Page 47 of For Dear Life

“Huh?”

“I guess she really hated the dog,” says Rowan.

“Good grief!” I shake my head, still unpleasantly aware of the woman, and man with the injured leg. Was I unwise to walk into a hospital environment? Not due to the blood, but this bloody awful new ability to sense people’s feelings.

“Can I bite you?” I repeat. “The nurse might let everybody through if one of us is injured or in great pain.”

“Are you insane?” whispers Rowan.

I slant my head. “Have we not discussed the issues with society’s definitions of insanity?”

“Yeah but asking to bite a guy so that he’s injured enough for us to enter the emergency room fits the ‘psycho’ definition.”

I ignore him. “Yes or no, Leif?” Is he stepping backwards?

“Leif would very much like your mouth on him but probably not your teeth,” says Rowan.

A yell that would wake the proverbial dead manages to force through the doors and into the night, and I spin around in alarm. Several uniformed hospital staff appear and all focus switches to the unfortunate woman and her semi-hysterical partner. The woman behind the desk is now on the phone, while the other man has collapsed on the floor and his leg bleeds onto the shiny tiles.

And people say that my society is macabre?

“I’d rather have another fence post through my chest than experience that,” I comment as I stride past the woman to hit the large red button on the left of the doors to the ER.

“Your child would probably eat its way out,” comments Rowan.

I halt and blink at his bizarrely rude theory. “And you say I’m insane? I didn’t enter the world that way.”

Or at least I don’t think I did.

“You might regret that comment,” Leif whispers to Rowan as he passes us. “You heard what Violet said about a sexual relationship. Never happening if you say things like that to her.”

Rowan glares at the back of his head. “She should’ve bitten you.”

“Good grief!” I say at the volume Rowan recently found inappropriate. Although my exclamation isn’t in response to their conversation, but the scene of misery ahead of me.

Row after row of gray plastic chairs fill the emergency room, and there’s a similar smaller reception desk nearby. At the opposite end of the room, another set of double doors lead somewhere else. A woman in a green uniform emerges from behind those doors and towards the reception desk.

Some injuries aren’t visible, but blood seeps from some humans’ skin or soaks their clothes. “Has anybody seen Grayson tonight?” I ask.

“Headed off campus for one of his meetings?” suggests Rowan. “We should stop him from going to his uncle anymore. What if something happens?”

“Something will happen—to Josef and not to him,” I say. “I’ll guarantee that.”

“I’ll check on Grayson once we’re done here,” says Leif.

Despite the amount of human misery, nobody’s writhing on the floor, although there is some yelling and children crying at an eardrum-piercing pitch. I wander to the desk, teeth on edge. I thought shopping malls were bad, but this misery-filled purgatory is a whole new level of human Hell.

I approach a desk manned by a guy with a nurse’s lanyard and the same weary look as his colleague. “What happens to the half-dead individuals who arrive via ambulance?” I ask.

“Take a seat,” he says curtly.

“They take a seat?” I turn and scan the room again. “Which seat?”

“No, miss. You take a seat.”

“But I’m looking for a half-dead person,” I continue. “A shifter. Have you seen him?”

The nurse ducks his head to take a clearer look through the screen at my companions. “Is she with you?”

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