Laura Wright - Eternal Hunger

Nicholas reached his brother’s side in a millisecond. “What’s the problem?” When he saw the reason for the outburst, he stalked out of the hole in the rock and went directly to Evans, his nostrils pulsing with each heavy breath. “Where is he?”

Evans’s entire body trembled with fear. “I couldn’t stop him. I—”

“Look at me, Impure !” Nicholas demanded.

Evans’s gaze flickered up. He saw Lucian coming toward him too, and looked ready to pass the hell out.

“How long?” Nicholas repeated.

“An hour,” Evans squeaked out.

“Shit!”

Nicholas turned when he heard Lucian. “He’s on the hunt.”

Lucian’s fangs elongated as he glared at the servant. “You stupid little fu—”

Nicholas stopped him. “No time. We need to find him. No female in his path is safe.”

The West Side Fourth-floor psychiatric unit

“Lock her in and check her every fifteen.”

Before the heavy wood door closed, Dr. Sara Donohue took another glance at her newest patient. Pearl McClean sat in the center of a twin mattress, legs crossed, chin to her chest, and due to a mild sedative, calm for the first time since she’d arrived from the ER an hour ago. The seventeen-year-old girl may have looked like an ordinary teenager daydreaming about her latest crush, but the blue paper gown she wore, and the fact that she was in a juvenile seclusion room on the fourth-floor psychiatric unit of Walter Wynn Memorial Hospital, made it clear that her troubles went far deeper than unrequited love.

Sara eyed the six-foot-three mocha-skinned security guard as he snapped the lock on the girl’s door. “Hey, Randy, page me if she rips off that gown again. I’m talking right away.”

He gave her a casual salute. “You got it, Doc.”

Sara turned away from the door and started down the hall. “Coming, Mel?” she called over her shoulder.

“Yeah, right behind you.” Melanie Abrams, the social worker who’d brought Pearl to the hospital and who worked most of the juvenile cases on the floor, ran after Sara, her ultrahigh heels making little clicking sounds on the scuffed white vinyl floor. “Not for nothing,” she said, her tone slightly breathless from the pace. “But when did cutting get so freaking popular?”

Her eyes on her files, Sara ran down the med schedules for the night. “Maybe when leeches became an impractical way of detoxing emotional and physical pain. But I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here.”

“How can you say that?” Melanie asked, clearly taken aback. “She has hundreds of cuts all over her body.”

“I know, but cutters normally stick to one area: arms, legs, belly. An area they can hide,” Sara said, while hustling down the hallway, her long legs covering ground like a Thoroughbred out of the gate.

A young psych nurse walked by them and, as usual, his eyes went directly to the petite blonde behind Sara. She could hardly blame the guy. After all, Melanie looked more like a centerfold than a tough-ass social worker, and when she was around, most women in the hospital felt like Mary Ann next to her Ginger. Not so much Sara, though. She had zero desire to be the hot one, didn’t have time to be the hot one.

“Maybe she wasn’t looking to hurt herself,” Melanie said, ignoring the nurse as she followed Sara. “Maybe she just wanted someone to notice her.”

“Could be.” Sara rounded the corner, then stopped at the double doors separating the juvenile ward from main reception and the adult long-term-care facility. She slipped her key card into the wall slot and waited impatiently to be buzzed through. Once she gained access, she took off toward reception, Melanie affixed to her side.

“You know,” Sara began, “she didn’t say a word when I was in there with her. She didn’t answer one question, but she did flinch every time I mentioned the mother’s boyfriend.”

Melanie looked thoughtful. “The guy seemed kind of shady to me, but he did act concerned when we came to get her.”

“Course he did. Who called 911?”

“The mom. She was at the door when we got there, led the officers and me right into the bathroom. We found Pearl crouched beside the tub. Knife was a few feet away.”

Sara dropped her files on the green marble desktop. “Was she wearing anything?”

“No. Naked, out of control, covered in cuts. But ...”

Sara glanced up, saw the confusion in Melanie’s pale blue eyes, and said, “What?”

“I don’t know . . . It was weird. With that many cuts, you’d expect a good amount of blood, right?”

“And what?” Sara said. “There wasn’t much?”

“There wasn’t any.” Melanie’s gaze flickered to the two nurses behind the large circular desk, and she lowered her voice. “These were fresh wounds, open—and they weren’t even seeping. Take a look.”

Sara opened Pearl McClean’s file again and flipped through the photos of her injuries until she got to the close-up shots of the girl’s wounds. As Melanie had said, the cuts looked new, unhealed; no scar had formed over the hundred or so gashes and yet there was no sign of blood. In fact, she thought, pulling the image closer, the skin looked almost shiny, like an imaginary piece of tape was affixed to it.

“So?” Melanie said. “What do you think?”

“ER doc says the weapon and cuts match up.” Sara stared at the photograph of the girl’s back, then shook her head. “I just don’t think those marks are self-inflicted.”

“So what, then? Someone did this to her? The boyfriend? The mom?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not letting her leave the hospital until I find out.”

Melanie eyed Sara, as if she didn’t want to say something, yet knew she couldn’t stop herself. “The mother raved about the relationship her boyfriend had with the girl. She said he was the perfect father—that he’d do anything for Pearl.”

Sara laughed. “You didn’t believe that.”

“No.” Mel sighed, looking momentarily deflated. “So what should I put in the report?”

“Let’s go with ‘deliberate self-harm’ for now,” Sara said, closing the girl’s file. “It’ll give me more time—”

Sara was cut off by the long bleating sound of one of the nurse’s pagers. She turned to see Claire, a reception nurse in her late thirties who always worked graveyard and was obsessed with bright blue eye shadow and cinnamon Certs, checking the readout on her pager.

“Who is it?” Sara asked her.

“LTC, 412,” she said.

Shit! “Buzz me in.” Sara pushed away from the reception desk and Melanie, and raced through the door to Long-Term Care. Gray . She’d just seen him an hour ago; he’d been fine. Her heart beat louder and faster as she ran down the hall. What the hell had happened?

Her breath pulled hard from her lungs as she burst through the door to his room. Her gaze shot to the bed, which was sans patient and stripped of all linen. Then she caught sight of Gray, completely calm, sitting on a chair by the window, staring out at the building across the airshaft and its handful of rooms that were dotted with light and life. His hands were splayed on his thighs, and his dark blond hair was disheveled. Several longer bits stuck out in places like weeds in the grass.

The rational part of Sara’s brain warned her to chill out and feign professionalism if she didn’t want any questions coming her way later, but it was almost impossible to be cool. Without a word to the nurse who stood beside Gray, Sara went to him and knelt down beside his chair. She fought the urge to wrap her arms around his long, lean frame and protect him from whatever crisis he’d encountered in the past five minutes. Instead, she took his hands, misshapen and discolored from decades-old burns. “What happened, Gray?” she asked him gently.