CHAPTER 1: TAKEN
I walked through twilight into the battlefield. The sun had vanished hours ago, and cold stars now glinted overhead. Fires guttered, and smoke rolled up in columns to the emerging stars. Bodies lay scattered upon the field, blood soaking into the dirt. I could smell it, rich and heady and sinking into the leaf mold, feeding the earth. Imperceptible to human ears, roots rustled underground, reaching for that sweet nourishment.
As I did.
I lifted my head to the sky. A cool autumn breeze brushed my face and tangled my red hair. Crows cawed in the gloom, spiraling out of the dark to light on my shoulders, to walk beside me in the trampled brown grasses. I picked my way over the dead and the almost-dead, pausing to bend and peer into the eyes of those who were slipping away. I could see the flicker of the encroaching Otherworld in their eyes, the horror of realizing that their lives were coming to an end. This place was my garden, and everything in it flowered to serve me.
I was a force of nature, stalking through this field, gazing upon the folly of men fighting over territory and riches. This was my milieu—the song of war and death. That power sang in me, and I was one with sky and land. Heady as this was, I still thought of the wives and children of these dead men cowering at home, their lives dependent upon the rash decisions of whichever nobleman claimed this patch of land over another. There was no justice for them; not even I could create that.
I paused before a banner trampled into the mud, gazing upon a fallen man in armor sprawled beside it. One of my crows hopped to his helmet and rapped on it with his beak, as if to see if the wearer of the suit was still within this world.
The man groaned. I smiled and knelt beside him. Lifting his visor, I stared down upon a blood-spattered face. My fingers trailed his cheek. I knew him; he was a young king, impetuous and not considered in his actions. His blue eyes followed my fingers, dazed.
“You came,” he said.
“My king,” I said. There was nothing else to say. My emotions were mixed: wistfulness, sadness, and hunger. He had once served me, and he still owed me.
“It was as you foretold,” he coughed. “We lost.”
I nodded, pulling the helmet from his head. Blood stuck his blond hair to the interior of the helmet, but I was gentle as I pulled it away. I cradled his head in my hands, exposing his neck to me.
“And you will pay for that prophecy,” I said. My mouth watered, smelling blood and fire. I bared fangs and sank them deep in his flesh. He thrashed, clanking in his armor, but I drank from him. His blood warmed my body, moving under my glasslike flesh and nourishing my cold marrow. I had tasted his blood before. This would be the last time, and I was sad to lose it, and him.
When I drained him dry, I sat back on my heels and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. One of my crows had disappeared inside his helmet, listening to its own echoing caws.
I savored this moment. There was something special about royal blood, about the warm richness of it, annihilating a celebrated bloodline. But the sorrow still weighed upon me. He was more than his blood. He had been more to me than that.
I stood and stretched, feeling warm and languid. I had taken dessert first, but there was still much more blood for me in the field beyond.
I waded into the remains of the field, listening for last screams and the thundering of terrified hearts. I hoped to forget that sorrow of losing the young king, to drown it in the delights spread before me.
Above me, a crow cawed, over and over into the dark.
I AWOKE FROM THE DREAM with a gasp, lurching bolt upright in my cot in the hospital on-call room. The room was windowless and perfectly dark, except for the blue glimmer of my cell phone. It rang insistently, and I reached for it, fumbling as I answered.
“This is Doctor Conners,” I muttered.
“Doc, this is the ER. We’ve got a trauma headed to operating room six. Patient’s male, early thirties, presenting with thoracic and head wounds. The surgical resident has stabilized him, and radiology will send his scans down.”
“Understood. Operating room six,” I repeated, and hung up. I took a moment to collect myself, running my hands through my dark brown hair. I reached for the hair tie on my wrist to knot it up in a sloppy bun. Casting about for the light switch, I began to search for my shoes. The fluorescent light drove the remnants of the dream from my head, and I gathered my things and my thoughts.
I’d considered myself lucky so far this evening. It was nearly the end of my shift, and I hadn’t been called once. Not even for a car accident. I thought it was an unusually quiet shift for a Friday, but I didn’t dare say that aloud. Why jinx myself? But it looked as if my luck was about to change, and I was going to be elbow-deep in trauma.
I left the on-call room and plodded down the hallway, past the staff lounge. I rubbed at my cheek, where a bit of drool had dripped. I usually slept like shit, and I was not one of those people who slept prettily with their hands primly tucked under the pillow and blankets tucked in at the foot of the bed. I sprawled all over the bed, swore in my sleep, and sometimes woke up with my head under the pillows and the blankets hurled across the room. My roommates in college had once accused me of sleep-eating all the ice cream in the fridge. I had denied it until they showed me the empty cartons under my bed. For shits and giggles, I even had a sleep study done a few years ago. Nothing useful had come of that other than admonishments to avoid caffeine. Like that was going to happen.
I waved at a couple of the internal medicine residents hunched, vulturelike, over the stale contents of a pizza box. That box had been there since the beginning of my shift, and I wasn’t sure it was worth attacking. Residents, though, had cast-iron stomachs and would eat anything that wasn’t literally crawling away from them.
I snagged an iced coffee from the refrigerator and chugged it. The cool coffee chased from my head the bits of my weird dream. Dreaming in blood was par for the course for a surgeon, but my subconscious sure liked to dress it up in historical costumes recently. Usually, I dreamed of work, performing endless surgery in my sleep. Sometimes, I dreamed of operating on myself. Often, I dreamed of something going terribly wrong that was all my fault, and I struggled to save my patient. I would awake in a cold sweat, heart thudding. The dreams I’d been having lately, even with battlefields and war, were actually an improvement over those. In the new dreams, I felt powerful, not like a complete and utter failure who destroyed everything I touched. In those dreams, I was comfortable with death in a way that I could never be in my waking life.
That disturbed me. I never wanted to be comfortable with death.
I headed toward operating room six and rummaged through the nearby clean room. Stuffing my hair bun under a cap, I dressed in a surgical gown with too-large booties. The hospital’s supply ordering system seemed to assume that all surgeons were men and ordered protective equipment accordingly. I swam in most of it. I scrubbed in thoroughly, deciding I was done when my hands were lobster-red. I was nothing if not thorough. A nurse helped me glove up and tied a mask over my face. Nodding at her, I squared my shoulders and concentrated on getting into my zone. Eighties new wave, my favorite, already played in the operating room.
“What have you got for me tonight, folks?” I asked.
I backed through the doors of the operating theater, butt-first, gloved hands lifted before me to keep them clean. I took small steps, mindful not to lose traction. Those thin booties were slick, and I’d fallen on my ass on more than one occasion when I made sudden moves. Tonight, I was determined to get through surgery in an upright position and not have to scrub in twice.