Flatline (Medicine and Magic Book 1) Read online

  My mind raced through possibilities in the differential, but the most likely was a pneumothorax—a collapsed lung—and given the way that he’d passed out, I suspect there was enough pressure from it that it was straining his heart.

  This was easy enough to treat in the ER. All I needed was a chest tube kit and he’d be fine. Out in the park, with nothing else around, I didn’t have a chest tube.

  I did have a pen.

  Pulling the parts off the pen and leaving only the tube, I gently pushed this into the stab wound. The guy moaned again. Maybe it wasn’t quite as gently as I had thought. There was a small press of air and hot guy started stirring again.

  After a moment, his eyes opened, and he looked at me.

  “What happened?”

  “It looks like you got jumped by a guy with a sword and stabbed in the chest. If I had to guess, you had a tension pneumothorax. I need to get you to the hospital—”

  “No hospitals.”

  “Sure. I get that you’re all sort of macho, but you won’t do well without going to the hospital and getting standard medical care.”

  The man looked down at his chest and his eyes quickly took in the pen sticking out of his chest. It moved slightly with each breath. “Are you a nurse?”

  I glared at him. Screw him for assuming that I was a nurse. I dealt with that kind of crap often enough in the ER. Oftentimes, people assumed Derek was the doctor and not me. It didn’t help that he had enough experience to make it believable.

  “Not a nurse. An ER doc, and it’s lucky for you that I am. If I hadn’t helped you, that kind of injury would be fatal. And if you don’t go to the hospital, it’s likely going to get infected. You’ll need a chest tube for a couple of days and then—”

  “No.”

  He started to sit up and I moved so that he couldn’t get up without forcing me away from him. “Listen. I don’t know what your deal is, but if you don’t go into the hospital, you could die.”

  “That sounds dramatic.”

  He fixed me with a cool stare. I felt the beginning of cold working through me, though this was different than the cold I felt when death came. There was something familiar to it, a tinge of magic, though when my grandparents used their magic around me, it left me with a hint of warmth. Whatever had triggered the chill of death earlier had departed.

  “It is dramatic because it has to be. There’s no reason for you to be so damned stubborn.”

  He fingered the pen, tracing his index finger around it. The sense of cold intensified before fading. When it was gone, he plucked the pen from his chest and the skin simply sealed shut.

  “Thanks,” he said, handing the pen back to me.

  I shook my head, holding my hand away from me. There was no way I was taking that back from him. “You’re a mage,” I said, leaning back on my heels. And a powerful one, especially if he was able to heal himself like that.

  He glanced over at me, eyes narrowing. “What do you know about mages?”

  Should I be honest with him or was it better to lie? “My grandparents were both mages. They’re strong enough, and I doubt they could have healed themselves the way that you just did.” I stood up and took a step away from him. I didn’t need him questioning what kind of mage I was, especially as the dark magic that flowed through me wouldn’t have an easy explanation. Even my grandparents hadn’t been able to easily explain it, and they worked with the council.

  “Your grandparents? That means that you’re a mage then. What are you doing working in a hospital?”

  “You don’t think medicine is a noble calling?”

  The mage stood and took a deep breath, looking around me. “Medicine is fine for those not acquainted with the Veil, but there are few enough with real magical talent for them to be wasted with such things.”

  He said it with such arrogance that I turned away.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that most of the time, we don’t need traditional healing. If you’ve got the mind for that, then you could do so much more within the Veil.”

  “You’d probably better clean them up before the regular police show up,” I said, pointing to the remains of the squat guy. Long face was nothing more than ash. Human-shaped ash, but still only ash.

  “I’m not worried about the police.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at him and looked at him. Really looked at him.

  The injuries and the daggers suddenly made a different sort of sense.

  “You’re a knight.” They were the protectors of the mages, and they were gifted with additional magic that even the mages didn’t have. It would explain his ability to heal himself. It might even explain why I had felt the cold when he’d used his magic.

  And it was even more reason for me to get away from him.

  If a knight discovered my kind of magic, I would be brought before the council for questioning. I didn’t think I had the right answers—especially as I didn’t know them—but that might not matter, not considering the darkness that worked through me.

  “Is that a problem?”

  I took another step back while shaking my head. “Watch that for redness and warmth. If either happen, you should be seen by someone non-magical. I still think you should get it checked out.”

  He nodded, but I didn’t know whether he would listen. As he was a knight, I knew that I shouldn’t worry too much. With his connection to the council, he would get more than enough help.

  “Thanks…”

  “Kate,” I said.

  He rubbed his chest where the sword had gone through. Now there was only a little raised flesh and a little bit of redness, but not much more. “Thanks, Kate. I’m Aron.”

  Hot guy had a name. When he said it, a chill went down my spine.

  Was he using his magic again?

  If he was, I didn’t need for anyone to explain why. It would be him testing me, trying to determine whether I had magic. Given that I had made the mistake of revealing my connection to magic, that wouldn’t be surprising.

