The Night Shift Feed

I punched in at 7:01 p.m., which is a stupid thing to say about a night shift, so let me back up. I punched IN at 7:01 p.m., and my phone had been sitting in my pocket with a text from Morgan since six o'clock that said, I have a surprise for you, and I'd been annoyed about it for a full hour.

Morgan was forty-seven, at least that's what her file said, and she ran the ER triage desk on the slow nights at Jenkin & Duncan Memorial, which in a rust-belt city like ours is every night. I'm Marcy, I'm forty-four, and I've been security here long enough to know that when a nurse texts you "surprise" an hour before your shift, it's either cake in the break room or trouble, and Morgan doesn't bake.

I stashed my bag in my locker and headed down the main corridor toward the ER, past the fountain nobody throws coins into anymore, and there she was, leaning against the wall by the elevators like she'd been standing there all her life and maybe had.

"There she is," Morgan said, pushing off the wall. "I was starting to think you transferred."

"You texted me an hour ago. What's the surprise, cake? If it's cake I'm gonna be real disappointed, because I already ate."

"No cake." She fell in step beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, and lowered her voice. "I need to talk to you. Privately. Not the ER, not the desk, somewhere with a door."

"That's ominous."

"It's a little ominous," she admitted, and she steered me toward the staff corridor instead of the ER, and I let her, because this is what you need to understand about Morgan and me. We've been friends for two years, ever since she escorted a patient up to the psych wing and I was the one walking them, and we've had coffee at three a.m. probably two hundred times, and in all that time she's never once asked me for anything private. So when she asks, I go.

We passed the east stairwell and Oscar came around the corner with his mop cart, fifty-eight years old and the quietest man in the building, and he looked at Morgan, then at me, and he did this little nod that was way too knowing, like he was congratulating somebody, and I felt my neck go warm.

"Evening, Oscar," Morgan said, easy as anything.

"Evening," he said, and rolled on, and I looked back at him twice before the stairwell door shut behind us.

"Does Oscar know something?" I asked.

"Oscar doesn't know anything," Morgan said, too fast.

"That was not the face of a man who doesn't know anything. That was the face of a man who knows everything and is thrilled about it."

"Marcy." She stopped in front of the security break room, which is a converted supply closet with a cracked vinyl sofa and a mini fridge that sounds as if it is a dying animal, and she put her hand on the door and looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, which never happens, because I read people for a living. "Can we go in? Please?"

"Sure," I said, and my stomach did something weird.

She went in first and I followed, and she shut the door and locked it, and I heard that lock click and every part of me said this is a bad idea, and then my brain said but what if it's a good idea, and I sat down on the sofa because my knees wanted an option.

"Okay," Morgan said. She stood in front of the door, not in front of the fridge, which was strange, and she took a breath she didn't need, and I know she didn't need it because of what happened next, but at the time I just thought she was nervous. "I need you to not run out of the room. Can you promise me that?"

"You're scaring me."

"Promise anyway."

"Fine, I promise, Jesus." I crossed my arms. "What, are you quitting? Are you sick? Morgan, if you're sick I swear to God."

"I'm not sick." And then she smiled at me, and when she smiled her mouth did a thing it had never done in two years of three a.m. coffees, and her canine teeth, both of them, were long. Like, an inch long. Pointed. Sharp enough that I could see the light on them under the buzzing fluorescent tube.

I did the only thing I know how to do, which is I laughed. "Okay, those are great. Where'd you get those, the Halloween store? Those are better than the ones Rita wears in October."

"They're not from a store."

"Sure."

"Marcy." She came closer, slow, and knelt down in front of me so we were eye to eye, and she pulled back the sleeve of her scrub top, and on the inside of her wrist there was a cut, a real one, a clean line that wasn't bleeding at all. Not a drop. It looked like a cut from three days ago except I was watching it, and while I watched, the edges pulled together and the skin went smooth and pink and then just skin, in maybe four seconds.

I stopped laughing.

"That's not possible," I said.

"No," she agreed. "It's not."

I looked at her teeth, and I looked at her wrist, and I looked at her eyes, which were the same warm brown they'd always been, and I said, "Okay, so, either I'm having a stroke, or you're about to tell me you're a vampire, and honestly the stroke is starting to sound preferable."

"Vampire," she said quietly. "Seventy years. I was twenty-seven when it happened, and I've been working nights ever since because nights are easier, and I've been at this hospital twelve years, and you are the best friend I've made in sixty of those years, and I could not stand it anymore, keeping this from you. That's the surprise. I'm so sorry about the text, it seemed funnier in my head."

I sat there on the cracked vinyl, and here's what I want you to understand about me. I do not flinch. Not in arguments, not at dares, not at anything, and for about eight months now I had been telling myself I could sit across from Morgan every night at three a.m. and feel nothing at all, and failing at it regularly, and some stubborn part of my brain looked at the teeth and the wrist and decided that this was just one more thing I was not going to flinch from.

So I said, "Okay."

Morgan blinked. "Okay?"

