Chapter Two
Charlotte
“Okay, let’s see—what have we got?” I bustled forward, pulling on a pair of gloves to examine the patient. Sebastian came with me, obviously eager to get a closer look at the big guy.
“What is this he’s wearing?” he asked under his breath. “Looks like some kind of weird costume from a Roman soldier movie or something!”
I had to admit he was right. My new patient had on a molded golden breastplate which buckled at the sides and a short kilt made of many leather straps that ended above his knees. There was an undergarment—an under-kilt I supposed—beneath it that had been pure white, which was now bloodstained and ragged. High black boots with golden metal greaves over the shins encased his feet—which had to be a size sixteen at least—and matching golden vambraces covered his forearms.
In case you’re wondering how I knew all the names of this stuff, it was from playing waaay too much Diablo III with my friend Zoe, back in college. I’m not exactly a gaming geek—I don’t have time to be—but I know my way around an RPG. Still, I had never expected a guy who looked like a fortieth level Paladin to land in my ER.
“That is one fancy gladiator outfit,” Gloria remarked. She had come back to do the blood pressure now that the patient was out for the count. “You know he has a sword too?”
“You’re kidding!” Sebastian exclaimed.
“Uh-uh. Look under the gurney.”
Sebastian flipped up the trailing sheet and gave a long, low whistle.
“Oh my Gawd. It’s as long as he is! I wonder what his other sword looks like—huh?”
He grinned at me but I was barely paying attention. I had finally managed to unbuckle the golden breastplate on both sides but it was really heavy—somewhere in the neighborhood of forty or fifty pounds. This was no cheap Halloween gladiator outfit—it was the real deal. Why was he wearing it and how did he walk around with this stuff on? Added all together the breastplate, vambraces, greaves, and sword, must weigh a ton!
Also, how had he known my name? But that question would have to wait until I figured out what was wrong with him.
“Help me lift this over his head,” I told Sebastian, who was happy to oblige. We lifted the breastplate carefully, sliding it over the patient’s head, and leaving the heavy front plate dangling down over the top of the gurney.
The white wife-beater type undershirt was also bloodstained. But I couldn’t see a wound—only evidence of one by the way the white shirt was rapidly turning crimson.
“Scissors,” I said and Sebastian handed them over. Starting at the bottom of the shirt, I slid the sharp blades up, careful not to touch his skin, which seemed to have a slightly jaundiced hue. Only it wasn’t yellow so much as a shimmering of gold—very strange. I wondered if he had something wrong with his liver. But what liver disease turned your skin gold?
When I peeled back the sodden undershirt, Sebastian gave a long, low whistle.
“Oh my God—would you look at that!” he exclaimed.
I frowned. “It’s a nasty slice, all right. Give me some gauze—let’s try and stop that bleeding.”
“No—I wasn’t talking about the knife wound!” Sebastian threw me an incredulous look as he passed the supplies I was asking for. “I’m talking about the way his chest and abs are even more muscular than that molded breastplate he was wearing! Forget a six pack, he’s got like…an eight pack.”
“I’m only interested in knowing if any of his fabulous abs got cut up in this fight,” I snapped. “Not how hot they look. Speaking of which, look under his kilt and see if there are any wounds there.”
Sebastian’s eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas.
“Yes, Ma’am!”
I sighed and shook my head, going back to the matter at hand. My new patient had a long slice that started at the top of his right pectoral region, just under the clavicle, and ran all the way down to the top of his groin. It was shallow but nasty and it looked like he had already lost a lot of blood. He might not need surgery but he sure as hell was going to need a whole crap-load of stitches.
“He’s hypotensive,” Gloria announced, pulling off the blood pressure cuff.
Damn—I had been right about the blood loss.
“Does he have any ID?” I asked the nurse. “Is he in the system? Do we know his blood type?”
“No to all three.” She shrugged. “He just stumbled in the ER door asking for you and collapsed.”
“Great,” I muttered. Just great.”
“No lacerations around the groin but he clearly needs a transfusion,” Sebastian said. “Let’s hang some O neg.”
Of course, this would normally be the right course of treatment. We didn’t know the patient’s blood type but O negative is the universal donor. Still, something made me hesitate.
