by G. R. Lyons
He went home, mechanically made his way through a tasteless dinner, and went to bed, tossing and turning all night while his mind was haunted with nightmares of blood and knives, rage and screams.
Chapter 14
GRAEDEN SPENT the next few days trying to focus on his work and avoid Zhadeyn as much as possible.
“Where we at, Len?” he asked.
“One hundred twenty-eight.”
“Are you sure?” Quinn asked. “I thought it was twenty-seven.”
“No, twenty-eight,” Leni said with a sigh.
“Hard to keep track when we have to work every damned day,” Quinn muttered. “Have these people never heard of weekends?”
“Obviously not,” Jase groaned.
“One hundred twenty-eight days,” Graeden repeated under his breath. “Can't go by fast enough.”
He looked up and saw Jase eyeing him suspiciously.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Jase said, shaking his head and lowering his voice so the others couldn't hear. “I was just worried you were actually starting to like it here.”
He glanced pointedly toward the door, and Graeden saw Zhadeyn hurry into the room, keeping her head down and skirting around them as she deposited some files and picked up others before vanishing again.
“Not that it's so bad in the meantime,” Jase added.
“What's that?”
“Well,” he began, glancing over as he flipped open a file, “it's just you seem to mouth off less to the weasel when she's been around. Unless they're both in the room at the same time, of course. Then you're worse.”
Graeden narrowed his eyes at Jase, who gave him a silly grin and turned away to help the first patient. Quinn and Leni were already busy with patients on the other side of the room, so Graeden picked up the next file and squeezed past the superfluous nurses to help the next person in line.
He worked tirelessly all day, the hours passing unnoticed as he buried himself in blood tests, coughs, and broken bones. Zevic came in periodically to check on their work and give permission for various procedures, making Graeden tense up and clench his hands into fists, only to relax again when Zhadeyn shyly rushed through the room, trading out files ready to be processed for files waiting to be written.
Graeden watched her go, trying to make sense of his sudden urge to smile despite the scare she'd given him a few nights before.
He pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and readied a tray with what he was allowed to use for stitching up a cut in a patient's leg. Graeden carefully cleaned and prepared the wound, then started on making neat stitches along the length of the gash.
“Do you need help, Dr. Graeden?”
Graeden took a deep breath, irritated by the sound of Zevic's voice, and said, “No, I've got it, thank you.”
“But there are nurses here to assist you,” the bureaucrat insisted.
“I'm aware of that. I'm perfectly fine.”
“But perhaps they could be of use?” Zevic asked, leaning closer as though trying to distract Graeden from his work.
“You do realize,” Graeden began, then paused as he completed a stitch and placed the needle again, never looking up from his work, “that one doctor plus two nurses makes a team of three, right?”
In his peripheral vision, he saw the man tense up and take half a step back.
“But…No, no,” Zevic said, alternately laughing nervously and frowning. “It's one doctor and two nurses. Two and one.”
“Which makes three,” Graeden murmured.
“I…But…”
Graeden raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to one side, the action covered by the fact that he was still looking down at his patient's wound, and only glanced up for a moment when Zevic suddenly hurried away.
“Get out,” Zevic hissed, just loud enough to hear from across the room, waving his arms at the nurses standing around with nothing to do. “All of you, out!”
The confused nurses filed out, followed quickly by the hospital director, and Graeden went back to his work with a restrained smile on his face. He finished the stitches, bandaged the wound, and sent the patient on his way while he went to the counter to finish writing his report.
Jase walked over and deliberately opened his patient's file right next to Graeden.
“I think I could kiss you for that,” Jase whispered, chuckling. “That was brilliant.”
Graeden raised an eyebrow, half looking at his friend while he scribbled the last few details about how many stitches he used. “Not going to harass me about pissing off the wolves?”
“Are you kidding? When I feel like I can finally breathe in here? Gods, this room feels almost empty now. It's wonderful.”
“You know,” Quinn said, squeezing between them and setting down his own file, “the Falsiners would take offense to that.”
Graeden looked past Quinn at Jase, and they both raised an eyebrow in question.
“Take offense to what, precisely?” Jase asked.
“Your comparison of wolves to these authoritative thugs,” Quinn said. “On Falsin, wolves are highly respected and revered. Almost godlike.”
Jase shook his head and looked at Graeden. “Remind me why we brought the walking encyclopedia?”
“Because I'm more likely to remember important details about our studies here than you are,” Quinn said with a smile and a wink as he went off to his next patient.
“Oh, damn,” Graeden said with a laugh.
“Won't do us much good since we're not actually studying what we were told we'd be studying,” Jase muttered, slapping shut his file.
Jase went back to work, and Graeden turned around to set his completed file aside, still seeing a line of patients waiting to be helped, but also feeling like a huge weight had been lifted from their space with all the excess nurses gone. He took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh as he moved on to the next injury.
He found a man lying in the next bed with a wad of cloth pressed to his forehead, blood soaking through, while a girl stood at his side, keeping her head down. The girl carried a heavy bowl that was overflowing with soaked rags, and the injured man added to it by tossing in the cloth he held and snatching a fresh one from the girl's hand.
