For the Dead Travel Fast
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Beckett watched Dr Harris produce a flow chart on the whiteboard she'd rolled into the hospital room, but she was struggling to comprehend. Her eyes kept drifting over to the crumpled form of her husband on the floor in the next room, soaked in sweat, a hollow look to his body that made her hurt.
"Now, PrPCs—remember that's red blood cell glycoprotein antigens specific to VL-transitioned bodies, like yours, mine, his—do not have nuclear material; they're just proteins, which are these telephone cord-looking amino acids that have stuck together. And amino acids are just carbons, hydrogens, nitrogens and a few others. The assembly happens inside your cells and is guided by the cell's nuclear IKEA instruction manual, which means you get all these leftover screws and these unused pre-drilled holes where maybe you should have inserted Tab A but there aren't anymore Tab As, and so we have this junk on your RBCs. And what is junk to most human bodies, well, in one of us, changed by VL, we need it. It's no longer junk—it has a function."
Kate blinked and reluctantly pulled her attention back to Dr Harris. "It's not leftover junk," she tried to process. "Are you sure he's okay?"
"Am I sure he's okay?" Harris looked surprised, and then mutinous for half a second before she sighed. She checked her watch and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Right, because I did three years of IM residency, three years Heme fellowship, and a five year residency in general surgery not to mention established an entire clinic dedicated to serving our kind just so I could be second-guessed—"
"I think I need to go in there." Kate pushed herself off the side of the bed before the woman could push her back down, but she'd only taken two steps when the nausea rolled over her—and a vicious agony—and her knees dropped out.
She hit the floor but Dr Harris was there, shoving a shoulder under Kate's armpit and hoisting her up on her feet again. "Sit—here—the wheelchair. Right now. I take my damned oath seriously." Harris practically slung her into the wheelchair near the door, checking Kate's pulse with two fingers, timing it as she looked at her watch.
Kate sank disgracefully and propped her head in her hands, hunched over the wound, trying not to breathe too deeply but also afraid she was about to plunge into a panic attack.
It just hurt a whole lot. A lot. Like she was tearing open her lungs with pieces of jagged rib bones, but she knew that couldn't be possible.
Right?
And on top of the physical pain, and somehow worse, was the knowledge that she'd done this. All of it. The CIA conspiracy would never have come into their home if she'd been content with seeing Bracken prosecuted and in prison for his crimes. She'd had choices, all along the way, to compromise her work or her marriage, and she'd chosen her marriage to suffer. She had chosen it.
Just as she had chosen to give way to desire and fear, to crawl across the blood-slick floor to her husband and change his life forever—to make him like her.
She had done this.
And then fought like hell to save him from it.
She couldn't have come all this way just to lose this man in a clinic designed entirely for vampires. She couldn't have fought her own base instincts for over a decade only to turn her husband in a moment of weakness and panic and need—and have gotten it so wrong.
She pressed tears back into her eyes and refused to let herself cry.
"You're weak," Harris said flatly.
"No shit," she growled.
"I meant." There was a pause as if the doc was being forced to consider each word carefully. "You're not healing as you should. I'm working on a glucose-heme supplement for you, but I stopped to explain what's happening in your body—what has been happening—because you deserve agency, all of us deserve the chance to know and be informed about what's going on inside us—only you want to weep over your husband."
"I'm not crying," Kate ground out. Breath hissing through her teeth. "I'm very concerned that he's not getting what he needs." Even if it was just her fingers in his hair, a cool touch at his fevered forehead. "At least comfort. My voice." Her throat closed up.
"Fine. I get it. I mean, I don't, but I'm sure it's legit. I'm sure he's not such a blood-sucking leech when he's out of phase."
Kate lifted her head. Stared emptily at the woman.
Harris rolled her eyes. "Let me get back to the lab, finish up, and I'll have the perfect cocktail for your IV. Once you've had a couple hours of intravenous nourishment, you should rebound again."
Her nostrils flared. "What about Rick?"
That stone-faced dismissal put a chill down Kate's spine. But Harris smoothed it over with a bright smile. "Of course, he's next. You're the one who got shot, you're the more dire case."
"He was shot too," she said quietly. "It's why I transitioned him. Because I had no other options for keeping him alive." The grief threatened to break her. "Don't let it be for nothing."
Harris obviously was biting back a retort, but she had that false bedside manner plastered onto her face. "He's next. He's in a well-mapped phase, Kate, so you don't need to worry."
She shoved herself to her feet, more fury than sense. "That's nothing more than a platitude," she snapped. "Of course I'm worried. More so now that you've ruthlessly explained what an ignorant vampire-bitch I am. Insinuated I practically raped my husband transitioning him without his consent. And from this distance, all I can do now is worry."
Harris's face flattened. Two hands came up as if to ward off Kate's emotions. "Hey. Consent is kind of my soapbox. We've got cases like yours where an ex-lover thinks he's hot stuff and turns his girlfriend in the middle of the night, thinking she'll be sexier. Then a lot vampires think they need to transition their kids before they're adults, cut down on the likelihood of—anyway, no, right, you don't care, why should you—but you're here, under my care, and I take that seriously. So—"
"Yes. We are here now, under your care, and you are not going to let him die. You're not even going to let him suffer. Because you're a doctor. You have an oath." And because sometimes the cop thing helped— "The same as me, when I swore to protect and serve."
Harris opened her mouth to snap back, but Kate wasn't done.
"No. No." She found the strength to push away from the woman, head for the door under sheer willpower and desperation, and she stabbed a finger at the other room. "I'm going in there, with him, and when you have whatever IV ready, I'll take it in there, with him. Because he is my husband. And that oath is one I will not break."
Ever again.
—-xxx—-