Just past midnight. Not, traditionally, the best time for ER docs, and Alan, looking over the unit, wanted to be anywhere but where he was. He’d tried to call Phoebe half a dozen times in the last few hours — at first just to check up on her, but then because he started being scared. He’d been pretty sure when he left her house for the hospital that he was fine where Phoebe was concerned — that he could take her or leave her and that if Brig found proof that she was conning him, he could go on without missing a beat. But not being able to reach her had left his heart thudding like a jackhammer, and he couldn’t get her beautiful smile out of his mind or stop thinking about the way she’d looked at him as he left. Alan was sure Phoebe was all right, but he couldn’t leave the ER to go check on her, and as a result he was having a hell of a time staying focused on his work.

The late-night pediatric clinic had cleared out, as had the felt-bad-after-the-doctor’s-office-closed crowd. There wasn’t as much busywork as a result, but the people remaining to be seen had bigger problems than “head cold for last month” or ”wrenched ankle last week.“

Three patients were on beds, with another three or four going through the triage process out in the waiting room. The first of the full stretchers held a knife wound to the shoulder that was deep and about six inches long and covered with a tight pressure dressing — and that would get about sixty stitches as soon as the combative drunk attached to it stopped threatening to kill the staff. The second held a fifty-four-year-old white male with chest pain radiating down the left arm for the last four hours, growing increasingly more severe, with current complaints of nausea, vomiting, and severe shortness of breath. He was in the middle of his first heart attack and getting everything in the book tossed at him while Alan waited for Admitting and the nurses in the cardiac unit to ready a bed upstairs. The third was a stressed-out man in his early thirties complaining of migraines and blinding lights behind his eyes.

The thing all three of them had in common was endless puking. The drunk had brought up his Mad Dog 20/20 dinner about an hour earlier and was now trying to rid himself of the turpentine dessert — and the whole ER reeked of it. The heart attack threw up in incessant tight, short little bursts, and apologized to the nurses after every round. And the migraine — oh, the migraine. The migraine made more noise than a twelve-cat fight; he sounded like he was trying to turn himself inside out every time.

Alan hadn’t been so close to throwing up himself since his first cadaver.

Even the nurses — as tough a bunch as had ever run an ER — looked a little green around the gills.

“I say we TOBASH Knife-Boy and ship the other two now,” said Helena, the night ER charge nurse. “TOBASH” was an acronym for Take Out Back And Shoot in Head; dealing with people who had just spent hours trying to kill themselves or others, and then when they almost succeeded, who arrived in the ER demanding care while simultaneously threatening to kill the people waiting to give it had given birth to that acronym. Helena smiled when she said it, but her eyes were grim. Twenty-three years as an emergency RN had ground a few sharp edges onto her personality.

This wasn’t what Alan had thought medicine would be — and worse, this was as good as it got. ER was still the place where doctors got closest to actually practicing medicine. Every other specialty ended up so tangled in paperwork, insurance, government-mandated categorization, and corporate bullshit that the doctors and nurses couldn’t do much patient care. The field had lost something essential when insurers started calling the shots on what they would cover, and it lost a lot more when hospitals went from being private community-funded services to the next big corporate profit-centered acquisition. Alan didn’t know if medicine would ever regain the ground it had lost.

It had lost its humanity.

He turned and found one of the nurses leading in a slender young black man who’d fallen down stairs at home — at least that was his story. A badly healed break in one arm and bruises in all stages of healing suggested that the truth was a long way from a simple accident. And the boyfriend, a trim, older copper-skinned man in pressed slacks, wearing a neat white shirt and tie not even loosened at the collar at this god-awful hour, acted suspicious as hell.

At least this newest patient wasn’t barfing.

Alan closed his eyes against the coming lies and thought of Phoebe. He wanted to talk to her — to reassure himself that she was safe and then to bitch to her about the night he was having, to hear her laugh at his description of the puke-fest. Better, he wanted to curl up in bed with her again and hold her, and then he wanted to make love to her. On his balcony. On the rug. In her bed. In his bed. On the kitchen table at his place. On hers... no, not on hers. She had one of those spindly, feminine tables made strictly for dining, and even that only if you ate with little forks and elbows down.

