For the Dead Travel Fast

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His every breath burned like fire but he didn't smell her. He didn't smell much of anything really, just the hot sting of his seared nose-hairs, but he had some idea that was mostly in his head.

He carried an unconscious Kate far more easily than he had any right to, considering his weakened state and hers as well, but the Doc had seemed to expect it, as if it was natural. Kate had gasped and gone rigid when he'd lifted her from the car, and within seconds had passed out against his shoulder, her forehead hot and branding against his skin.

(He remembered one sub-zero trek through the woods in upstate New York when he was seventeen, a particularly nasty winter, the snow turned to icy pellets, his rental car out of gas, trying to take a shortcut back to civilization. Every breath had felt just like this: like he was breathing knives.)

Whatever the Doc had sprayed him with—

Didn't matter so long as she fished the bullet out of his wife.

Up through the ambulance bay, the concrete echoing his steps back at him, the cold damp a strange dichotomy to the heat he'd been feeling for so long now it had become second nature. As he followed the doctor, the sweat on the back of his neck prickled and chilled, the tips of his fingers going numb.

He felt strange, and that was strange, because he was pretty sure he felt normal again for the first time since getting shot. Normal. Average.

Except, of course, for the way he easily carried his wife through the back end of an urgent care clinic. His shoulders were fine, his knee didn't tweak, his back was solid. So okay, not everything was normal.

"As your temperature drops," Dr. Harris remarked, leading the way down a concrete hall, "the urge to sink your teeth into her will also drop."

He wasn't sure that was possible. Kate Beckett had been delicious from day one. "Well, Doc, hate to burst your bubble, but I've had that urge since the day I met her."

Harris's braids clacked as she spun around, the beads bouncing. She pinned him with a look so violently cold that he froze in his tracks.

"Kidding," he said lamely. "It was a joke. Kind of."

"A joke," she spat. "We don't joke about VL around here."

'VL' again. "Yeah, so what is—"

"You need to be specific when you give symptoms and conditions. Specificity will save both your lives," Harris said, resuming her breakneck pace up the concrete hall. "Did you or did you not have urges before she transitioned you?"

"How'd you know she—" He shut his mouth, narrowed his eyes at her fast-moving form. Deputy Peacemaker Dave had smelled it on them, so he had to assume the Doc could too. He had to assume every vampire they met knew scads more than they did because Beckett knew so little to begin with. Speaking of—the wound had bled through the bandage again and he could feel it against his shirt, warm and inviting. He gritted his teeth and called out to the doc. "Hey. How much further?"

She didn't stop, turning left at the junction and coming up out of the concrete sloped hall and into what looked like storage in an unused cafeteria. He saw the metal windows where patients would line up with their trays, the folded up tables pushed to one side to make room for old equipment and supply boxes.

Through the double doors and into another hall and this time it smelled of intensive care lotion and bleach, much more like the urgent care clinic he'd seen around the front. "She's bleeding a lot," he called to Dr Harris. "Can't you—"

She opened a door with a key she pulled out from around her neck, gestured him ahead of her. "In here."

He did so quickly, grateful the Doc was getting to the real emergency. "She was shot about—damn, it's been over 24 hours now—" There was a desk in the middle of a wide room, with three rooms spoked around the central nurses' station, all empty and dark. Reminded him of the ICU after she'd been shot. "Three GSW's but all exited cleanly save this one at her torso." He moved into the first room, which was open and closest, and eased Kate onto the hospital bed, wincing at the way the blood welled up. "I'd been shot in the chest. She transitioned me then to save my life, but in that process, I drank from her, this wound specifically, and healed it up with the bullet still inside. She—"

He didn't feel it coming. The needle was a painful jab into the lower bulge of his bicep, just below the line of his t-shirt, flexed as he'd been lowering Kate's head to the bed.

"What the—" But even as he said it, betrayal hot and stinging, something bad was happening to his central nervous system. "You bitch." It was a snarl and a terror—it didn't sound like him, but the feeling that rose up, swift and deadly—

was already too late.

The drug trickled cold and clear straight to his heart where it was pumped out fast. Everything was so fast. One moment he was caressing his wife's cheek and holding a hand to the blood-soaked bandage, giving her vital stats, and the next he was staggering, heavy, uncoordinated.

He was encased in ice, a searing painful ice that restricted him to nothing but an animal noise groaning through his chest and a rictus in his muscles. His knees bent with the weight of his own body, his hands in claws, his eyes too painful to move.

"It's faster this way," Harris was saying. "And I can't have the whole vampire population tearing through my patients to get to your sweet new meat." She jammed a wheelchair into the backs of his legs and he toppled back hard, his head hitting something, his body collapsing into an awkward bend in the wheelchair seat.

She began rolling him out of the room.

He moaned, an inhuman howl, as she zipped him into the next room over and left him parked beside the empty bed. He heard the doors close with a swish behind him, and the throwing of a bolt, and then a weird expectant silence.

He could see Kate in the other room. Her eyes were open now; she was struggling to push herself upright.

No, he wanted to mouth. Stay. But he couldn't move.

A hiss of air somewhere, the faint cool touch of a breeze on the back of his neck. He could see Kate through the fractals of ice that seemed to form over his vision. But his eyelids were so heavy…

Right before he passed out, he saw the Doc enter her room, pushing a surgical tray ahead of her.

—-xxx—-