The Patient Who Knew Me

The IV pump clicked at three in the morning, and I counted the clicks the way I always did on the long stretch of the night shift, one two three four, before the bag ran dry.

Room seven had been my patient for seven years. I knew the sound of his breathing better than my own. I knew the way the sheet settled over his chest, the exact position of his hands on the blanket, the faint line of silver still visible under the skin above his heart where the bullet had lodged and stayed. Nobody at Valley Regional asked why a comatose man had a piece of metal in his chest that no surgeon would remove. Nobody asked why his chart listed no family, no insurance, no next of kin. He was a John Doe who had arrived one autumn night with a hole in him and never left, and I had been the one holding his chart when the ambulance doors opened.

I set the fresh bag on the hook and adjusted the drip. The room smelled of antiseptic and old carpet and something else, something warm and dark that I had spent seven years pretending not to notice. It smelled like pine and rain and a forest floor in autumn. It smelled like the inside of my husband's coat.

Stop it, I told myself. I had counted thirty-seven of those clicks already. I was tired. I was always tired at three in the morning.

His hand moved.

I watched it slide across the blanket, slow and deliberate, fingers opening. I told myself it was a reflex, the kind of thing that happened with patients like him, the body finding a new position in its long sleep. Then his fingers closed around my wrist.

The grip was not the weak flutter of a man who had been lying in a bed for seven years. It was strong and certain, and it pulled me down until my face was close to his, close enough to see the color of his eyes.

They were open. Amber, gold at the edges, and fixed on mine.

"You smell like my Gamma," he said.

His voice was rough with disuse, but it was a voice, a real one, and the words went through me like a shock of cold water. I tried to pull back and he held on. His thumb moved against the inside of my wrist, slow, searching, and I felt the pulse there jump under his touch.

"Let go of me," I said.

"Your scent." He breathed in, and his chest rose under the thin hospital gown. "Pine. Wolfsbane. You have been hiding. Why have you been hiding?"

I did not answer. My mind had gone blank in a way it never did, not in seven years of codes and crashes and families screaming in the hallway. I could feel the heat of his hand through my skin, and under that heat something else, a pull low in my belly, a stirring in the place where I kept my wolf locked and quiet. She lifted her head for the first time in years and she was not afraid. She was interested.

"You know that name," he said. "Gamma. You know it."

"I do not know what you are talking about." My voice came out steady. Good. Steady was the only thing I had left. "You have been asleep for a long time. You are confused. I am going to get a doctor."

"Seven years." His eyes did not leave mine. "I counted the winters in the pipes. The cold comes through the wall in January. You wear a blue coat in January. You smell like the coat when you come in from the snow."

I stared at him. Seven years of night shifts, of walking in from the parking lot with snow in my hair, and I had never once thought that the man in room seven knew I was there.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Caleb." The name came out of him in a long breath, as if he had been holding it. "Caleb Rourke. And you are the woman who has been keeping me alive with poison."

The word hit me before I understood it. Poison. I looked at the IV bag, at the clear fluid running down the line into his arm, and the floor seemed to tilt under my feet. I had hung that bag. I had hung a hundred of them.

"What poison?" I said.

"Wolfsbane." His jaw tightened. "It keeps me between forms. It has been keeping me here since the night I fell. Whoever has been ordering those bags does not want me to wake."

I thought of the supply closet, of the identical orders that had come down from the office year after year, of the way the bags were always already prepared when I arrived for my shift. I thought of the regent's name on the paperwork, a name I had seen in the file room and never once questioned.

"You are saying someone at this hospital has been poisoning you for seven years," I said.

"I am saying someone in my pack has been poisoning me for seven years." His thumb pressed against my wrist again, and I felt the mark before I saw it, a warm line of heat that started at the bone and spread up my arm. "And you are the first person who has touched me since it began."

I looked down. On the inside of my wrist, where his thumb had been, a faint shape was rising out of my skin, pale and curved, the color of moonlight on water. It had not been there when I came into the room. It had not been there when I checked his pulse an hour ago, and I knew that because I had counted his pulse, thirty-eight beats, and I had looked at my own hand while I did it.

"No," I said. I pulled my arm free and stepped back until the foot of the bed hit the backs of my legs. "No. I have a son. I have a job. I have a life, and I am not part of whatever this is."

"Your son." His eyes sharpened. "How old is your son?"

The question landed in me like a needle. I did not answer. I turned and walked out of room seven, and the door swung shut behind me with a soft click, and I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall and my hand pressed over the mark on my wrist.

The corridor was empty. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. At the nurses' station, the phone began to ring.

I pushed off the wall and walked toward it, and I told myself that a man waking from a coma could say anything. I told myself that the mark was a burn from the hot water in the sink, that the pull I felt was exhaustion, that the word Gamma had come from the same place a dreaming brain gets faces and names and old dead husbands. I told myself all of it in the time it took to reach the desk.

Then I picked up the phone, and the voice on the other end said, "Nora, this is the front desk. There is a man down here asking for room seven. He says his name is Silas Rourke, and he says he is family."

I looked down at my wrist. The mark was still there, and it was still warm, and from the direction of room seven I heard a low sound that was not a machine, not a click, not the hum of the lights.

It was a growl.