Graeden rushed over and got the man to lie back and let him inspect the wound. He applied pressure to the wound and cleaned away the excess blood, seeing that nothing more was required than some disinfectant and stitches.
“May I ask what happened here?” he asked, trying to distract the man as he applied an antiseptic.
The man winced and growled and hooked a thumb at the girl beside him. “Her fault. Girl doesn't know her duty.”
Graeden saw the girl flinch and shuffle back a step, and he asked, “Is she your daughter?”
“Daughter?” the man spat. “No, my newest wife. Clearly wasn't ready for her bedroom duties. Tried to run and I stopped her– Aaarrrgh!” The man flinched away from Graeden, stung by the cleaning of his wound, and let out a low growl.
Graeden looked over at the girl and saw her hold back tears, shuffling back another step and turning to one side so Graeden could see marks on her skin where the man had obviously beaten her.
“She's just a child,” Graeden blurted out before he could stop himself.
“She's thirteen,” the man spat. “Had her mooncycle, so she's old enough. Don't you go judging us with your sinful Agori ideas.”
Graeden opened his mouth to say something, then noticed Jase looking at him pointedly and shaking his head. Clenching his jaw, Graeden took a deep breath through his nose and started stitching up the man's cut.
The man groaned as the thread pulled through, and growled out, “Stupid bitch tripped me and I fell, and this happened.” He paused, growling again at the pain, and said, “She'll either be well fucked or dead by the end of the night, that's for sure. These damned women and their ideas lately, I tell you. Not like it used to be. Don't know their proper place anymore, I swear.”
Graeden's jaw hurt
from keeping his teeth clenched, but he managed not to say anything while he helped the man sit up and went to the cabinets for more bandages, changing his gloves and washing his hands first before gathering what he needed.
“Don't you dare try to get away,” he heard the man growl behind him, and the girl gave a whimper.
Graeden took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and started to turn around when he heard a slap.
Then he heard something crack, like a twig snapping or a bone breaking, and he dropped what was in his hands, his breath catching in his throat as he froze.
“Grae?” Jase asked. “You alright?”
The sound of that crack filled his mind, calling up old memories. Graeden threw himself at the sink and vomited, his whole body shaking.
“Whoa, Grae! What's wrong?”
Graeden gasped and vomited again, then sank to his knees, his hands clamped over the edge of the counter.
“Grae?”
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to drown out the sound and the guilt. He gasped out a breath and froze again, but his meditations weren't enough to calm his mind.
A hand lightly touched his shoulder, and Graeden dropped his arms, turning to see Zhadeyn crouched beside him, offering him a cloth. He took it mechanically and wiped his mouth, staring at her as she sat there, taking back the cloth and handing him a glass of water.
He took a sip of the warm drink, keeping his eyes on the woman while he slowed his breathing.
“Who got hurt?” he asked quietly.
“No one, Grae,” Jase answered, crouching down beside him. “No one's hurt.”
“But that sound…”
“Sound? Oh.” Jase pointed toward the patient Graeden had been helping, and he saw the girl gathering up bloody bandages from the floor. The bowl lay cracked into two pieces at her feet.
Graeden sighed and slipped onto his backside, leaning back against the cabinets.
“Gods, it sounded just like–”
He stopped and looked over at Zhadeyn, then back at the girl scrambling about while her husband growled curses at her.
“Like what?” Jase asked.
“Nothing,” Graeden said, shaking his head and slowly standing. He gulped down the rest of the water and set the glass aside, seeing Zhadeyn hurriedly clean out the sink and then scooting out of the way so he could wash his hands again and go back to finish with his patient.
The girl stood aside, holding together the cracked bowl and all the bloodied rags, a hospital janitor moving around her to clean up the bloody mess on the floor while Graeden bandaged the patient and sent him on his way, still too unsettled to say anything. He went back to the counter, shaking his head as he tried to get his mind in order and finish his report.
“Alright,” Jase said, capping his pen and tossing it aside. “Time to go home.”
Graeden sighed. “Thank the gods.”
He scribbled down the last few words and snapped the file shut, tossing it onto a pile of those waiting to be processed as he headed out the door behind the others.
“Man, I swear,” Leni said once they were out on the street and out of earshot of anyone else, “going back to work at home is gonna feel like a vacation.”
“No shit,” Jase muttered. “Who ever heard of working ten- or twelve-hour days? Honestly.”
“Some people do,” Quinn put in with a shrug.
“Yeah, by choice,” Jase said. “Not like here, where it's mandatory.”
“Grae?” Leni asked. “I don't hear you complaining.”
“That's because he's used to it,” Jase said with a laugh. “You usually pull—What?—like, fourteen-hour days back home?”
Graeden shrugged and didn't answer.
“Why do you work so much, anyway? Iora wasn't that high-maintenance, was she?”
“What?” Graeden asked, then shook his head, still trying to push aside his nerves. “Oh, no, she had her own money.”
“Had some other girlfriend on the side she didn't know about?” Leni asked with a grin, elbowing Graeden in the ribs.
