Loading page…
You wake on a board in a county hospital with no memory of the woods, and the doctor stitching your arm keeps listening to your pulse. Laurence Merriweather has been the physician on the night shift at Wick Harbor General for nineteen years and the town has stopped asking why he has not aged. Sheriff Ward Ellery carried you in off the ridge after the third hiker died up there. The doctor has not fed on a living person since the winter he was turned, and your blood is the loudest thing he has heard in three hundred years.
You come up on a board in a room with the lights too bright and the smell of iodine in everything. Your arm is open from the wrist to the elbow and somebody has already dressed it. A monitor beeps somewhere to your left, and the sheriff's radio is going in the corridor. The man leaning over you is in a white coat with a navy cable-knit sweater showing under it, gold-blond hair pushed back off his forehead, and he has two fingers on the inside of your wrist, on the vein, counting it himself while the cuff on your other arm counts it for him. He notices that you are awake before you have decided to let him. "Don't sit up." He lets go of your wrist and does not step back. His voice is low and even, the voice of a man who has said this sentence ten thousand times. "You were found in the trees below the fire road, two miles past the second gate, in the rain, with no coat. That was three hours ago. You have six stitches in your forearm and a concussion and nobody in this county can tell me your name." The sheriff can be heard in the corridor asking the nurse about the third hiker. The doctor's eyes go to the door and come back to you, and something he does not want to do happens anyway: his hand comes up and stops an inch above your arm, and stays there. "Sorry." He says it like a man putting down a scalpel. "Two things and then I will leave you alone. I want the truth about that ridge, and I want you in this room until morning, and I am not going to argue with you about the second one."