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  Mercy Killer

  Wings of Justice Book 1

  T S Paul

  Great God Pan Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by T S Paul

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The Federal Witch Universe (and what happens within/characters/situations/worlds) are Copyright (c) 2016-2019 by T S Paul and Great God Pan Publishing

  Special thanks to my wife Heather who keeps me grounded and to Merlin the Cat. We are his minions.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Author Notes

  Also By T S Paul

  One

  The former soldier screamed out in agony into the silent ward. "Nurse! Can someone help me?"

  Looking up from the pile of files in front of me, I peered over my shoulder. Half the lights were off, giving the special ward a haunted look. Patient twenty-five seemed to be awake. Normally we sedated them at night. I wondered if he was possessed. Those under the influence of demons were able to shrug off the effects of drugs to some extent. "Chris, can you take care of twenty-five?"

  "He's not my patient. I've got the evens tonight. Odds are all Christine's," he answered, not even bothering to look up from his own work. Chris was the single male nurse on this shift.

  There are times I really hated working in this hospital. My job duty as floor RN meant that I was responsible for this entire ward, usually at night.

  Situations such as this one arose constantly. This particular hospital was part of the VA system here in Massachusetts. Budget cuts were everywhere these days and even the VA wasn’t immune. My experience as a nurse and low pay this place paid was why I was in charge of all four wings on this floor. Shorthanded wasn’t even a word that would explain the number of nurses available to help. "Where's Christine at?"

  Chris stopped typing and spun around in his chair. "How should I know? All I see is more paperwork." He waved his hands at the overflowing counter around us both.

  Blowing out a breath in disgust, I sighed. "Fine, I’ll take care of it."

  I pushed my chair away from the counter and stood up. Room twenty-five was only the tip of the iceberg. If any awake patients in the other rooms caught a glimpse of me, they would all be calling for help. Sometimes my job really sucked.

  Crossing to the room, I could see twenty-five trying to pry his hands loose from the restraints. Bloody rings were cut into the man’s flesh. He’d been trying to escape for a while now. I grabbed his chart off the door as I entered and flipped it open.

  He was a retread. A former cured patient that had left us but then had come back. These men had fought the worst enemy mankind had ever come up against and had won. Their bodies and minds had been broken because of it. Going out into the world post-war was very scary for some of them. Too scary.

  According to Corporal Essen’s records, his entire unit had been wiped out by an unknown entity, otherwise known as a Demon. More than half the patients on this wing were here for the same reason.

  "Hello, Corporal Essen. What can I help you with?” I asked him as I carefully looked him over without touching him.

  "Let me go! Let me go!" The former army man struggled to free himself, further inflaming his arms. Healed burn scars covered every inch of his exposed skin.

  "I'm sorry, corporal. I can't do that. Those are there for the safety of both you and the rest of the patients. Do you remember why you're here?" I glanced down at the notes again. Married with two children is what family status read. Flipping to the end, I found a new notation.

  "No. Maybe." He stopped trying to pull free and glared at me. There was the slightest hint of red in his eyes. "Will you tell me?"

  I waved the file in my hand. “This says you had an altercation with your wife. Were you aware you did that?”

  Essen looked away from me. “She threw my things away.”

  All the notes said he was uncommunicative, so this level of conversation was new. “Do you know why she did that?”

  “They were my memories. Mine! My men fought and died for those things. She had no right to do that,” Essen half yelled at me.

  Catching the man’s eyes, I kept him focused on my voice. “This was war related, then?”

  “Marge said the war was over. But she’s wrong! It will never be over for me,” Essen stated. The gleam in his eyes was much brighter now. “How else am I supposed to remember my men? I need that stuff!”

  What historians were now calling the Demon War was over. It had been over, in fact, for a bit more than fifteen years. The horror began in the early 1940’s continuing the chaos and confusion of the previous decades. Paranormal creatures, once thought to be myth, burst onto the scene during what many called the great war of 1914. Battles were fought and landscapes were changed. Humanity took a stand against the formerly hidden beings by banding together as a species. Paranormals were ostracized and locked away until they were needed. In the former country of Germany a dictator arose. Dark powers that should have remained hidden were used to raise a demon prince. By killing his new master the prince cast a plague of demons upon the Earth that only the combined efforts of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia could stop. By then all of central Europe was destroyed.

  These men, though, were constantly reliving the battles they’d fought. Whipping out a pen, I made a notation. Day shift would need both a psychiatrist and an exorcist soon. Someone really screwed up letting him go the first time.

  “Corporal, I’m going to have someone look at those wrists for you. I can’t let you go tonight, but I’ll schedule a doctor for you. We only put those on you to keep you safe. Will you let us help you?” I asked the man.