Furniture ought to be multipurpose, he thought, and bolstered by the obvious truth of this, he took a deep breath. Phoebe was all right. She was just taking calls on the psychic line and was too busy to answer his calls. Or afraid to answer, for fear it might be the freak. Maybe he should pick up an answering machine for her so she could screen her calls. She should have one. Why didn’t she? In any case, though, he was sure she was fine. He promised himself that he would try her again as soon as he finished the new assessment. Then he headed behind the curtain to listen to lies for a while.

* * *

Twelve fifteen a.m., and Phoebe had gotten over the shakes. She took out her Browning, stripped it, and spread the pieces on an old towel in the center of her bed. She sat, bad leg positioned off the side and aligned to cause her the least possible pain, carefully cleaned the weapon and put it back together. She checked the mechanism to make sure it worked smoothly, then slid the shell cartridge in with a satisfying click. When she was finished, the oddly sweet smell of the cleaning oil filled her bedroom, and she felt confident that the handgun would operate correctly if she needed it.

She slid the Browning into its holster, secured the holster within her backpack, and stared at the ceiling. She tried to find the woman she had been in that first moment when she’d acted to stop Michael. She had only been that woman for a short time — a few minutes, less than half an hour at the most. But that woman had moved beyond fear into a cold place where sound rang hollow and pain washed out like the blue in a South Florida sky and colors faded away to black and white and blood red. When she had been that woman living in that cold place, she had been able to stand against Michael and win.

It was the first time. The only time.

And now she had to do it again.

She thought of Alan, and what Michael would do to him if he got him in a shotgun’s sights or within reach of his knife. Phoebe frowned. She didn’t know that she could find the woman she had been for those few critical moments — but even if she could, the effort would be useless if she wasn’t in the right place to make a difference. And the right place at that moment had to be the emergency room.

She looked at her knee. “You hurt,” she told the damaged joint. “A lot.” It didn’t — or at least it didn’t hurt any worse than its baseline level. But the nice thing about her knee was that it always looked like it hurt. Anything that could make medical professionals flinch and stare fixedly at other things while they corralled their shocked reactions had to be pretty bad. Her knee was.

She looked at the clock. Already twelve forty — she had taken far longer than she should have to clean her gun. Pushing one a.m. was a ludicrous hour to be out in her neighborhood. The neighborhood scared her even without having to think about Michael. But she thought of Alan, and how a death he wouldn’t see coming hovered over his head like a dark angel.

She had to get moving. “Right. Out the door. Don’t think. Just do.” She swung her backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her cane as she headed for the door. She kept her free hand under the backpack’s front pouch flap, resting on the grip of the Browning, and she tried not to let herself think about Michael and whether he was flesh and blood or a ghost bent on vengeance or some stranger coming after her for reasons she didn’t know — or if he might be someone she knew. Like Ben.

The weight of the gun had grown in the backpack. Phoebe could find no beauty in the thing, no grace. Nothing but efficiency and a tight, tense freedom — the freedom to stand between death and those she... loved?

She could not think of love. Not yet. Probably not ever. Love was an emotion reserved for those whose lives were not lived under a deathwatch. She could not afford the messiness of love, or the hope.

Phoebe could only afford a dark, ferocious intent to survive.

Outside was typical South Florida summer — the air filled with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine, voices from one of the enclosed patios nearby speaking softly in Spanish, dogs barking. The night, still too warm and humid to be genuinely comfortable, nonetheless felt better than morning would in a few hours when the sun came up again.

Palm fronds rattled in a faint breeze. Phoebe’s skin crawled. She thumbed the safety off, but nothing and no one came after her. She reached her car, checked it for intruders before getting in, locked it as soon as she was seated, and managed to start the thing on the first try.

She drove to Alan’s ER, parked in a location that gave her a clear view of the entrance doors while still letting her see around her, and tried to spot Alan’s car. She didn’t see it — perhaps the doctors had a parking lot away from the general traffic. Alan had a fairly nondescript car — a four- or five-year-old well-maintained green Toyota Corolla with M.D. plates — but she was certain she would recognize it if it were in view.

That late at night, the parking lot was almost empty. She waited with the car doors locked and her heart in her throat until she saw a security guard making outdoor rounds — then she flashed her headlights and got out, grabbed her cane, and shouted for help.

He turned.