“I said we need O neg up here. And a suture kit.” Sebastian can be really bossy sometimes.
“Wait.” I held up a hand to stop him.
“Charlotte—”
“Just wait, I said!” I snapped at him. “This is my triage, Sebastian—he asked for me personally. So I’m going to determine the course of treatment.”
“But—” He began, but I ignored him. Instead I took off my glove.
Now this is something a medical professional should never do—especially around an open wound in a patient with an unknown medical history. There are so many blood-borne pathogens on the loose out there it’s not even funny. But I had a feeling about this strange patient with his bizarre outfit and his golden-sheened skin—and I always listen to my feelings.
Taking a deep breath, I placed my ungloved hand on his face, cupping his cheek carefully.
I felt a strange tingle run between us that almost made me pull my hand away. It was like a low-level electrical shock. What in the world could it mean?
And then my sixth sense kicked in and I knew.
What did I know from a simple touch? Well, all kinds of things. I knew that O negative blood would sicken or perhaps even kill this man. I knew he had been recently fighting for his life. And I knew something else—but it was something so strange and disturbing that I immediately pushed it to the back of my mind and concentrated on the important stuff instead.
How did I know all these things? Well, I have a sixth sense—a gift that I really don’t talk about. An impossible gift, most people would say. When I touch someone, I pick up information about them. Not everything, just…bits and pieces. Don’t ask me how or why it works—I don’t understand it myself. But I’ve had it all my life and lately, it seemed to be getting stronger. This time the certainty was so strong, I didn’t even try to fight it.
“O neg is no good,” I said. “We’ll have to do a cross-match.”
“What?” Sebastian frowned at me incredulously. “If O neg is no good then what blood are we cross matching him with?”
I took a deep breath.
“Mine,” I said.
“Yours?” He looked like he couldn’t believe it. “Charlotte—”
“Just do it,” I said. “Get a cross-matching kit.”
Like my mysterious gift for knowing things when I touch people—my touch-sense I call it—my rare blood type is something I almost never talk about. Even my best friends Zoe and Leah didn’t know these things about me. They just had a vague idea that I had a rare blood type and thought I was a good judge of character.
I don’t know why I keep the truly important things about me from the ones I love the most. Maybe because I’ve always felt different—like I don’t belong. Of course, being adopted could have something to do with that. Even as a young child, I remember trying to hide my touch-sense from my adopted mom and dad. I think I was afraid I would drive them away with my weirdness.
For whatever reason, I saw no need to reveal to anyone that I could tell the minute I touched someone if he or she would make a good friend or would probably turn out to be an enemy. Or that they were fighting with their parents. Or that they were having an affair with a
married man, or that cheesecake was their favorite food…or any of the hundred other little incidental tidbits I’d gotten from people over the years when I touched them.
And in the case of men that I touched there was something extra. Another dimension of knowing that was both troubling and provocative. I always knew the moment I touched a man if he—
“Here’s the kit and I brought a sample of O neg,” Sebastian said, breaking my train of thought. He handed me the kit and the sample with a sullen look on his face. “Just for your edification, your majesty.”
“Fine,” I said, ignoring his sarcasm as I peeled the plastic sterile wrapping off the tray and set it up.
In cross-matching blood, you take a small sample of your patient’s blood and mix it with a small sample of the blood you want to transfuse them with. If the blood starts to clump up, you know it’s not a viable match and it wouldn’t be safe to give to your patient. We were in a hurry but the patient wasn’t crashing—yet, anyway. So I decided to prove Sebastian’s incredulity wrong with a demonstration.
Taking a small plastic pipette from the kit, I sucked up a small sample of the patient’s blood. His wound had mostly stopped bleeding by now but there was still plenty to go around. I deposited the sample into the small plastic tray. Using another pipette, I put a small sample of the O neg on top, letting the patient’s blood and the O neg mix.
The result was immediate and dramatic.
Big clumps began to form in the small plastic tray like curdled milk. In under a minute, the tray didn’t hold liquid blood at all—it was just a big, nasty looking blood clot.
“Holy God,” I heard Gloria, who had been watching over Sebastian’s shoulder murmur. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“It’s really weird,” Sebastian agreed in hushed tones. “Now what?”