  Essen nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

  Inclining my head, I murmured my own thanks and left the room. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar is what my mother used to say all the time. Of course, she wasn’t trying to catch flies. Looking up and down the hall, I visualized the case multiplied by hundreds or even thousands. When a war ends, the soldiers usually go home. Not these poor souls. They were literally cursed to this place and the few others like it for the rest of their lives.

  “You stopped it. Call me impressed,” Chris muttered as I brushed past him to sit back down. As before, he didn’t look up at me.

  I blew out a breath. “Corporal Essen. His restraints are entirely too tight on him. There’s bleeding on top of his scars already.”

  Chris turned his head to stare at me. Not showing an ounce of compassion himself, he asked me why I cared. “They’re just a job. Why do you care about them so? I’ve looked at twenty-five. You couldn’t have missed his eyes. The exorcism obviously failed. How much you wanna bet they take him from here and send him to Crowley?”

  I shook my head. Crowley was the name of the prison all hard-case paranormals and Demon-possessed people were sent to. The rumor was that it was a place of no return. As for my compassion, it was what kept me sane here.

  The rest of my night shift was filled with medical alerts, hand-holding, and a code blue on one of the lower floors. The rest of the hospital forgot about us here, unless there was an emergency.

  Our patients were outside the normal caseload of the hospital
. Too many of those that served our country with honor were dying from the effects in a way no one ever believed was possible and…they were forgotten here.

  A cold hand on the back of my neck gave me the shivers, causing me to bolt upright in my chair. “I’m awake!”

  Dr. Charles Norton removed his hand and laughed. “That is a unique way of catching up on paperwork, Gen. I should try it.”

  Giving the handsome man a smile, I ducked my head a little before speaking. “We were short again last night. Christine pulled another no-show on us. She won’t listen to me at all, it seems. Can you talk to her?”

  Running his fingers through his short hair as if to straighten it, the young doctor nodded. “Night shift is really short-handed right now. More budget cuts. I noticed a few applications in my box this morning. I’ll do a few interviews. And I’ll speak to Christine. Be aware that the hospital can’t afford to just get rid of trained personnel, though. She may just move downstairs.”

  “Yes, sir. But look at this!” The giant stack of patient files and other paperwork still rose in front of me. Waving my hand at it, I reminded him of the day’s work. “I’ll buckle down on this tonight after day shifts had a chance to make a dent in it. Memorial Day is Monday, so it should be a quiet weekend on the Demon wing.”

  “Charles. I keep telling you to call me Charles, Gen. You’re an RN, not a candy striper,” the doctor remarked. Picking up the night log, he began signing off on meds or other requests.

  “They make more money,” I muttered to myself sarcastically. The young girls in the bright outfits downstairs disgusted me. The way they interacted with the patients reminded me a lot of how my mother treated her clients. All part of the game, she would say.

  Norton looked up from file. “Did you say something, Gen?”

  I shook my head. “Just talking to myself, sorry. Did you see my note about Corporal Essen?”

  “Yes, I’ll add my concern to yours but...you know how short-handed we are…” Charles pointed his finger skyward. “They may just send him on. Demon possession isn’t something we’re set up to deal with.”

  “I understand.” I signed my name on the file in front of me then tossed it onto the shorter, to be filed, pile. “Have a good shift, Dr.…Charles. I’m going home.”

  “About that,” Charles reached out, tapping Chris’s shoulder to gain his attention. “Both security and the local police have much of the hospital sealed off. You’ll both have to go through the interview process as you leave.”

  Chris looked up from his pile of paperwork in surprise. “What? Politics or police? What happened to make them act like that?”

  “A big-shot lawyer down on three died in his sleep last night,” Charles replied.

  I snorted. “People die. It’s sort of our business around here.”

  Giving me a sharp look of disapproval, the doctor shook his head. “Not like this. He fell down some steps and broke his leg last week.”

  “Blood clot? That sort of thing can happen,” Chris remarked.

  “True, but he was on anti-clot meds for that. This was something else. Remember when the lower levels were remodeled last year?” Charles asked us.

  Chris and I both nodded. It had been a major production. Hundreds of thousands spent on all three floors, a huge expense for the hospital. The Demon Wing and all of the floors above us hadn’t even been touched. It turned out to be a bit of pork barrel politics from the local politicians.

  “Closed circuit cameras were put in when they did it. The administration said it was to protect the patients, but you know how that goes,” Charles explained. “Security rolled the tape back. Someone snuck in and killed him.”

  “Why kill a nobody lawyer at the VA?” Chris asked.

  Charles shook his head. “He wasn’t a nobody. It was Brandon Hoot, the insurance guy. You know, the one that scammed that nursing home a few years ago?”

