Scarborough Fair
Me: Morons are morons.
Lucy
It's not difficult to get depressed in a place like this. I mean sure you're there to help people, in whatever capacity that might be, and there's such an upside when you can actually do that, it reminds you why you wanted to do this job in the first place. But...
In this place, almost all the kids here have come here to die.
It shouldn't just be hushed up as a fact of life that kids die here. Vampyre Medicine has come on so much in the last hundred years or so it's amazing, we can detect some Change Rejections long enough before they happen to prevent them. Some, we can't. It makes me sad that with fledglings, it was completely out of their control. It wasn't their fault they were Marked or that they rejected the Change, so when I look at people being wheeled in here on trolleys and doctors buzzing around like flies to a carcass it's not just a fact of life, it's as tragic as falling into deep water when you can't swim or being hit by a drink-driver. Dr. Cilian said it had nothing to do with how or why, it was simply a fact of life that life had to end at some point, be it sooner or later.
I was just starting nurse training with Dr. Cilian when they rolled yet another trolley in. Seven thirty in the evening, my college folders out in front of me, pulled together and puffy-eyed, the pen in my hand writing notes when I dared to break away from his eye-contact, despite the fact I was pretty sure my knickers were on backwards. I hadn't been very coherent getting up this evening and I was surprised I had managed to pull my trainee-nurse's uniform on properly. Now for human nurses, the uniform was blue. For veterinary nurses, it was usually green, but sometimes blue. For vampyre nurses, the uniform was identical to that of a normal nurse, but it was black. I was wearing some strange concoction that identified me as a trainee nurse, it was very finely striped black and white, which quite frankly made me feel like Sweeney Todd, and when I walked down the street normal folks thought I was an escaped inmate from the nearest prison. Still, rules are rules, and so Sweeney Todd I was.
Anaesthesia of vampyre fledglings and pre- and post-operative care was today's topic. He was sitting across the consulting room desk from me, just talking and talking and talking. At least I think that was what he was talking about, I'm not really sure... It was amazing being here, you could walk down a hall and hear dialects from all corners of the globe. For example, Catríona, or just Ríona for short, the Music Mistress, was a tiny Irish girl with an amazing knack for the fiddle, and so much energy it was surprising she didn't just make herself catch on fire with it all, she was like a little blonde firecracker with a deep southern Irish accent as musical as her violin. And then there was Ellen, the mate of Literature Master Aleron Ainscombe, who was the House's Farm Manager. Yes, this gets better, we have a farm. When we first introduce fledglings to blood, we use cattle-blood as opposed to human's, as early on in the Change their stomachs don't immediately take to human blood, generally if they have too much they chuck it all back up again. Gradually, as they get older, we phase out the cattle blood and phase the human blood in. They don't know this of course and most of them probably never will, but we had the farm for that reason. It also provides us with milk and beef. Ellen, bless her, could be summed up completely in three words: 'Herefordshire farmer's daughter'. I swear I couldn't understand a word she said. When she spoke, it was like something out of a period drama, I had no idea some people actually talked like that until I met Ellen. She wasn't here for most of the time, as she was diurnal and worked the farm in the daytime, and came back to the House for meals and to sleep during the night, but if I had had lessons with her I wouldn't have learned jack, except how to speak farmer I suppose. Never had there been a stranger pairing, he was the proverbial city bookworm, a well-spoken academic, she was the girl who spent all day in overalls, covered in cow muck. She barely scraped GCSEs but knew farming like the back of her hand. From day one they were taken with each other and slowly fell in love. It was a lovely story actually, I was surprised he didn't turn it into a novel or something. Now, back on track, Dr. Cilian was Italian, qualified in Rome before coming here, and every word he said was actually verbal sex. I wasn't paying much attention. In fact, I think I was staring at his abs again, not that there was a heck of a lot to see through his shirt and pullover and labcoat but it leaves much to the imagination. He's gorgeous, olive skin, dark hair, tall and slim, and he has these smouldering eyes that just make you wanna squeal.
Oh Nyx, he was looking at me, actually, down at me, and I was still staring at his jumper. I looked up at him from beneath my fringe.
"Was there something on my sweater Lucy?" he asked me sternly.
"Erm... I thought I saw a stain?"
Major reality check Lucy. He is a super sexy doctor and Nyx knows how many times your age, and you are a dumpy blonde with enough freckles to substitute a sunspot. Not to mention you're a nurse, and a really bad one at that! Get a grip Lucy you're not even a nurse... Oh crap he's still staring at me like he going to kill me...