“Now this,” I said. I took another sample of the patient’s blood and put it in another one of the plastic trays. Then I pulled down the right sleeve of my white lab coat, baring my arm in my short-sleeved scrub top. “Gloria,” I said to the nurse. “Would you mind using a sterile needle to stick me for a sample?”
I have a really good vein on the inside of my left elbow and Gloria was a pro. In no time she had a small sample of my rare blood in yet another of the plastic pipettes and Sebastian was slapping a band-aid on my arm.
I put back on my lab coat and squirted a few drops of my own blood into the tray containing the patient’s. Then, we waited.
As I had expected, nothing happened. Which in this case, was a very good thing. No clumping or clotting—I was a clear match with this strange man who I had never met before in my life.
“All right—I don’t know how you knew, but you were right.” Sebastian was already frowning in concentration. “So what are you going to do—pump out a pint for him right now?”
“No need,” I said. “I have several bags saved here at the hospital. Gloria, if you could go get one…no, better make it two.” I told her where to find them and she nodded and went at once.
In case you’re wondering why I happened to have several bags of my own blood lying around, it’s for a very good reason. When you have an extremely rare blood type, you often can’t accept donated blood from anyone else—at least, unless their blood exactly matches yours. So it’s better to bag some up for emergencies like car injuries or unexpected surgeries. I had never had either one of those but I’m a person who believes in keeping two steps ahead and being prepared.
The Boy Scouts have nothing on me.
As it was, it was damn lucky for my patient that I was so anal retentive, as Zoe used to like to call me. Otherwise, he would have been in big trouble with no possible donor.
“All right,” Sebastian said, putting a hand on his hip as I got the suture kit and began to stitch up the long gash across my patient’s chest and abdomen. “How did you know? And what blood type are you, anyway?”
I shrugged uncomfortably and answered the easier question. “I’m just a rare type, that’s all.”
“Bullshit!’ Sebastian exclaimed. “There’s rare and then there’s rare. What type are you?”
“All right, I’ll tell you but you have to keep it to yourself.” I sighed and looked up from my stitches. The patient was stirring uncomfortably but he wasn’t waking up—not yet anyway. I didn’t like to give him any medication for pain while he was unconscious and hypotensive so I tried to be quick.
“All right, all right—I promise,” Sebastian said eagerly. “Now give.”
“I’m…Rh null,” I said reluctantly.
“What?” Sebastian exploded, his eyebrows raising almost to his hairline. “You have the golden blood?”
“Shhh!” I glared at him. “You promised to keep it to yourself!”
“Yes, but…hell, Charlotte—that’s the rarest type in the whole freaking world! I did a paper on it last year—I think there are only something like ten or twelve registered donors anywhere on the planet.”
“Nine,” I said, still stitching. “Could you start a line on him and give him some fluids while we wait for Gloria?”
Sebastian did as I asked, but he couldn’t stop talking about my rare blood type. There’s a lengthy, boring, scientific explanation that goes with it but to make a long story short, Rh null blood has no Rh antibodies or any traces of the Rh factor that most people have at all. Which means that it can be given to anyone—even people with extremely rare blood types. Hence the nickname, “the golden blood.” Rh null is the true universal donor but it’s so incredibly rare that the blood is usually hoarded for extreme cases.
I knew all this because I had been donating blood twice a month since I turned eighteen and my rare type was discovered by my doctor’s office.
My blood had saved a lot of lives but if I got sick and needed a transfusion, the nearest donor with my blood type lived in Australia. Which again, was why I always kept a couple of bags on hand for myself.
Just in case.
Gloria came bustling back soon enough with several bags of my blood. She hung one from the IV pole and connected it to the drip already in the patient’s arm. I was halfway done with the stitches by then, and hoping to be finished before the patient woke up. But the minute my blood hit his arm, his eyes flew open and he tried to sit up.
“Whoa! Whoa, there big guy!” I put a hand on his arm and urged him to lie back down. “Just settle down and let us take care of you.”
He frowned, gazing at me blearily with unfocussed eyes.
“Goddess?”
“It’s just me—Doctor Walker,” I said and added, “Charlotte Walker. Remember, you asked for me?” Although I still didn’t know how he knew me.
