Sympathy for the devil Read online

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  "Hell billed me?" she whispered.

  The squished gremlin continued to stain the knee of her uniform, but another one appeared right in the spot where she'd landed. It swore at her, shook a tiny fist in her direction, and vanished into nothingness. She stood there for a moment, relieved that she hadn't actually killed the little creature, but at the same time furious about the bill. When at last she turned to go to the nurses' station, she caught another glimpse of that mysterious blue flash. When she turned to look, of course, nothing was there.

  But something had been. She was certain of it.

  At the nurses' station, Louise said, "Recovery just called with your pacemaker—he's been out of OR for an hour, but they said they're going to keep him for another hour. He isn't stabilizing the way they want." Dayne nodded. She put the bill from Hell down on the nurses' station and, with both howling, cursing gremlins still clutched firmly in one hand, she paged Dr. Batskold.

  When he called, she was brusque. "I found out what Mr. Fields' problem was. I need you to come to ICU right away."

  "I'm doing my charts in Medical Records. Can it wait?"

  "No."

  She heard an exasperated sigh, then she heard Dr. Batskold mutter, "They can never handle anything by themselves." One of the other doctors was evidently in the room, catching up on charts, too.

  Dayne smiled grimly. She'd caught the little devils, but she wasn't going to try to figure out how to get rid of them. For another doctor she might have made the effort . . . but not for Batskold. For once, she regretted that she wasn't working the night shift; this would have been just thing to wake him up over at three A.M.

  For that matter, she was more than a little curious to see how Dr. Batskold was going to include gremlins in his diagnosis. She'd bet Gremlin Infestation wasn't a discharge diagnosis that Medicare, Medicaid, or Blue Cross/Blue Shield would be willing to pay for.

  Batskold made it to the unit fast enough; Dayne uncharitably thought that he was probably hoping for another code, so that he could be the mighty hero fending off Death again.

  She said, "Fields wasn't hallucinating."

  "Don't say that you called me up here to tell me that. He was hallucinating. He claimed he was seeing little clear men—"

  Dayne held up the gremlins, which had stopped screaming and were trying to wriggle free, and said, "I caught two of them. There were quite a few more."

  Batskold backed up and stared at the creatures in her hands and paled. "Jesus," he whispered, "what are they?"

  "Gremlins. From Hell."

  His eyes narrowed. "Are they real, or is this some prank?"

  "They're real, all right."

  He held out a hand. "Let me see."

  Dayne shrugged, and handed one to him. "Hang on to it."

  "Let me see the other one, too."

  She handed him the second gremlin as well.

  "God, they're ugly." He held both of them right up to his face. One of them peed on him, a thin stream of clear water.

  He yelled and smashed it onto the nurses' station, where it crunched, then slammed the other one down beside it. Wiping his hands on his pants, he said, "Little bastards."

  Dayne yelped, "Don't smash them! They're expensive—"

  He pointed a finger at her and glared. "You mind your own business. It's all your fault the damned things are here."

  New gremlins, identical to the old ones, reappeared next to their smashed bodies. Dr. Batskold glanced down, yelped and smashed them again. Dayne turned and walked away. She'd tried to tell him, but he wasn't listening to her any better than he ever did.

  Certainly no more than five minutes later, as she was helping Mary pull one of her people up in bed, Batskold fell silent.

  "Keep your arms crossed over your chest, Mrs. Williams," Dayne told the patient. "You don't have to help us."

  "A tiny little thing like you isn't going to be able to move me." Mrs. Williams was pushing the two hundred fifty pound mark, and most times, she would have been right.

  Dayne shrugged, though. "I lift weights," she said. "I'm a lot stronger than I look." She and Mary grabbed the draw sheet and counted to three—on three, they turned and stepped, and Mrs. Williams found herself again up at the top of the bed, where she belonged.

