Chapter 2 : Second Chance

Blair’s POV

The night is filled with sirens that never sleep, but the people who attend to them need their rest, and that is exactly what I’m doing right now. I am heading home. I really need to stop doing these double shifts on back-to-back days because it’s going to mess with my sleep schedule. It also has me working way later than I usually do.

I pull my jacket a little tighter across my body and keep my keys laced in between my fingers, pepper spray clutched in my other hand. Being out at four o’clock in the morning is dangerous, especially when walking alone. Sadly, the bus doesn’t run at the hours I usually get off work.

Instead, I usually end up walking. It’s about thirty minutes to my apartment from the hospital. Yeah, it’s dangerous. It beats the extra thirty dollars or more a night I would have to pay for one of those taxi services though. I have rent and taxes to pay.

Sometimes I can get a ride with a fellow nurse or one of the doctors, but most nights I end up beating the familiar path down the road. I take a left at one light and walk pretty much a straight shot down the rest of the way.

I keep my head on a swivel, finding myself twitching at every little sound. A can knocking over. The squeal of a tire. The endless sirens heading to the place where I just left. I swear I hear gunfire from somewhere in the city.

Thugs.

Usually, on the way back, I make my lists for tomorrow or try and think of all the good things that happened throughout the day to help counter all of the horrible things I’ve seen.

Sadly, my mind drifts to the one truly horrible thing that happened all evening—when I lost my patient.

Sure, it definitely is not my first one. I have lost a lot of patients through my relatively new career at the hospital. Still, there was something about this guy that seemed a bit off. Other than the two shots, everything was superficial. I’ve seen people slip away with less, and yet, I have also seen people survive worse.

The guy should not have died the way he did. His heart should have started back up. He should have been given the O-negative blood to see if we could start him back up. Sadly, we can do everything we can and still lose the strongest of them.

I think about the way his wounds were bleeding, sluggish, and dark. The coldness of his body still makes me feel frigid. Only corpses in the freezer were that cold. I think about that brief moment when I looked into the injured man’s eyes and saw crimson. The eyes shouldn’t have been bloodshot like that.

Something about the entire case has me on edge, but without his friend to claim him, we only have the name his friend provided before vanishing into the darkness—Angelo. Was that a first or last name? I honestly have no idea and, frankly, that is going to be future Blair’s headache. Until then, I get to go back home and rest.

I see my apartment up ahead, the yellow street lamps illuminating the way. The gate looks like it is closed, which is a good sign. Most of the places around here don’t have any kind of privacy gate because it gets torn down or run into. At least this place feels more secure. After all, who is going to force open a gate to a courtyard only to be denied access by a keycard panel?

Suddenly, as I walk by one of the nearby alleys, I hear a loud crashing sound followed by a gagging, wet cough and the sound of staggering footsteps shuffling in the alley just ahead of me.

My heart is literally in my throat, pounding as hard as a sledge hammer against a concrete building. Did someone just jump off the roof? Were they alive? Or did they just slam themselves into the nearby dumpsters?

Adrenaline courses through my body. I grip my keys a little tighter and flick the little safety switch for the pepper spray off. Whoever is around this corner is about to have a really bad day. I prepare my body to run as I hold my ground, listening intently in hopes of figuring out what is happening without engaging with whoever is there.

My hopes of it being no one are immediately dashed as a man comes staggering out of the alleyway. My fight, flight, or freeze impulse kicks into high gear and I prepare to fight. I’ve seen too many cases of what happens when the girl submits to the psychopath, and I refuse to be a statistic.

The man’s head swings toward me and I rear my fist back to land a massive punch before I sprint for my life to my apartment building just across the street when recognition smacks me across the face.

The man staggering out of the alley is the same man who dropped off Angelo, his friend. I would recognize that mess of curly black hair and those pale green eyes anywhere.

I freeze and look at him just as he looks right back at me. His hand raises and I suddenly see there are trickles of blood coming from either side of his mouth. His hands are also coated in blood. I think for a moment that he might have actually ended the person who killed his friend, but I am instantly countered when I see blood beginning to drip onto the ground by his feet.

“I… I’m….”

The guy doesn’t get the words out. Is he going to say I’m sorry? Is he going to say I’m hurt? What he does instead is collapse to his knees, heaving in breath after breath, and clutches at his abdomen.

He’s hurt. He is obviously hurt.

I look around and see no other cars. There are no security cameras. I don’t even think my phone has enough charge to make an emergency call, which I blame on my charging cable not doing the job right.

However, we are right by my apartment.

I have medical supplies. Maybe not enough, but this guy seems like he was just now injured.

I have a chance to save him when I couldn’t save his friend. At the very least, I can stabilize him back at my place.

The thought is an insane one, but I have no time to lose.

“On your feet,” I say firmly, daring to snake his arm over my shoulder as I crouch down beside him. He initially resists, pulling away to read my features. I see my determination reflected in his green eyes.

“You…’re…” There is a glimmer of recognition now on his face.

“Yeah, the girl from earlier at the hospital. And, if you want to live, you will get on your feet and come with me,” I state, gripping onto his arm tighter.

He offers no more resistance, wincing as he forces himself to his feet. I can see his hand is currently cupping a wound that is oozing blood.

I want to triage him right then and there, but getting into my apartment which is in sight is our best bet. I tug off my jacket and shove it into his arms.

“Press this to the wound. We’re almost there,” I say. The man looks at me confused, but obeys, pressing one of my favorite jackets against his chest.

