Blood and Fire

ONE

Her head was pounding, and the buzzing of the machines around her, the too-bright lights above her, weren't helping. She rubbed at her temples, hissing softly as another light was flicked on.

"Another headache?" Irene asked softly. The intern always spoke so softly, so quietly, that she had become Mara's favourite. "I can get you some painkillers for it, if you'd like."

Mara waved a hand, focusing on the scans laid out in front of them. "Thank you, Rene, but I'll be fine." She flicked through the pile of scans, lifted one up to the light. She tilted her head. "Remind me which patient I'm looking at."

Irene flicked back to the front of the file she was holding. "Unidentified male," she read. The younger woman tucked a wild curl behind her ear. "He came in a week ago with severe burns, lacerations all over, and he had a brain bleed."

Mara remembered. The man had been rushed into surgery, and she had been operating on him for hours. She frowned at the scans. "His collar bone was broken," she said. "These scans have to be from a different patient." She showed Irene the scan, pointing to where the bone should have been clearly cleaved in two pieces. "This bone is almost fully healed. That process does not take seven days."

Irene frowned slightly, the expression hardening her face. "I collected those less than an hour ago," she mumbled.

The pair of them looked through the scans, and Mara's headache worsened tenfold by the time she shooed Irene out. The intern had been paged by general anyway. Mara stared at the scans for a minute longer, bracing her hands against the table, before snatching up the patient's file and storming for the room on the other side of the hospital.

-

For someone who had been less than an hour from death less than a week ago, the John Doe looked remarkably well. His skin, which had been peeling away and charred when he had been brought in, was oddly smooth, with only a few swirling scars down his neck and over his shoulders. All of the bones he had broken were set in casts, but something told her that they were nearly fully healed beneath.

Mara didn't dare step further into the room, and turned on her heel the second his finger twitched slightly. The man showed no signs of waking, but she did not want him to catch her staring at him like a schoolgirl when he did.

She gave Mitchell a honey-sweet smile when she reached the reception desks. The nurse sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose, looking at her with tired eyes. "What is it now, Knight?"

Mara smiled sweeter, in a way that she knew showed her dimples. "I need to run tests on the John Doe in room two-fifteen," she said.

Mitchell frowned slightly. "How many tests? And what are they?"

Oh, he was going to kill her for even asking. "Bloods, urine, toxins: everything." She winced at the flaring of Mitchell's nostrils, the way he opened his mouth to immediately shut her down. "Please, Mitch, I really need them." He was glaring at her. "I'll do your laundry for a week."

Mitchell narrowed his eyes at her. "Two weeks," he said, "and dinner on Saturday night."

She sighed, then grinned at him. "Deal. But only if you'll call your lovely friend Dan and get him to throw in a complete background check while you're at it."

Mitchell grinned at her as she turned on her heel and walked down the hall to the on-call room. Her head was still pounding: she needed a damned nap.

-

Mitchell sent Irene to wake her up. The intern smiled sheepishly and offered her a coffee, before handing over the file of Mitchell's research—and the results from his tests. She could have kissed the man for being so efficient with it all.

"Mitchell says to wear a red dress," Irene hummed, hovering by the door. Mara lifted her brows, and Irene flushed. "He- he asked me to tell you to wear a red dress for your...date."

Mara's lips curled into a slight smile. "Did he now?"

Irene smiled and ducked out of the room before Mara could send her away with a response for Mitchell. Turning her attention away from the door and to the file in her hands, she began to scan through everything Mitchell had found.

Which, after combing through it three times over, wasn't much. The John Doe had no drugs in his system, no signs of previous health problems, nothing out of the ordinary. The background check had amounted to less than nothing, which she had expected considering the fact that the patient was a John Doe. It was the results of the blood tests, though, that had her frowning.

She checked them over and over, not quite believing her eyes. There was no blood type that matched the patient's, and not even any animal blood matched it either. Mitchell had scribbled a note on a post-it and stuck it to the sheet: Come down to the lab to have a look. It's freaky.

Mara flipped the file shut and tucked it under her arm as she walked out. Thankfully, the hospital was fairly quiet, and nobody had paged her. She'd be on files today anyway, so technically she wasn't deviating far from her plans. Still, she made sure she took an empty elevator down to the labs, just in case anyone thought to report it to one of the higher level residents.

Mitchell was waiting for her in the corridor that smelt of disgustingly strong cleaning products, and he waved her into the spotless lab without a word. She followed, and leaned over the microscope he gestured to. Her brows furrowed. There was no way that this was possible. She looked up at Mitchell, and he shrugged. "I know. I had Emma run them over three times, just to make sure the samples weren't contaminated with something."

Mara looked into the microscope again, a headache starting to form between her eyes. Where she should have been seeing a cluster of red blood cells, what looked like strange, silvery neutrons jerked around in the sample. Silver, with small splotches of deep, purplish red. She had never seen anything like it before.

She swiped the sample off the tray, and pocketed it. Mitchell frowned at her. "Shouldn't we report it to someone?"

Mara headed for the door, then the elevator. She barely glanced at him over her shoulder as she jabbed the button that would take her up to the second floor. "No," she said tightly. "Whatever that is, it isn't normal. I don't want my patient turned into some freak show for the residents." Mitchell frowned at her, so she added, "Not until I've thoroughly questioned him about it first."