Page 13 of Hot Blooded

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” Tessa said quickly, instantly feeling terrible. “You’ve got your kids and a mortgage and your own household to worry about. I don’t have…you know. Any of that. I can handle it.”

“Yeah, well, you’re still taking on too much.”

She shrugged. “The faster this gets resolved, the sooner we can all stop being stressed by it.”

“You still need to take a break now and then. The kids miss you. They keep asking when they can see their Auntie Tesita.”

Just like that, Tessa’s temper flared hot again. Babysitting your children is not a break! she wanted to scream at him. And don’t use your fucking kids as emotional blackmail! But she loved her niece and nephew, and didn’t want to say anything she’d regret, so she swallowed the words and forced herself to speak levelly. “Sorry, Rob. I’m already committed for Wednesday. Don’t you have a babysitter you can call?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he sighed.

Not one who’ll work for free, huh? she thought bitterly. “Alright, well, sorry about that. Anyway, I gotta start getting ready for work. I’ll talk to you later.”

“You’re working on a Sunday, too?” he asked, incredulous.

“Yeah,” she said flatly. “I’m a nurse. This schedule is nothing new.”

Rob grumbled some more about her overburdening herself—without offering any meaningful solutions for unburdening herself—and then finally let her off the phone.

When Tessa stepped outside to make her way to the train, she paused on the sidewalk, prickling unease running down her spine. She’d been feeling it all weekend. Any time she went outside, it felt like she was being watched. Giving in to the paranoid impulse, she looked around, searching windows and stoops, trying to figure out who was staring at her.

But she saw nobody. It was late, the sky was dark, there was nobody else around. Unsettled, she tried to ignore the feeling as she began walking. Her mind started sorting through a rolodex of medical conditions that caused feelings of paranoia, of being watched. As she reached the train station, she pulled her phone out and called Ma.

“Hey, would you do me a favor and check to make sure the stove is turned off? Does the furnace run on gas?”

Ma reassured her that there was no gas leak. But as Tessa slid her phone back into her pocket, she couldn’t shake that watched feeling.

Once she reached work and stepped inside the sanitized, florescent-lit halls, the feeling faded. As she sat in the locker room, changing her street shoes for her comfy, clean working shoes, she started to wonder if maybe her brother was right. Maybe the strain was getting to her. Anxiety and stress could cause feelings of paranoia, agoraphobia.

But what could she do about it? She couldn’t quit her job. And she wasn’t going to stop going to Amos. At this point, even if she wasn’t being paid, she’d still show up. Could she offer pro-bono visits during the other days of the week? She suppressed a small laugh. Anxiety briefly forgotten, she got up and started her shift.

Midway through the night, things were relatively quiet in her ward. She checked in at the nurse’s station, got the okay from her supervisor, and ducked out for her meal break. At two in the morning, there wasn’t a lot of choice for hot meals. But there was a 24/7 corner shop a few blocks down from the hospice that sold cups of soup from the neighboring Ukrainian deli.

The walk was well lit and well-trafficked. It had never made Tessa nervous before. But as soon as she stepped out of the hospice, that tense, watched feeling hit her again. If she hadn’t been feeling it all weekend, she’d have chalked this particular moment up to woman’s intuition and dipped right back inside the safety of the hospice building. But she was tired of her life, she hadn’t been able to get her vampire fix in three days, and she just really wanted some fucking borscht.

She reached the corner store without incident. Ivan, the owner’s college-aged nephew was sitting at the counter, staring at his phone, ear pods in. He raised his eyes briefly to acknowledge Tessa’s entrance, then went right back to his phone. She went to the cooler where the deli soups were stocked. There was only one cup of borscht left, and she snapped it up with a delighted sigh. It was tragic that the high point of her day was soup, but she’d take her dopamine hits wherever she could find them.

On the walk back to work, excitement for her lunch overshadowed the anxiety that had been plaguing her all weekend. She forgot about the feeling of eyes on her back, instead caught up in a repetitive thought loop where she envisioned herself microwaving the borscht and then sitting down to eat it in a perfectly empty break room where she could quietly read on her phone instead of being pestered by extroverted coworkers.

She was only two blocks from the hospice, crossing in front of a parking garage that served the nearby hospital when she noticed a dark shape huddled against the base of the shadowed structure. Her first thought was that someone had dumped a bag of garbage. But as she got closer, vague lumpeness resolved into more detail—bare white feet sticking out of tattered pants. Matted, long hair tangled around a pale, hollow face. Thin, raw-knuckled fingers clutched a ragged shirt close to his throat. He had nothing even close to reasonable outerwear. The early Spring weather was way too brutal for that kind of exposure. If he wasn’t dead already, he would be soon.

Tessa approached the slumped body cautiously. Her born-and-raised-on-the-South-Side instincts were telling her to walk away—call an ambulance and let the trained first-responders deal with it. But her life’s work had programmed her to respond differently. She stopped beside the prone figure, just out of arm’s reach.

The man’s thin, bony chest moved faintly up and down in rapid, shallow, almost imperceptible pants. Alive.

“Hello?” she said clearly, loudly. “Are you okay?”

No response.

She sank down to a crouch beside the body, setting her borscht aside. “I’m going to check you for injury,” she explained.

Careful not to shift his head or neck, she examined his ears and nose for any leaking fluid. She pressed her fingers to his carotid artery, checking his pulse. It fluttered faintly, far too rapid. She lifted one eyelid, using the light on her phone. His pupils were so dilated, his iris was just a thin ring around huge black circles.

Shit. She opened up her keypad to dial 9-1-1, but before she even tapped the first number, a cold, bony hand closed around her wrist. She gasped, caught by surprise, dropping her phone.

“Hello?” she said loudly. “Sir? Can you hear me?”

He winced, eyes squeezing shut. A raspy groan rattled in his chest.

---