Widow

PROLOGUE

SEVEN MONTHS AGO

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I groaned with my ham sandwich poised at my lips as my pager went off. I pulled it off my waistband and read the small screen that only displayed numbers. I sighed and looked longingly at my sandwich before quickly rewrapping it and putting it back in the break room refrigerator.

A priority one page to trauma room three meant my dinner would have to wait. It wasn't the first time a rendezvous with a ham sandwich had been interrupted, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.

I hightailed it down the stairs and grabbed a pair of blue gloves out of the dispenser. I snapped them on before pushing the doors to the trauma room open with my hip.

The room was a flurry of motion, and I stopped short as I approached the exam room table they had just moved a woman onto. It was controlled chaos, and I was about to become its leader.

"What do we have?"

"Adult female. Age unknown. Found burned in an abandoned mall parking lot trying to drag herself to get help." One of the nurses filled me in as I stepped forward.

The two EMTs backed away from the table, pulling their gurney with them. One of them turned to me. "Partial and full-thickness burns over eighty percent of her body." He shook his head and looked back at the woman. "I don't know how she managed to crawl or how she's still alive."

The woman had been crawling? She should have been dead on arrival, or at least unconscious. I took in the sight in front of me and stopped myself from cringing.

This was definitely one of those 'oh fuck' moments that doctors don't like to admit we have. But we do. All. The. Time. We are human.

White gauze covered most of her burned body. It was a miracle that her chest moved up and down with her breaths. Our hospital had a state-of-the-art burn center, but even I had never seen so much damage to a living, breathing person before.

Who had burned her? Why had they burned her? Was it an accident?

Her vitals were delivered to me rapid fire. They were almost non-existent. Yet she was whimpering on the gurney like she was suffering from a mere broken bone.

I wasn't the only one in shock over the woman in front of us. The people in the room raised their eyebrows at me in a silent question of how to proceed.

"Call upstairs," I ordered as the nurse hooked her up to our machines. She was flat-lining now, but was moving and mumbling.

Her mouth was opening and closing like she was saying words. I moved farther forward and leaned in. The smell made bile churn in my gut. I was glad I hadn't had a chance to eat my dinner, or it would have made a surprise reappearance.

"Ma'am, what's your name? Can you tell us what happened?" The EMTs couldn't get the information out of her in transit. She was Jane Doe.

More noises that sounded an awful lot like words came out of her mouth.

"Ma'am, can you repeat that?"

Her fingers reached out to grab my arm. They were severely burned and looked foreign on her body, twisted and mangled from whatever hellfire had consumed her.

"Ma'am, we can't understand you."

I leaned even closer, hoping I could understand what she was trying to tell me.

I shouldn't have.

In a movement that was faster than humanly possible, and certainly quicker than she should have been able to move given her injuries, she reached out and pulled me closer, her teeth sinking into the side of my neck.

She was fast, like a viper.

I immediately stumbled back, taking off my gloves, and grabbed a piece of gauze to hold over the wound.

A lot of thoughts go through your head when a patient attacks you. Are they mentally ill? Should I attack back to prevent injury to myself? Are they reacting because of the situation?

It might have been a quick bite, but it was a painful one.

The machines suddenly began beeping like crazy as the woman thrashed on the exam table, trying to break free. She went from having non-existent vitals to sending the machines haywire with erratic readings.

There was an increase in activity as security and more personnel rushed into the trauma room. There wasn't much I could do with a neck wound.

I was led to an empty exam room in a daze of disbelief. I had only been attacked once before, knocked on my ass by a man higher than a kite. That was child's play compared to a bite to the neck.

The bite was deep and left me feeling dizzy. Human bite wounds were the worst. I'd be lucky if I didn't get an infection.

The door opened, and one of the on-call residents came in, looking pale. I couldn't blame him. What we had all just witnessed in that trauma room was a once-in-a-career type of situation.

He snapped on a pair of gloves and took over holding the gauze to my neck. A nurse joined him, and he removed the dressing. His inhale of breath was loud enough to make me flinch.

"Jesus, Lia."

"How bad is it, Roni? No need to sugarcoat it. Will I be stuck wearing turtlenecks for the rest of my life?" I let out a pained laugh and gripped the edge of the exam table.

I hated turtlenecks.

My neck was throbbing, more than it should be from a bite to the neck. It almost felt like there was a foreign object inside of it.

"It looks like... Teresa, have a look at this." He was wiping my neck with an antiseptic wipe. His lips were drawn tightly in a line. "Doesn't it look like..."

Teresa looked around his arm, and her eyes widened before settling on me. She opened a few cabinets and dug around. She returned with a mirror and held it up so I could see for myself.

My breath caught in my throat. Now that the area was clean, it was evident it wasn't a bite from a mouth. My heart rate went through the roof, and I'm sure if I was hooked to monitors, I would have been tachycardic.

"What the actual fuck?" I reached up and probed the area that looked an awful lot like two wounds from fangs.

My hands were shaking as I lowered them to my lap and let them clean the puncture holes and cover them in gauze. Teresa left the room to grab me a new scrub top since mine had blood and fluids from wound care on it.

"You'll need to take antibiotics. Once we get the chem panel back, we'll know if there are any diseases we need to worry about." Roni took his gloves off. "Are you feeling okay?"

I nodded. I was more shocked than anything. It wasn't unheard of that people filed their teeth to resemble those of vampires. Los Angeles was a crazy city. There was never a dull moment in the ER.

It's why I chose to become an emergency room doctor.

The door opened, and Teresa returned with a blue scrub top clutched in her hand. Teresa was tough as nails, so her demeanor didn't ease the dread that had slowly crept into my body.

"The patient has died." She dropped the top on the table next to me. She took my hand. "They figured out what she was saying. Repeating, actually."

I gripped her hand. I didn't like the way this evening had taken an unexpectedly morbid turn. One minute I was about to sink my teeth into deliciousness; the next, a charred woman was sinking her fangs into my neck.

Now I knew how the ham sandwich felt.

The room was silent, besides the faint sounds of the bustling ER on the other side of the closed exam room door. I felt like I was outside my body, looking down at the three of us. The rest of the room blurred, and the only thing I could see was us.

"She kept repeating, 'find her, find her'." She cleared her throat. "Then she let out a loud screech, and a large spider crawled from her mouth. It moved so fast we couldn't kill it."

My eyes went wide, and I brought my hand to my neck.

"The other doctors think she was on something. Possibly burned herself doing drugs. That a spider crawled into her mouth while she was crawling in that parking lot." Teresa was thinking out loud. It wasn't helping. At. All.

Whatever had happened in that trauma room wasn't natural. I had a bite that looked an awful lot like a spider bite on the side of my neck, a spider had crawled from a woman's mouth, and now that woman was dead.

Little did I know it was much more than just a bite.