"Okay. I'm not running, I promised. But I want to test it. I don't just take a magic trick on faith, that's not how I work." I held up one finger. "Test one. Let me touch the teeth."

"You want to touch my teeth."

"I want to confirm the teeth are real and not, like, snap-on veneers from the Halloween store, yes."

She laughed, and it was a real laugh, relief all through it, and she leaned in and opened her mouth a little and said, "Go ahead. Careful, they're sharp."

I reached up and put my fingertip on her left canine, and it was not plastic. It was not acrylic. It was smooth and cold and hard, and it had a ridge down the back like a real tooth, and the second my finger touched it, a shiver went through me, slow, starting at my fingertips and rolling all the way down to my toes, and I pulled my hand back and put it in my lap like it had been caught doing something.

"Test two," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "Pulse."

"You want my pulse."

"Everyone has a pulse. Even people who heal in four seconds."

"Not me," Morgan said, and she took my hand, turned it over, and pressed my two fingers to the inside of her wrist, right where the cut had been, and her skin was cool and smooth and there was nothing. No beat. Nothing at all. I counted for a full ten seconds because I don't lose, and there was nothing, and the whole time she was watching my face with those warm brown eyes, and the shiver came back.

"Nothing," I said.

"Nothing."

"Okay." I pulled my hand back, gently, and rubbed my fingers on my jeans, and looked at her, and I realized I wasn't scared. I was something else, something I didn't have a name for, and I was kind of mad about that. "So. Twelve years here. Seventy years. Coffee every night. And you never once thought to mention this."

"Would you have believed me?"

"No," I admitted. "I'd have written you up for being drunk on shift."

"There it is."

"But Oscar knows." I jerked my thumb at the wall. "Doesn't he. That nod. He knows."

Morgan winced. "Oscar found out three years ago, by accident, and he keeps it to himself, and that's a whole other story, and I'll tell you it if you're still sitting on that sofa in ten minutes."

"I'm still sitting here," I said. "I'm not going anywhere. But Morgan? Fair warning. You said surprise, and I've got questions, and I don't lose, and right now you are losing."

She grinned at me, and the teeth caught the light again, and that shiver started up all over again.

Morgan sat back down next to me on the vinyl, close enough that her knee touched mine, and she looked at her hands for a second before she spoke. "Okay. You want the whole thing, so here's the whole thing. The teeth are the smallest part of it."

"Go on."

"I need blood, Marcy. Not a lot, not often, but I need it, and there are rules I've kept for seventy years about where I get it. Blood banks, mostly, and no, before you ask, it's arranged, it's paid for, nobody gets hurt, nobody even knows. I've never fed on a living person. Not once, not in seventy years, because I've never trusted myself enough, and because the one time I came close, before I had all my rules in place, I promised myself never again."

"But?"

"But I've been hungry for six weeks." She said it flat, like she was reading a chart. "The supplier had a disruption, and I've been rationing, and I'm fine, I want you to hear that, I'm in control. But six weeks of rationing, and then there's you, walking your rounds past the triage desk every night at eleven, and Marcy, your scent has been driving me absolutely out of my mind."

I stared at her. "My scent."

"You smell like," she stopped, and laughed a little, embarrassed, which was not something I'd ever seen Morgan do. "Warm. Like coffee and skin and being asleep in a sunlit room, which is funny, because I haven't stood in sunlight in seventy years. For six weeks I've been doing math in my head at three in the morning, sitting across from you, about how many pints I have left and how fast I heal and whether I could get through one more night, and every night you show up and I want, and I can't, and I sit there and I pour the coffee and I'm fine, I'm always fine, but I'm tired, Marcy. I'm so tired of fine."

The mini fridge kicked on behind us with that dying-animal rattle, and we were both quiet for a second, and I became extremely aware of the side of my own neck.

"So what are you telling me," I said. "Are you telling me I'm in danger?"

"No. God, no. You were never in danger, not for one second, I need you to know that. I'm telling you because you asked what the hunger is like, and I told you it's like thirst, and that was a lie, a polite lie, and I don't want to lie to you anymore tonight. And because there's one more thing, and this is the part you can say no to and I will never bring it up again as long as I exist."

"Okay," I said slowly. "Say it."

"I can show you what the feeding feels like. From the other side. There's something in the bite, I don't fully understand the biology and I've had seventy years to try, something that goes into the person, and it isn't pain. It can be pain, if I'm careless or cruel, and I have seen it done that way, and that's why I have rules. But done right, done slow, it's," she searched for the word, and her voice dropped. "It's the best thing a body can feel. That's what the old stories were garbling. People didn't run from us, back when they knew us. They begged."

I sat there with my heart pounding, which felt stupid, sitting next to someone with no pulse at all, and I thought about all the reasons a sane person would stand up and walk out of a supply closet, and then I thought about the fact that I had never once in my forty-four years walked away from anything just because it was a bad idea.

"You're asking," I said. "You're actually asking me first."

"I'm asking you first. I would never just, no. Never. You say no, we finish our coffee, I tell you the Oscar story, and it's Tuesday, and nothing happened. You say yes, and I