The first gurney hits the doors hard enough to rattle the glass.
Not a metaphor. A real slam—metal frame on tile, wheels skidding because someone is running while trying not to run. The automatic doors cough open and the night air follows the stretcher in like it paid for a bed.
"Two minutes out, multiple incoming!" a voice barks from the radio at the charge desk. "Highway pileup—chain reaction. At least twelve vehicles. Ejection, entrapment, possible tanker involvement—"
The radio keeps talking. The department stops listening in sentences.
We listen in pieces.
Ejection. Entrapment. Tanker.
My hands are already moving before my brain finishes deciding to move them. Gloves. Gown. Face shield. I snap the shield down and the world becomes slightly foggier around the edges, like I'm viewing my own life through a pane of breath.
"I need Trauma One prepped, now," I say, and I don't raise my voice. It travels anyway. "Massive transfusion cooler to the bay. Get me an ultrasound. Where's respiratory?"
"On the way!" someone shouts back, indistinct behind curtains and adrenaline.
A teenager—no, early twenties—comes in on the first gurney, eyes wide, chest heaving like he's trying to out-breathe panic. There's blood on his jeans, too much of it, dark and wet and already cooling.
I catch the rail and walk with him like I own the stretcher and, by extension, the situation.
Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Disability. Exposure.
My mind does not chant it like a prayer. It snaps through it like a checklist on fire.
"Name?" I ask, leaning close enough that he can hear me through the room. "Can you tell me your name?"
"J—Jay," he wheezes.
"Jay, look at me." I press two fingers to his wrist. Fast. Thready. "Any allergies?"
He shakes his head too hard and almost blacks out from the effort.
His abdomen is rigid when my palm skims it. That's not a bruise problem. That's an inside problem.
"Pressure's dropping," the nurse at the monitor says, voice tight.
"Two large-bore IVs," I say. "Type and cross. Trauma labs. Hang O-negative until we have a match."
Jay's eyes flick toward my hands, and I see him notice the blood there—mine? his? someone else's? It doesn't matter. It's blood. It exists in my orbit.
The smell gets through the mask anyway.
Copper. Salt. Warmth.
My throat tightens like it's remembering thirst for the first time.
A line of heat crawls under my tongue, slick and impatient.
I swallow. Nothing changes.
The second gurney arrives with a man whose face is grey with shock and whose right arm doesn't look like it belongs to his body anymore. The third is a woman with her hair matted to her scalp with blood, eyes rolling back while someone shouts that she was "found under the dash." The fourth is an older guy in a reflective vest with a crushed chest and no voice left to scream with.
There's no time to be horrified.
Horror is a luxury item. This place does not stock it.
I point. "You—bed three. You—bed five. Get the woman under the dash into Trauma Two, now. Respiratory, I want a tube ready. If her GCS drops, we intubate."
"Michael," the charge nurse snaps, cutting through the noise. "We're running out of monitors."
"Share them," I say, already turning. "Put vitals on the wall board if you have to. I just need trends."
Another scream, another stretcher, another person who is suddenly the center of someone's entire universe and is also, in the cold light of triage, a problem to solve before the next problem arrives.
My body moves like it has a separate set of lungs.
It isn't magic. It isn't even grace.
It's the simple fact that if I slow down, the department collapses. If the department collapses, people die. If people die, the smell of blood gets worse. If the smell gets worse—
I don't finish that thought.
My gaze flicks toward the doors. More lights. More silhouettes. More wheels.
My mouth is dry. My tongue is too aware of my teeth.
[HUNGER: 58% — CRAVING]
[HEALTH: 93% — STABLE]
The overlay sits in the lower edge of my vision like an insult. Not bright. Not flashy. Just present. Like a brand.
"Thorne!" someone yells. "We've got one with arterial bleed!"
"Where?"
"Hallway—no bed—"
I'm already there.
A young woman—mid-thirties—has a towel pressed to her thigh, red soaking through as if the fabric is giving up. Her hands are shaking. A firefighter is kneeling beside her, face streaked with ash and something darker.
I kneel, too. "Ma'am, I'm Michael. Stay with me. I'm going to stop this. Tell me your name."
"R—Rina," she gasps.
Bright blood pulses between her fingers with every heartbeat. Femoral. High-pressure. The kind of bleed that doesn't give you long enough to say goodbye properly.