“Wheelchair, please!” she yelled, and he grabbed one from just inside the doors and hurried to help her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can’t walk.” She slid her pant leg up to the knee, showed him, and watched him wince. “Dr. MacKerrie is expecting me.”

He looked down at her leg, and his gaze focused, then slid away. “You call ahead?”

She nodded. “We’re next-door neighbors.”

He waited while she levered herself into the wheelchair, carefully not bending her supposed-to-be-injured leg. He adjusted the footrest to let her keep the leg straight — she kept the pant leg pulled up for the shock value. The knee did look swollen, actually. It didn’t hurt any worse than usual, but maybe she should have let Alan take her in to have it X-rayed after they crashed into each other.

“How did you do that, miss?” the guard asked.

She shrugged, not wanting to go into the sordid details. “Accident. Long story, and not very interesting.”

“He going to admit you?”

“I certainly hope not.”

The guard nodded and came to a decision. He took her in through a side entrance, skipping the admission office and triage. Alan saw her as they came through the double doors. He looked at her, and Phoebe saw an expression of relief wash over his face, and then he looked down at her leg and said, “Room one’s open. I’ll be right in.”

The guard offered to help her onto the stretcher.

“I’d rather stay in the chair — I don’t want to move it any more than I have to. I’m afraid the pins might be loose again.”

Alan came in as the guard was leaving. He waited until the guard was gone, then closed the door and said, “I’ve been trying to call you for hours. You scared the shit out of me, Phoebe. What happened?”

“That was you on the phone?” She cringed. “I’m sorry. I thought it was... Michael. I fell asleep on the couch, and slept for hours, and then— ” She considered telling him that Chick had woken her, but decided not to. “In my nightmare Michael was giving me a flower for my funeral, and when I woke, I found this on my chest.” She’d wrapped the dead rose in plastic. She pulled it out of her backpack and showed it to him. “I was afraid to answer the phone.”

He stared at the rose, and she thought he paled a little, but it was hard to tell under the fluorescent lights. “Oh, God, Phoebe. I thought you were just busy taking calls.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t wake up until just before midnight. My call average is going to plummet if I don’t get some time in.” She grinned a little. “Not that I don’t have bigger things to worry about.”

He took a deep breath, reached down, and gently palpated her knee. “You have some new swelling here and some heat over the joint. What happened?”

“Nothing. I wanted an excuse to come in here that wouldn’t draw too much attention to me.”

“Walking in would have worked.”

Phoebe shook her head. “I meant, that wouldn’t draw too much attention from Mi— ... from the stalker. If he was watching me, I wanted to have a seemingly legitimate reason to be here.”

“It looks like you have some fresh damage. More bruising and swelling since the last time I looked at it. Nothing huge, but I’m not happy about it.”

Phoebe shrugged. “It’s the same as usual. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say it’s all right, but I don’t really want to do anything with it. I can’t afford the X-ray and the ER fees and everything else right now.” And I don’t dare let you out of my sight when Michael may be coming, she thought.

Alan nodded. “An X-ray wouldn’t hurt, I don’t think, but if you’re sure you haven’t done anything new to it, we can let it go with Ace, ice, and elevate. You and I can do that as a private visit so we don’t have to do a chart on you. I’ll cover any costs.” He crouched beside the wheelchair. “You sound like you’ve finally decided the guy coming after you isn’t your ex.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because just now was the first time I heard you call him anything but Michael.” He smiled. “That’s good, Phoebe.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure the person coming after me is Michael. I called him my stalker for your benefit, but not because that’s what I believe.”

Alan’s smile died. “Oh.” He sighed deeply. “He can’t be Michael.”

Phoebe held up a hand. “How does Chick come to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“But she does — right? I mean, you know it’s her.”

“Of course I know it’s her. She’s my daughter.”

“He was my husband. He was my stalker. He was nearly my killer. I know him better than I know anyone on the planet except myself. I don’t know how he’s coming after me any more than you know how Chick has come back to you.” Phoebe leaned forward in the chair. “But I think the two things are related — Chick and Michael. I don’t know what form he’s in, but I think Chick knows about him. What I don’t know is why she got you involved with me. You would have been a million times better off if you’d never met me.”

He stood utterly still for a long moment. Then he just shook his head. “No. That isn’t true.”