“Goddess,” he whispered again but his eyes seemed to focus more. “I feel strange. What…what are you doing to me?”
“Stitching you up,” I said matter-of-factly. “This is a nasty wound you have here. How in the world did you get it with that big, heavy breastplate you were wearing in the way?”
“Assassin droid,” he muttered, his eyelids beginning to drift down again. “They have…armor penetrating weapons. Nano-blades. Caught me…unawares. Inexcusable lapse.”
“Um…okay. Sure, those sound bad,” I said, wondering if it was the blood-loss talking or if the guy was just out of his head. I mean, assassin droids? Nano-blades? Really?
“What else are you doing to me?” he murmured drowsily.
“Well, you need a transfusion.” I kept stitching since he wasn’t complaining and nodded at the bag of my blood hanging from the IV stand over his head.
“What?” His eyes opened all the way and widened, cycling through a strange rainbow of colors again. Blue, green, pale yellow, silver…what was going on with him? Was this some kind of rare mutation? If so, I had never seen anything even remotely like it.
He looked worried about the transfusion so I hastened to reassure him.
“Don’t worry—I know you have an extremely rare blood type.”
“It goes beyo
nd rare,” he said. His voice was deep but melodious—like someone playing a cello. It was rich and somehow utterly masculine. “No one on this planet could give me blood except…” His rainbow eyes widened and he stared at me. “No,” he whispered. “Please, my Lady…tell me you did not give me your own sacred blood.”
“How did he know?” Sebastian demanded. “I thought he was completely out of it when we hung the fluids and blood.”
“Sebastian!” I hissed in frustration. I had been going to give the patient a little disclaimer about how all transfusion blood is carefully checked and completely anonymous but my big-mouthed friend had ruined that.
“Goddess…my Lady, you cannot!”
My patient reached for the line in his arm, about to yank it out. I dropped my curving suture needle and grabbed for his big hand instead.
“Stop!” I put as much command as I could into my voice and stared him right in his rainbow-shifting eyes. “You stop that right now Mr.…” I had to trail off there, because I didn’t know his name.
“Verrai. Captain Kristoff Verrai of her majesty’s Imperial Guard of Femme One.”
“Okay, Kristoff,” I said. “That’s quite a title and I bet there’s a long story behind it. But I’ve got a short story for you right now—you try to rip that line out of your arm and I’ll have you in restraints so fast your head will spin.”
“But…” He shook his head helplessly. “You have the rainbow aura. I am not worthy to receive the sacred blood. My mother was only a lesser noble—I have no royal lineage.”
“Uh, well that’s okay,” I said, patting his arm. Now he was just spouting nonsense but at least he didn’t seem inclined to pull the line out anymore. “I don’t care about your, uh, lineage,” I told him. “It’s my blood and I say you can have it. All right?”
He looked deeply troubled but I held his eyes with my own until, at last, he nodded and sank back on the gurney.
“Very well. But I fear there will be grave repercussions when we get to Court. Or perhaps even before.”
“Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, all right?” I said, using one of my dad’s favorite expressions. “For right now, just leave the line alone and let me finish stitching you up.”
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on my face.
“I knew you were a La-ti-zal but I never thought you’d be a Healer. The old Goddess-Empress—she whom I still mourn—was a Seer. And so was the Incarnation before her and the Incarnation before her. I thought all of them had the gift of Sight or Knowing in some way.”
“Uh…sure,” I said, nodding again. Behind me I heard Sebastian whisper to Gloria,
“Are you hearing this stuff? Better check his blood alcohol level.”
“On it,” she whispered back.
I had thought that my patient was settling down again, but then he started shifting on the bed, his hips moving from side to side uncomfortably.
“What’s wrong, Kristoff?” I asked, frowning at him. “Are you experiencing discomfort? Do you have another wound we should know about?”
“A wound? No. But discomfort…” He shifted again, one big hand coming to cover his groin. My eyes were drawn to his pelvis and behind me I heard Sebastian give a long, low whistle.
“Oh my Gawd,” he muttered. “It’s fucking huge.”