"Tourniquet," I say. My voice is calm because if it isn't, hers won't be either. "High and tight."
Someone tosses me one. I strap it above the wound, pull until the strap bites and the bleeding slows, then stops.
Rina sobs. It's not pain. It's relief. It's the moment her body realizes it might get to keep being a body.
I should feel relief, too.
Instead, the moment the blood stops flowing, my throat aches.
The curse does not care that I saved her.
It cares that the blood existed and I didn't take it.
A nurse hands me gauze. My glove is slick, red shining under fluorescent lights. I keep my fingers curled inward so no one sees how my hand trembles, just slightly, like a held-back animal.
We get Rina onto a bed.
I turn.
Another gurney.
Another face.
Time becomes a corridor I'm sprinting down while dragging everyone else behind me.
"Jay's pressure's tanking!" someone calls.
"Ultrasound now," I say. "If there's free fluid, we call surgery. Don't wait for imaging."
The probe slides across Jay's abdomen. Black pools on the screen, wrong in a way that makes my stomach clench.
"Positive FAST," the resident says.
"Call OR," I say. "Now."
I pull back and there's blood on my wrist where my glove meets skin. Not much. A smear. A trace.
It might as well be a flare in a dark forest.
My mouth waters. It's not pleasant. It's not a craving for dessert. It's the body's desperate little lie: if you do this, you will live.
I angle my wrist toward my face as if adjusting my glove. My head dips, mask hiding it. The motion is small, a normal movement in a room full of frantic normal movements.
My tongue touches the smear.
One quick swipe. Nothing dramatic.
The taste hits like a shockwave anyway.
Not sweet. Not romantic. Hot salt and iron and life.
The hunger eases by a fraction—just enough to stop the tremor in my hand.
Just enough to keep me human-shaped.
I straighten and keep moving before my brain can decide what that meant.
[HUNGER: 51% — CRAVING]
[HEALTH: 92% — STABLE]
The HUD is wrong in a way that makes me want to laugh. I just did something I should never do at work, in front of cameras and coworkers and God, and the cursed overlay responds like I took an antacid.
Another gurney arrives.
I'm already speaking. "Chest compressions in progress?"
"Lost pulse in the rig," paramedic says, breathless. "Two shocks delivered."
"Keep compressions." I climb onto the step stool and take over, hands centered on sternum, elbows locked. Rhythm. Depth. Recoil.
I watch the patient's face bounce with my compressions, lips slack, skin pale. I do not allow myself to think about the blood inside that body, still warm, still waiting.
My arms burn.
My hunger climbs with each push, each exertion, each second spent denying myself.
[HUNGER: 68% — CRAVING]
[HEALTH: 90% — STABLE]
"Epi in," someone says.
"Resume compressions."
The department is a machine. I am a cog that refuses to slip.
And the curse is a second machine inside me, always turning, always grinding, always asking for fuel.
The night becomes a blur of tags and sutures and calls to radiology and shouted lab values and the snap of gloves and the wet sounds of suction and the constant wheel squeak of stretchers arriving like the world itself is bleeding out onto our floor.
At some point—somewhere between the fifth intubation and the third time I say "clear" and step back for a shock—my vision tunnels.
Not from exhaustion.
From scent.
There's blood everywhere, and my body is too aware of it, like a starving man trapped in a bakery.
[HUNGER: 82% — PREDATORY]
[HEALTH: 88% — STABLE]
I keep my face neutral because neutrality is camouflage.
"Michael," the charge nurse says, catching my eye. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," I say, and it's not a lie. It's a strategy.
I peel off my outer gloves, toss them, and pull on fresh ones. The act buys me a second, a ritual to keep my hands from doing what they want.
My fingers flex.
Not yet.
Not here.
Not like this.
I take a breath through the mask. It feels like breathing through cloth in a burning building.
Then another patient comes in and gives me something better than air: a problem to solve.
—
The crash wave ends the way storms end—without permission. One minute there's still thunder, the next there's only dripping and cleanup and exhausted people leaning against counters like they've forgotten gravity exists.
I find a corner behind the supply room where no one can see me unless they're looking for me.
My hands shake when I close the door.
Not fatigue. Not fear.
Need.
