Day Reaper. Melody Johnson

Hospital Center’s visiting and office hours were long over, but gaining entrance wouldn’t be an issue. The entire hospital was deserted; not just closed for the night, but completely forsaken. It wasn’t just the vacant halls and empty rooms that gave the building that hollow feeling, although they certainly contributed to it. Like the stranded cars lining New York Avenue and the forgotten shoes, briefcases, and purses scattered across the sidewalk, the hallways, rooms, and office areas had been dropped mid-use and abandoned.

      Clipboards and paperwork remained on the front desk and welcome stations, discarded and unfiled. Gurneys filled the hallways, some with rumpled sheets, some still soiled, and a few spattered with blood. Food hadn’t been packed away in the cafeteria. Gravy and marinara sauce had congealed in their silver tubs, uncooked chicken and beef patties had attracted the attention of flies at the grill station, and trays, plastic ware, and half-eaten meals littered the tables. Chairs were pushed back or overturned; people had obviously fled the cafeteria mid-meal, and I could only imagine the kind of panic that would cause people to leave their personal belongings behind—evidence of the same panic we’d seen in the street.

      Unlike the street, however, the hallways of the hospital were not littered with mutilated bodies. The people who had been here either were hiding, had survived the attack, or more likely, had fled like the young girl futilely attempting to escape from the Damned. I replayed the horror of that memory over in my mind one last time before letting it go. As much as it pained me to admit it, as much as it always pained me, the evidence here and on the street proved that Dominic was right. That girl’s death was a tragedy, but it was only one of a thousand tragedies. We couldn’t save the one if we wanted to save the next thousand.

      Wherever that thousand were, however, they weren’t here.

      No one was.

      “They aren’t here,” I whispered. I don’t know why I whispered it, but in the silence of the empty hospital halls, I felt conspicuous and out of place. “We should have come during the day. Greta and Meredith won’t be here now that the sun has set.”

      “They’re here,” Dominic assured me.

      “No one’s here,” I argued. “It’s after dark. They’re probably bunkered down at home, not working.”

      “This isn’t work anymore; it’s survival. They’re here.”

      I rolled my eyes. “You can’t know that for certain.”

      “I do.”

      “How?” I challenged. “How are you so sure that Dr. Chunn and Greta would be here of all places, when no one else is? Why not at the precinct or at home or dead?” I forced myself to say. Looking around at the evidence of everyone’s obvious absence and the gore outside, I couldn’t ignore the cold, hard fact that New York City and her citizens had suffered a great loss in the last seven days, and it was more than possible—likely even—that so had I.

      Dominic pursed his lips, obviously struggling with whatever he was about to say. I prepared myself, but after a long moment, the words he whispered were not the words I’d expected to hear.

      “I know they’re here, because it’s where they’re keeping Nathan.”

      I blinked, startled at first by his admission and then suspicious of his wording. I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean, keeping?”

      “Come. See for yourself.” Dominic stepped to take the lead and turned the corner down the last hallway toward the morgue.

      I followed, feeling that vise around my chest tighten painfully again. My heart couldn’t beat and my breaths couldn’t quicken, but fear for my brother’s well-being sliced just as deep as it always had. When Dominic paused at the doors to the morgue, his hand hovering at the handle instead of pushing it open, my fear got the best of me; I elbowed past him and attempted to cross the threshold. But I didn’t think of it as a threshold. To me it was just a door, and I’d opened and stepped through doorways my entire life without asking permission or being injured or encumbered.

      But that life was seven days past.

      I rebounded off the threshold like I’d hit a live wire and landed hard on my back. I blinked, stunned more by my sudden view of the ceiling than by the ache blanketing the front of my body, but it did ache. I’d walked into nothing but air, and the air had smacked me back with the force of a Mack truck.

      Dominic’s face swam into focus, blocking my view of the ceiling. “Are you all right?”

      “Who taught Dr. Chunn to fortify her morgue into a fallout shelter?” I asked, my voice more a groan than actual words. “Keagan?”

      Dominic lifted an eyebrow. “Keagan hasn’t left our fallout shelter in seven days, let alone constructed one for a group of humans.”

      “Cassidy? Is that you?”

      Nathan. At the sound of his voice—clear and strong and sharp—the aching urgency around my chest loosened minutely. I needed to see him with my own eyes, to touch him and hug him and know that my seven-day absence hadn’t hurt him as much as it had obviously devastated everyone else in this city, but hearing his voice, even disembodied, was better than nothing.

      “Nathan, it’s me.” I winced at the guttural sound of my voice and tentatively explored the elongated fangs suddenly crowding my mouth. “Kind of,” I amended.

      I took a deep breath, purely out of habit. I didn’t need air and taking in such a large quantity didn’t produce the calming effect it used to—if anything, it produced the very opposite, slamming home the many ways I was no longer still me. I needed to get control over my emotions, or at the very least, practice hiding them like Dominic had taught me. It was bad enough that I looked like microwaved leftovers. I didn’t need extra fangs to improve my appearance. Two were damning enough.

      “Why are you loitering in the hall? What do you need, an embossed invitation? Get in here, quick, before the Damned sniff you out.”

      Just like that, from one moment to the next, something in the air released, like the vacuum seal of an opened jar. The morgue hadn’t existed at the end of the hallway, not for me—a void I’d have noticed if I hadn’t been so overwrought with worry and urgency over Nathan—but with three thoughtless little words, “Get in here,” the seal unlocked, the void was filled, and I could walk wherever I willed.

      And just as suddenly as the morgue had opened to admit me, a barrier of my own contriving prevented me from entering: unadulterated fear.

      “I can’t do this,” I whispered. “Nathan can’t see me like this.”

      Dominic pulled me to my feet with a steadying hand. We stood, forehead to forehead, and he brushed his knuckles across my cheek. “Yes, you can. He will see you, and he will accept you.”

      I shook my head.

      “I know exactly what you’re going through, Cassidy. You’re stronger than this fear. You will survive it. Moreover, you and Nathan will survive it together.”

      “How do you know what will and won’t survive?” I snapped, unaccountably and irrationally angry with him.

      “I know because I lived it. Nearly five hundred years ago, I was a newly turned vampire with human loved ones too.”

      His words startled me into silence. For as long as I’d known Dominic, we were two very different creatures, with different morals and priorities and tolerances, but since the very first grudging compromise between us, we’d come together to defeat a common enemy: the rebel vampires. Over time, I’d realized that we had more in common than just enemies, and little by little, those commonalities, combined with Dominic’s irrefutable actions of bravery and sacrifice and loyalty made the truth, no matter how unlikely, undeniable: appearances aside, we were very similar people. Now that we were actually the same creature, you’d think that moments like this, when we shared a common moment, wouldn’t rock me like it used to, but it did.

      “You revealed your transformed self to human loved ones too?” I asked,