We stumble together through the side gate into the courtyard. My hands, slightly glossed from the man’s blood, clutch the keycard and swipe. The door makes its signature chime before swinging, unlatching from the other side.

I navigate the two of us, now almost carrying the man’s weight on my shoulder. I wince as I scrape my arm against the side of the brick wall. Did I cut myself? I’m sure I just did, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is getting him into my apartment to my emergency medical kit that I keep in my kitchen.

Sadly, he’s proving harder to navigate.

Good heavens, he is massive. Compared to my average height, this guy is a towering giant, being at least a head and part of his shoulders taller than me. They say muscle is heavier than fat, and they would be right. The guy feels like a lead brick as he starts to waver ever so slightly.

“We’re almost there. Just take big breaths for me, okay?” I ask. I feel the guy nod, but see his eyes swirling. He’s definitely having a hard time staying conscious.

I practically shove him against the elevator as I punch the button leading to the correct floor. He’s still clutching my jacket to the wound, but within the short distance from the alley to here, he has definitely lost some strength. The elevator doors clatter open and I tug him along. My heart hammers in my chest. Can he feel the panic that I’m feeling? Am I really bringing a bleeding, injured stranger into my home?

Too late to back out now.

We’re here.

I fumble with the keys and throw open the door just as the guy wavers one more time. Evidently, the shock of the injury is getting to him. He’s losing consciousness!

I lunge forward and just barely manage to catch the guy, only managing to guide his fall into my apartment. Now, of all times, I’m actually grateful we don’t have a video security system that’s working at the moment.

I hoist him up by slipping my arms under his armpits to drag him into my unit, hurriedly shutting the door and noting the blood smear outside of my door. I’ll get to it in a second. I close and lock the door as I pull the man into my living room.

As I look at him, I have to put my homebody self into a different part of my brain. I can’t think that this is my home. I can’t think this is probably the beginning of every horror movie ever—inviting in a stranger pretending to be sick and hurt.

Right now, I am a nurse and this is my patient.

I dart over to my kitchen, shoving a bottle of glass cleaner out of the way, and tug the medical kit out. I wash my hands twice before slipping them into a pair of gloves and kneeling by my patient.

First things first. I snatch a pillow from my sofa and slip it under his head. Next, I start assessing the wound. At first glance, I only see one injury. Most likely, based on the hole, it is a penetrating wound. His clothes are obviously slashed with one additional hole in his chest.

His breathing is shallow and my mystery guy is on the verge of hyperventilating. His body, frigid to the touch, is trembling. Maybe he had some kind of intense fever?

I lift his shirt to better assess the injuries, and I falter. Across his torso, I see fresh slash marks which seem to be leaking the same dark blood as the other guy. Were they related? Was this a genetic condition? He’s definitely not getting enough oxygen to his blood.

The other thing that strikes me as peculiar is the tattoos and scars across his body. Some of the scars look like puncture wounds, about the width of a human finger. Others look like slashes that have long since healed. Some scars are equidistant.

What on earth had this guy been through?

As I look at his torso, I see the freshly created wounds consisting of five lacerations and one penetrating wound. That’s all I can see on the front. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is something else on his back.

Again, much like his friend, the wounds don’t seem that severe, but there is something odd about the wounds. They almost seem like they are sizzling, foaming ever so slightly. Can’t have that be infected, but I don’t want to put peroxide on a chemical burn.

I snag some vinegar from the kitchen and douse the scratches and the puncture wound before using the peroxide. The man winces and trembles, gritting his teeth as he passes in and out of consciousness.

“I know. Just hang in there,” I say as I press gauze into the lacerations and snake my arm around the guy’s midsection to secure the initial bandages, hoping beyond hope it’ll staunch the blood.

He’s not having a hard time breathing, so I’ll make sure his lungs aren’t collapsing in a second. For now, I need to see what else is going on with the puncture wound.

I grab a tampon, which is essentially sterile gauze, and have it prepared to plug up the hole when I notice something off about the puncture wound. I shine my flashlight onto the wound as I continue to wipe away the blood and see something about an inch inside just at the base of the sternum and over the heart.

Is it a bullet? I swallow dryly. Doctoring 101 told us that removing a bullet and digging around in a patient is the last thing that you should do.

At the same time, this was about an inch or so into the flesh and if it was coated in some kind of acid, it could be eating away at his flesh. I decide it needs to be neutralized. I grab my tweezers and maneuver myself around his body to best retrieve the foreign object.

I steady my hand like how a kid would playing that game of “Operation” before slipping the tweezers into the wound.

His body tenses, but he remains completely stiff as a board as I manage to snag the back end of something. As carefully as helping a butterfly from its cocoon, I pull out the foreign object. The wound gushes with the same thick, nearly black blood as the man cries out, teeth gritted and grinding as a cold sweat begins to cover his body. I douse the wound in vinegar before electing to clean it.

I reach over the man to grab some more gauze; but, in that moment, something else happens.

As I reach over, I watch the man’s eyes snap open. I see the pale green suddenly change to dark crimson, like watching a drop of food coloring dissipate in a glass of water. His mouth opens and I watch as his eye teeth elongate to nearly an inch and a half long.

He lunges forward toward me, but his movements are sluggish and I’m able to throw myself backward out of the way as his eyes roll into the back of his head and he passes out again.

Did that really just happen? Did I just see that? What the everloving fuck just happened?