I sit on a rolling stool and pull the small kit from my locker—nothing dramatic, nothing illegal in a hospital, just supplies that any staff member can access. A bag of fluids. A fresh line. Tape. Alcohol swab.
I spike the IV bag and hang it on a hook that isn't meant for it. I swab my arm, slide the needle in, and start the drip.
Cold fluid slips into my vein and my body reacts like I'm trying to drink water while drowning.
It helps.
Not much, but enough.
Enough to let me keep my mouth closed when someone bleeds nearby.
[HUNGER: 74% — PREDATORY]
[HEALTH: 87% — STABLE]
The meter doesn't drop as fast as it would if I had real nourishment. It doesn't need to. The IV is a lie I tell the curse, and the curse is not stupid—it's just willing to accept a down payment if it keeps me alive until the next real meal.
I stare at the bag, watching the drip chamber tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
That sound wasn't part of my life before.
Nothing about this was part of my life before.
The Day comes back the way pain comes back—sudden, intimate, unwelcome.
I'm not in this hospital in the memory. I'm somewhere ordinary, somewhere stupidly normal. A sidewalk. A streetlight. The smell of rain on concrete. I remember thinking about something irrelevant—work schedule, grocery list, a message I didn't answer.
Then a weight in the air. Like the world inhaled.
A voice that wasn't a voice. A pressure behind my eyes.
And afterward, thirst.
Not the kind you fix with a bottle of water.
The kind that turns your bones into hollow things that rattle.
I didn't wake up dead. I woke up alive and wrong.
Heart pounding. Breath too sharp. Skin too sensitive. Every scent too loud.
And the first time I passed a butcher shop, I almost walked through the glass.
It took weeks to understand triggers.
Blood scent. Injury. Fear-sweat mixed with iron. The sound of a pulse when the room is quiet enough.
It took weeks to understand what helped.
Not food. Not sugar. Not coffee. Not sleep.
Fluid helped a little. IV helped a little more. But blood—
Blood was a key in a lock that wanted to open.
I named the hunger because naming it made it feel like something I could fight.
Ensanguine Thirst.
As if dressing it up in a pretty word would keep it from devouring me.
I exhale, slow, controlled.
The IV drips.
My Hunger eases by a notch.
[HUNGER: 69% — CRAVING]
[HEALTH: 87% — STABLE]
My phone buzzes on silent.
A text from dispatch: HELI INBOUND. MOUNTAIN PICKUP. NEED ED ESCORT.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, close my eyes for half a second, and then I'm moving again. The bag comes down. The line comes out. A cotton ball goes on. Tape. Sleeve down.
No trace.
No confession.
I step out into the hallway with my face set to neutral and my pulse steady enough to pass for human.
"Thorne," the charge nurse says as I walk by. "You're on escort?"
"Yeah." I grab my jacket. "I'll be back."
Outside, the night is cold enough to bite. The helicopter pad lights glare white against the dark. The rotors are already whining as the crew runs their checks.
The flight medic meets me at the pad. "You're coming up?"
"Just escort." I keep my voice easy. "What've we got?"
"Fall injury," she says. "Hiker. Unstable terrain. They're calling it an accident."
"Calling it," I repeat, and my mouth tastes like irony.
We load gear, lift off, and the city falls away into a scatter of lights.
The mountain rises like a black wave.
Up there, the air is thinner. The rotor wash kicks dust and pine needles into spirals. A man on a stretcher is waiting, face pale, leg splinted, jacket soaked through at the shoulder with blood.
My throat tightens.
Not now.
I focus on straps. On securing the patient. On checking his airway. On keeping him warm.
He looks at me with glassy eyes. "Am I gonna—"
"Not if you keep breathing," I tell him, and for once the words are both comfort and instruction.
We bring him down. We land. We unload.
I walk him through the doors like I did with Jay, like I did with Rina, like I've done a hundred times.
And then I finally step back into the fluorescent hum of the ER and think, foolishly, that maybe the night is done with me.
It isn't.
—
The call comes in as I'm wiping down the gurney rails.
"Ambulance arriving," the triage nurse says, voice strange in a way that pricks at my nerves. "Single patient. Possible animal attack."
"Dog?" someone asks.
"Witnesses said—" she hesitates, glancing toward the doors. "They said rabid. They said it didn't move right."