  Mary looked toward the nurses' station. "It's awfully quiet out—"

  "Nine hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars?!" Dr. Batskold bellowed. "I'm not going to pay that! Jeeeee-zus Christ!" Dayne peeked out to find him standing right where he'd been before, back when he'd been busy smashing gremlins. He held a sheet of paper in his hand that looked a lot like the one she'd received, but with more sheets appended. A ring of gremlins stood around his feet, staring up at him. His face was red, his usually fashionable gray hair stuck out in all directions, and his eyes were about to bulge from his face.

  Dayne shook her head. "Dr. Batskold just got his bill." She tried hard not to smile, but the corners of her mouth twitched up in spite of her intentions. She turned her back to the window so that he wouldn't see her laughing if he looked her way.

  Mary said, "He's leaving." An instant later, she added, "Oh, my God. The gremlins are going with him."

  Dayne couldn't resist. She turned to take a peek, and sure enough, Dr. Batskold, stomping furiously out of the ICU, was followed by a glistening train of gremlins that ranged from an inch to four or five inches tall—all of which trailed after him, mimicking every move he made.

  All she could think was that gremlins couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

  Chapter 34

  Dayne pulled a loaf of bread and some jelly out of the refrigerator—she was too tired to cook anything more demanding than toast. While the bread browned, she punched the answer button on her answering machine. She'd forgotten to check it on Sunday, and she had a huge number of messages waiting.

  She fast-forwarded through all the ones with her supervisor's voice. That took care of most of them.

  "Good Lord, Dayne," her mother said in stunned tones. "What have you gotten yourself into? Call home as soon as you get in."

  Dayne frowned. She understood her mother being concerned about her link to the Hellraised . . . but her mother's message didn't really seem appropriate. Certainly her lawn was still covered by sightseers and T-shirt sellers and fundamentalist picketers, and the police parked next to her drive still kept her Satanist supporters and her Christian supporters from ripping each other to bits, but the reporters were gone—and she didn't feel that she'd gotten herself into anything.

  The next call was a hang-up, as was the one after it. The one following that was from Paige, who cleared her throat a few times before stammering, "Um . . . this is-is-is . . . not an emergency or anything, so . . . um, why don't you call me back when you can?"

  Paige sounded bizarre.

  Dayne shook her head. The next voice on the machine was deep and sexy. "Dayne, this is Adam." He was chuckling, and his voice sounded more bemused than anything. "If it isn't too much trouble, I'd like to stop over and see you tonight. . . ." Dayne's pulse picked up. She'd thought about Adam on and off during the day while she was working. He was obviously interested in her, a fact she found more than a little bit surprising—but delightful. Adam was the first person since Torry to give her goosebumps and butterflies; better yet, with Adam, she didn't have the endless nagging feeling that he was trouble waiting to happen. That gut instinct about her dead husband, proven right in the end, had warned her away from a number of otherwise nice men since. Its absence felt like a green light to Dayne.

  Adam left his phone number and asked Dayne to call him back as soon as she could. Then he added, "I like the message," and Dayne groaned.

&
nbsp; Suddenly her mother's enigmatic message, and Paige's nervousness, became clear. Dayne had forgotten to warn her family and friends about the strip-search-and-read-'em-their-rights machine message she'd left for the obscene phone caller.

  She rewound that message to get Adam's phone number, then forwarded to the next. "Dayne? We haven't heard from you . . . but maybe next weekend won't be such a good time to stop by." That was her brother—with all the excitement, she'd forgotten he and his wife were hoping to come by, and worse, she'd forgotten she was supposed to get the weekend off if she could.

  The next message was a hang-up.

  So was the next.

  On the following one, she heard a long silence, then softly, the whispered word "bitch" before the phone on the other end slammed down.

  Her stomach lurched. Maybe that will be the last time he calls, she hoped. Maybe now he'll go away.

  She took a deep breath and glared at her hands until they quit shaking. Then she called her mother, and explained that everything was fine; she called her brother and promised to try to get at least one day of the next weekend off. She called Paige, and explained her phone message, and that she couldn't come by because she had a date.

