The Alpha's Collateral

JO

The trucker’s name was Dale Ostrowski, and at 3:04 in the morning he decided to die on my shift.

He’d rolled his rig on Highway 61 just past Knife River, where the black ice waits for the guys who’ve stopped respecting it. Six broken ribs, a bruised lung, a spleen the surgeons had argued about and decided to leave in. He came up to the ICU at one o’clock, grey and polite, apologizing to me for the trouble. At 3:04 his monitor still showed a rhythm. At 3:05 I couldn’t find a pulse to go with it.

“Bree. He’s PEA. Call it.”

Bree hit the button, and the overhead voice said Code Blue, ICU, bed fourteen in that calm robot tone that makes everybody on the floor walk faster. I already had the bed flat and the board under him and the heel of my hand on his sternum.

“You’re going to hate this, Dale,” I told him, and pushed.

Ribs that are already broken don’t crack. They grind. You feel it in your wrists and you keep going, a hundred and ten a minute, two inches deep, because the alternative is that his heart stays a fist that won’t open.

Coming in at seven I’d watched a lopsided moon go down behind the hill, ten days shy of full. Every night nurse on earth will tell you the moon fills the beds. In my family it does more than that. In my family, everybody grows fur on it except me.

Bree ripped the epi out of the code cart and had it in his line before the resident made it through the door. “Epi in at 3:06. Who’s got the clock?”

“I’m the clock.” Sweat ran under my braid. “Dr. Patel, he’s got a left flail segment and his chest tube stopped draining twenty minutes ago. I paged it. Nobody came.”

“Two minutes,” the respiratory therapist said. “Switch?”

“Not yet.”

Patel was twenty-eight and looked twelve under the lights. He put a hand on Dale’s chest and watched it not rise right. He looked at the neck veins standing up like cords.

“Tension,” he said.

“Second intercostal space, midclavicular line,” I said, like I wasn’t telling him, and swapped out with the RT to hold the kit open.

The needle went in. Air came out of Dale with a hiss like a slow tire. Ninety seconds later I put two fingers on his carotid and there it was, thready and fast and stupidly beautiful.

“I’ve got a pulse.”

“ROSC at 3:17,” Bree said. “Dale, buddy, you owe Jo a fruit basket.”

“He owes me new wrists.” I peeled off my gloves. “And that chest tube owes me an apology.”

Patel cleared his throat. “About the page.”

“Put it in your note, Doctor.”

He looked at the clock and decided that was a fight for daylight. It was 3:20 on a Saturday in November and we’d all made worse choices.

By 3:40 Dale had a new chest tube, sedated, his wife on her way from Silver Bay. I sat at the station charting the code with my forearms still shaking. Bree slid a cup of vending-machine hot chocolate next to my keyboard.

“Twelve minutes,” she said. “That’s your personal best for the month.”

“Don’t jinx it. It’s only the fourteenth.”

“You want to know what I love about you, Niemi? You do CPR like you’re mad at the patient.”

“I am mad at the patient. He drove a semi on 61 at midnight in November.”

She laughed, and I was halfway through typing spontaneous circulation achieved when my phone buzzed in the chest pocket of my scrubs.

It buzzed against the pill bottle I always kept there, a small rattle like a tooth in a jar. My hands, which had been steady through twelve minutes of compressions, stopped being steady.

DAD.

My father hadn’t called my phone since September. He hadn’t called much before, either, but in September there had been a reason to, and he still hadn’t. At my brother’s funeral he’d looked at the casket and the birches and the sky. Everything but me. I’d thought it was grief until I caught myself in the funeral home’s bathroom mirror. I had Mikko’s eyes. Grey, the color of the lake on a day when it can’t decide whether to freeze.

The phone kept buzzing.

“Is that a man?” Bree said. “At quarter to four? Is it the hockey guy?”

“There is no hockey guy.”

“There’s always a hockey guy.”

“It’s nobody.” I stood up. “Cover me five minutes?”

“Nobody gets five minutes. Somebody gets three.”

I took it in the supply room, between the IV bags and the shelf of foley kits, with the motion-sensor light cutting out every thirty seconds unless I waved my arm.

“Dad.”

“Johanna.”

He was the only person who called me that. I could hear the wood stove at the house in Rautala ticking, and ice in a glass. Four in the morning and he was drinking, or still drinking.

“Who died?” I said. In my family a call at this hour meant someone had, and the last time it was my brother.

“Nobody died.” A pause. The ice moved. “The Harbor Alpha has called his Surety.”

I’m wolfless. I’ve never shifted, never run a moon, never felt the pack in my chest. But I grew up in the Range Alpha’s house, and I learned the law like other kids learn the Lord’s Prayer.

“Mikko killed one of his on Harbor ground,” I said. “And he killed Mikko for it. That’s the blood debt. It’s paid, Dad. It’s in the ground in Rautala.”

“The debt is paid. The war isn’t over.” The ice again. “The Surety is how it stays over.”

“One of your blood,” I said. “Under his roof. A year and a day.”

“You know the law.”

“I know it’s a hostage with good manners.” I waved my arm at the light. “Okay. And you’re calling me because?”

“It has to be Niemi blood.”

“There’s four of us left, Dad. Me. You.” I counted them on the shelf of foley kits like it would help. “Tuomas. Ari.”

Uncle Pekka’s boys were twenty-four and twenty-six and both wolves, and both stood behind my father at pack meetings.

“It’s you, Johanna,” he said. “There’s no one else.”

“There’s Tuomas. There’s Ari.”

The silence on the line was long enough that the light went off. I stood in the dark and didn’t wave my arm.

“The pack needs them,” my father said.

“And I’m what? Surplus?”

He didn’t answer that. He didn’t have to. No I can’t lose them, no I’m sorry. Just the arithmetic of a man with three people to spend, and one of them doesn’t run on the moon.

The one you can spare.

I waved my arm. The light came back on. The IV bags were all still there, which felt important.

“I have a job,” I said. “I have a shift tomorrow night. Tonight. Whatever. I can’t just not show up.”

“You’ll be at the Kovach house at sunrise. Sanna will drive you.”

“Did he ask for me? By name?”

“He asked for Niemi blood. I chose.”

“You chose.”

“Don’t make this harder than it is.”

“Harder for who, Dad?”

When he spoke again his voice had gone rough, and I hated that it still worked on me. “He’ll keep you safe. It’s the law. Anyone who harms a Surety dies for it. Nobody can touch you there.”

“Nobody’s touching me here,” I said. “Nobody’s even calling.”

“Johanna.”

“He killed Mikko.” It came out too loud for a supply closet. “You’re sending me to live with the man who killed Mikko.”

“Mikko is dead,” my father said. “Sunrise.”