Strangers of the Night. Megan Hart

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       Chapter 1

      Samantha Janecek had never liked hospitals in general, but she loathed this hospital in particular.

      It wasn’t the smells of chemicals and despair, though those clung to her like some stinking perfume she could never quite scrub away. And it wasn’t the bright, unrelenting lights that forced everyone inside to adjust to some artificial internal clock, although they messed with her sleep so much that she hadn’t been able to get more than four hours at a time since she’d started here. More than anything else, it was this uniform.

      No scrubs for the nursing staff here at Wyrmwood. Nope, the women had to wear white, starched dresses with Peter Pan collars and a weird belt thing that hit her too high on the ribs to be comfortable. Thick white support stockings, crepe-soled granny shoes. Worst of all, the mesh cap she had to pin into the thickness of her blond hair, which refused to ever stay neatly in the required bun. The uniform was straight out of the late sixties—fitting, she supposed, since the rest of Wyrmwood seemed to have been arrested in that same era. Including the fact there were no male nurses here, only orderlies. They also wore all white, but at least they got to wear pants.

      “Morning, miss,” said Nathan through the glass as she showed him her ID card and pressed her fingertip to the panel at the side of the door.

      When the green light clicked on, she pushed through the heavy door that slid behind her with a hushed whirr. “Hi, Nathan. How’s it going?”

      “Same old, same old.” Nathan shrugged. “Quiet tonight.”

      Of course it was quiet. Not only were all the patients on the fourth floor secured in their individual rooms behind soundproof walls, but most of them barely spoke aloud. Some by choice, an elective muteness. Some because they’d lost the capability for speech somewhere along the way. It might’ve been different on other floors, but as she’d never worked on any of them, Samantha couldn’t say.

      “Have a good one,” Samantha said as she signed in using the electronic keypad at Nathan’s station.

      She paused for the automatic snapshot that would be added to her file, another level of proof that she was who she said she was. That she was here when she ought to be. She’d often considered pulling a funny face during the picture taking, but had never quite dared. Humor was not encouraged here.

      She didn’t speak to the armed guards posted at the elevator entrance to the floor. One or both of them might be on her team, but she never knew. Never would know, not unless it was necessary. Vadim made sure of that.

      Samantha had been working at the Wyrmwood job for the past eighteen months. She’d never asked what strings had been pulled to make sure she was assigned to the fourth floor. She simply followed the rules she’d agreed to when she took the job. The money from the Crew kept coming in, deposited into an account in no way connected to the one she used for her Wyrmwood salary, and which she checked only once a month, using an encrypted burner phone she then tossed immediately. Money she couldn’t spend until she was no longer needed here.

      The question was, when would she decide that she was finished with this assignment? How much longer could she stand it here before she lost more than a little bit of her own mind? Working in near silence all day long, taking the vitals of men and women who were often little more than chilly mannequins. Forcing her body into an artificial day/night cycle that fucked up her social life, not just her mental state. She was not the first person Vadim had ever assigned to this task. Sooner or later, all of those who’d come before her had ended up leaving, some of their own accord and others because they’d stopped toeing the Wyrmwood line. She’d never found out how many of them had ended up as patients themselves. Stopping for a moment in front of a closed door with nothing more than a small viewport in it, she allowed herself the briefest second to touch the cold metal. A little longer, she told herself. Surely she could last a little longer.

      At the desk, positioned between the two corridors of the L-shaped building, she managed some banal chitchat with the nurse leaving her shift. Patty was nice enough. She did yoga. Had a bland husband, several unremarkable children and a couple of dogs she referred to as “fur babies” in a way that made Samantha supremely uncomfortable. She and Patty would never be friends—Wyrmwood employees were discouraged from socializing outside of work, anyway, even if they’d had anything in common beyond the job. Samantha knew, though, that no matter how normal Patty seemed, the fact she worked here at Wyrmwood meant she had the highest security clearance possible. It meant that, like Samantha, Patty was capable of killing you with a ballpoint pen or her bare hands. Not only capable, but willing.

      “Quiet tonight,” Patty said in an echo of Nathan’s earlier statement. “You shouldn’t have any trouble.”

      “Never do,” Samantha said with the bright, sterile smile she’d cultivated over the years as part of her armor against the “normal” world. It had worked well for this stint in Wyrmwood, that was for sure. That smile, she was convinced, was what had finally earned her the job. “Have a good night. Give the pups a squeeze from me.”

      “Will do!” Patty gathered her things and signed out of the computer, pausing for another of those snapshots, and left.

      Alone at the desk, Samantha released a pent-up sigh and allowed her face to fall into an expression that didn’t even come close to a smile. She was still being watched, of course. She knew that. But she didn’t have to pretend she was here for a party. If anything, the two performance reviews she’d had since taking the assignment had made note of her “professional demeanor” and “consistent attitude.”

      Signing in, adding another profile picture to the files, she settled into her seat to scroll through the notes left behind by the last shift. Patty preferred crossword puzzles to extensive note taking, which was fine with Samantha, since there was rarely anything important to note. Fourth floor had twenty patients who required varying levels of care, and all of them were her responsibility.

      But she was there, really, to take care of only one.