  That case was huge. It was in all the papers. Hoot was a shyster lawyer working for some out of the way firm, and he had a brilliant idea. Sell very high-priced life insurance policies to the elderly. Looking at it from the outside, it sounded like a way to help people get money after death to cover their families’ expenses and things. But it wasn’t quite like that. The policies were all fake. The company issuing them didn’t exist in real life, only on paper. Somehow Hoot had ginned up paperwork stating that he didn’t know this fact and that the money he collected wasn’t in his possession. Investigators were unable to find any trace of the funds. Hoot beat the case in court and continued to live the high life, literally taking money from widows and orphans. A real scumbag.

  “Oh,” Chris replied.

  “Oh is right. They are interviewing everyone who worked last night over this. I’m surprised they haven’t come up here yet,” Charles explained to him.

  “The signs.” Lost in thought, I absently answered.

  Both men turned in my direction. “Signs?”

  I glanced at the ceiling. Men. “The Demon signs?”

  “Right. Those. We’ll be last, then,” Charles replied.

  Every elevator, stairwell, and hallway surrounding us warned of our patients here. Government officials, including the police, got a little twitchy when they encountered the possessed.

  By the Gods above and below. Just how much had those cameras seen? Had they caught my face?

  “Charles, do you know who they’re looking for exactly? I mean, we might have seen the person up here. We do get visitors sometimes,” I said, correcting myself.

  The doctor cocked his head to one side for a moment as he thought about it. “In my interview, they didn’t say. From what the others have said downstairs, it was after visiting hours.” He waved the file in his hands. “No visits on here, so it was just you two here last night.”

  Dr. Norton was right. It was just us two and we had perfect alibis. Chris would never rat me out. He would have to admit to taking a nap every time he worked night shift if he did. Doing as little as possible was a job not easily replaced. With him, I was safe.

  “I guess I’ll wait for day shift then,” I told them.

  Charles smiled then looked down at the file in his hands. Pulling out his pen, he signed the log. “I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

  Just like always, the young doctor went to his office and closed the door. If Christine had been here, she would’ve gone with him. From what I’d seen here, she was all about personal care when it came to the doctors. She disgusted me and reminded me of my mother. I hated my mother.

  Flipping open another file, I dug back into the reports. Each patient needed to be updated, in triplicate, each and every night.

  Day shift showed up a full hour late. Two nurses, an intern, and three very nervous police officers got off the elevator. One man peeled off to stand guard as the others approached the desk.

  Making a show of glancing at my watch, I smiled at the day shift RN. “Running late today?”

  The woman shook her head as she hooked a finger over her shoulder. “Interviews. These guys think someone here at the hospital killed someone on purpose.”

  One of the police officers scowled. “We know someone killed someone. It’s our job to find them.”

  Corporal Essen took that moment to cut loose, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Out! I want out! Get these things off me!”

  Instinctively, both officers started toward the man’s room, but I stepped in front of them with my hands raised. “Hold up, please. You cannot go in there.”

  “Lady, we can go anywhere we like, we’re the police,” the cop said, pointing at his badge. “Now move!”

  Stepping to one side, I spoke to the other RN. “Room twenty-five. He was P5 but slipped into P2 yesterday.”

  “Has Dr. Norton been informed?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I replied. Turning away from her, I watched the two uniformed cops approach Essen’s room.

  “Hey buddy, you ok in there?” the first cop asked as they both stepped into the r
oom.

  Essen spotted the men and began tugging and shaking as he tried to loosen the hospital cuffs. “Please help me, these hurt!”

  “Hold on there. Let us take a look at you,” the second officer told him as both men stepped closer to the bed. “Are you seeing this, Brian?”

  Sergeant Hinnekamp had been on the job for longer than his partner had been alive. But he’d never seen something like this, in a hospital of all places. “I’m seeing it but not believing it, Michael.”

  Officer Michael Lloyd reached out and grabbed Essen’s left arm while the sergeant grabbed his right. Both were in the act of loosening the bonds when Dr. Norton stepped into the room.

  “Stop! Don’t…” the words were barely out of his mouth when Essen grabbed Michael with his now loose hand.

  “At last!” Essen shouted, even as he sagged in the bed.

  “Dammnit!” Dr. Norton turned and hit the large red button next to the door. “We’ve got a code black in room twenty-five!”

  There were emergency supplies at every station on this floor and near the elevators. By hitting the alarm, Dr. Norton effectively locked the floor down and alerted security of a Demon event.

  Reaching across the desk, I quickly pulled on my gloves. Unlike surgical wear, these were more like fancy dish gloves. Rubber had proved effective in protecting humans from Demonic possession by touch. Essen had either broken free or had managed to transfer his ‘Demon’ to another. Good for the former corporal, but bad news for the cops!

  Nurse Chris and I hit the doorway at the same time. Doc Norton had the younger police officer in a chokehold, immobilizing him. The other cop was on the floor, out cold.