The Doctor's Guardian. Marie Ferrarella

both surfaces with a gel. Rubbing them together, Nika called out, “Clear!” before applying both paddles to Kelly’s chest.

      His body convulsed in response, clearing the mattress in some places, but ultimately the former police sergeant didn’t awaken from what appeared to be his now permanent sleep.

      Nika didn’t want to let him go.

      “C’mon, Mr. Kelly, you’ve got a chess game to finish, remember? You wanted to show Don that he couldn’t just come in and be the center of attention, remember? Don’t wimp out on me now,” she pleaded. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked at the nurse who was now at the controls of the defibrillator. “Again!” The next moment, with the amps raised, Nika cried “Clear!” and tried to revive the man again.

      With the same results.

      Twice more she made the retired police sergeant’s body go through its macabre, lifeless dance and had the exact same results each time.

      Holding the paddles, she saw the two nurses and the orderly looking at her, waiting. Silently telling her to do what she knew she had to do.

      Call it.

      She released the sigh that was rattling around in her chest. “Time of death—eleven twenty-three,” Nika pronounced quietly and then returned the paddles to the cart.

      “You did everything you could do, Doctor,” Katie told her sympathetically. “It was just his time to go,” the grandmother of five added softly.

      “Besides,” the other nurse, Jenna, chimed in, “where he’s going is a lot better than where he would have gone if you’d brought him back from the brink,” she assured Nika with the confidence of the very young who never doubted themselves. “Have you seen that nursing home he was living in?” Jenna, all of twentysomething, shivered to make her point. “If that’s the way I’m going to end up, shoot me now.”

      “Hey, a little respect for the dead,” Gerald chided sharply. Jenna frowned and fell into a brooding silence as she slowly stripped the deceased man of the various tubes and wires that had been connected to him. Gerald spared Nika a compassionate look. “Death’s all part of it, Dr. Pulaski,” he told her philosophically. “You shouldn’t take it so hard.”

      The orderly was right. After all, what did she expect, Nika asked herself. She was working in the Geriatrics Unit, for heaven’s sake. These were old people. A lot of them had overtaxed their immune systems and were susceptible to so many different things, things that could fell them without a moment’s notice.

      That was why they were running understaffed in this unit, because of the threat of someone unwittingly bringing in the flu. They couldn’t control the visitors who came in—although, sadly, a lot of these patients had no one to visit them—but they could at least control the staff’s interactions with the patients.

      Nika nodded in response to what the orderly said. She forced herself to focus on the steps she had to take next, not on what had just happened.

      “I guess it just seems like a lot of these old people have been dying lately,” she murmured. And death was not something she would ever get used to.

      “That’s because they have,” Katie told her. She went about tidying the man up so that he had a little dignity left, even in death. “They’re old people,” she emphasized, just as Nika had in her mind. “It goes with the territory and is to be expected. It’s a lot harder to handle when you lose a patient in the pediatrics ward,” she pointed out. “At least these people have had relatively full lives.”

      Nika nodded, then squared her shoulders, silently telling herself to get over it, to straighten up and fly right. She’d do none of her remaining patients any good if she allowed herself to break down and cry.

      “You’re right,” she told Katie.

      The woman grinned broadly. “Of course I’m right. It’s in my contract,” Katie told her with a wink. “Go help your living patients. There’s nothing more you can do for Mr. Kelly. We’ll do what needs to be done for him now,” the nurse assured her, taking charge.