The sterile, shocked silence of the trauma bay was shattered by a new, more pervasive alarm—a blaring, repetitive tone over the hospital's PA system that every staff member recognized with a sinking heart.
"Code Grey, Emergency Department. Code Grey, Emergency Department. All available staff to the ER."
A mass casualty incident. A bus crash, a fire, a building collapse—the reason didn't matter in that moment. Only the overwhelming, imminent need did.
The spell broke. Dr. Evans, still staring at the specimen cup holding the silver shard, snapped back to the present. His eyes, wide with lingering disbelief, met Elena's. "Go," he said, his voice rough. "They need every hand. We'll… we'll handle this." He gestured vaguely at the now-empty space where Lionel had been, already being wheeled toward the elevators to the ICU.
Elena stood frozen for a second, torn. The mystery was being wheeled away, but the concrete, screaming reality of a Code Grey pulled at her duty. The stranger was stable, for whatever unfathomable definition of 'stable' applied to him. The people flooding into the ER would not be.
She turned and ran, joining the stream of nurses, doctors, and technicians flooding toward the emergency department's ambulance bay.
The next several hours dissolved into a relentless, bloody kaleidoscope. The incident was a multi-vehicle pile-up on the interstate. The ER became a storm of triage tags, shouted orders, and the raw sounds of human suffering.
Elena moved from gurney to gurney, assessing, stabilizing, prioritizing—a fractured femur here, a tension pneumothorax there, a child crying for a parent who wouldn't be coming.
Her body worked on pure, trained autopilot, but her mind was a split screen. One part was here, in the chaos, counting respirations, checking pulses, applying pressure dressings.
The other part was trapped in the cool, silent space of the trauma bay, replaying the moment those golden eyes had blazed open, full of an ancient, feral pain that had looked directly at her. The feel of his cold, dense flesh under her hands. The impossible, visible knitting of his wound.
What are you? The question was a ghost, haunting her between the screams.
During a brief, desperate lull—a moment to grab a sip of water and a granola bar from the staff room—she found her feet carrying her not back to the fray, but toward the bank of elevators.
She didn't press the button. She just stood there, staring at the floor indicator. He was on the seventh floor. Neuro-ICU. Room 743, the computer had said.
She shouldn't go. It was a violation. He wasn't her patient. She was a "family liaison" in a lie so transparent it was almost invisible. Yet, she felt a pull, a connection forged in that moment of shared, surreal crisis. She needed to see him peaceful, to confirm that the monster was dormant, that the man—if he was a man—was resting.
Taking the elevator to the seventh floor, the relative quiet of the ICU was a shock to her system. The air hummed with a different kind of tension—the vigilant watch over fragile sparks of life. She found Room 743, a private suite with a glass wall looking into a dim, quiet space.
He lay in the bed, surrounded by silent, blinking monitors that still displayed his perplexing vitals. The sheets were pulled up to his chest.
In the soft glow of the equipment, he looked less like a fallen prince and more like a sculpture on a tomb, perfect and utterly still. The angry, fresh scar on his chest was visible above the sheet line—a stark, pink line against his pallor. It already looked days old.
A nurse inside the room glanced up and saw her. Elena raised a hand in a weak, acknowledging wave, and the Nurse, recognizing a colleague, albeit a disheveled one, gave a tired nod and returned to her charting.
Something tightened in Elena's chest. He looked so isolated. A stupid, compassionate impulse made her slide the glass door open just enough to slip inside. The Nurse looked up again.
"Just… family," Elena whispered, the lie tasting bitter.
The Nurse, overwhelmed with other critical patients, said, "Don't touch anything. He's sedated for monitoring."
Elena approached the bedside. Up close, the aura of otherness was still palpable. The cold seemed to radiate from him, a personal winter. She watched the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest for a moment.
Then, almost without thinking, she reached out and adjusted the thin hospital blanket, tucking it a little more neatly around his shoulders. It was a nurse's gesture, automatic, meant to provide a shred of comfort in a sterile world.
As she leaned over, the clip on the back of her temporary hospital ID badge—the flimsy plastic replacement for the one she'd lost last week—snagged loosely on the edge of the bed rail. She didn't feel it give way.
She straightened, taking one last look at his serene, sleeping face, so at odds with the snarling creature of an hour before. "Who are you?" she breathed, the words a ghost of sound.
There was no answer but the soft beep of the heart monitor. Turning, she left the room, the glass door sighing shut behind her. She hurried back toward the elevators, back to the warzone of the ER.
On the floor, beneath the metal frame of the hospital bed in Room 743, the plastic ID badge lay face up. The harsh overhead light glinted off its laminated surface, illuminating the slightly pixelated photo of a woman with tired but kind grey-blue eyes, and the clear, printed text:
MARIA'S HOSPITAL – TEMPORARY STAFF
ELENA HART, RN