Page 7 of For Love and Blood and Fury

Darkness covered her eyes as she felt the last of her sons die. Losing them like balloons cut from their ribbons as the sound of sirens joined the screaming. Then oblivion swallowed her whole.

Chapter Four

People aren’tafraid of death; they fear what comes before it. Fear saturated the hospital corridors and desperate prayers painted its walls. But when medicine failed, peace was the only thing left. For Marisol, the hospital was her peace.

Coffee in hand and dirty blonde hair in a stubby ponytail, Marisol was ready for twelve hours on the night shift. It was the first of three shifts on, but then she was looking at a solid four days off of work and she’d promised herself a beach day.

Marisol clipped her nurse’s badge to the V-neck of her green scrubs the moment she got through security. As soon as she arrived at the nurse’s station in the emergency room, she pulled off her backpack stuffed with too many snacks that were never enough and all the random stuff she’d gotten used to having just in case. Before shoving the bag in a locker in the break room, she grabbed her water bottle and slung her stethoscope around her neck.

“Lopez, you’re the only person in this hospital who’s ever early,” Abby, the nurse she was relieving, said when they met in the nurse’s station.

Marisol smiled. “I don’t want to be the reason you’re late to Junior’s soccer game.”

Abby pointed to the pendant Marisol wore on a long, thin necklace. The small gold circle held a geometric design under some stray silver lines. A twelfth birthday present from her late grandmother twenty years ago. “Better tuck that away. Carmelita is the charge nurse tonight.”

Tucking the charm into her shirt, Marisol laughed. “A guy grabs her necklace one time in forty years and she thinks it’s going to happen with everyone,” she joked, even though she’d never intentionally create a hazard to a patient.

Standing at the portable computer on a cart, Abby gave her the rundown on the ER patients that were trapped in the limbo between discharge and admission. Marisol had just started for the patient with a possible concussion when she made the rookie mistake of noticing how quiet the floor was. Of thinking it might be an uneventful night.

As if the universe wanted to flick her in the forehead, the ambulance bay doors flew open and paramedics wheeled in a blood-covered patient on a gurney.

“Female, early-to-mid thirties, unresponsive at the scene,” one paramedic rattled off. “No visible injuries but covered in blood, vitals are low but stable.”

Marisol hurried over, a decade of ER nursing falling into place. The unconscious woman’s expensive looking clothes were shredded and drenched in blood. Far too much blood for her vitals to be stable. Under the harsh lights, the woman’s olive skin was a stark contrast to the dark red staining her face and matting her long, wavy hair.

“Let’s get her into Trauma Two,” the emergency physician directed when he took hold of the gurney and pushed them faster.

Voice calm and mind racing, Marisol looked away from the patient and toward the paramedic. “ID?”

“None,” the other paramedic said. “Not a wallet, purse, phone. Nothing.”

“Robbery victim?” Marisol guessed.

“It was a fucking bloodbath,” he replied with a shake of his head. “This lady must have gotten caught in the crossfire of some gang beef. I guess they had enough time to take her shit, too.”

Marisol listened while the paramedic described a horrific scene. They were in the trauma bay and cutting the woman out of her clothes when Marisol said, “We’re going to have to work fast if we’re going to treat all those people?—”

“She was the only one left in the street,” he replied before leaving with his partner.

“Jesus,” Marisol whispered, chest tightening when she looked down at the patient.

Grabbing another pair of scissors, Marisol rushed to help get the patient trauma naked so they could find her concealed injuries. With so much blood and the tears in her clothes, she expected the woman to be riddled with bullets or stab wounds.

“Hang ten units of O neg,” the doctor called over the chaos of four people working hard to save a life. “Clear that airway and get her vitals.”

“Where’s the bleeding?” Marisol asked when she couldn’t find so much as a scratch while she cleaned the blood that had soaked through the woman’s clothes on her right side.

“I’ve got an abrasion on the left lower quadrant,” a scrub nurse who’d been called to help prep the patient for surgery shouted.

“Abrasion?” Marisol furrowed her brow, blood pumping and mind on the highest alert.

They rolled the patient to check her back, but the only visible injury was the one on her hip. It wasn’t even a puncture wound; there was no way it was the source of the blood.

“Leads,” the doctor barked, his focus unwavering as he prepped for a central line.

Marisol grabbed the EKG leads and peeled off the adhesive backing. She placed them on the woman’s exposed chest, the pads sticking to the rise and fall of her breastbone. When her forearm brushed against the woman’s bare skin, a jolt, like static electricity, passed between them.

The woman’s eyes flew open, dark and intense. Her chest heaved as she gasped for air, her voice a flood of panicked Spanish that Marisol couldn’t understand despite being bilingual.

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