“Yeah, right,” Jase said, laughing. “When would he have the time?”
Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Maybe that's where he disappeared to every day at lunch?”
“Guys, just drop it, would you?” Graeden muttered, stuffing his hands into his pockets.
“Come on,” Jase taunted, backhanding him on the arm. “We're bored. Tell us something.”
“Yeah, come on,” Leni added as they turned a corner and came within view of their apartment. “Who is she?”
“Who is she?” Jase seconded.
“Who ya hiding, Grae?” Leni joked.
“I said drop it, alright!” Graeden growled, shoving Jase aside and glaring at him.
Jase held his hands up. “Alright, alright. Gods, Grae. We're just playing.”
“Well, just play with someone else's life, alright?” Graeden spat, pushing past them and letting himself into the apartment.
He went straight to his room, closed the door, and leaned back against it with a sigh.
Maybe you should just tell them, he thought. It's all gonna come out eventually.
No, not yet, he argued back. And not them first. Gods, I wish this would just all go away.
Graeden sank down to the floor and rested his arms across his knees, closing his eyes. A series of memories flashed through his mind: from the cracked bowl in the hospital, back to dodging a bloody knife, and forward again to the news that Lorel Suleta was dead, spurring him on to Tanas as a means of temporary escape.
And then meeting Zhadeyn, which only made escape impossible.
What are you doing, Grae? he asked himself, thinking of the Tanasian woman. Nothing but trouble lies down that road.
Thinking of Zhadeyn—saving him from a danger he didn't know, feeding him when he stayed alone at the hospital, caring for him when he became ill—a desire welled up in Graeden that he could no longer deny, despite the haunting resemblance.
Or perhaps because of it.
So similar in look but so different in manner, he thought as he lay in bed that night. Or is she?
That night, instead of his dreams being haunted by blood, they were filled with something infinitely more dangerous.
Temptation.
Chapter 15
“WELL, WOULD you look at that,” Jase teased under his breath the next morning as they were handed a fresh stack of medical records. “More patients with broken bones. Shocking.”
“Do you think they'd invoke the gods if we mentioned calcium?” Graeden joked.
Jase snorted. “Probably. And welcome back.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Jase said with a laugh, and turned away, mumbling something about a better mood.
Graeden watched him walk away, puzzled, then shrugged to himself and went to his own work, helping a patient who had a severe cough. He ultimately sent the man on his way with a less-than-effective medication, but the only thing he could legally prescribe, and moved on to the next file, losing himself in the process that was now becoming eerily familiar.
“Do you think we'll forget how to do this without bureaucrats looking over our shoulders when we get back home?” he asked Jase in the middle of the day.
Jase looked at him strangely for a moment, then asked, “You, too, eh?”
Graeden nodded. “We've been here too long. Another four months might ruin us for this profession forever.”
Jase snorted. “You kidding? Going back will feel like a party. Less paperwork, no legal restrictions, just doctor and patient and simple contracts, with none of this red tape of permission slips and requisition forms and approval stamps.” He sighed. “Gods, I can't wait. Remind me to never, ever complain about my job back home ever again.”
“When did you ever complain?”
“Oh, all the time. You were always just too damned busy to hear it.”
Jase gave him a silly grin and went back to work, and Graeden turned back
to the report he was finishing, a little nagging thought in the back of his mind telling him that, once he went home and set everything to rights, he would have to find a way to make more time for his family and friends.
If they didn't completely disown him for his secrets, that was.
At the end of the day, just as the doctors were wrapping things up to go home, Zhadeyn shuffled into the room, her face lined with pain, and carrying a weighty stack of patient files. She set them carefully on the counter, keeping one hand on top to stop them from toppling over, and hesitantly tapped on Graeden's shoulder.
He scribbled out the last few words in his report and turned toward her.
“I'm sorry, Dr. Graeden,” she murmured. “They asked that you review some questionable statements in these.”
“What?” he asked, glancing over the stack.
She pointed at red marker tabs sticking out of the files. “The billing department needs clarification on these files before they can send them out for processing.”
“Clarification on what?” he asked, glancing over at Jase, who also looked puzzled. Graeden grabbed the first file and flipped to one of the pages that was marked. “This is from the first week we were here,” he thought aloud, reading through notations added to the file in red ink. “Has this patient been waiting for the medication I prescribed all this time?”
Zhadeyn nodded. “Most likely. The files have to get approved first.”
Graeden slapped the folder down. “It's been almost four weeks. They couldn't have pointed this out sooner? This patient is probably dead by now!” Zhadeyn flinched and took a half step back. “I'm sorry, I'm not angry at you. It's just this gods-damned system…”
Jase reached over and grabbed another file out of the stack, flipping through it, and practically dropped the whole thing on the counter. “This man needed surgery the next day at the very latest, and it hasn't been scheduled yet? Why?” He turned over a few sheets, scanning the notes, and shook his head. “What? 'Prognosis not deemed sufficient to justify costly surgical procedure; suggest patient return at a later date when symptoms worsen, unless doctor can better explain recommendation.' This is ridiculous! What part of 'terminal' do these idiots not understand?”
