Maggie barely managed to keep herself from gawking at Roger as he leaned back and rested his hands on his knees. His skin had become a pasty color she’d never seen on him before, and his brown eyes were troubled when they met hers.

It didn’t make it any easier that Roger and Harding were as unsettled by this as she was; it made it worse. That meant she didn't imagine this was all wrong; it meant it was all wrong.

For a second, they stared at each other, and then their training kicked into place. They’d been riding together for so long they didn’t have to speak as they went to work on their patient. In the victim’s condition, the best thing they could do was get him loaded up and to the hospital as fast as possible.

Kneeling at the man’s side, Maggie got a closer look at his back. The skin had been pulled back about three inches on each side from the center of his spine. The wound ran from beneath his shoulder blades to the middle of his lower back. Through the blood, glistening pieces of his spine were visible. The flow of his blood seemed to have ceased as none pooled within the wound and the puddle beneath him wasn’t spreading.

No one can survive this. The pain, the shock to his system, the blood loss. This is impossible. Then, she saw the small rise and fall of his back.

She had the unsettling notion she’d tripped headfirst into a Pink Floyd song and someone was about to start screaming at her that she couldn’t have her pudding until she ate her meat. She then cursed Roger for making her listen to Pink Floyd.

Maggie’s head twisted to the side as she inspected beyond the wreckage of the man’s back. Through the blood and the tattered remains of his shirt and coat, she noted raw slices arcing across the man’s flesh. Beneath those reddened slices she saw the faint white lines of what appeared to be scars.

It looked as if he’d been… whipped?

“What is going on here?” she whispered.

The man’s bloody fingertips twitched on the ground when she spoke. Maggie gazed at his hand, waiting for further movement, but it remained still.

“Drug deal gone wrong would be my guess,” Harding said. “I think they were teaching this guy a lesson before they decided to kill him. They picked the wrong place as a group of young bar hoppers stumbled across them and called it in. I was right down the street and the first to arrive.”

“Wrong place for them, good for him,” Maggie said, and the man’s fingers twitched again.

Harding grunted. “I picked the wrong decade to quit smoking.”

“You and me both,” Roger muttered as he worked. “Let’s get him loaded, Mags.”

“On his back?” she asked as she gazed at his spine, and the man’s fingers jerked toward her.

“Yes,” Roger said. “We need access to his chest in case he codes, which with the amount of blood he’s lost, is a very good possibility. He’s barely bleeding anymore, so I don’t think he’ll bleed out if we put him on his back.”

“I don’t think there’s any blood left in him,” Harding muttered, and as improbable as it was, Maggie silently agreed.

Maggie gazed from the open wound to Roger and back again. “If we put him on his back, it’s really going to hurt him.”

“He’s probably so far into shock, he’s not feeling much pain anymore,” Roger replied.

“If it helps, I plan on cuffing him,” Harding interjected.

“Are you kidding me?” Maggie blurted.

“No.”

“So we won’t be able to roll him. He has to go on his back, and if we have any chance of saving him, we have to get him out of here, now,” Roger said.

“Shouldn’t we bandage him or pack the wound or something?” she asked.

“With his spine the way it is, I’m not risking putting anything in there and causing more damage. Besides, I think it’s best if we just get him out of here, instead of taking the time to bandage him.”

“I agree with getting him out of here,” Harding said.

Maggie sighed in resignation; Roger was right. The longer they stood here and debated a situation they’d never been trained for—because no one ever could have prepared them, or thought to prepare them, for this—the more likely it was they would never get this guy to the hospital alive.

Together, she and Roger lifted the man and placed him onto the stretcher. She winced for him as his weight settled on his back. If he had enough sense left to register pain, this had to be agonizing for him.

She nearly shrieked when the man groaned. If she’d been a gambler, she would have bet money on this guy never making it to the hospital, never mind making a sound again. Her eyes shot to Roger, who gazed back at her with a dumbfounded expression she was sure matched hers.

She couldn’t stop her hands from shaking as she strapped the man down. Harding stepped forward, captured the man’s wrist, and handcuffed it to the stretcher.

A vaguely familiar, sweet odor pushed aside the stench of garbage and blood clogging Aiden’s nostrils. It took him a moment to place the scent as butterscotch. There had been a girl in his high school who sucked endlessly on butterscotch candies. The scent made him recall how sweet butterscotch tasted on his tongue.

