Read Nightlord: Sunset for Free Online

Apparently, dead people don’t mind temperature much.  It’s us living folks that mind being scalded and frozen.
    That got me to thinking.  What, exactly, was changing?  How?  What did this do to me?
    I determined to find out.
    Oh, looking back, I can see I was avoiding the issue, sort of.  By distancing myself from the problem, by treating it as a clinical, scientific problem—not a life-and-death matter of immediate concern—I was stepping back from it.  But it did help me to come to grips with it.
    First thing: call in.  If I’m going to be sick, I’ll use a sick day.  Maybe several.  No problem.
    Second thing: I’m going to need someone to help.
    So I called Travis.  Travis is about six months past his RN, and he’s been my friend since high school.  If I ever needed a kidney, Travis would volunteer.  I might even go so far as to make the man a gift of one lobe of a lung.  There are two things I needed at that point:  someone to listen to my troubles and someone who wouldn’t get bent out of shape about them.  That was Travis.
    I called him up.  The phone rang six times before he answered.
    “Mrphgm.”
    “Hey, Travis?”
    “Grumph.”
    “Good morning to you, too.  Look, I have a problem, and I need your help.”
    “Dgnwtmtz?”
    “A little before seven.  I’m not kidding, Travis.  This is serious.”
    There was a pause. “How serious?”
    “I need you, Travis.”
    There was another pause.  “Do I have time to shower?”
    “It’s not going to kill me before sunset.  Sure.”
    “I’m on it.”  He hung up without saying goodbye.
    See why I’m friends with the man?  Do you have any friends that would do that?  I hold myself highly fortunate to know him.  But it’s a two-way street; I recall a couple of times I got out of a warm bed for him, too.
     
    I ate breakfast on campus.  It tasted much stronger than I recalled food should.  All my senses were cranked up.  Not as bad as the night before, but still far over normal.  At least the food stayed down.  I did try a candy bar first, just to make sure, before Travis and I hit the cafeteria.
    I was getting some odd looks from the staff on my third trip through the line.  But I already paid for my meal plan; working at the university has its perks.  They couldn’t really say anything so long as I ate it right there.
    Travis and I sat well away from most other people while we talked.  I told him my story, he listened.  About the time I started in on the story of my supposed previous life, he held up a hand.  I stopped.  Rummaging in his bag for a moment, he fished out a notebook and a pen.
    “Start over.”
    So I did.  It took a couple of hours; he asked questions and I kept interrupting my own story to go through the chow line again.  When I brought him up to date, he flipped through the pages he’d filled with the odd, multi-directional chaos notes I’ve seen so often.
    “You know I haven’t written this much for patient reports in the past week?”
    “That’s because you type them.”
    “Computers are wonderful.  But still… the sheer volume… Okay.  So you want to know what’s going on in your bloodstream and such, right?”
    “Yep.”
    “I can arrange for some tests, sure—Herb works in hematology and I can talk him into it.  I don’t know what the schedule looks like for the x-ray or MRI machines—”
    “Hold it, hold it.  I was thinking more along the lines of old-fashioned medicine, to start.  Gross physical symptoms.  I don’t feel like crawling into a magnetic bottle or getting irradiated.”
    He nodded.  “I can do that.  You know we need to come up with a pathology for this thing.”
    “So you’ll take some blood.  Okay.  I wouldn’t worry.  Apparently it requires fluid interchange.  A lot of it.”
    “Sex?”
    “No… As I understand it from things she’s said, only the blood is contagious.  You have to get infected blood into your system, whether by drinking it or