Page 26 of The Planetary Systems Preservation Committee Decided We Needed a Nanny

The nurse’s hand shoots out and stops me in my tracks, and I’m about to give them a what-for when my PDA pops up with a message from my robot. “Return to Lora.”

I show the nurse, they let me go, and I run to the room, barging into a disaster that will need both cleaning and fixing. The woman is dead or faking it with a long metal spear pinning her to the wall. She doesn’t really look all that human right now. It looks like she shape-shifted, but it’s hard to explain. It's like her bones shifted, but not like the shape of them did, just the underlying structure. It’s gruesome, to be honest, and I don’t think anyone really wants to know what would cause that kind of mutilation.

Lora rattles, pulling me out of my stare off with the womanish-thing on the wall. He’s on his knees, panting heavily, and bleeding from more places that I can count at the glance.

I run to him, stopping just short of touching him. “Do you need blood?” I demand, ready to give it all to him, if that’s what he needs.

“Take me to your domicile,” he rasps, spitting blood with every word.

“We’re literally at a hospital,” I say while doing as I’m told and using my teleportation device to take us both to my apartment.

Lora and I land in my living room, and he grabs my waist. “I ask for a donation, but then I will go into my until I heal. May I inhabit your closet for the duration of my ?”

“You are too big for me to move to my closet,” I remind him.

“I will move,” he rasps, coughing a glob of blood up onto my uniform.

I help him as much as possible to his feet and he limps to my bedroom closet, where he falls back to his knees and gets comfortable. He indicates he’s ready for my donation, so I carefully straddle his hips, squatting instead of sitting so that I don’t exacerbate any of his wounds.

“My gratitude,” Lora whispers, pulling me close. “Do you have nanites?” he asks from a breath away from my neck.

“Of course,” I assure him, since one of my jobs as a janitor is biological decontamination that requires microscopic nanites, and I’m required to carry medical nanites with me while in a hospital for emergent situations even though I’m not medical staff.

Lora rattles in approval and sets his mouth against my neck. His vampiric fangs descend with a snap, biting into my jugular with amazing precision. The worry and fear for Lora holds back the arousal that I got from this last time, but it’s still stupidly pleasurable rather than painful. Lora’s saliva could be bottled up…

A wave of lightheadedness hits me suddenly, but when I try to pull back from Lora, he holds me tighter.

“Baby, I’m beginning to feel…” I taper off as my vision starts to cloud around the edges.

Lora rattles possessively, crushing me to his chest for a few fraught seconds before all at once he goes completely limp, falling back to the floor in a lump, eyes wide open with a film like a nictitating membrane over them, mouth slack, fangs still hanging out of his mouth a good two inches.

I carefully pull out a sticky bandage thing with nanites instead of gauze and fumble with getting it unwrapped as I seep blood from my vein. I eventually manage to get the nanites unwrapped and onto my puncture wounds, and then I give in to the faint I’ve been breathing through, falling onto Lora’s huge, hard body.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Everything hurts.

I slowly lift myself up off Lora’s body, creaking with sore muscles and a crick in my neck that makes me gasp. I blink back tears of pain as I get reoriented in life. I’m still in the closet, and Lora is…

Unthinking, I cock my head to the side curiously and yelp in pain at the sharp lightning strike of pain from the stupid way I fell unconscious.

Lora looks dead. I’m not even kidding. He’s not breathing. He’s not moving. That waxiness of his skin is exaggerated more than ever. He’s room temperature. Everything about him looks lifeless.

I scramble off of him and then knee walk back to him, checking his body for any kind of pulse. I don’t even know where his pulse points are, but I get nothing, and eventually I overcome the stupid neck pain enough to put my ear to his chest where I know he has at least one heart because I’ve heard it before, but there’s nothing at all. No sound, no beating, no thumping…

“Lora?” I whisper, shocked and horrified.

My entire body starts shaking, trembling with a tsunami of emotion. I shake him, but he’s stiff as a board like he’s been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in.

A cry of grief erupts from me as I sit back. I hold myself, arms crossed to keep my guts inside when they feel like they’re being ripped out. Tears soak my cheeks as grief buries me. I didn’t even know him that well. We were just starting out. What the fuck? What the fucking fuck??

“Ollie?” Bee’s voice breaks through the grief and shock, and I turn to see my cousin standing in the doorway with her phone in her hand. “Oh my god. Ollie!” she cries out, falling to her knees beside me. “I got a text from the empire that you were in distress.”

I indicate Lora. “He’s gone. I don’t know what happened. He drank my blood to heal from his wounds, but when I woke up, he was like this. Just… dead.” My voice breaks on that word, and I curl into my cousin, crying harder than before.

Bee hugs me around my shoulders tight for just a brief moment before pushing me back. “I’m going to check him. I’m a literal emergency care worker, and I was a nurse. I’m going to check him,” she repeats, pulling out a touch screen device similar to the one I use, but hers has some fancier attachments.

She holds it over Lora’s body and the thing scans him. It’s hard to breathe, but I manage to get air into my lungs before my cousin makes a sound like she’s not as worried about my loss as I am. “Uh. This says he’s sleeping,” she explains, sitting back and showing me the results of her scan.