  “What were those things?” They weren’t human, and the chill of death I’d detected didn’t seem to flare when they disappeared.

  He watched me. “Dangerous creatures. Now that they’re gone, you don’t have to worry about them.”

  I found that hard to believe, but any questions I asked would only draw me deeper into the magical realm, something I desperately didn’t want. It was better to pretend none of this had happened.

  “Good luck, Aron.”

  I turned away from him and started jogging, my mind racing. The reason I’d gone into medicine was so that I could avoid mages and people like Aron. And now I’d gone and saved him, drawing attention to myself.

  It was time for me to be heading back home and get some rest before my next shift. Morning would come all too soon, and I needed to rest up before I started to feel the cold of death again.

  As I made my way out of the park, I couldn’t help but feel as if Aron watched me. When another chill settled along my spine, I knew that he was testing to see what sort of magic I might have. Hopefully the darkness that burned inside me didn’t give up the secret too easily.

  3

  I flopped down on my couch, completely exhausted. Three shifts in a row could be brutal, especially pulling twelve-hour shifts as I had been, but it was switching from the day shift to the night that was the hardest. The program considered me lucky for having twenty-four hours off between shifts. Never mind the fact that I needed to adjust to the change in sleeping schedule.

  All I had to do was make it through the next two years. If I could do that, I could be an attending and have a more relaxed schedule. I might even pick some quiet hospital to work, get away from the chaos of the city and find someplace slower.

  At least the last two shifts had been relatively uneventful. There hadn’t been any major trauma and I had been spared the calling of death during the last few days.
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  There were times when I wondered whether that was a good thing or not. After the chill and the nausea retreated, there were times when I felt empowered, almost as if having that sensation, that detecting the pull of death, somehow strengthened me. That had to be my imagination.

  At least I hadn’t needed to explain my illness to anyone. Locks had spread the rumor that I was pregnant, leaving me to have to very pointedly tell people that I was not. After the fifth time, I gave up on it. If people wanted to believe that I was pregnant, let them. Who did it hurt?

  There wasn’t anything on the TV at this time of the morning. I could watch the morning talk shows, but they annoyed me more than anything, especially with as chipper as the hosts tended to be at this time of day. I wasn’t a morning person on the best of days, but after pulling a night shift, all I wanted was to relax before getting a little sleep and doing it all over.

  A knock sounded on the door.

  “Just a minute,” I said.

  Dragging myself off the sofa, I peeked to see who might be knocking at eight o’clock in the morning, and then let out a quiet sigh as I pulled the door open.

  “Marvin. What can I do for you this morning?”

  Marvin was an older man, probably in his mid-fifties, and most of the time struck me as lonely. “Kate. I saw you come home and I thought that I might catch you before you went to bed. I tried the other day, but you must not have heard me.”

  At least that explained who had been knocking on my door the night I’d met Aron. I had ignored the knocking, wanting only to rest but was too wound up. I had gotten myself a nice glass of pinot and sat in the bath, soaking, when someone came pounding on the door. Knowing it had been Marvin made me more comfortable. There was a part of me that had worried it might have been Aron or someone from the council.

  “Yeah, long shifts, you know?”

  “Well, not really,” he said, wringing his hands together. “I’ve only ever done daytime work, and the government wants to make sure we don’t pull overtime.”

  “How does the mail get sorted if you’re not working overtime?”

  Marvin flashed a brief smile. “I try to ask the same question, but it always manages to get done. I work my eight and come back home.”

  I wondered what that was like. Most of the time, my twelve-hour shift turned into thirteen, though I tried to hand the patients off to the oncoming resident. The ER could get busy and no one wanted to dump on anyone else.

  “Maybe goblins do it,” I said.

  Marvin frowned. “That’s not funny, Kate.”

  I shouldn’t joke like that, but it was possible that the government hired goblins to sort the mail overnight. There were plenty within the government who were fully aware of the magical world and I couldn’t be the only person affiliated with the Veil who wanted a more normal life.

  “I’m sorry, Marvin.” I knew he took his job at the post office seriously. And he wasn’t even the one delivering mail, but as he liked to point out, the mail doesn’t get delivered if it doesn’t get sorted. “What do you need?”

  “It’s probably nothing, but…”

  When he started like that, I knew exactly what he was after. “What are you experiencing?” Marvin wasn’t the only one in the building who thought they could pay me a house call to get their symptoms checked out, but he was one of the few who thought that I was enough of a real doctor to help. Most of them thought that residency meant that I was still a student.

  “It’s probably nothing. Mostly leg pain, but it’s been driving me nuts the last few days.”

  Even my tired mind didn’t have much trouble working through leg pain. It could be many different things. “Did you do anything that you could have pulled a muscle?”

  He shot me a strange look. “Do I look like I have muscles that can get pulled?”

  I laughed. If nothing else, Marvin had a sense of humor. “Everyone has muscles that can get pulled. Have you done anything different lately? Maybe a new exercise program?”

  “Honestly, Kate. When have you known me to exercise?”