  Then she called Adam.

  "Satco, Executive Suite, this is Gwendolyn speaking."

  The voice was beyond sexy. Dayne stared at the telephone for an instant, unnerved, then said, "Uh, yes . . . this is Dayne Kuttner. I'm returning Adam D'Agonostis' call."

  "Oh, wow," the voice on the other end said, and most of the sexiness—and a good part of the femaleness—disappeared in an instant. "The Dayne Kuttner?"

  That change and that sudden enthusiasm was even more unnerving to Dayne. "I suppose so," she said, then followed up that vague admission with a question which she hoped would effectively change the subject. "Is Adam in?"

  "Oh. Yes, of course." The voice returned to its original form, and its owner put Dayne on hold.

  A moment later, Adam picked up. "Hi, there. That's some message on your machine."

  "I've been getting unpleasant phone calls," Dayne told him. "I decided I didn't want to get any more of them."

  "That ought to do it." Adam laughed. "You'll be lucky to get many calls at all. Anyway, are you going to be home tonight?"

  "Yes. I'd love to have you over."

  "Good. Oh, by the way, I have some terrific news for you."

  He sounded so cheerful—she smiled and leaned against the wall. "Really? Terrific news would be nice."

  "I'm glad. I found an opening with Satco for an RN—if you're interested, I'll bring over an application for you to fill out."

  Dayne considered the possibility of doing something that wasn't related to the ICU, and her smile grew broader. "I'm interested," she said. "Bring it over. You can tell me what you know about the job when you get here."

  She hung up the phone and stared out of her kitchen window, considering Adam and wondering at her reaction to him. She couldn't blame it on being alone for too long; if that were the case, she would have been drawn to someone else long before this. Dr. Weist, who was handsome and considerate and intelligent, had been politely hinting he'd like to take her out, and his was only the most recent in a line of offers. Nor could she fool herself into thinking that Adam was right for her in a way no one else to that point had been—she was pragmatic enough to admit she didn't know anything like enough about him.

  She smiled ruefully and watched the birds pulling berries off the dogwood tree in the backyard. She was pragmatic, but not so pragmatic that she hadn't fallen foolishly in love with a stranger.

  "It isn't love," she muttered—but it was. She'd been in love only once before; and that one time she had fallen in love, it had been like this. She met Torry, she fell in love before she even knew him. . . .

  "And look where that got me."

  There were times when she wished she could fast-forward her life and look back at it the way biographers did on their subjects' lives; the biographers could always see what each choice meant. They could always see, from their lofty height, where their subjects were getting it wrong. Dayne, down in the thick of her life, had gone badly wrong with Torry. Moreover, while she could not believe that Adam was another version of Torry, the depth of her emotions and their suddenness unnerved her. Somehow, she feared, she was once again about to get it wrong.

  Porthos jumped onto the counter and stared past her, his fur standing straight up. He hissed, and she felt the hair on the back of her own neck raise—atavistic response. She looked where the cat was looking, and caught only the briefest of flashes of blue from something that was moving in the apartment's tiny laundry room. She rose slowly, looking for a weapon. The baseball bat still leaned against the kitchen door. She grabbed that and stalked forward, silent and scared. She heard nothing from the laundry room . . . but the sense of presence was unmistakable. Porthos maintained his vigil on the counter, unwilling to move closer.

  She took a deep breath as she reached the partly open door—then she kicked it open and jumped in, screaming, slamming the bat down at the same time in a short, vicious arc. . . .

  Onto nothing. The tiny laundry room had only one door—the one through which she had come. It had no window, neither cabinets nor cubbyholes. She opened both the washer—empty—and the dryer—one still-damp pair of jeans and a few pairs of white cotton underwear. The intruder had neither a place to hide, nor a place to flee, yet he was not there. Rationally, she knew she should take that as proof that she had seen nothing, and that Porthos had been hissing at a phantom of his own imagining. She would have been happy to be rational.

  The stink of rotten eggs, however, hung in the air.

