Page 65 of Blood & Ash

Then the monitor tone changed.

It happened without warning. The monitor jumped straight to the flat tone: no warning spike, no crash first, just an unbroken, sustained line. The same sound from twenty minutes ago filled the clinic again. Marcus was at the sink washing his hands. He turned. The soap was still on his fingers. He crossed to the gurney in three strides. Delphine’s chest was still. There was no rise and no fall. The absence was complete.

He moved immediately.

He pressed into compressions, heel of hand to sternum, full depth. His count picked up from wherever his brain had stored the last number.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

His voice was flat. The narration was automatic, a habit built across eighty-five years of rural medicine where he was often the only trained person in the room.

“Adrenaline, one milligram IV push. Amiodarone, three hundred milligrams. Sodium bicarbonate, fifty milliliters.”

He reached for the crash cart with his left hand. His right stayed on Delphine’s sternum. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. The drawer opened. He drew the adrenaline, capped it, and set it on the gurney rail. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.

“Twenty-nine. Thirty.”

He broke compression, checked her airway, tilted her head, and gave two breaths. Her chest rose and fell. The flat tone continued. Marcus pushed the adrenaline into the IV port, recapped the syringe, set it down, and went back to compressions.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

The second round took longer. His shoulders ached. The muscle across his upper back had gone tight during the first arrest and never loosened. He ignored it. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. The flat tone held. The line on the monitor stayed flat. Delphine’s skin had gone waxy again, with gray at the lips and gray at the nail beds, the kind of gray that meant minutes, not hours.

Between the second and third round, his hands paused.

It lasted half a beat, maybe less. His right hand came off her sternum. His left moved to her throat. His fingertips found the carotid. Nothing. His thumb brushed the line of her jaw. The turning question lived there, in the space between his thumb and her pulse point. One bite would do it. His venom would stop the arrest cold. Vampire turning had that effect: it reset the nervous system. It would save her life. It would also take something from her that she’d never offered.

His hand moved. Back to compressions.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

He didn’t turn her. The decision was made in the pause and never spoken aloud. He would get her back the hard way. Or not at all.

The third round yielded nothing. The flat tone held. Marcus pushed the amiodarone, three hundred milligrams, and the fluid ran clear. He recapped the syringe and set it down. His shirt was soaked through now. The clinic was cold, his breath coming white.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

In the fourth round his count lost its rhythm, the numbers coming out rough and gritted. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. The flat tone continued. Then it didn’t. The line jumped on a single wide, aberrant complex, then another, a second and a half apart. The rhythm established itself, irregular and bradycardic, forty beats per minute. The monitor registered each complex. Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two.

Marcus leaned forward, both forearms braced on the gurney rail, and let his forehead drop toward his hands for one second, no longer. Then he straightened. The penlight got a sluggish answer from both pupils. She breathed on her own again, shallow at first, then deeper. The monitor held at forty-five. Then fifty. Then fifty-two.

He took a heavy wool blanket from the supply shelf, unfolded it, and tucked it around Delphine’s body, over her shoulders, under her arms, across her legs. The tucking had little to do with warmth. He needed something to do with his hands that wasn’t counting or compressing or drawing drugs.

He checked the IV line. The site was clean. The drip was running. Normal saline at one-fifty milliliters per hour. He adjusted the rate. One-seventy. She needed volume. Her blood pressure was sixty-eight over thirty-eight, dangerously low.

The monitor held at fifty-five. The rhythm was irregular but sustaining. PVCs came every sixth beat, not ideal but present. Marcus pulled a stool to the side of the gurney. The metal legs scraped the concrete. He sat down. The stool was too low. His knees came up. He didn’t adjust it.

He put two fingers to Delphine’s wrist. The radial pulse was weak and thready. Forty-eight beats against his fingertips. He counted. Forty-nine. Fifty. Fifty-one. Her skin was cold. The blanket hadn’t warmed her yet.

He stayed there with his fingers on her wrist and his eyes on the monitor while the lights hummed and the oxygen mask hissed. Delphine’s chest rose and fell on its own rhythm. The compressions and the drugs no longer carried her. The rhythm was hers.

The flat tone didn’t return.

Marcus didn’t move from the stool. His back hurt. His shoulders ached. His jaw was locked hard enough that the hinge had gone numb. He stayed where he was because moving meant admitting that something had ended, and nothing had ended. She was alive. The monitor said so. His fingers said so. The rise and fall of her chest under the wool blanket said so.

He counted her pulse against his own. Forty-eight to sixty. The discrepancy narrowed as the minutes passed. Fifty. Fifty-two. Fifty-four. His breathing slowed to match hers. His body did it without his permission, just as it had counted compressions and drawn drugs and made the decision at her throat without being told.

Outside, the night held. The window above the reagent shelf stayed black. Dawn was hours away, and Marcus had no intention of being anywhere but right here when it arrived.