Forever After

Chapter 15

I sat on the hood of the car, waiting for the coyotes to show up to take away their prizes. I wasn’t really seeing the woods or the bodies, wasn’t paying much attention to the cold metal below my butt or the fact that, yet again, Justine had run away.

 How did it get to be this way? It was only a year ago I was working as a medical examiner in Chapel Hill, living a normal, boring, non-violent life. Back then, guns scared me and I was phobic of cutting to the point I could barely hold a scalpel to a dead body without cringing. But I’d always faced my fears. I nearly passed out when I had to do surgical rotations in medical school, but I got through it. To think, in a year, I went from that to hunting werewolves with a katana.

It all started with a visit with my brother, Dante Giovanni Rossi, or Deegee for short. He hates that name so, logically, I always called him that. Giovanni, he liked being called Giovanni. 

I guessed I must have caught him on an off day or something, because one moment, we were talking and laughing after scarfing down a truly horrifying amount of food, the next, I was lying on the floor, convinced I was about to die. I remembered the look in his eyes. I remembered thinking he really WAS a sociopath. Psycho. Monstro. Monster.

The next thing I remembered lucidly was being in the hospital. I was treated for my injuries and released. But I was turning and it was a disaster waiting for a time and a place. I wasn’t a violent person. I was quiet and shy and a workaholic, more than happy to work sixty hour work weeks. I’d never forget the first time I killed someone.

 #

I was still in the hospital. The pain was back, and the morphine wasn’t worth shit. So, I just lay there, curled in a ball whimpering. 

Between the morphine drip and the blood transfusion, I couldn’t bend my right arm and my arm kept twitching as I tried to keep myself from drawing it toward my center.  

The light hurt my eyes again, even though the shades were drawn, and they’d turned off the overhead fluorescents. The nurse came in to check on me not long ago, but I felt okay then. How long had it been? A half hour? An hour? Two?

“Knock, knock,” a male voice called from the now open door, the light searing even through my closed eyelids.

 A moan escaped me as he eased the door closed behind him.

“Sorry,” he moved toward the side of the bed quickly, his slip resistant soles not making a sound against the industrial flooring. “I’ll go get the nurse or the doctor to look in on you, okay?” He reached to pat my shoulder reassuringly.

I still wasn't sure what my brain was thinking. Maybe it wasn’t. I sure didn’t remember telling my body to move, even though it did. Quicker than I thought I was capable of moving in my condition, I seized his arm, holding on for dear life. I finally opened my eyes.

“Wow,” he twitched his lips into the semblance of a smile, trying and failing to disguise his grimace. “You sure are strong.”

For a dead woman. The thought crossed my mind in a brief moment of clarity. No, not dead. Dying. The clarity slipped away and something else took over. My hand shook where it was still attached to the orderly.

He gently laid his hand over mine where it rested on his arm and tried to pry off my fingers without hurting me. Reflexively, my fingers dug in deeper. His grimace returned.  

“Easy, Doctor Rossi. Just let go and I’ll get you some help. Okay?” He squinted, looking deeper into my eyes. “Doctor Rossi? Are you in there?”

Next, he leaned in closer, moving his throat toward my mouth. At the time, some part of me thought he was offering me a buffet. Now, I thought he must have seen my lips moving and thought I was trying to speak. My eyes drifted closed as he came within inches of my mouth. I tried to move my face away as an abrasive cologne assaulted me, but another scent hit me. The scent had my eyes popping open and, before I knew it, I was leaning in and breathing deep.