"Emergency!"
With a swish of his coat, he was gone. Ah. Thank you Nyx. Wait why am I still sitting here?
I launched myself into the prep room with fire coming out of my arse. Dr. Cilian was already at the trolley-side of a fledgling, asking questions, drawing up drugs. Not another Change Rejection, how many more kids wanted to die during my training? I took a look at her from a distance, as I wasn't supposed to get in the doctors' way. Ah, she was that girl who everyone thought was a bit of a weirdo. She was a seriously odd, tell the truth, a complete loner, the others constantly took the piss out of her. It was the oddest Change Rejection I had ever seen, we don't normally get broken legs...
On the end of the firing line of Dr. Cilian's questions was an adult vampyre, ah of course I know him, he was in final year when I was in Firsts, oh he's big into fencing, what's his name...? Oliver Pendragon. He must be the new Fencing Master then. I wondered who they'd get to replace Spiridion. Oliver looked pale, but otherwise alright as he reeled off answers.
"You aren't going to believe this." He said to Dr. C, "But she just jumped off the keep."
Dr. Cilian raised one of those lovely eyebrows. "She jumped off the keep?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure she didn't fall?"
He scoffed a little bit. "Oh she fell but she wanted to."
"You saw it?"
"I was walking across the beach with Demeter and we saw her at the top of the keep, we screamed at the top of our lungs at her but I don't think she could hear us."
Dr. Cilian creased his brow as he glanced at the girl again, like something didn't make sense. "Are you her tutor?"
"Yes."
"Alright." He said, "We'll see what we can do. Lucy!" he snapped, I darted to his side, "Get get me a 1.5 22 gage needle and a sanguireous IV."
I nearly tripped over my own trainers as I sprinted to the pharmacy. 1.5 22 gage 1.5 22 gage... I grabbed two for good measure and yanked a sanguireous IV off the shelf. That my friends, is correct terminology for 'blood IV'. Nowadays they treat it so the protein chains and antigens on the red blood cells disintegrate, everything that makes blood personal to one individual goes, whilst keeping the good nutritional bits, it's basically so that people don't have orgies in hospital, in fact humans do it to all transplant blood and even some organs now, it lessens the chance of the body rejecting it. Perfect for icky fledglings. I sprinted back and stuck it on an IV stand, and then I tried to place the IV. Calm hands calm hands calm hands... Screw it my hands were shaking so much I could barely hold the damn needle. Dr. Cilian pinched it from between my fingers and pushed me out of the way grumbling before I could protest and placed it himself just like that, so easily. God I hate these efficient people!
Yianna
Spiridion had this blatant disregard for absolutely everything and everyone. It didn't matter what it was, but of course he took particular pleasure in disregarding me. In fact such was this disregard that it became twisted and warped in some way, so that things that effected normal people, just didn't have any effect on him. And now, I sat across the table from him in Jury Briefing, I just knew that he was laughing inside. Oh he didn't look like he was, he just looked like the grumpy old sod he always had been, but I knew him better. It was part of his game. I had fired him and now he wanted revenge for that. How he had done this, I didn't know. All I knew that he must have gone through a lot of high-powered humans to achieve this, and I certainly believed him capable. I was only too happy to get this damn trial over and done with and then I could go home and life would return to normal.
My ears were barely paying attention to the little bald human man who was explaining the details of the case to us. There were ten other jurors, apart from Spiridion and myself. One was an eighteen year-old girl called Casey, barely old enough to know her left from her right, there was a brightly coloured kaftaned art student from the University of Manchester called Siobhan, who would have voted 'not guilty' if we were sentencing a serial murderer. Then there was Paul, an OAP with a good sense of humour. Adrian, a rather petit - for lack of a better word – large animal vet with a penchant for corduroy and check shirts who kept looking at his watch and complaining about being forced to take time off work to do this. There was a middle-aged woman called Mia who had three kids who were her entire life, Sanjib, a gay Sikh man with a passion for shoe-designing, Marjorie, an old lady who was about to lose her marbles, Kenneth, a nurse, need I say more? Sandra was a frightening-looking London businesswoman, and Ron was a teacher. We were all sitting around a table like we were conducting a board meeting in a room which smelled of beeswax polish but there wasn't a genuine piece of wood in sight. I stopped myself from yawing the trial was a simple custody battle, a divorced couple fighting over the children. Not a mind-bender, but it would be a long haul. I would be lucky if it ended within a year. The bald man dismissed us, and the other jurors got up. Siobhan asked if anyone wanted to go for coffee. Sanjib said he would, he wanted to talk to her about some designs of his. Casey agreed too, Ron passed, as did Mia and Kenneth, and Sandra and Adrian walked out without so much as a nod to any of the others. I didn't blame them, they had far better places to be, as did I.
