Page 7 of Burn Falls
“I obviously do.” I chuckled.
“Really—”
“Dad, I do this for a living. Let me help you.” I was no office manager, but I could sort all of his financials and get them ready for April since I did that for the bank.
He stared at me for a moment, a look of defeat on his face. “Thank you.”
After we ate in the break room, I handed out the checks for everyone before everyone left early and I went back to my father’s office where I knew I wouldn’t leave until well after dark. I was determined to help him sort the papers and give him a little bit of a breather when it came to OBB before the holidays. I hated seeing him stressed, especially when business was good.
I didn’t know what time it was or how long I’d been organizing all the paperwork because I was in the zone. So much so that I almost didn’t hear the scream coming from down the hall. I rose so fast from the desk chair that I banged my thigh on the corner of the desk before I ran out of the office door. I sprinted in the direction of the scream and came to a screeching halt the moment I saw a man hunched over my father’s body. The man’s dark gaze met mine, and then he disappeared before I could blink. I didn’t have time to think about how or why because the moment he was gone, I rushed to my father’s side and saw blood pooling around his head that was coming from his neck. As fast as I could, I ran back to his office and grabbed my cell from my purse to dial 911.
CHAPTER TWO
The clock on the wall ticked as the time passed slowly, echoing to my sensitive hearing.
I sat in the break room of the hospital sipping a cup of coffee while reading the newspaper to catch up on what had happened the day before while I’d slept. My shift so far had been quiet—unnervingly so—like the calm before a storm.
I’d been a doctor for almost sixty years since graduating from medical school in 1960. It was challenging at first, trying to figure out how to go to medical school given I could only come out at night, so I’d befriended the professors and compelled them to provide me with all the material and tests at night until my clinical. After I’d graduated med school, I took the extra classes needed and eventually became a surgeon. Of course, that was many years ago.
The downside to being as old as I was, and on the run from the man who wanted to rip my heart from my chest, was the fact that I had to move around from place to place before humans realized that I wasn’t aging. Every time I had to use a new alias and compel someone at the American Medical Association to update my license with the new name. It was time consuming and needed to be done given everything. I’d thought about not moving and compelling people to believe whatever I needed them to, but it was daunting to even compel women after sex, so I figured moving was easier.
For the past five years, I’d been a trauma surgeon at the Edgewater General Hospital in Anchorage, Alaska using the name Dr. Parker Young. I found my last name comical given I was anything but young.
The weather during the winter was perfect for being a vampire. There were more dark hours in the winter, and in the summers, I would work the graveyard shifts at a hospital in Seattle where the balance between dark and light was more normal.
Being a doctor wasn’t my first choice of a career because there was so much blood and I had to drink it to live, but since I had an infinite amount of time on my hands, I’d chosen a profession where I could work in the dead of night and have access to endless amounts of blood without needing to kill innocent people. And because, on the outside, I looked twenty-four, I wore glasses and used compulsion to help me land the jobs I wanted. I was also able to compel a blood supplier to keep giving me bags to keep at home in whatever town I lived in. That was one of the good things about being a vampire: using mind control on humans to get what we wanted or to make them forget something they’d seen us do. Because of that, after I got a job, I didn’t have to bother with a disguise, but I needed to keep moving so there was less of a chance Renzo would find me, and so I didn’t have to keep compelling the innocent humans.
But since moving to Alaska five years ago, I’d found this sleepy town was perfect for me. So perfect that I’d thought about making it permanent, and if the day came that Renzo found me, I’d face my fate. I was tired of running. I wasn’t sure what I’d do about me not aging, but compulsion seemed to be the answer for everything, so I could try that until it got tiresome.
Elizabeth, the charge nurse on duty, stuck her head into the break room. “LifeMed on the way. Severe bite wound coming in from Burn Falls. ETA thirteen minutes.”
Coffee cup abandoned, I dashed to my locker to down a bag of O-neg before surgery so I could keep my cravings at bay.
“Miles O’Bannion, fifty-six. BP ninety over fifty, tachy to one-ten. Severe bite wound to the throat and heavy blood loss. We started a transfusion as he had signs of hypovolemia. Daughter says all she saw was a man, who disappeared from the scene.”
“You weren’t able to stop the bleeding during the flight? He’s bleeding out,” I stated, looking at the blood soaking the bandages around the patient’s neck.
“We tried,” TJ, the flight doctor, responded as we lifted the patient from the gurney and onto a bed in the trauma room.
“It’s probably his carotid. Call surgery, Elena, and let them know we’re on our way up,” I barked, moving the bed out of the room. My nursing staff followed me as we headed toward the elevator.
The flight doctors had packed the wound with gauze and used compression to try to stop the bleeding, but now it was seeping through the material. I pulled the gauze away to inspect the wound, and the moment I saw it up close, my mouth gaped open. If I could have stopped breathing, I would have. To the human eye, it would look as though an animal had taken two chunks out of the patient’s neck, but I knew differently. They were vampire fang bites. I’d seen this kind of bite many times before, and I, myself, had caused this wound before—but never to the point where they ended up in the emergency room.
“Are you okay?” Rosey, my lead nurse, asked as we wheeled the bed into the elevator.
I knew I wasn’t hiding my shock, but this man had been bitten by a vampire, and therefore, I knew there was another vamp in Burn Falls. In the five years I’d lived in Alaska, I’d yet to come across another vampire other than my friend Athan, and that was only when he visited me.
“Where was he attacked again?” I asked, placing the bandage back on the wound and using pressure to try to stop the bleeding again. I needed to know where, when, and most definitely who.
“Burn Falls,” Rosey reminded me.
“Right. But where?” I prodded as the elevator dinged opened onto the surgery floor. We rushed straight into the operating room.
“Flight team didn’t say,” she responded.
Of course they didn’t. I needed to talk to TJ as soon as this surgery was over.
While the anesthesiologist started his IV to administer the anesthesia, my team and I scrubbed in so we could begin the procedure. When the anesthesiologist gave the nod, I stepped closer. “Let’s get the bandage off and see exactly what we have.” I removed the gauze and handed it to Rosey. Blood was still gushing from the patient’s neck and if I didn’t repair the artery stat, he would die on my table.
