Love Is in the Air by Carolyn McCray Read Free Book Online Page B

her laurels. It was getting late, and she had about two hours’ worth of charting to do in under thirty minutes.
    She certainly couldn’t count on Stacy to pick up her slack.
    As Sal settled in for some power-charting, the excitement of the day waned. Her mind wandered back to last night’s pain rather than to which anticonvulsant she had started for the epileptic. How could she feel the terror of the hallway without knowing the cause of it?
    “Dr. Calon?” A meek female voice startled her from the other side of the doorway. Unlike the Badger, Sal had an open-door policy.
    “Yeah, what do you need?” She answered kindly, knowing that only a medical student could sound that terrified. Soon, they’d realize that she and Manning treated their students very differently.
    “Um, Paul asked me to bring the labs on Mr. McMillon.”
    Sal glanced at the urinalysis. Mr. McMillon, if that was his real name, had been playing with someone he shouldn’t have. “Have the lab culture it and start one hundred thousand units of Pen G.”
    Sal looked up at the fresh-faced student. Had she ever been that young? Well, it was time for this student to earn her keep. She pulled a maneuver straight out of Maria’s playbook. Her friend would be proud.
    “And have a talk with the patient about safe sex. He also might want to upgrade his ‘adult entertainment.’ Remind him that even in this instance, you basically get what you pay for.”
    The girl’s face blanched as she stammered, “ What… I can’t… I mean… Shouldn’t it be you?”
    “Sorry.” She shooed her away. “Consider it a rite of passage.”
    Chuckling at the student’s stunned look, Sal went back to her charts.
    Okay, sometimes she and Stacy were alike.

CHAPTER 17
    Sal hit the key that stamped her electronic signature onto the thirteenth out of a gazillion charts. She looked at the little clock on her laptop. She’d never be done by midnight.
    Pulling out her cell phone to call Richard, Sal stopped short. The hairs at the back of her neck trembled. There was no lightning, yet a bolt shot through her body. No thunder rumbled, yet her body shook. Sal worried that she was having a panic attack, until she felt the heat at her back.
    Gulping, she knew exactly who stood there. The man.
    In his presence, her missing memories didn’t flood back. Instead, every gruesome detail of Maria’s dead body and the terror of the crimson hallway simply reappeared—as if someone had hit the ‘Restore’ button, and she suddenly had access to the movie of her blood dripping onto the man’s glowing knife. She felt horror and relief swirl uneasily in her belly.
    While getting her memories back had been her goal, their sudden reappearance threatened to unbalance her. She had been terrified enough living through them. Now within this instant, she was forced to relive it all as if were new again. Tears threatened. She didn’t want to step back into the moment she’d found Maria dead, but she couldn’t stop it.
    Clutching her midriff, Sal felt like retching. She felt like running. She felt like dying. Then these displaced memories seemed to find their place amongst the others. As they settled in, the racking pain subsided.
    She thought the worst was over, and then another wave of horror crashed over her, knocking the wind from her. The memories represented a loss even greater than Maria. The world she knew, with order and science and logic, no longer existed.
    The man behind her, who could make memories flutter away and then reappear, proved that. These stark, graphic images of that crimson hallway forced Sal to accept the unacceptable. Horrible, nasty things stalked the night that were far more terrible than any fairy tale her grandmama used to tell. Not only did they stalk, but they killed.
    As the memories sorted themselves out, Sal realized that she should have died last night. She would have, if not for the man standing behind her. Sal owed him her life, but didn’t even know