"A custody battle eh? I there I thought we were going to see a murder trial."
"Stay away from me Spiridion. You've done enough damage. Can't you see I need to be at the House?"
He smirked at me. "I think you need to be here." He said, taking another step towards me.
"I said stay away from me!" I hissed, glaring at him profusely. He backed away slowly, and walked away from me. Finally, peace and quiet. I knew how to make people leave me alone.
Spiridion
I clasped at my head and rubbed my temples furiously. The building had flooded, water was crashing down around everyone, men women and children being swept away by the torrent. There was a split second when the fear became real, when water filled by lungs, when I tried to choke but couldn't, when everything went black. I blinked several times and knocked myself out of it as I walked down the street in the middle of Hull, spitting out water, people turning to look at me as I went by. I felt cold, and a shiver travelled up my spine like someone had walked over my grave. Cursing, I made for the nearest bench and sat down, still fighting to keep my vision clear. The February wind was freezing the blood-vessels in my cheeks, and it was a jolly good thing, it was keeping me to my senses. That was the thing with High Priestess Yianna. She was a subtle bulldozer, removing obstacles from her path by bringing them crashing down. Those that had an impact on her life and get close were the ones who could withstand her offensive.
Yianna never revealed her affinity to anyone, that was standard. Maybe it's time she told everyone. Yianna has the ability to make people hallucinate, but not just any old hallucinations. Yianna has the ability to invoke people's greatest fears in visions, wherein the victim lapses into a mental state of almost astral projection, into another reality where the physical implications carry on into their bodies. She calls these realities 'psionospheres'. She can also see illusions herself, her own power shows her what has happened in an area that she passes through empty, from psi fragments left there. And when she was angry, the only way to get out of the psionosphere was to get as far away from her as possible. Bloody woman, she didn't hesitate to use the damn affinity, no matter what people's circumstances were. She spent so much time in her psionospheres she had forgotten what the real world was like. I growled, taking assurance in one thing. If Yianna could tell what had truly transpired through her psionospheres, how would she deal with court proceedings, in which no importance whatsoever was placed upon telling the truth, only upon whoever lies the best?
Lucy
Later on, I was still assisting with this girl who had jumped off the cliff. I mean castle keep. The doctors had had to operate on some bits of her, internal bleeding from the force of the landing, blah blah blah, they had reset her legs in plaster, pumped blood out of her lungs, and the kid was actually still alive. I felt sad for her, I knew she was bullied and I never wanted anyone to feel so sad that they didn't think their life was worth living. The lads never seemed to go for her, despite her being very beautiful, and the other girls treated her like crap in the pan. It was now early morning, well after hours, and I had been instructed by Dr. Sex to monitor the girl's TPR, so monitoring I was. Temperature normal, respiration low, as patient unconscious, and I was counting the pulse now, a stethoscope stuck into my ears and held to her front. I'm really annoyed right now, because I'm only at twenty seconds, thirty-four beats, that means I have forty seconds to go and I have a really itchy ear. It's driving me insane! Thirty-seven thirty-eight thirty-nine... The door opened. It was Dr. Sex. I pulled the stethoscope from my ears in frustration. Great, now I had to start counting all over again! He held the door open for another figure, who appeared to be Oliver Pendragon. Poor bloke looked knackered, his eyes were red and his feet were somewhat dragging.
"How is she?" he asked, as I itched my ear. Ew ear wax...
"That's just it." said Dr. Sex, taking a glare at me with my finger in my ear. I immediately started talking her pulse again, "She's fine."
"That's good isn't it?"
"But the point is that she really shouldn't be." Dr. Sex continued, all grim again, "I mean how far is that drop? Ninety odd feet? There is no way that even an adult vampyre could have survived a fall like that."
Oliver sighed. "Don't you doctors ever learn not to look a gift horse in the mouth?"
"Oh I'm not complaining. But she landed on a rock for Nyx's sakes. There shouldn't have been much of her that wasn't two-dimensional."
"So, what? She's a very very lucky girl."
"And you're sure nothing broke her fall on the way down?"
