Shapeshifted Read Online Free PDF Page B

translation line at the hospital if need be. The woman I was following knocked on a closed door and, at an answer from the occupant, opened it for me.
    Dr. Tovar held my résumé in his hands.
    He was beautiful. Dark skin, black hair, a strong jaw, wide shoulders under a tweed coat—suddenly I wished I’d dressed up a little more for this, until I remembered he was a doctor.
    Doctors were bad ideas, and off limits, for any nurse. You got into fights with doctors too often to think of them that way. At the hospital, it was like war. Nurses were on the front lines, and doctors were like distant generals who never believed you when you said you were running out of ammunition while they were yelling at you to march.
    When he was done frowning at my résumé, he glanced up and looked surprised, for the briefest of moments, to see me. Regaining his composure, he gestured to the extra chair.
    I sat down across from him. This room was a personal office with a simple desk and worn-down chairs, not a place for seeing patients. There were books in both Spanish and English behind him, thick medical dictionaries that looked out of date. If it were any smaller, my knees would have met his beneath the desk.
    “And just why am I looking at your résumé?” He had a mild accent, the kind that said he’d grown up somewhere else but lived here a very long time.
    “Lucky, I guess?” I tried halfheartedly to sound convincing.
    He looked up at me with a grimace, and his eyes traveled up and down the length of me, much as the woman who’d walked me down the hall had. At a club or on a date, it might feel sexual, but here I felt like he was cataloging all my flaws. When he was done, he sighed. “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”
    “I’m sorry, but no. I can play a mean game of charades, though.”
    He didn’t crack a smile. “What do you know about serving diverse patient populations?”
    I’d had to camouflage the second-to-last job on my résumé. No way to put works well with vampires down in the prior employment blank. “I worked at a county facility. We saw all kinds of patients there.”
    “Why did you leave?”
    “I didn’t like working night shift.”
    “And yet your next job was at a sleep clinic? Your … current job?” he said, after inspecting the dates more closely.
    “I’d rather work days. And with patients that are awake.”
    He made a thoughtful noise. He wasn’t that much older than me, early thirties, but he seemed older, like he was required to exude the aura of middle-aged wisdom here. I guessed as the doctor of a community health clinic, it was expected of him.
    “So, um—what happened to the mural outside?” I asked, trying to make small talk.
    He gave me a dark look over my résumé. “We painted over it. I don’t want people praying to death on my watch.” I swallowed and nodded as he went on, setting my résumé down. “Nothing personal, Miss Spence, but you’re completely unqualified to work here. You don’t speak Spanish, you’ve never done real clinic work with people who were awake, and you’ve never been out of a hospital setting. I don’t think there’s anything you can offer us. At all.”
    His tone wasn’t rude; he was just being forthright about the facts. My instinct was to fight him—but with what? My mom was right. Just because fighting was the only tool in my tool belt didn’t mean it was always the best one for the job. And why should I, now that the mural was gone? It’d been foolish to think I’d gotten some sort of a sign.
    And being rejected here didn’t mean I was condemned to work at the sleep center. I’d sent my résumé out to a ton of other places. At least now I knew I needed to come up with a better why-I-left-my-last-job lie.
    I stood and reached out to shake his hand. “Ah, well. Sorry for wasting your time.”
    He took my hand and shook it. His hand was warm and strong, and he gave me a begrudging nod. “Not many people try to work down