The giants arrived by noon. Even though the elementals ward cleared, most other patients stayed put. Some, of course, had no choice—not every procedure at Empire General was elective.
I stalked the hallways, obsessively tallying the number of occupied beds throughout the hospital. I only forbade myself to enter the vampire ward. A tiny, illogical corner of my mind worried that I’d wake Nick, that the power of my emotions would force him from the safety of his vampire-bound sleep even though the sun was still high in the sky.
Ultimately, I let Becs lure me out of the office. She insisted that I had to eat lunch anyway, and the new security guards had everything under control. I let her reach both of us to a familiar park bench, looking out at the Potomac River in the heart of Georgetown. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d walked down the hill as a med student, seeking a break from intractable classes. Staring out at the slow-flowing water, I could feel my blood pressure return to normal.
Becs dug into her backpack and produced a pair of waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches. She passed me mine—roast beef and brie on sourdough with a double serving of thin-sliced cucumber, just the way I liked it. I could even forgive the, um, aroma of her egg salad on rye because she took such good care of me.
“This is amazing,” I said, after I’d swallowed the first perfect bite. I couldn’t believe she’d pulled together such fare from Natasha’s kitchen.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“Last night!” I said defensively.
“I meant food,” she said, arching her eyebrows in deliberate provocation.
I blushed, but I said self-righteously, “I meant food, too. I had bacon and eggs and toast!” At her skeptical look, I became fascinated by the crust of my sandwich. “Nick made it for me, when I came back from my walk.”
“I want to know about that walk,” she said. “But first tell me about Nick.”
He’s different from any guy I’ve ever met. He makes me feel safe, even when everything is crazy. He doesn’t care if I’ve lost my powers.
I shrugged. “He’s a guy.”
Becs put her sandwich in her lap. “Here, I’ll make this easier for you. He’s hotter than an ifrit in Phoenix. But you’ve had your pick of hot guys before.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” she insisted. “You could have gone out with half my senior class at the Academy, if you’d ever opened your eyes to see they existed. And you had your pick in college school too. There were even a couple of med students worth a night or two.”
I snorted. “I didn’t exactly have time for a boyfriend then.”
“That’s my point. You didn’t then, and you don’t now. But you seem to have chosen one, all the same. And he’s a vampire.”
“What?” I asked, pretending to be shocked.
Becs didn’t let me off the hook. “Come on, Ash. You know that complicates things. The day/night schedule alone is a killer. What’s going on?”
I shrugged. “I’m just having fun. It’s not like I’m going to hold out for my One True Love. It’s absurd to wait for the Promised One when he could be ten thousand miles away, working in a call center in Hyderabad.”
“But…” Becs prompted when I ran out of steam.
“But there’s something special about Nick. I… I like the person I am when I’m with him. Does that make sense?”
She nodded. “It makes a lot of sense. So long as you remember that you’ve only just met him.”
A sliver of ice cut through the sunny afternoon. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, he showed up right before things started getting crazy at the hospital.”
“Things have always been crazy at the hospital.”
“You know what I mean,” she reprimanded. “We never had banshees before Nick came around. Shucks, either.”
The sliver of ice turned into a glacier calving across my heart. “You think he’s going to kill someone?”
“I don’t know what to think.” She was using her warder voice—calm, implacable, utterly without emotional content. They must have taught an entire course at the warder’s Academy about using that tone.
“Wait a second. You’re the one who told him about our meeting in the storeroom.”
My protest made me remember the banshee whose comb we’d found in broad daylight. And the hellhound who’d attacked that morning had only made its appearance after I hustled Nick into seclusion for the day.
“He couldn’t have let either one of them in,” I said, hating the defensive note in my voice.
“I’m not saying he did. But we never had a problem with harbingers of death before Nick showed up.”
I couldn’t deny that. But I also couldn’t believe Nick had anything to do with my ongoing problems at the hospital. I would have felt something when I was with him—something off—if he was essentially a terrorist working for some huge, dark, unknown cause. That type of evil would be evident even if my powers were on the blink. Right?
