Waiting Room Shifting Novels & Stories

The follow-up appointment was at two thirty on a Wednesday and Jayda arrived five minutes early, which was her habit for appointments that mattered, and she sat in the waiting room with the specific quality of someone who had learned to use waiting rooms as thinking spaces rather than endurance exercises, the brief forced stillness of them no longer feeling like something to be managed but like something to be used.

All of those facts occupy the same night. “I keep waiting for the next channel alert,” I admit. “The second wave. The secondary entry. The blade from the scrap of cover that was supposed to be clear. My body has not received the message that the sequence has stopped.” Caius’s voice is quiet. “It will. Not on a schedule. On the accumulation of hours that do not require a response.” Zane shifts, then stays. “We should sleep in shifts anyway. Not because the overlay is live. Because none of us will do it properly if we leave it optional.”

Bright The hospital waiting room was full, but to me it was as if everything were silent. The ticking of the clock on the wall was the only thing marking the passage of time, and even then, the hands seemed to move at an unbearably slow pace. I felt trapped in a kind of limbo, a space where nothing changed and all I could do was wait.

“The seventy two hour window is gone. They’re going to move on Whitmore faster than planned.” “Is that good?” “It means less time for him to do something worse than parking a car outside our building.” Her mind lingered on it. “Your father waited three weeks,” she said. Avalon was quiet. “This time they’re moving tonight,” she said. “That’s different.” “Yes.” Sitting down, he rested his weight on both palms. Things had shifted now Back against the mattress, she stayed dressed in the robe, lying down. He lay beside her. Both stayed awake together.

And I had to hope he would fight to come back to me. Walking into the office, we took our seats to wait our turn. I looked around the waiting room. There were not many waiting as the doctor kept his practice run tightly. People did not wait long. I could see one person waiting who was missing a limb. He was a shifter and looked lost. He was alone for his visit. He was using crutches to get around. He looked up at me and smiled as I smiled back.

“All right.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll be moving Christian in a couple of hours. We’ll need some time to settle him and get him stable, and a few medical items need to be taken care of that I won’t get into with you. The ward is on the fourth floor, and there is a private waiting room. A nurse will come and get you when he is done. Why don’t you go shower, eat, and try to relax?” “You-you want me to leave now?”

The fact that I can't shift is bothering me more and more every single day and I am getting really impatient. I have just two days now till it completes two weeks after my birthday, and if I don't shift till then, it will mean that I am defected, that I am an abnormal werewolf who can't shift. My eyes burn with tears when I think of it and I look up at the ceiling to stop them from falling.

I stood at the front of them and looked at the range of faces, the accumulated decades and centuries in the room, the specific quality of people who had been existing carefully for long enough to have developed a considerable patience for waiting. “The waiting is done,” I said. “What Ethan has been building is ready to be used. We are the thing between what he has built and the moment he uses it. That means we move now, not when it’s comfortable, not when we have more information than we have.” I looked at them. “Be ready. The call will come within days and it will not come with a long lead time.” They dispersed.

Drew made a sound of mild outrage and settled back in his chair and looked at his phone again with the focused attention of a man who was absolutely not thinking about anything in particular. I almost smiled again. The kind that came from remembering that the world still had ordinary things in it, small ridiculous human things, even in waiting rooms at whatever hour this was. Moments later. The doors at the far end opened and I felt it before I saw it… the shift in the air of a room when someone walks into it who belongs to you. I was on my feet before I had consciously decided to stand.

Irina sat down. Sasha sat beside her. The family waiting room on the third floor was small and beige and had chairs that were marginally better than the waiting room downstairs and a window that looked out at a parking structure which was not a view designed to comfort anyone but was what it was. They sat in it. Two chairs facing the door. The clock on the wall moved in the specific way clocks moved in waiting rooms — each minute taking considerably longer than sixty seconds to complete, as though time had been informed of the situation and had decided that urgency was not its problem.