Tag: suspense

He’d taken it too far.

Garret knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth.

It was just that he was stuck here in the hospital, feeling useless, instead of being out there trying to find this guy who just kept taking victim after victims.

Failure.

Thats how he felt. He’d gotten himself shot, and almost got his partner and his partner’s girlfriend killed in the process.

Now he was just lying here instead of being useful.

Still, he shouldn’t have taken it out on Calico.

“I’m sorry,” he said, it came out begrudgingly but he meant it sincerely. Just because her perky attitude irritated him didn’t mean he didn’t like her. She was a good person from what he’d seen she just got on his nerves.

Instead of replying, she simply came to the bed and touched her fingertips to his wrist. Like her touch always did he got a little jolt of electricity zinging inside him. Unwanted attraction he had no intention of doing anything about.

After jotting down her notes in his chart, she wheeled the table with his breakfast on it over to the bed and then turned to leave.

“I’m sorry,” he tried again. “Just feeling a little useless sitting here,” he added because for some reason he needed her to know he wasn’t usually a jerk. “With your job you obviously care about other people.”

Nothing.

She merely kept speaking like he hadn’t said a word. As Garret watched her go he felt a pang in his chest. Alone he had nothing to do but glance down at another newspaper on his bed and read the headline; Authorities chased and lost attacker.

Fifth nurse found alive but severely wounded.

Nurse Calico Jennings caught the headline of the paper lying open on the desk as she quickly hurried onto the ward where she worked.

A shiver raced through her as she thought of what those poor women had gone through. At least this one had survived, but even if she managed to recover from her injuries there would be scars left behind.

Deep scars.

She knew.

She’d had her own brush with near death thanks to a crazy ex boyfriend who couldn’t take no for an answer, and she knew how lucky she was to have survived the ordeal.

Unfortunately four, maybe five if this one didn’t pull through, nurses hadn’t been so lucky.

“Oh, Cali, so glad you’re here,” her friend Nora said as she hurried down the hall.

Shoving aside bad memories before they could threaten to take over and push her back into the dark place she’d been trapped in after her ordeal. It was coming up on the one year anniversary of the day she should have died and this serial killer who was targeting nurses was making it worse.

“Let me guess,” she said pasting on a smile and letting it sink in and become real. “Mr Grump-pants is being a big old pain in the butt today.”

“When is he not?” Nora groaned. “You have better luck with him than the rest of us, can you go and check his vitals? Try to get him to eat? Maybe give him a personality transplant while you’re at it?”

Calico laughed and it felt nice to brush aside the darkness and bathe herself in light. Without searching for little pockets of light she wouldn’t have survived.

“I’ll go see if I can work a little magic,” she assured her friend then headed down the hall to Garret’s room. She got that he’d been shot and almost died, but he hadn’t, and he should be more grateful for that. She’d made it her mission to try to get him to see that life was beautiful, that there was joy everywhere if you looked hard enough, but he made it hard.

Practically impossible.

“Morning, Garret,” she said brightly.

Dark eyes cracked with rage as she turned towards her from his spot on the bed. “Didn’t you read this?” he snarled as he tossed the paper at her. “Another nurse, just like you, is fighting for her life. How can you come in here with a smile on your face? Don’t you care about anyone other than yourself?”

Fourth nurse found dead.

Garret stared at the headline as he lay in his hospital bed.

Given he’d been stuck in the hospital for the last almost two weeks, recovering-way too slowly for his liking-from the gunshot wounds that had come dangerously close to stealing his life, he’d spent a lot of time around nurses.

Most of them he was able to ignore. Not because he had any personal grudge against them, just because he didn’t want to interact with anyone right now.

He’d sunk into a deep pit of depression and he wasn’t sure how to claw his way out.

Wasn’t sure he even wanted to.

Maybe it would have been better if he hadn’t survived.

There was one nurse he couldn’t ignore.

One nurse who seemed to have made it her mission in life to bully her way into making him want to live. She was a fiery red head with the biggest, brightest green eyes he’d ever seen in his life. They were an almost unnatural shade of green and if he didn’t know for absolute certain there was no such thing as animal human shifters he would have sworn she was really a cat. She moved like one, all smooth and lazily, and she had little metaphorical claws that came out when he eventually got annoyed with her sunshiny attitude and said something rude he always wound up regretting.

Why couldn’t she just leave him be?

Why couldn’t she understand that he had nothing to live for and would have been better off dead?

And why did the thought of her winding up as nurse victim number five make him feel like he’d lived for a reason?