Page 22 of Hospital for Immortal Creatures

“I’ll go see them.”

Tina slapped his ass. “Later, sexy.”

When he didn’t so much as reply or glance her way, she huffed and hopped into her car. Zacharia only registered she was gone when the familiar sound of her orange Peugeot 208’s engine filled the air.

Her tail lights were disappearing into the night when Zacharia’s phone rang. Speak of the devil – it was one of the Three Idiots. “Boss, there’s a box here. Appeared out of the blue… Umm… it just, like, showed up.”

Zacharia hung up, murmuring to the car that she would have to wait. He closed the hood, threw the cover over her, and headed for the main gate security post.

He strode through the courtyard, crushing heaps of yellow leaves beneath his feet. Late autumn cold crept over his body, causing chills along his skin. Street lights illuminated the paths between the green meadows, hillocks, and tall oak trees of the yard, but Zacharia kept to the murky shadows. A sudden powerful gust of wind smacked him across the face and knocked over more leaves from the trees above. He winced at the tiny drops of rain that dripped from the sky.

The security post was to the right of the main gate – a little brick structure, equipped with the necessary gadgets to provide twenty-four-hour surveillance of the entire Hospital and its surroundings. To the side, the Three Idiots stood in a circle, staring down at something Zacharia couldn’t see.

“What’s up, guys?”

The Three Idiots raised their heads in alarm and moved aside, allowing him to spot the wooden box at their feet.

“Boss, this thing popped up out of nowhere,” Idiot One said. An inexperienced vampire, he had screwed up more surveillance shifts than Zacharia could count, resulting in him being assigned to the areas with the least likelihood of anything happening – the side walls.

Idiot Two bobbed his head. “Yeah, I saw it on the screen.” He was a witcher with a crooked nose and a tendency to watch human porn on his phone instead of surveying the main gate, as he was supposed to. “At 21:19, all clear. Then, bam! Three seconds later, this box appears – like that!” He snapped his fingers to illustrate his point.

Zacharia tried to get their measure with a glance, but there wasn’t much to measure. “Where were the guards on the outside of the gate?”

“I was with Tony.” Idiot Three pointed at Idiot Two. “We heard a noise coming from the forest and I suggested we go check it out…”

“So, neither of you was where you were supposed to be when the box appeared?”

Idiot Three shrugged. “Well, yeah. We were in the woods, but there wasn’t anything around.”

Amateurs.

Zacharia pointed to the thing with his eyes. The square box was less than three feet by three feet. Its wooden top had a metal ring. “What’s in it?”

“We don’t know, boss. We didn’t dare to open it,” Idiot Two confessed.

“And why not?”

“What if it’s a bomb?” Idiot One’s voice was becoming shrieky.

Zacharia bared his teeth. “If it’s a bomb, you blow up.”

“Well, yeah, but seeing as how we’re no longer immortal and stuff…”

Why was he even bothering to train such imbeciles? Maybe it was time to add some humans to his security team. Good thing there wasn’t much to protect the building from, otherwise, they’d be screwed with these cowards on duty.

“Why are you three on this shift, anyway? I specifically left orders to never assign you together.” He leaned closer over the box, inspecting the light-brown polished wooden surface.

“Well, Tony couldn’t do tomorrow, and I was already—”

Zacharia ignored them. As a half-lycanthrope and half-vampire, he had the monstrous power of the former, the high speed of the latter, and his own extraordinary intelligence. On top of that, his senses were more heightened than most immortals’. Which was why his nostrils had no trouble detecting the familiar smell of death. Whatever was in the box, it wasn’t alive.

A flash of lightning brightened the entire courtyard as if to foreshadow something dreadful.

He was suddenly keen to get the box as far away from the Three Idiots as he could, to better inspect it. “This is for the surgeons, boys. I remember now, Nyavolski told me he was expecting something.”

“Ah, all right. That explains it. They could have at least left a note…” Idiot One mumbled.

Zacharia shoved the box under his arm. “Get back to work. I’ll take it inside.”