Aric, I called to him. Aric, I need you.

It was hard to see. My head spun revoltingly fast and I felt like the inside of Mr. Kelly’s colon. When my eyes were finally able to focus, they fell upon a pair of feet directly in front of me.

A janitor holding a mop loomed over me. “Hi,” I mumbled.

He made a few sweeps at the mess next to me, but otherwise did his best to pretend there wasn’t a naked woman with a bleeding ass cheek lying in front of him. I forced myself to my feet, using the wall I had just shifted through for support. All I wanted to do was take a second to breathe and maybe vomit some more, but the screams and the gunfire from behind the wall forced me back into action. I sprinted to the ED. I wanted to change as soon as I stumbled through the main doors, but my body insisted I eff off.

Security came in handy after all. They distracted the vampires by unintentionally offering themselves up as snacks. I decapitated a vampire with a jumping, spinning kick when his head jerked up in my direction. It landed somewhere near the heap of wheelchairs shoved against the wall.

My only problem was that I was still dizzy from shifting through the stupid cinder block, and I fell onto my already sore ass, giving the other vampire ample time to pick me up by the throat.

His hands squeezed tight. “Kill her, Edison!” the decapitated head screamed from the seat of a wheelchair.

Edison never had the chance. My body couldn’t change yet, but I could extend the claws in my feet. They slashed him across his thighs while my fists broke through his chest and collapsed his lungs. He twisted at the last minute and I missed his heart, but I injured him enough that he released my throat.

I immediately rolled to my feet when I fell to the floor and leapt onto Edison’s back when he tried to flee. I yanked his head back, exposing his throat so I could sever his neck with my claws.

And damnit all, he still wouldn’t die!

Edison and his pal must have been old, real old. I’d rather have fought a new vampire any day of the week than take on a master or a vamp older than three hundred years. It wasn’t enough to rip out their hearts or tear off their heads to kill them. Oh no. It had to be both. So there I was, on the floor, being bitch-slapped by Edison’s wildly flailing arms while the fangs from his decapitated head sunk into my forearm.

His incisors dug deep. They scraped against bone while the blood he took from me seeped onto the floor through his severed throat. No. That wasn’t nasty or anything.

I banged Edison’s head over and over against the tile floor, trying to crack it like a nut. It didn’t work; I was either too weak from blood loss or he had an exceptionally hard head. My luck generally sucked so of course things had to get worse. The first vamp I’d decapitated had gotten to his headless feet. He charged at me with the wheelchair that held his head.

“I’ll kill you!” his head hollered at me. “I’ll kill you, bitch!”

If the people in the ED weren’t screaming before, they certainly were then.

Chang, the martial arts master whom Misha hired to train me, had taught me a valuable lesson not learned in most strip mall martial arts studios. “If you can’t rip an evil creature off of you, figure out a way to use him as your weapon.” Honest to God, that was one of the first things I understood him say in his broken English. I kicked Edison’s body away from me and slammed his head against the oncoming wheels of the chair.

The body pushing the wheelchair had nowhere to go because his head went bouncing across the floor. He just stood there, making it easy for me to bash through his chest with Edison’s head and tear out his heart.

“You whooore. You bitp,” Edison muttered through a mouthful of me. I was hurting, bleeding, and horrendously nauseated, but the name-calling really pushed me over the edge.

I protruded two claws from my fingers and poked the bastard in the eyes. He screamed, finally letting go. His head hit the floor with a sickening splat. Like an idiot he tried to use his body against me, despite having been blinded. He lifted his legs and tried a jumping kick. Not only did he completely miss me, he made it easy for me to catch his foot. My fangs snapped it off so he wouldn’t bother me when I tore out his heart. Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed the poor housekeeping person hiding behind the linen cart. She peered around the cart and got smacked in the face when I carelessly tossed Edison’s foot aside. Blood from his ankle trickled down her face.

“I’m so s-sorry,” I stammered. She stared at me with horrified eyes, tripping over the unconscious security guards in her haste to join the terrified group huddled in the corner.

Edison continued to scream obscenities at me until I abruptly hushed him by ramming his heart with an IV pole. Silence had never been so golden. Before his fangs could completely retract, he was nothing more than a mound of ash.

My hands gripped the IV pole to help keep me on my feet. Spots flickered in my field of vision. I tried to blink them away, but it didn’t work and in a way made things worse. For a moment, my body refused to move, readying itself to vomit. When I didn’t, I risked taking a step.

I limped to the linen cart the poor housekeeping person was pushing before the start of the chaos. My right butt cheek seeped blood with each step. I guessed that was the body part that made up my tail in beast form. I pulled a clean sheet from the cart and wrapped it around me. In the corner, a few feet to my right, stood a doctor, about four nurses, and twelve patients ranging in ages from a toddler with a bandaged arm to another nursing home drop-off. Everyone stared with wild, terrified eyes at my half-naked, ashy, and bloody body. And while they had stopped screaming, they were barely breathing by that point.

If I’d been in better shape, I would have offered them support or words of comfort. But I wasn’t, and besides, what the hell would that have done? Judging by their now catatonic expressions, they were going to need at least two years of therapy before they could tie their own shoes.

I looked to Helen. She stood perfectly still, coffee cup in hand, despite most of the contents spilled across the front of her shirt. “Could someone get me some scrubs?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

No one moved, with the exception of the new doctor who fainted. In his defense, I did look pretty damn nasty.

It hurt to talk, but I tried again. “Please?”

Helen gave me a short nod then took a few stumbling paces toward the employee locker room. She didn’t make it very far. Three more vampires came tearing down the hall. If that wasn’t bad enough, a werelynx in human form followed close behind them. He was dressed like a ninja and swinging nunchucks with sharp blades protruding from the tips. Helen retreated in the time it took me to let out the mother of all swearwords.