The automatic doors open.
The stretcher rolls in.
The patient is a man in his late twenties, shirt torn, skin mottled with bite marks that look too deep and too neat. His throat is wrapped in gauze already soaked through. His eyes are wide and unfocused, like he's watching something behind us.
"He was conscious on scene," the paramedic says, breath tight. "Started seizing in the rig. Pressure dropped. We can't get it up."
I lean in. The man's lips are blue. His skin is cold around the edges, warm only at the center, where blood still holds heat.
There's a smell to him.
Not just blood.
Something sharp. Something old. Something that doesn't belong in a normal city.
My tongue presses against the back of my teeth.
[HUNGER: 77% — CRAVING]
[HEALTH: 86% — STABLE]
"On three," I say. "Slide him over."
We move him into a bed. Monitors clamp on. The screen lights up with numbers that look wrong.
His heart rate spikes, then stutters.
His eyes fix on my face for one lucid second.
"Don't—" he rasps, and the sound is wet. "Don't let it—"
Then his body arches.
The monitor screams.
Flatline.
"Pulse?" someone asks.
I press fingers to his neck. Nothing. I start compressions anyway because habits are stubborn and hope is contagious even when it shouldn't be.
"Epi," I say.
Someone pushes it.
We shock.
Nothing.
We shock again.
Nothing.
The room goes quiet in the special way that only happens when everyone realizes the truth at the same time.
"Time," the attending says softly.
I stop.
My hands hover above the dead man's chest as if they forgot the next instruction.
And then—
His fingers twitch.
Not reflex. Not post-mortem settling.
A twitch with intention behind it.
His chest jerks, shallow, like a puppet pulled by a string.
The monitor remains flat.
Cold sweat breaks on my spine.
My vision narrows.
A new sensation blooms in my mouth, under my tongue, behind my eyes—a tingling that isn't hunger the way I know hunger.
It's recognition.
It's the curse's attention snapping to a target.
This is food, something inside me seems to say, and the thought is not in my voice.
[HUNGER: 89% — PREDATORY]
[HEALTH: 85% — STABLE]
The staff backs up instinctively. Someone whispers, "What the hell—"
"Curtain," I say, too fast.
They hesitate.
"Privacy curtain," I repeat, and my voice comes out sharper than intended. "Now."
A nurse pulls it because we're in an ER and we obey momentum when we don't have understanding.
The curtain slides around the bed, boxing me in with the dead-not-dead man.
The fluorescent light inside the curtained space feels dimmer, as if the fabric filters not just sight but judgment.
The man's eyes snap open.
They are not human eyes anymore.
They are too dark, too reflective, like a cat's gaze caught in headlights.
He makes a sound. Not words. A wet click of teeth.
My body reacts.
It is not a decision.
It is my curse doing math I cannot see.
I grab his jaw with one hand and force his head to the side, exposing the torn gauze at his throat.
Blood beads there, thick, black-red, wrong in a way that makes my stomach twist and my mouth flood with saliva.
I should step back.
I should call for help.
I should do a hundred things that a normal man would do.
Instead, my mouth opens.
My teeth press to skin.
Not to kill.
To drink.
A small swallow.
A taste.
The tingling detonates into heat.
My Hunger drops—not by much, but by enough to make the world sharpen.
[HUNGER: 83% — PREDATORY]
[HEALTH: 85% — STABLE]
The corpse shudders under my grip.
It twitches again, stronger.
I take another swallow before I can stop myself, and the blood tastes like smoke and iron and something I don't have words for.
The curtain shifts.
A brush of fabric.
A shadow crossing the seam.
My head jerks up.
Someone is outside.
Someone is close.
The curtain lifts—
—and a woman steps in with the movement of someone who has opened a thousand doors into danger and never once apologized for it.
Her eyes take in the bed. My hands. The blood at my mouth.
The split second of silence is sharp enough to cut.
"Michael Thorne," she says, voice level, as if she's reading my name off a file she's already memorized. "Step away from the patient."
I freeze with blood on my lips and a dead man twitching under my palm, and the only thought that makes it through the roar in my veins is the simplest, ugliest one:
Caught.
[HUNGER: 90% — PREDATORY]
[HEALTH: 85% — STABLE]