, it scares me more than any nightmare.
“Rain check,” I tell her, before forcing a smile.
She shrugs. “Suit yourself. But you’re gonna burn out if you don’t blow off steam, Sloane.”
“I’ll be sure to work on that.”
Suzie heads back to the emergency room, and I stand in the hallway, trying to convince my feet to follow her.
Instead, I pull out my phone and google Sins & Spirits.
The first result is a minimalist website with a black background and crimson text.
SINS & SPIRITS
Where Darkness Drinks
One photo.
A shot of the bar’s exterior—low lighting, motorcycles lined up out front like metal sentries, neon signs glowing red against brick.
And something about it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
‘Come home.’
Letting out a frustrated groan, I roll my shoulders and close the browser, shoving the phone away as though it burned me.
I’m losing it.
That’s the only explanation.
Working too many shifts, sleeping too little, seeing too much death. The mind fractures under that kind of pressure. It was a lesson I learned in foster care, watching other kids crack under the weight of too much trauma and not enough safety, you either build walls or break with them.
I survived by keeping my head down, by staying small, staying quiet, staying sane.
So why do I suddenly want to walk into a biker bar in the worst part of town and see what happens?
‘Because you’re tired of staying small,’ a voice whispers in the back of my mind. ‘Because you’ve been running from something your whole life, and you’re finally too exhausted to keep running.’
“Screw that!” I mutter, pushing back through the doors into the emergency room. I’ve got forty minutes left on shift, three more patients to stabilize, and a mountain of paperwork. I don’t have time for existential crises or mysterious pulls toward dangerous dive bars.
But as I’m cleaning blood off my hands in the scrub sink, I catch my reflection in the metal paper towel dispenser. And for just a second, just a heartbeat, I swear my eyes flash gold. Then it’s gone, and I’m me again—an exhausted, bloodstained, human.
“Get a grip, girl,” I mumble, then take off for the remainder of this chaotic night.
The end of my shift comes in a blur.
I clock out and drive home through empty streets, the radio playing too loud to drown out my thoughts and the random voices.
And I absolutely, definitely do not drive past Sins & Spirits to see what it looks like.
Except I do.
The bar is alive at this hour, motorcycles gleaming under streetlights, the growl of engines and low thrum of bass spilling into the night. There’s something primal about it. Something raw and real in a way the sterile emergency room will never be.
I slow down as I pass, only for a second, and I swear someone standing by the entrance turns and looks directly at me.
A man. Tall, broad-shouldered, leather-clad.
Even from this distance, even in the dark, I feel the weight of his stare as a physical thing.
There’s something about him, about the way he moves, it’s slow, yet fast at the same time.
I can’t explain it. I feel it. And as I drive past him, it’s almost as if he stares right through the windshield and locks eyes with me.
My heart slams into my chest, knocking my breath from me, and in the rearview mirror, I swear I see my eyes flicker gold again.
“Shit, fucking, shitty, fuck, fuck!” My foot hits the gas before I can think, my tires sliding out from behind me, smoke pluming out from behind my car as I speed down the street as if something is chasing me.
“What in the ever-loving Christ? I really am going insane,” I mumble to myself, moving my hand up to my rearview and turning it away from me for the remainder of the ride.
When I finally arrive home to my shitty studio apartment, I lock the door, check it twice, and collapse into bed with all my clothes still on.
Just as exhaustion hits and I am about to doze off, that voice hits, this time with a vision behind my closed eyes.
“Soon,” she whispers, her smile full of teeth and promises.
“Soon you’ll remember what you are.” I wake gasping, my fingers clutching the sheets, sweat pouring down my temple, and when I look down, my palms are stained red.
But it’s not blood.
They’re faintly glowing in the dark, flicker, and then finally fade.
“What in the hell?” I whisper-yell, panic beginning to settle deep inside me as I bring my knees up to my chest, my body trembling all over.
My hands were just fucking glowing!
Or maybe they weren’t, and I am exhausted.
I’m definitely losing my mind.
I’m a nurse. I see this kind of stuff every day.
Patients come in claiming they’re seeing the impossible.
We give them a psych evaluation, a cocktail of drugs, and send them on their merry way.
But I’m not supposed to be the patient. I’m not supposed to walk into the hospital, talk to Kevin, and say, ‘Hey, can I grab some Ativan and benzos for the mental breakdown I’m currently experiencing? ’
Slumping back onto the mattress, I flop my forearm over my face, tears welling in my eyes, my heart rapid-firing in my chest as I try to calm my breathing.
“You’re gonna be fine. You need to sleep this off, and everything will be back to normal in the morning, you’ll see.
And maybe stop talking to yourself, too, Sloane. That might be helpful.”
Sliding my legs off the side of the bed, I get changed into my pajamas, pull back the covers, and slip in.
A long breath escapes me, and I close my eyes and try to relax.
Finally, my body begins to ease, my muscles unclench, and somehow, I unwind, but as I start to drift off, another vision floats behind my eyes.
This time, it’s not the stalker woman who haunts me, it’s the man from the bar.
And he doesn’t scare me…
He electrifies me.