As soon as I pulled up to the emergency room doors, I left the keys in the ignition, grabbed my phone, and flew out. I ran up to the check-in counter and frantically signaled the nurse. She was busy talking to a woman with a nasty cough. A baby in the waiting room wailed, the mother trying desperately to calm him with a toy. A male worker in blue scrubs wheeled a patient out of a hall and parked him in the waiting room with the others. The only other staff in sight was a young woman taking someone’s blood pressure in a small room just behind the counters.
“I need help,” I said.
“Take a number, lady. I’ve been here five hours,” a man grumbled from a seat by the automatic doors.
Ignoring him, I tapped the counter with my hand. “Is there an Amanda here? She called about my father. Hello?”
Christian appeared from outside and strode up to the counter. He snagged the attention of the older lady who was showing the cougher how to fill out a form. “Be a good lass and help out the woman to your right,” he said firmly, charming her with his Vampire gifts.
The woman robotically walked up to me. “How can I help you?”
“Someone named Amanda called. My father’s here. Crush Graves. I mean Eugene Graves. Can someone tell me what’s happening? Is he okay? Where is he? I need to see him.”
She tiredly scratched her forehead before typing something in on the computer. When a young man strode in from the automatic double doors, she crooked her finger and summoned him over. “Mike, she’s here for Eugene Graves.”
“Oh,thatguy.” Mike casually rested his arms on the counter as if he were ordering a drink at a coffee shop.
“Is he still in the trauma bay?”
“They just wheeled him to radiology for a CT. Do they wanna talk to the doctor? It could be a while.”
I approached Mike. “I’m right here. Why don’t you ask me?”
From behind me, Christian’s hands rested on my shoulders. “Can you take us to the room he’s assigned to?”
Mike gave the woman a peevish glance before walking us across the room and through the automatic doors. “I’ll let the doctor know you’re in there, but I don’t know how long he’ll be. He might not come back.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I snapped.
“If they take him directly to surgery, he’ll be admitted upstairs.” Mike stopped by an open doorway and gestured for us to go inside. “Wait here, and I’ll look for the doctor.” He closed the door.
I looked around the sterile medical room and immediately noticed my father’s clothes in a plastic bag by the chair. The bed was disheveled with a white blanket hanging over the end. How long had he been in here by himself? A minute? Six hours?
“At least there’s no blood,” Christian remarked.
“Unless he bled out in the trauma room.”
“Aye, but if they moved him in here, that’s a good sign.”
I crossed my arm over my middle and cupped my other hand over my mouth. “Unless it was a heart attack. Or a stroke. What if he doesn’t know me? What if he can’t talk? What if he’s a vegetable?”
I waited for Christian to throw in a zinger about Crush lounging in his recliner and his unhealthy lifestyle. Instead of making jokes to lighten the mood, he kissed my forehead and put his arms around me.
“Level down,” he said. “If you don’t keep your energy under control, you’ll pass out and wind up being the one in this bed.”
We waited for twenty-six minutes. I kept staring up at the clock, tempted to spring to my feet and demand information. That fleeting thought was quickly erased whenever I heard another patient screaming in pain or the sound of footfalls rushing down the hall.
“How long does a CT scan take?” I asked, wondering if something had gone wrong.
Christian abruptly lowered his gaze to the floor and stepped into the corner. I jumped when the door abruptly opened and a man walked in.
“Hi. I’m Dr. McGuiness,” he said, barely making eye contact as he sat on his round stool and got on the computer. “Are you family?”
I shot up out of the chair. “His daughter. Where is he?”
“Because of his condition, we moved him upstairs. Let me just pull up the lab work,” he said, sounding more like a waiter going over the ingredients for salad dressing as he listed off things that made no sense to me.
“What happened?”