I offered up a prayer to Hecate that denial was just a river in Egypt. If I was wrong, the Empire Bureau of Investigation would end up in permanent residence on the hospital grounds. And I could very well find myself in a permanent cell, far beneath the Eastern Empire Night Court.
I folded wax paper over my sandwich. I’d lost my appetite. “Whatever happens, I know you’ll keep me safe,” I finally said.
“Of course I will.” Becs made it sound as if no sane person could ever doubt any alternative. But then she ruined everything by saying, “Physically. I’ll die before anyone hurts you physically.”
Great. That meant she thought Nick was going to break my heart.
I couldn’t imagine she was right. And even if she was, I couldn’t imagine not taking the chance. I had it bad for my shadowy vampire…lover? Boyfriend? Whatever.
Becs finished her sandwich as if we’d talked about nothing more disturbing than the Nationals’ chances in the post-season. Then, she reached into her backpack, producing a pasteboard box with a familiar gold sticker.
“Friends?” she asked, passing the treasure to me.
“For Cake Walk cupcakes?” I asked. “You’re stuck with me forever.”
She laughed as I sliced a fingernail through the paper label. I knew what I’d find before I opened the box: Three miniature Caramel Castle cupcakes—each one consisting of four layers of yellow cake secured by caramel icing--and three Lemon Leaps—sweet lemon cake with sour lemon curd, finished off with sugared lemon rind. Becs was the safe, secure Castle, while I took the Leaps. That’s the way our friendship had always been.
She waited until I’d eaten two of mine, devouring each in a pair of bites. Then she said, “I have a suggestion, but you’re not going to like it.”
I looked at her warily. “Suggest away.”
“We need help with security at the hospital.”
“You saw those giants!”
She nodded. “And they’ll be great, through the weekend. But you said yourself we need a more permanent solution.”
I frowned. With a theft, a banshee, and a hellhound in little more than a week, “solutions” were thin on the ground.
Becs obviously took my silence as permission to continue. “Empire General has to accommodate everyone. You have to secure the building against every type of imperial, no exceptions.”
“That’s in our charter—we’re required to treat every denizen of the Eastern Empire.”
“The only other institution I can think of with such a diverse population is the night court. They’re required to hear every case in the Eastern Empire.” She paused until I nodded, and then she said, “The court had to work out a massive security scheme—maybe even more than you do, because they’ve got mundanes going in and out of the same building.”
“So if we talk to the court about their security…”
“…We might get a handle on what we should be doing,” she confirmed.
It felt like failure to reach outside the hospital. But I didn’t want to feel this lost for even one day more. “Who’s in charge of security for the night court?” I asked.
“A vampire. His name is James Morton.”
A vampire. Unbidden, I remembered the feel of Nick’s fang alongside my jugular.
Silently ordering my imagination to settle down, I said, “Can you set up a meeting?”
“I’ll go over there tonight.”
“Perfect,” I said.
“But I have one requirement.”
“This is the part I’m not going to like.”
She had the guts to meet my gaze. “I don’t want Nick Raines knowing about it.”
My initial response was to protest. Nick had done nothing but stand by me. He’d made me dinner. He’d kept me safe.
But Becs had made a hell of a lot of dinners for me over the years. And she’d raised her sword in my defense—against threats real and imagined—more times than I could count.
She was my best friend. She was my warder. She deserved one favor, even one that made me feel like a traitor to the man I’d slept with just the night before.
“Okay,” I said. “Set something up.”
“And?” she pressed.
I hated the words, but I said them. “And I won’t tell Nick.”
“Thank you,” Becs said quietly.
“You’re wrong,” I warned her.
“I can’t tell you how much I want that to be the case.”
We sat on the bench for a long time after that, watching the river flow slowly downstream. Ultimately, we ate our last two cupcakes, but the lemon rind left a bitter aftertaste that no amount of water could wash away.