Love Bites Then it Sucks by Julie Steimle (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

But anyway, there was Nurse Gowan, who regularly dipped into the drugs for his own ‘high’. Then Nurse Wixom who stole insulin for a relative who needed it. I felt sorry for Nurse Wixom, but stealing is stealing and I knew it would cause her trouble in the future if she kept it up. Things like this always outed eventually, and that’s when lives got ruined. I hated to see that.

Trudging down to the emergency rooms, I sighed as I went along my new routine walkthrough. It was a must as people died on the operating table a lot, and it was wise to send the souls as quickly as possible on their way. When I had just reaped a man who had been stabbed three times in the stomach—feeling wiped out, and staggering into the hallway where I leaned against the wall to catch my breath—I looked up and saw that cop again, the one who reminded me of Deidre. He was staring at me, mouth in a thin line, his brows furrowed. This time he was with an older man, and they were handling a prisoner in cuffs who had to be treated for some kind of wound. But then my eyes set on their prisoner. He had an oddly green mark on his forehead. It wasn’t the usual death mark. They were never green. But this one… it was bizarre. I had a feeling that prisoner was not near death at all, though he was definitely marked. I wondered about it as he seemed peculiar in other ways. No imps near him. But he could not see me.

Just then, as I was distracted thinking about it, someone rushed through the halls and brushed up against me. Immediately, that man gasped, jumping back while seizing his chest. He was an orderly, tall, lean, dressed in tarnished white.

Pressing against the wall to stay off from him, I stared, watching a near nurse come up to him. He did not see me.

“Are you all right?” the nurse asked him.

The orderly I had accidentally touched nodded, though he was shaking. “I… I dunno. I just felt like…”

“Like what? What happened?” The nurse examined him, felt for his pulse. He was clammy and his heart was clearly racing.

“Like someone just walked over my grave,” he murmured.

I stepped back further, getting into a darkened doorway. He had no mark on his forehead, but I had a feeling I had just given him a ‘brush with death’.

The nurse nodded. “Maybe you’d better get your heart checked out.”

Sighing, I continued my rounds, trying to ignore the stares of the cop. But as I turned a corner, he called out to me. “Be careful. We don’t want accidents here.”

The nurse and the man looked at him, wondering why he was butting in to their business.

“Nosy cop,” the orderly muttered.

But I nodded to the policeman, saluting him with my scythe hand. “Sorry. I’m still new at this.”

He nodded and went back to handling his prisoner. That’s when I knew for certain the cop could see and hear me. And biker George had said to leave him alone—so I did. There was no reason to complicate the life of a man who could see ghosts.

The worst part of the hospital, to be honest, was that it reeked of the odor of blood. And despite being immaterial and supposedly not needing to eat, it was still a temptation for me. I could only compare it to a chocoholic finding herself in a chocolate factory as the chocolate was being tempered. With that warm aroma on the air, it was driving me crazy. Once my rounds were done, I left the hospital to get away from the blood scent and walked the neighborhood.

The territory I had to patrol was shaped a bit like a puzzle piece. The boundary was not straight, but crooked, with hollows I could not enter and jutting parts I had to patrol. I also was amazed how much life and death occupied that singular small territory, as there were shootings in my neighborhood almost twice a week. The lucky thing was that most people were just wounded and not killed.

That is, until the drive-by.

I was walking through a particularly graffiti’d-up street where I was strolling near a trio of girls walking home from school. Their tight black hair was twisted into bunched pigtails and cornrows, clean and neat. Laughing together as they talked, hefting backpacks full of what I assumed were schoolbooks on their backs, their shining white teeth radiated a brightness in the rather dank street—evidence happiness can occur anywhere. They had just gotten off their bus and were heading to their brownstone apartment building where I assumed all three of them lived. Friends, I think. Maybe sisters or cousins. On the steps near the building was a small gathering of punks in their late teens or early twenties with sagging pants, huge sweatshirts with gangsta’ logos on them, dangling chains, and backward hats, just ‘chillin’. They were making the usual ruckus. No big deal, though their imps were obnoxiously suggesting they do something stupid, like petty theft. A car peeled into the road just as the girls reached the steps of the building. The windows rolled down. In a split second I saw red marks pop up on the girls’ foreheads—a number of those marks also on the gangster punks, though only one red.

I knew what was going to happen next.

As the bang of guns went off, I shot ahead of those girls to be between them, splayed my arms with my scythe out wide, praying those bullets would hit me instead—because no one deserved to be collateral damage in a gang war.

The girl’s screams filled my ears as I fell back, each bullet striking into me.

