Venice, Italy. 10 July 2007
The kitchen clock chimed 1AM as Sebastian raced in, his eyes wildly scanning the space. "Josephine!" he called, but the empty room gave no response. Isabel moaned softly in his arms and he brushed her cheek with his nose. "It will be okay, amore mio. You're going to be okay. Keep warming up and come back to me, okay?"
She moaned again and he hurried back into the hallway. In quick succession he checked the common area, Josephine's shared bedroom, and the baths. No one seemed to know where she was, and Isabel's breaths were growing slower. There was no more time to waste. Sebastian took the grand staircase to the surface level three steps at a time, only taking care not to trip in order to keep Isabel safe in his arms.
He burst into the salty night air and rushed down the street toward the hospital. Even with his vampiric powers, he ran hard enough that his lungs begged for air. He wasted no time running into the emergency room and shouting, "Help! My girlfriend is dying! I need help!"
Nurses scurried into the room, took one look at Isabel, and rushed her away on a stretcher. Sebastian tried to follow, but two of the nurses stood in front of the door. "Please wait here, sir," one of the nurses said, sending Sebastian to sit down in the waiting area.
Isabel was rushed into an exam room where the nurses removed the blanket and began taking her vitals. Her breathing and body temperature were dramatically low, and the nurses immediately set about warming her. They covered her in a heated blanket and began administering warmed intravenous fluids.
Little by little, her lips and fingers began to lose their blue pallor. The monitoring machines beeped less and less frantically, but her heart rate went from too slow to too fast and she didn't wake.
The doctor entered the room with a clipboard and a somber expression. "Get two bags of blood and start the transfusion. This girl is so anemic I'm surprised she's alive at all! Did we get a history on her yet?"
"Not yet, sir. Maria just left to talk to the man who brought her in a moment ago."
"Okay, good. So hypothermia, anemia, anything else that I should be aware of?" The doctor scanned the chart, then looked back at Isabel. The color had returned to her cheeks and her breathing was growing stronger. Hopefully once she got some blood in her, she'd be able to tell them what happened.
The nurse Maria returned and handed another clipboard to the doctor. "Her name is Isabel, age 29. The man who brought her in is her boyfriend. She has a history of leukemia, anemia, and fainting. He said he found her at the bottom of the cellar stairs, unconscious."
"I see," the doctor replied. "Check her for bruising. If she fainted from anemia and fell down the stairs, she quite likely injured herself. Once she wakes up, call me."
Both attending nurses nodded. Maria set about changing the warmed IV fluid to a blood transfusion, while the other nurse, Lily, scanned Isabel's body. Her chest and wrists were heavily bruised, and when Lily touched her left arm, Isabel whimpered.
"This doesn't look like she fell down the stairs," Lily muttered to her coworker. "Look at these marks on her wrists. You can see the individual finger-shaped bruises. If she ended up at the bottom of a set of stairs, I don't think it was by accident. Do you think her boyfriend pushed her?"
Maria shrugged. "He seemed genuinely frantic when I spoke with him, but I'm not a detective. It all seems suspicious to me. I want to know how she got so hypothermic on a June night. It's almost like she was stuffed in a freezer or something."
"It's definitely strange. I'll get a report started for the authorities just in case."
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A pain like twin bee stings in her wrist brought Isabel crashing back to consciousness. But the feeling was familiar; heat racing up her arm and into her heart, followed by tingling in every cell. Her ribs shifted and knit, as did the bone in her arm, both of which made her scream with pain.
"Shhh, it's okay, Aurora. It's just me." Josephine's soft voice relaxed Isabel immediately, and her tongue tickled against Isabel's wrist. "There. That should take care of the broken bones and things. And the doctors are already giving you more blood, so you should be fine soon."
Isabel nodded and opened her eyes. "At least hospitals are better these days than they used to be," she murmured, gesturing vaguely with her fingers. Josephine stared at her for a moment before her face broke out in a smile.
"Did you get your memories back?! You're speaking perfect Italian again!"
"Of course I'm speaking Italian! I've only spoken it for-" She paused, the connection making its final link. "Oh! That's right! Where is Sebastian? We have to tell him the good news! And I have to apologize for being so prickly...and accusing him of being a liar..."
Josephine frowned. The simple action made Isabel's stomach sink, but she grabbed her sister's hand and looked her firmly in the eyes. A sigh escaped Josephine's lips and she shook her head. "I don't know where he is. He came running through the keep and demanded that I come to the hospital and make sure you didn't die. I couldn't even ask what happened before he demanded that I 'tell her not to follow me!' and he disappeared."
"So obviously I have to follow him," Isabel replied, her jaw set. "If he's demanding that I stay put, he's definitely doing something dangerous."
"I mean, you're not wrong there." Josephine rolled her eyes and put her hand firmly against Isabel's shoulder. "But you're too weak to go anywhere. You're going to stay put until you have the proper amount of blood. Then the two of us can hunt down that husband of yours and find out what mess he's gotten you into."