That was when I saw what the patient was trying to hide—a perfectly enormous erection. Seriously, it looked like something out of a porno. The leather kilt was flipped up from Sebastian’s earlier search for another wound and the white under-kilt didn’t hide much. The thin fabric was stretched tight over the patient’s burgeoning member, which he tried vainly to hide with one big hand.
“Forgive me,” he muttered, his face turning crimson. “It is the effect of your blood, Goddess. I cannot help it.”
“You can stop calling me that. Dr. Walker will do just fine,” I said, trying to ignore his obvious “problem.”
“But you are a Goddess—or most believe that you are,” he said, looking at me earnestly. “It is a title of respect.”
Behind us, Sebastian snorted.
“Right. The Goddess of Trauma, maybe. You better stop or Miss Goddess’s head will swell too big to fit in the door of the hospital.”
The patient glared at him.
“Be still, commoner. I know you cannot see it, but this female has the rainbow aura—she is in fact the true Incarnation of the Goddess-Empress. You are not fit to stand upright in her presence. Better you should grovel on your knees before her and beg her forgiveness for daring to speak so disrespectfully in her presence.”
“Hey!” Sebastian put a hand on his hip and frowned. “Look, we’re going to just pass that kind of talk off as blood loss. But for your information, Dr. Walker here is just an intern. A very good intern and apparently one with an incredibly rare blood type…” He gave me a speculative look. “But just an intern all the same.”
“Sebastian…” I glared at him in exasperation. Never knowing when to shut up was my friend’s defining personality trait. Discussing me with a patient was extremely unprofessional and probably broke all kinds of Hippa laws. Not to mention that it was also kind of insulting.
“Well, it’s true,” he said airily. “Sorry to burst your royal bubble, Goddess, but—”
The last word ended in a choked gurgle. My patient had sat straight up on the gurney and reached one long arm out to grab Sebastian by the throat. Without any apparent effort, he raised the intern with one hand and glared at him.
“You do not speak so to the Goddess-Empress,” he said, his deep voice a menacing growl. “It is disrespectful and rude. Were you on Femme One it would be grounds for immediate execution and I would gladly swing the axe myself.”
“Shit!” I shot to my feet as Sebastian’s sneakered feet kicked a good twelve inches off the floor. “Gloria—give me ten of Haldol now.”
“Yes, doctor!” Gloria could move fast and she was back with a syringe almost before I could blink. I darted around the side of the bed and injected directly into the patient’s left deltoid. It was twice the dose I would have given anyone else but Kristoff was so big and from the way Sebastian’s face was turning the color of a ripe eggplant, he was strong too.
The meds kicked in quickly. Kristoff’s muscular arm sagged and Gloria and I were able to get Sebastian away from him.
My friend coughed and choked, his hand going to his throat to explore for injuries. I thought he might have some bruising but I doubted there was any permanent damage—I hoped not, anyway. Sebastian could be an annoying, arrogant prick at times but he was still the closest thing I had to a friend now that Zoe had disappeared and Leah had moved to Virginia with her jerk of a fiancé who was now her husband.
Kristoff’s eyelids fluttered over those amazing, rainbow eyes and he seemed to realize what had happened.
“What is this…this feeling? This lethargy?” he demanded, his deep voice starting to slur. “Wha…what have you done?”
“I’ve given you something to help you calm down,” I said firmly. “It’s for your own good.” I tried to help guide him back down to the gurney but he resisted.
“But…how…how can I protect you if I’m…if I can’t…” His eyelids were drooping and his broad shoulders started to sag.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t know how you know my name but you have a wrong idea. I’m not any kind of Goddess or Empress or anything like that. I’m just a medical intern and you don’t have to protect me.”
“Yes, I…I do,” he protested. “I…” Suddenly his eyes snapped open and he lifted a wavering arm, pointing to something beyond the pale blue curtain which was still hanging open. His lips moved but for a moment it seemed like he couldn’t speak.
“What? What is it?” I asked, frowning. Outside the curtain it was just business as usual in the ER. I could see that we were starting to get busier. Interns and attending moved around the beds as well as nurses, techs, and other support staff.
But one person in
particular seemed to bother my patient.
“D-danger,” he stuttered hoarsely, his wavering arm still outstretched.