“You would have. Your life is in danger now, and that’s because of me. Anyway, I’m just saying that these contacts with Michael aren’t necessarily taking place on the physical plane.”

“Michael’s spirit is bringing you dead flowers?”

“And moving my tea mug around. And, I don’t know... watching me all the time.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know how he’s doing it. But I know it’s him, the same way that you know Chick is really Chick.” She closed her eyes. “It feels like him.”

“I thought knowing he was dead would be a comfort to you.”

She smiled up at him. “I know. But right now it would be false comfort. That’s... no. We don’t want false comfort. We don’t want any sense of security that’s based on a lie, because that could get us killed. This is real comfort. The two of us in here — just being with you, knowing you’re safe.” She reached over and took his hand. “I know I don’t know you very well, Alan—”

“You almost knew me a lot better.” He smiled at her, and she couldn’t help but laugh a little.

“True. And I don’t want to make any assumptions and I don’t want to crowd you. But I feel better being here. Knowing that you’re safe, at least right this minute.”

“You can make a few assumptions.” His sudden grin flashed wickedly, and his eyes lit with an unholy come-hither glow.

“I can’t. We can’t. We don’t dare. We’re in a tight spot right now — shared fear, shared strangeness — and that’s going to create a sense of false intimacy. We’re going to have to ignore it, because it isn’t real. You know this. You know how people act in traumatic situations.”

Alan looked startled. Head cocked at an angle, he studied her. And smiled a warm, winning smile. “You mean like survivor sex?”

Phoebe felt her cheeks get hot. “Yeah. Like that.”

“And you think that we would be a bad idea? Us? You’re trying to talk me out of us?”

Phoebe wanted nothing in the world less than that, but she said, “I just don’t want... um... either of us mistaking this for something it isn’t. Something more permanent.”

She looked away from him. She didn’t want him to say something he didn’t mean. Something that he would regret when sanity returned and it was time to move on.

Something like I love you.

She wasn’t going to let herself say those three words, either.

“When we get through this, things are going to look different. And I don’t want either one of us getting hurt.”

Alan took two steps towards her, so that he was close enough that she could feel the heat of his body and smell the lingering whisper of aftershave. “You can’t know what the future holds,” he said. “And in the meantime, I’m all in favor of survivor sex.”

She got all warm and tingly, and a wicked little voice inside of her said, I’m all in favor of survivor sex, too. But she smiled a shaky smile and said, “Well, it’s not anything we have to worry about right now.”

“Who’s worrying?” Alan asked and took the step that closed the gap between them. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up. “You’re sure the knee is okay?”

“Um— ” Phoebe said, but didn’t get a chance to say anything else, because he was kissing her, his big hands cradling her buttocks, and she wrapped her legs around him, being very careful with the knee because there were some things she simply did not wish to explain to anyone — ever — and explaining how she’d dislocated her knee while jumping the bones of an on-duty ER doctor (in a trauma room, no less) while pretending to be a patient certainly ranked high on that list.

Their lips crushed together, their tongues slid and thrust, their bodies tried to push through clothing to reach each other. The kiss — the kiss tossed Phoebe into a place of pure red unthinking haze, into boiling blood and howling images of him naked her naked them rising and falling, heaving, thrusting, and she wrapped hands around the back of his head and pulled him tighter, closer, wild with a desire so consuming that she would willingly have stripped him bare and thrown him to the cold linoleum floor and impaled herself on him and ridden him to screaming, shrieking climax right then and there.

He broke free, looking dazed, and slid her onto the Stryker stretcher that filled the center of the room. He stepped back, and she felt suddenly like the sacrifice on a pagan altar.

“Where have you been all my life?” he said, and his voice broke.

“Where are we going to be ten minutes from now — that’s what I want to know,” she replied.

“I’m here until seven a.m. We have two other doctors in the ER for this shift, but leaving early — no. It’s just not done.”

“Time now?”

“Almost three. Wow, time drags when you want to get moving.”

“I’m going to explode before then.”

Alan looked down at the tented fabric of his scrub pants and muttered, “Shit. Look— I’m going to put an Ace wrap on your knee, put you back in the wheelchair, and put you in the doctors’ lounge — we have a couple of bunk beds in there, and you can rest—”

For a moment that sounded eminently reasonable to Phoebe. Then the whole reason she’d come to the ER in the ridiculous hours of the morning fought its way through the fog in her brain, and she said, “Could I just sit at the nurses’ station, out of the way? I promise to keep my hands to myself and not say anything that would embarrass you.”

