“Sorry,” he said quickly and held up both hands. The patient, a slight woman with tired eyes and flat hair, gave him a brief, wan smile. “You’re right. I’ll be careful.”
He dodged around the chair and then hesitated as he looked back. If Dylan wanted answers, they were in that room with Somerset and his brother.
Maybe ‘careful’ wasn’t such a bad idea.
The elevator was out of order.
An engineer from Big Sky Services, the company name blazoned over the back of his overalls, was working on it. Susan from Patient Services hovered behind him, her phone in hand to update whoever needed to know, as whoever was trapped between the floors yelled demands down in panicked, half-muffled voices.
Stairs it was.
Dylan fished his phone out of his pocket as he gave the scene a wide berth and headed toward the stairs at the end of the hall. He pulled up the Uber app as he half-turned to nudge the door open with his shoulder. Until he found out what was happening with his car, it was rideshares or public transport. And after last night, he wasn’t ready to take on Belling buses.
The hospital stairwell was concrete and white paint, with the outer wall all glass from top to bottom. It was supposed to provide natural light, and chairs had been set up on each landing for patients and visitors to enjoy the space. Except the company holding the parking contract built a six-story parking structure right in front of it. There was about six inches of space. So now the stairs were dark, the windows couldn’t be cleaned, so they were opaque with bird shit, and the nurses had grabbed the comfy chairs for the break room.
In an effort to make it all a little bit less dreary, someone had plastered Christmas decals on the windows. What light got in through the crack between the buildings puddled in spots of muted color on the concrete. Dylan’s feet scuffed through them as he jogged down the steps, one hand on the plastic banister and his attention on his phone.
”Itoldyou!“ a woman’s voice, tight and brittle with anger, rose from a couple of floors below. “I don’t know where your stupid, asshole friends are, and I don’tcare.You can all fuck off together and LET GO OF ME!”
Aw, shit.
Dylan stopped mid-step—mid-swipe—and looked down over the railing. Two floors down, he saw a blonde woman in jeans and a cropped white T-shirt being dragged up the stairs by one arm behind a barefoot man in sweats. She was flushed with anger and kept trying to dig her feet in to twist herself free, but the man yanked her along with him. Her arm where he’d gripped it was red-raw from the friction.
“Get off me!” the woman demanded. There was a thread of panic through the temper now. She grabbed the man’s arm, the ring on her finger sparkling even in the dim light, and dug her nails in until the skin split. When he ignored her, she looked around frantically for help. Around, and then up. Her eyes met Dylan’s. “Hey! Hey, you! Help me! Call the cops or something—“
The man turned and, without hesitation, backhanded her across the face. The crack of knuckles against jaw echoed off the walls and dirty glass.
“Hey!” Dylan yelled the objection as he leaned over the rail. He knew better. There were a lot of guidelines about how to react to a domestic violence situation as a medic. Escalation was not one of them. He’d not been able to stop himself.
Blond hair spilled out of the messy knot she’d had it in as the woman hit the wall. She went down onto her knees, hard enough to make Dylan wince in sympathy, and raised her hand to her face. It came away bloody, and she held it out in a mute ‘look what you’ve done’ to the man. He ignored the silent accusation. Instead, he locked eyes with Dylan.
Dylan recoiled.
He couldn’t explain it. Something in the man’s unremarkable face had reached into Dylan’s brain and dragged up some visceral ‘that’s wrong’ response. It grabbed him by the throat as his heart rate kicked up a beat, and the hairs on the backs of his arms stood on end.
Run, it told him.
Orkill.
He had to pick.
Below him, the man—something vaguely familiar about him tried to pick at Dylan’s memory but failed under the flood of adrenaline—grinned. The same urges flickered through his eyes, but he’d not have to pick.
Nobody moved. Even the woman stayed hunched over herself and snuffled into her bloody hand. Dylan took a step back up the stairs without breaking eye contact.
Then another.
The man stared at him, body pulled wire taut with tension, and peeled his lips back from his teeth in a snarl.
Sweat ran down Dylan’s back.
He took another step and misjudged. Only the side of his foot made contact with the stair, and his ankle twisted. He caught himself, but instinct made him look down. When he swung his attention back to the tableau below, the woman was alone on the stairs.
Dylan heard the running footfalls echo up to him and the ragged, hot breathing of something that sounded much larger than the man he’d seen.
This time, the atavistic instinct didn’t wait for Dylan to decide. It hijacked his body and hit him with a jolt of adrenaline straight to the brainstem.
Runit was.