  “You walk to work, and that’s exercise.”

  “I walk to work because it’s the easiest way to get there. No parking. And you walk to work too.”

  “I’m a bit younger than you.” By more than half, I didn’t add, but I didn’t need to. Marvin didn’t need me to remind him about how much younger I was, though maybe I should. Most of the time when people learned that their doctor was only in their mid-twenties, they wanted someone else.

  “Fine,” I said. “You haven’t done anything other than walking. What about other activities? Have you slipped?”

  He shrugged. “I’m pretty careful. You know me.”

  I knew him better than I wanted. Marvin was fine—a mostly harmless neighbor who stopped by more often than I preferred. There were other neighbors that I enjoyed far less than him.

  “Can you show me where it’s bothering you?” It was better to get it over with. Then I could get back to watching crappy morning TV and maybe finding a way to get some sleep.

  Marvin pulled up the leg of his pants and revealed his calf. I didn’t need him to pull up the other pant leg to know that it was swollen. The way that he worked to get the pants up made that plenty clear.

  “It’s mostly back here,” he said, pointing to the back of his calf.

  I crouched in front of him. This would be easier in the ER. He’d be lying down, for one, and I would be presumably getting paid. Then again, Marvin watched over my condo when I was gone, and I never had to worry about packages disappearing.

  When I palpated his calf, he winced and tried to jerk away. I held onto it for a moment and noted the warmth throughout the entirety of his calf.

  “You need an ultrasound, Marvin,” I said.

  He left the pant leg up and looked at me with a strange face. “A what? Will it hurt?”

  Probably a little, especially as they pressed to get the images, but Marvin didn’t need to know that now. “It’s non-invasive. It uses sound waves. You need to see if there’s a blood clot in there. You really shouldn’t wait too long on this. I’m sure you could get in with your doctor today.”

  “But you’re a doctor.”

  “An ER doctor, and you need to go somewhere they can get the ultrasound done to check for a blood clot.” I met his gaze, wanting him to take what I said next seriously. “This can be dangerous, Marvin. If it is a blood clot, it could go to your lung and you could need to be hospitalized.” I’d had a patient in with a pulmonary embolism just last night, but he’d had advanced cancer, making a clot unsurprising.

  Why would Marvin have one?

  “Why would this happen to me?” he asked, almost as if he were echoing my thoughts.

  “There are lots of reasons,” I said. I wasn’t about to get into the likely culprits. “Maybe you bumped it and it’s nothing more than a deep bruise.” That was another possibility, but given the way his calf felt, it was either a clot or an infection, and either way, he needed to see his primary doctor.

  “I would have known,” he mumbled.

  Not necessarily, I didn’t say. There were plenty of people who bumped themselves, getting injured without remembering how it happened. “Just get checked out. It’s more than I can do in my condo,” I said with a smile.

  “Alright. Thanks for checking it out. I still wish you had an office somewhere. I know there would be a line out the door to see you.” He added the last with a wink and I cringed inwardly. Men like Marvin often thought it was fine to comment on my looks.

  “I have an office but trust me, you don’t want to be there.”

  He stepped back into the hall and I closed the door behind him before he had a chance to either say something else or check on some other problem. Most of the time, I got questions about rashes. If they weren’t infected, I rarely cared. A rash didn’t usually cause any problems.

  I made it back to my couch and sunk into it, quickly starting to drift off. Lucy, my gray and w
hite cat, flopped down on my lap, nuzzling her head on my hand until I petted her. She could be a little aggressive when I was home, but she didn’t seem to mind the fact that I would be gone for long stretches.

  I don’t know how long it was before there came another knock on my door. If it was Marvin again, I don’t know what I would do. There was only so much I could put up with.

  When I peeked through I couldn’t see anyone on the other side of the door.

  Was it a delivery? I didn’t see anything out there.

  My complex was relatively nice, but there were times when I didn’t like living alone. Mostly, that came from growing up around the kind of magic that was meant to scare. I understood that the stories kids told, often to frighten, had undertones that were true.

  Take the mages. Magic was all too real, though most people didn’t know that it happened all around them. I had been born to it and had seen it my entire life growing up. My parents might have been gone, but my grandparents were mages who understood the concepts and were able to teach me the basics. I think they were as disappointed as Aron had been when I had decided to pursue something beyond the Veil.

  Mages weren’t all that lived on this side of the Veil. From what my grandparents has taught me, all creatures believed to be myth existed in our world, only most of them managed to remain masked. Some hid deeper behind the Veil, hidden even from the magical in this world.

  That was the reason that I was careful when something strange happened. My grandparents had warned me often enough that I knew to be careful.

  I waited, but nothing appeared.

  Maybe it was only a delivery.

  After waiting another moment, I pulled the door open and looked along the hallway. There was no sign of anything. Had there been, I imagine that Marvin would have seen it. Knowing him, he would have chatted with whomever had come. Maybe he would have shown them his leg.

  There wasn’t anything outside my door.

  Who had knocked?