"Well what is there to break her fall?"
Dr. Sex looked confused. "Like you say," He said, "It's a gift horse."
I pulled the stethoscope from my ears, gently this time, as I remembered how expensive these things were. Pulse was normal. I scribbled it on her chart, before moving to get out of here for the day.
"We're going to move her into isolation later not, so fast Lucy so that we can manage her condition more easily and we can keep a better eye on her. People who've tried to kill themselves once will normally try again and hospitals are a relatively easy place to do it in. Around the clock observation I think. Lucy."
"Yes Dr. S...ilian?"
"Will you go to her room and bring her some clean clothes, toiletries and also something to keep her occupied when she wakes up, some books or the like please?"
I nodded and scurried off, very aware that I had absolutely no idea where her room was, or how I was going to carry all that stuff up here. I would have to drop by the porter anyway as I didn't have a key to her room. The office was still lit, even at this time in the morning. I knocked on the glass.
"Hello." I said, "Could you tell me where Anastasie Parisien's room is please?"
The man picked up a folder from a pile to his right and flicked through it. "Epiphron House, Room fifty-three." He said, "What's your reason for visit?"
Yep, you guessed it, just like Hogwarts, we had a house system. The dorms were on four levels, each level split in two, for boys and girls. Each level was referred to as a House, housing a variation of Firsts to Creps, and were named after the children of Nyx and Erebus. Four girls' Houses, four boys' Houses. The girls' Houses, were Hemera, goddess of the day, Epiphron, god of 'prudence, shrewdness, thoughtfulness, carefulness and sagacity' (I read that on Wikipedia), Thánatos, who was death, and Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance. The name means 'to give what is due'. And in the boys' corner, their respective counterparts were Aether, god of light, Charon, the insurer of safe passage to the afterlife, Hypnos, who was sleep, and Moros, the god of doom, whose inhabitants were often jokingly known as 'morons'. Each House had its stereotypes, for example, Aether boys were the pretty boys, the jocks, Charon were the geeks, Hypnos were just lazy and, you guessed it, Morons were morons. The Hemera girls always said they were the closest to Nyx, as Hemera was Nyx's favourite child, but by Christ they were the biggest airheads and sluts, I'm not even kidding, no wonder we kicked their arses at inter-House, well, inter-House everything. The Epiphron girls were the boffins, the good girls who worked hard, got into Oxbridge and pursued high-powered careers, the Thánatos girls were all emos. Me, I'm a Nemesis girl. Or I used to be. Made sense, seeing as I seem to be my own worst enemy sometimes.
"She's in the Infirmary and I'm here pick up some stuff for her."
The porter nodded, handed me a key, and I hit the stairs. Think of the calories Lucy, the calories... At least I wouldn't need to go for a run today. Her room looked pretty normal actually. Fairly plain, she hadn't done a lot to it, most girls covered their walls with posters of half-naked men and hung fairy lights around the place, there wasn't a heck of a lot in here. I had almost expected to walk in here and discover she was part of a bid for world-domination or that she was some kind of morbid goth. Sticking my nose into her wardrobe, I found a small carry-bag in the bottom and went on the search for essentials. I grabbed her some toothpaste, her toothbrush, face wipes, some shampoo and conditioner, some soap, deodorant. Couldn't see any make-up lying around and to think of it I'd never seen her wear any anyway. She'd need some clean underwear too, and some jeans and a couple of shirts... The bag was getting full, what was I packing for her to leave the country or something? Hm, and Dr. Sex said she'd want something to keep her occupied. Tell the truth there wasn't a lot in here that could pass for boredom breakers, there were just textbooks and files. I checked in her drawers, under her bed, ooh, wait, I found something. There were some old books under her bed. Pulling them out, I wiped dust off them and read the titles. 'Witchcraft Throughout The Ages'? 'Advanced Spells and Rituals'? These looked like they belonged in the S&R department, and even then on the very highest shelves. They were for people who were preparing to take exams to teach S&R at a much higher level than was ever taught at Houses of Night. In universities, maybe. In complete and utter honesty, these may not be hers, from the amount of dust I blew off them they hadn't been opened in ages, and the room allocations get shuffled every year to put the new Firsts and Seconds into dorms of two or three and allow the Thirds and Crepusculars to have rooms of their own. These could have been here for far longer than she was, she probably didn't know they were even there. Still, what if she did? It was a bit creepy.
"Weird..." I said to myself as I replaced them under her bed. Weird indeed.
R&R!