That high school girl had been the first one he kissed and felt up. She might have become his first everything if her family hadn’t moved to England. She existed back in the days when he’d dreamed of living a relatively normal life for a vampire residing amongst humans. He’d gone to college for a time, back in the day when sports and video games had still been fun and important to him. However, he soon realized he’d been a fool for believing he could fit in as his father and the Stooges had in college.

His father and the Stooges were turned vamps. He loved them all, but they didn’t have a clue what purebred, male vampires endured when they stopped aging. He hadn’t had a clue either.

But none of that mattered right now. That was the past. Something was happening in the present he had to focus on.

Why was his mind so jumbled? Why was he thinking of a girl he’d completely forgotten until now and college days he’d given up?

If he was in this much pain, he was in danger. Hands gripped him, lifting him and rolling him onto something. He was jostled again, and then someone grabbed his wrist. Cold metal enclosed his wrists; he tried to jerk away, but he didn’t have the strength.

His body felt like he’d been stretched on a rack before being repeatedly sliced open by Carha’s whip. Why was he so weak?

Bits and pieces filtered through his mind. Had Carha just chained him? He’d kill the bitch if she had. It didn’t matter if she was the only one willing to flay him open as he needed, he’d warned her not to play games with him.

Then he heard the butterscotch woman speak again. Her voice dragged him back toward full consciousness. Despite the tremor he detected in it, strength resonated in her tone. His hand jerked against the metal before someone clasped his other wrist. He turned his head toward the voice and tried to open his eyes. He didn’t like the fear he sensed in her, and if he could look at her, if he could see where he was, then maybe he could remember.

“I really don’t think he needs to be cuffed,” Maggie said to Harding. The metal handcuff rattled when the man’s hand jerked against his restraint.

“Until we know what happened here, this man is also a prisoner,” Harding said briskly as he walked around the stretcher to cuff the man’s other wrist too.

“In case you haven’t noticed, he’s not exactly in the condition to jump up and run off on us,” she retorted.

“Don’t care.”

“Officer Harding—”

Her words broke off when Harding’s eyes met hers, and she saw the wariness in them. It hit her that Harding wasn’t handcuffing their patient out of concern the man might make a miraculous escape; Harding was doing it because he worried for them.

What have we walked into here? She wondered for the hundredth time since entering this alley.

“Let’s go, Mags,” Roger said.

Without speaking, the two of them lifted the stretcher and started to carry it out of the alley. There was too much blood to wheel it out of here. She and Roger would be scrubbing the ambulance for hours afterward if they attempted to wheel it, and she wanted as little to do with this whole mess as possible.

When she got the chance, she was going to scrub her skin raw. Until then, she would have to be content with getting out of here, getting this guy to the hospital, filing their report, and forgetting any of this happened. Tomorrow, she and probably all the others who’d been here would feel foolish for being so creeped out, but right now all she felt was the impulse to bolt like a rabbit.

She met Glenn’s eyes when she walked by him. His black skin glistened with sweat as he gave her a nod of greeting. Glenn had been on this job for longer than Roger, yet she saw the alarm in his brown eyes before they shifted to Roger.

“It’s insane here,” Glenn said to him.

Glenn and Roger had been partners for nearly a decade. Before Maggie started working for the company, Glenn was offered the opportunity to move to an earlier shift, and he’d taken it. Glenn and Walt had probably been preparing to return to the station for the end of their shift when this call came in. The timing for them had been worse than the timing for her and Roger.

“Stay safe,” Roger replied.

The ground beneath Aiden’s back swayed as he was carried somewhere. Male voices spoke with each other. He didn’t hear the woman again, but her scent remained strong. Doors opened, and whatever he was on was pushed forward. He gritted his teeth when he was set down somewhere.

“I’ll ride with him,” Roger said.

“You’re better at getting through traffic than I am,” Maggie replied. “You’ll get us to the hospital faster.”

Before Roger could protest, she climbed into the back with their patient. Roger stared at her for a second before closing the doors. Taking a deep breath, Maggie pulled off her winter uniform coat and placed it on the bench before setting to work on gathering the equipment needed to check their patient’s vitals and keep him alive long enough to get him out of their lives.

A small jolt of electricity shot from him to her when she grasped his wrist to check his pulse. Unlike static electricity, this current generated from some inner, instead of outer, force. It hadn’t been an unpleasant sensation, but her skin prickled with an awareness she hadn’t anticipated.

Glancing at the man, she almost recoiled when his eyes fluttered back and forth behind his closed lids. She had no idea how this guy was still alive, but he showed more signs of it than some of her patients who had sustained a lot less in the way of injuries.