“Not going to do any tarot readings for the nurses, huh?”

“I was a teacher,” Phoebe said. “I’m certified to teach biology, anatomy, and honors science all the way through twelfth grade. I can pretend to be normal.” She smiled a little. “I had lots of practice passing for normal as a kid.”

“You could never pass for normal,” Alan told her. “Only for extraordinary.” He took an Ace bandage off a huge metal storage shelf and started wrapping her knee with it. His timing couldn’t have been better. A nurse knocked and popped her head in the door. “We have a two-car collision on the way in. CPR in progress on one that’s already tubed, two dead at the scene, two with big trauma, one baby in a car seat that sounds unscathed but is going to have to be checked out. You need me to finish up in here?”

Alan said, “I’ve got this wrapped. She’ll need an ice pack. And let her wait at the nurses’ station; she shouldn’t have driven here with this, and she definitely doesn’t need to drive home on it.”

“You want me to call a ride for you?” the nurse asked. Her tone was professional, but Phoebe could see curiosity in her eyes.

“I’m going to drive her home,” Alan said.

“My car...”

“Morrie owes me a favor. He’ll bring it for you.”

Phoebe smiled at the nurse and tried hard to look like someone who hadn’t just been kissed to within an inch of her sanity. She had the feeling the nurse wasn’t buying any of it — that behind that polite, curious face lay a mind saying, “Yeah, sure, I’ve got eyes, honey.”

So Phoebe sat tucked away in a corner of the nurses’ station, her backpack on her lap, her hand on top of the flap, watching the doctors and the nurses hurrying between patients, and watching cops and paramedics and EMTs pouring into the open spaces, bringing patients on stretchers, and watching techs running in and out of the department. And all the darkness of the past two years filled her again. She had been in places like this, surrounded by doctors and nurses and cops like these, and her scars were still fresh and she was not yet free. She watched Alan, listened to him taking charge, making things better, saving people’s lives, and everything he did just pounded home to her the reality that all she was doing for him was bringing him trouble and danger and the threat of his own death.

And for what? On her part, she didn’t know. On his, though — for a psychic connection with his dead daughter? He could replace her with someone else who could do the same thing better; by a real medium, not a sideline tarot reader. Someone who wouldn’t risk his life simply by being there. For a passing sexual attraction born of shared fear and danger and strangeness? Phoebe could see the female members of the ER staff all around her — nurses, a doctor, lab and X-ray techs. Most of them were young, all of them were strong and healthy, and many of them were very pretty. They had everything in the world in common with Alan — shared goals and shared careers, a common philosophy, understandings that came of fighting together for something worthwhile. And futures.

She could see the dead rose lying on her chest, as clearly as if it had been branded there.

She didn’t have a future.

So she and Alan shared a transient connection to his dead child’s ghost and to her reportedly dead psychopath of an ex. Well, that and a sexual chemistry so explosive it hurt. It was going to be agony when Alan moved on with his life, leaving her with memories of the best thing she’d ever experienced — and the knowledge that it hadn’t even been real. That was...

That was pathetic.

Once she’d found a way to protect Alan from Michael, she could just get in her car and drive away. Save face, protect her feelings. Until then, she could avoid any more kisses, or touches, or curling up in bed together.

She watched him, and thought, Yeah, I could protect myself and my feelings later, and miss out on everything now. But I’ve never had great sex. Hell, I’ve never even had great chemistry. All I need is once. Just one time with him, in bed or anywhere, all the way, just to know what it’s like. What it could have been for me with someone better than Michael. Then I’ll step gracefully out of his way and live with reality. At least that way I’ll have an amazing memory — for however long I have left. And if I’m out of time, I haven’t thrown away my last opportunity for something wonderful because I was afraid to take a chance.

She stared at her right leg. She figured she could take hurt feelings — or even a broken heart — standing on her head. She’d been through a lot worse.

Here and now, he wants me. It doesn’t have to be forever, it doesn’t have to be real. I’m an adult. I just have to make sure I don’t let myself fall in love with him. That I remember who I am and who he is.

That I remember that no one gets to keep every wonderful thing that moves through her life, and I’m no exception.