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The night staff called him Doctor Hale, because that’s what the badge said.
They never asked why he volunteered for the overnight shifts. Never questioned why the old patients stabilized when he took over. Never noticed that the blood bank shortages always coincided with his rotations.
Hospitals are temples of forgetting. People come here to die quietly, stripped of titles, influence, history. Men who once signed laws. Women who once ran syndicates, churches, unions, families that ruled blocks and decades. By the time they reached the geriatric ward, they were just bones wrapped in paper gowns, shitting themselves, waiting for the morphine drip.
That’s where the Guild had been exiled.
They had ruled once, quietly. Not kings, not gods. Fixers. Architects. People who bent nations without ever being photographed. They called themselves the Guild because it sounded medieval enough to scare the superstitious and boring enough to slip past everyone else.
And now they were rotting.
Parkinson’s. Dementia. Failing hearts. Soft brains. Soft hands.
Useless.
Doctor Hale walked the ward like a priest doing last rites. Calm. Methodical. Clipboard tucked under one arm. His face held the practiced neutrality of someone who had seen too much death to react to any of it, but that was the lie. Hale didn’t fear death.
He’d outrun it for almost two centuries.
Room 417 housed Miriam Cross, ninety-three, former intelligence broker, spine curved like a question mark. She’d lost the use of her legs and most of her short-term memory, but her eyes still tracked movement like a hawk.
“You’re late,” she rasped when he entered.
“Time is relative,” Hale said, checking her vitals. Her pulse fluttered like a trapped bird. “Especially for people like us.”
Her lips peeled back in something close to a smile. “You smell different tonight.”
He leaned closer so the camera above the door couldn’t catch his mouth near her ear. “Because tonight, we stop pretending.”
The Guild had found Hale ten years earlier, when his name surfaced again, same face, same credentials, different decade. Patterns attract predators. They’d tested him first. Offered him money. Power. A seat at the table.
He’d laughed.
Then he showed them what he was.
Not the theatrical kind. No coffins, no castles. Hale was a functional vampire, the result of a forgotten medical experiment conducted during a war that officially never happened. His body didn’t age. His organs regenerated. Blood wasn’t sustenance in the poetic sense, it was fuel. Catalyst. Without it, he could survive, but diminished. With it, he was something else entirely.
The Guild saw opportunity.
Now, standing in the geriatric ward, Hale opened a refrigerated case from his cart. Inside were syringes labeled with false trial codes. Each one contained blood that had been… altered.
Not turned. Enhanced.
He injected Miriam first.
Her body convulsed. Alarms spiked. Then, steadied.
Her spine straightened by degrees. Fingers curled with strength they hadn’t had in decades. Her eyes cleared, the fog burning away like mist under sun.
She inhaled sharply. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, I remember everything.”
Down the hall, Hale repeated the process.
Former war financiers. Disgraced judges. Retired arms dealers. A disgraced cardinal whose name had been erased from history books. Twelve of them. The last true Guild members still alive.
They didn’t become young again. That would’ve been suspicious.
They became functional.
Hands stopped shaking. Eyes focused. Speech sharpened. Minds woke up angry.
The next phase took weeks.
Physical therapy reports were falsified. Improvement charts padded. The hospital board, already compromised, signed off on experimental treatments without reading the fine print. Hale fed selectively. A milliliter here. A controlled extraction there. No deaths. No red flags.
What blood Hale gave them carried his nature diluted, refined. They weren’t vampires. They didn’t need to feed. But their bodies remembered dominance. Their cells stopped dying on schedule. Their minds stopped decaying.
The Guild didn’t want immortality.
They wanted relevance.
Within months, the patients were discharged, into “assisted living” facilities that were anything but. Secure compounds. Old safe houses dusted off and rewired. The Guild reconvened in a basement beneath a decommissioned courthouse, sitting around a scarred oak table like ghosts refusing to lie down.
Miriam spoke first. “The world forgot us.”
Hale stood in the shadows. He always did. “The world is loud. It forgets anything that doesn’t scream.”
A former judge cracked his knuckles, bones no longer brittle. “We don’t scream.”
“No,” Hale agreed. “You redirect.”
They began quietly.
A senator’s stroke reversed overnight after an anonymous transfusion. A hedge fund collapse halted by a whisper campaign and one missing accountant. A pharmaceutical merger dissolved when three board members suddenly remembered crimes they’d sworn were buried.
The Guild didn’t seize power.
They rebalanced it.
And Hale? He became their physician, strategist, and executioner when needed.
Because not everyone deserved correction.
A young tech mogul figured out something was wrong, patterns, coincidences, elderly figures resurfacing with too much clarity. He threatened exposure. Thought sunlight was a weapon.
Hale visited him in a private clinic.
“You’re dying,” Hale told him honestly. “Aggressive cancer. You didn’t know yet.”
The man laughed until Hale showed him the scans.
“I can fix it,” Hale continued. “Or I can let it finish.”
“What do you want?” the man whispered.
“Nothing,” Hale said. “The Guild wants silence.”
The man chose wrong.
Years passed.
The world shifted in subtle ways. Old laws resurfaced. Old debts were collected. Nations leaned differently. No one ever blamed the elderly, who would?
They were supposed to be fading, not sharpening.
One night, Miriam found Hale alone in the ward again, standing beside an empty bed.
“You gave us back our teeth,” she said. “What do you get?”
Hale looked at the flickering monitor. Flatline. Peaceful. A donor, officially.
“I get to practice medicine,” he said. “The long kind.”
She studied him. “And when we’re gone?”
Hale smiled, not kind, not cruel. Just patient.
“Then I’ll find another ward,” he said. “Power never dies. It just ages poorly.”
The lights hummed. Somewhere above them, a city slept, unaware that its future was being prescribed in milliliters.
And Doctor Hale clocked in for another shift.
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