She's the third one this week.
It's Wednesday, for fuck’s sake.
Dr. Boggs catches me in the hallway after we've got Brianna stabilized and moved to observation.
He's a good doctor—mid-fifties, steady hands, doesn't rattle easily. But even he looks tired tonight.
"That's seven in ten days, Mercer."
"I know."
"Something's changed out there. This isn't the usual flow."
"I know." I strip my gloves off and toss them in the biohazard bin. My hands are steady. They're always steady. It's the rest of me that shakes, and only ever when no one's watching. "Whatever they're cutting it with, the dosing is all over the place. It's not consistent batch to batch. Some of these people are getting ten times the lethal amount and they don't even know it."
He shakes his head. "I've been at Ruby Memorial for twenty-two years. I've never seen a spike like this."
Neither have I. And I've been here long enough to know what Morgantown's drug problem looks like on a normal day.
This isn't normal.
This is something new, something flooding in from somewhere, and the ER is catching the overflow while the source keeps pumping.
I chart Brianna's case, check on my other patients, and try not to think about the sixteen-year-old girl who came in last Monday and didn't make it.
Her name was Caitlyn.
She was a junior at Morgantown High.
I worked on her for twenty-six minutes before Dr. Boggs called it, and I haven't said her name out loud since because saying it makes it real in a way I'm not ready for.
I wash my hands at the nurses' station. The soap smells like nothing. My scrubs smell like sweat and adrenaline and the sharp chemical tang of Narcan.
There's a half-moon of blood on my inner wrist from where Brianna's fingernails broke the skin through my glove.
My shift ends at seven and I know I should go home. Shower. Eat something that isn't from a vending machine or a DoorDash order I forgot to pick up.
Sleep, maybe, if my brain will shut off long enough to let me.
Instead, I get in my car and drive to the clubhouse.
I don't know when visiting Garrett and Vanna became a habit instead of an obligation, but somewhere between book two of Vanna's life and whatever chapter we're in now, it stopped feeling like checking on my brother's recovering addict wife and started feeling like visiting family.
The clubhouse isn't what most people picture when they hear "biker compound."
It's not some run-down shack with broken windows and motorcycles rusting in the yard.
It's... lived in.
Worn in the way good leather is worn—creased and softened by use, shaped around the people who fill it.
There's a garage that always smells like oil and either gasoline or diesel, depending on the day.
A main room with a bar and mismatched furniture, and hallways that lead to rooms where brothers live when they've got nowhere else or nowhere better.
Garrett and Vanna's room is down the back hallway.
I knock twice—our knock, the one we've done since we were kids, two quick raps—and Vanna opens the door.