My head hit concrete with a hard thud. And the lights went out.

*

“Yes, I understand your fiancée left you at the altar, but—”

“She didn’t leave me at the altar,” Hanz protested to his supervisor at the hospital with exasperation. “We didn’t get that far. That’s not the issue. The issue is when I do my residency—do I need to apply in this state? Or can I apply for out-of-state hospitals? And further, do I need to remain in one hospital? Or can I transfer at need?”

“Transfer at need? Mr. Johaansen, you won’t have time to search for her with an eighty-hour week schedule,” his supervisor said, understanding his motives completely.

Gritting his teeth, Hanz breathed hard, trying to keep his temper. He didn’t often lose his temper, but this past week had been impossible to manage. No one seemed to understand what he was going through. And everyone’s sympathy was awkward and judgmental. People said rude things about Eve’s character as if they thought it would make him feel better. They did not comprehend that she was kidnapped, and he could not explain it had been done by the supernatural realm.

And the only people who did comprehend were her family, Rick Deacon, and the Holy Seven. Almost all of them came to California and met personally with Hanz to get the story out and clear. The only members of the Seven who had not come were Peter McCabe and Daniel Smith, both who were in London for some reason doing what they described as vital research about an elf. They had intended to come for the wedding, but had cancelled their flights when the wedding had been called off. Hanz thought it odd behavior, especially since he had met Daniel before and the guy seemed decent. Polite. Hanz had assumed that Peter was the same with how highly the others talked about him. The other Seven explained that they were on urgent business, but would be in contact with him shortly. Currently most of the Seven were in Eve’s hometown, Cliffcoast, speaking with Mr. McDillan, the vimp expert, to get a lead on what they needed to do to help Eve.

“All the same, sir,” Hanz said to his supervisor, “I would like to at least have my options open.”

His supervisor did not look happy. However, he said, “Where is it you intent to apply?”

Shrugging, Hanz breathed with a degree of relief. “I don’t know yet. When I get a lead, I’ll tell you.”

And that was the end of the conversation. Dismissed, Hanz left his supervisor’s office. Truthfully, they had wanted him to stay on at that hospital. Hanz was one of their star pupils, they said. An asset whom they had assumed would stay long after he finished his residency. That had been the plan before Eve had vanished. They were both Californians. The town was near the ocean where Eve was happy. She could surf in her off hours, and they could be together. And she had her career here. Eve was never going to be a stay-at-home mom, as she was, for lack of a better word—infertile. And the SRA made it clear she would never be allowed to adopt a child, not even a ‘ghoulie’—which Hanz had come to understand was a child with something supernatural about them like that kid, Roddy Mayhem. So they had planned to be a working, childless couple—not his ideal dream, but it included her always with him.

Now he didn’t even have her.

Hanz broke down, sobbing.

It wasn’t fair.

*

I awoke with a headache, and sirens ringing in my ears. Opening my eyes, I sat up and looked around. The police were on the curb, taking notes and stringing out black and yellow tape. I looked behind me, terrified at what I might see. But the three girls were not there. Rather, I saw them down the block, talking with a police officer who was taking notes. They were giving him a license plate and a car description. A gangster boy ghost ‘stood’ next to me, peering down at me with a deep frown. “You couldn’t save me too?”

“I saved them?” I looked to the girls again, then winced. Pain stabbed in my right shoulder, my left arm and my neck. I also had a pain in my side, under my ribs, another on my leg, and yet another near my heart. I reached up and felt the wound on my neck then my chest. I was bleeding like a damp sponge, but I could not smell it.

He made a rapper gesture at me as if he would spout rude lyrics. “Yeah, you b—”

“Shut it,” I said, pushing off the ground. I rubbed the back of my scalp, my sore wings fluttering to stretch. Somehow it had actually hurt. I pulled out my scythe. It clanked heavily on the ground, though only the ghost and I could hear it. The gangster lurched away from me. He drew in a breath. But before he could run away, I hooked him up and sent him on his way into the light.

I stepped toward the girls who were sobbing. The youngest one of them was staring at me silently.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

She silently nodded, her dark eyes wide with terror.

I pulled back, noticing the marks on their foreheads were gone. “Good.”

Then I hobbled away from the crime scene.

My head was aching. All those wounds in me were killing, though I did not die myself. When I could find a place to sit down, I examined each bullet wound in me. I was hit eight times. I found another wound just above my right temple. Technically I should have been killed. Though, as I thought about it, technically, as an immaterial half-imp, those bullets should have passed through me and hit those girls. They hadn’t. I had somehow saved them. But how was that possible?

I