  The doorbell rang, and she jumped. Porthos yowled and fled from the kitchen—she could hear him thundering up the stairs as she walked to the front door.

  She peeked out; Adam waited on the landing, a vase full of painted daisies and baby's breath in one hand, a folder in the other. He was staring back at the picketers and the T-shirt vendors, and the decreased but still fairly heavy traffic.

  She opened the door, and he jumped a little and turned to smile at her—and she was struck again by how perfect his handsomeness was, and by how hard her heart began to beat just looking at him.

  "Come on in."

  He stepped inside and nodded back at the watching crowd. "Wonder how long it will take until they get bored with that."

  Dayne, who had signed a few autographs on her way in from work, and who found the people on her doorstep interesting, just shrugged. "Big news is good for seven days," she told him. "By that rule of thumb, they'll all get tired and find something else to interest them by this Friday." She grinned. "Until then, I have to confess I'm enjoying the notoriety. I've never had anyone ask me for my autograph before. That's fun."

  He looked genuinely surprised. "People find amusement in the strangest ways," he said, more to himself than to her.

  "Has anyone ever asked for your autograph?"

  He stood, staring down at his feet, studying his shoes and nibbling the corner of his lip for a long time. "No," he told her at last. "No one ever has."

  "Then you don't know. I don't think it's at all strange to enjoy it."

  "I'm not likely to find out." He changed the subject. "I brought you some flowers." He handed her the vase; the daisies were beautiful, pink and red and yellow and pale blue with bright yellow centers. The baby's breath filled in around them like a lacy cloud. "I hope you like flowers."

  She grinned up at him. "Of course." She reached up to take the vase with her free hand, and Adam suddenly glanced down.

  "Expecting reporters? Or was that for me?"

  She realized she was still toting the baseball bat around. "Oh . . . no. I just thought I . . ." She shook her head. She had no desire to tell Adam about the intruder she couldn't be sure she'd had. She didn't want to sound silly. "Nothing," she told him. "I've just been kind of cautious lately."

  He smiled down at her. "Very sensible."
/>   She sighed. "That's me. Sensible." Her sensible-ness wasn't the trait she hoped Adam would pick up on, but then, he wasn't likely to see her standing in her hall, clutching the baseball bat she'd hoped to brain some intruder with, and say, "How sexy of you." She was going to have to make a point of being sexy if she wanted him to see her that way.

  She led him back to the kitchen, and while she gave the daisies some extra water, listened to him rustling through the contents of his folder. She heard one of her kitchen chairs scrape along the floor—sounded like the one against the far wall . . . the one that would make it easiest for him to watch her. His gaze was a physical itch between her shoulderblades, and she felt—with some annoyance—the heat that rose in her cheeks in response. She was twenty-eight—far too old to feel like some infatuated twelve-year-old.

  She turned to carry the vase to the table, and found, as she'd suspected, that he was watching her; more nerve-wracking, that the expression on his face hinted at an attraction as complete as what she felt.

  Then she looked at her kitchen table, and was amazed at the sheer number of papers he'd brought.

  "That's a job application?" she asked, and put the flowers down, and drew up a chair at right angles from his.

  "It's a lot of things. Job application, permission form for Satco to access your records and add copies to our permanent files, disclosure statement, contract, job description for your job—a few other things. Mostly it's just a lot of red tape before Satco can hire you; we deal with a number of secret and sensitive things, and we have to be sure that you won't divulge any of our trade secrets."

  "Why the contract?"

  Adam smiled. "Because I know you'll get the job if you apply for it, so I'm saving a couple of days this way. It's selfishness on my part, I suppose, but since I met you, I haven't been able to think of much else. I like the idea of you working with me—and the sooner, the better." He leaned forward and rested his chin in his cupped hands and smiled at her—a smile that gave her goosebumps.

  "I like the idea of working with you, too—but would I be? You haven't told me anything about the job, other than that it's for a nurse. And how would a corporation use my ICU skills?"