I frowned at what he was pointing at. It was just Carlos, our elderly janitor, emptying the trash. He was a nice old guy with gray hair—probably in his late sixties with a slightly hunched back. He never complained about cleaning up when a patient was sick or incontinent and he was always there to lend a hand when we needed lifting help.
“Who, Carlos?” I asked, frowning at Kristoff. “Don’t worry about him—he’s one of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet.”
“No…danger!” he insisted. Clearly he was fighting to stay awake. I couldn’t believe it—I had never seen anyone fight off that amount of medication. “Please…” He grabbed my arm, his eyes swirling so many colors now I couldn’t count them. “Give me…help me…wake up. Have to…have to…protect…”
If he hadn’t looked so serious and desperate I would have laughed at the idea that I needed protection from Carlos. He was such a sweetheart—I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling touched at the fiercely protective look in Kristoff’s strangely gorgeous eyes. After he woke up I would have to have someone who specialized in ophthalmologic disorders come take a look at him. But in the meantime, I wanted to reassure him.
“It’s all right,” I told him gently. “Carlos is a good guy. He would never hurt me.”
“Not…who you think,” he insisted. He was still fighting the meds but it was a losing battle. His eyelids were fluttering closed and I saw that he had incredibly long lashes for a man. “Assassin…droid…”
“Annnd we’re back to the delusional fantasies,” Sebastian’s voice was hoarse but still snarky.
“I’m glad you’re recovered enough to be sarcastic,” I said as Kristoff finally sank back down on the gurney. “I was worried there for a moment.”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just peachy.” He massaged his red throat gingerly. “You think that’s the first time I’ve been choked by a hot guy?”
“Can we please not get into your sex life right now?” I asked in an undertone as Kristoff’s big body finally slumped into drugged unconsciousness.
“Just because you don’t have a sex life to discuss—” he began but I waved him off and went to check on Kristoff now that he was out.
Where had this strange man come from? And what was the deal with his weird skin and eye coloration? How did he know my name? And how did he have my blood type—or at least a type so rare that it was only compatible with mine?
There were so many unanswerable questions it made my head spin. But there was no way of getting answers now. I had gotten everything I could from him with my touch-sense earlier, and I had given him enough Haldol to put him out for hours—probably until sometime tomorrow afternoon at least.
“Come on.” Sebastian tugged at my arm. “They’re bringing in a multi-trauma MVA. Some idiots who were texting and driving plowed into each other—we’ve got more triage to do.”
“Okay, you’re right. Go ahead and I’ll be there in a minute.” I nodded at him to go on and turned back to Gloria. “I want this guy put in a room on the psych floor and be sure he’s restrained,” I told her. “I don’t want him hurting anyone when he wakes up.”
“Well, with ten of Haldol on board, that’s going to be a while,” she said. “But sure, I’ll get the ball rolling, Dr. Walker.”
“Thanks.” I gave her a grateful smile and took one last look at Kristoff Verrai. There was something special about him—my touch-sense told me so. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but for now, I had business to attend to.
I turned to go and from the corner of my eye, saw that Carlos the janitor was watching me. He turned away as soon as he saw me looking, but there was something in his expression—a coldness—that sent a shiver down my spine. Suddenly I wondered what I would know if I walked up to him and grabbed his arm.
“Assassin-droid,” murmured Kristoff’s deep voice in my head. “Danger!”
It was crazy, right? But was it any crazier than what I had been experiencing lately?
Suddenly it occurred to me that I was putting him on the psych floor in restraints when I myself had been seeing visions of a blue space worm trying to contact me through shiny surfaces for weeks now. Talk about hypocritical!
But that’s different, I argued to myself. I’m probably just having those visions because I’m tired. Plus, I don’t go around dressed in a Roman gladiator’s outfit, grabbing people by the throat.
Of course Kristoff had only done that because he felt that Sebastian was disrespecting me but still…
“Goddess…” he had called me. And he had seemed to think I was in danger.
Don’t be stupid, Charlotte!
With an effort, I shrugged off the sense of dread that had somehow settled over me like a cold, clammy coat. I had patients to treat, a night in the Pit to get through, and morning rounds to do before I could even think about getting some rest.
It was time to get back to business as usual—I could worry about my strange new patient later.
Descended Part 1: Queen of the Universe? Who, me? Page 3
