Bloodshifted

by Cassie Alexander

  Raven got up gracefully and offered his hand to Natasha, who took it to rise. He bowed deeply to her, kissing her hand in a formal fashion. “Soon,” he told her, then released her hand and walked out.

  The vampires left the room first, then Lars and Celine trailed after them toward the dance floors. Natasha watched Raven leave with a soft smile on her face. She looked young. Asher said she should have been my age—but if she’d been turned into a daytimer when Nathaniel’s blood-testing scheme had been found out, that would have been seven years ago. She’d first gotten vampire blood when she was what, nineteen? Twenty? But she didn’t look like she’d aged a day since sixteen.

  When she turned to look at me, though, her eyes were ancient—and I realized Raven’s command had given her utter power over me.

  Jackson stepped up quickly as we became the last people in the room. “She’ll help me tonight—she can be yours tomorrow,” he warned.

  “What, you don’t trust me?” Natasha teased, giving him a lopsided grin. “Does Jackson have a crush?”

  “What kind of lab is it?” I interrupted. Her father had been doing illegal research on humans for vampires when he’d gotten in trouble with the Consortium. If she’d continued it on her own and been successful where he’d failed—

  “Stem cell. Have you ever done anything like that before?” She sounded genuinely hopeful. I shook my head. “But you’re familiar with sterile procedures, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you can draw blood?”

  “Like a vampire,” I said flippantly.

  Natasha blinked, and then broke into a smile. “Good enough for me,” she said. She looked to Jackson next, much more business-like. “I’ll expect my subjects by dawn. I want a male and a female, and try to make sure they’re not addicted to anything. The last set—”

  “I’ll get them to you after my disposal run,” he said, cutting her off.

  Natasha nodded curtly at him, then smiled again at me and walked out of the room. I turned to Jackson once she was gone. “You don’t just clean the bathrooms, do you?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jackson raised a hand and pushed it through his hair while bowing his head a little. “Not really, no.”

  “Why did you sell me out to Raven?” Not that I should have expected any loyalty—I hardly knew him and he was a daytimer, come on. Baby, your mother really ought to know better by now.

  “Everybody here has to pull their own weight—” he began, making excuses while I frowned, more at myself than him.

  I’d never worked in a lab but I’d had to have been living under a rock not to have heard of stem cells—cells that were undifferentiated, that could grow into other cell types depending on where they were used and what factors they were exposed to. Scientists were busy trying to use them to cure all sorts of things, but the research, while promising, was complicated and slow.

  What the hell was Natasha using stem cells for? Was she still trying create blood substitutes like her father had been? I realized that if she was—I needed to know. She couldn’t be allowed to succeed. A world where vampires didn’t need humans for blood would be a world overrun—and no safe place for you, baby.

  At the thought of that dismal future, I frowned even harder. “And what’s a disposal run?”

  “It’d be easier to show you on the road. Assuming you want to come.”

  I hesitated. I should be volunteering to help Natasha immediately. The sooner I figured out what she was up to, the sooner I could report her to the Consortium. It was another possible way out of here: calling the group that seemed to loosely govern supernatural creatures down on her and Raven’s heads. Unfortunately, the only time I’d met a representative from them they hadn’t handed me a business card.

  “She doesn’t have any work for you yet—she’s out of human-shaped lab mice,” Jackson said. “And it does involve leaving here for about an hour in a car.”

  At the thought of getting outside and being able to ask Jackson questions in the car safely, like just what Natasha was testing, I was sold. “Let’s roll.”

  * * *

  Jackson led me through another warren of hallways until we reached a point where the walls widened and our tunnel was intersected by another one—and a prone person’s leg was visible on the far side, as if whomever the leg had belonged to had fainted dead away. I looked at Jackson, whose demeanor said that this was normal for him, and then ran ahead.

  “Are you okay?” The leg belonged to a man, a boy really, some pale club kid—made paler by blood loss. “Sir? Can you hear me?” I felt for a pulse, and it was there, but weak and slow. I shook him hard. “Hey!”

  Jackson put restraining hands on the boy’s chest. “Don’t wake him up—it’s not good for him, or us. He doesn’t want to remember this, and it would only make our job harder.” He easily picked the man up and hoisted him over his shoulder.

  “What happened to him?”

  “What do you think happened? Raven gave you a huge amount of blood the other night. He had to get it back from somewhere—or someone.” Jackson shrugged and the man jiggled. “He’s lucky to be alive—it’s not as powerful for them when they don’t kill the victim. Something about eating the spark of life fills them up faster.”

  “Psychophagy.” Once upon a time, a vampire had wanted to eat me.

  Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “Is that what it’s called?”

  “Yeah.” It was hard standing beside him when I ought to be calling 911 and starting warm IV fluids on the boy.

  “Huh.” Jackson turned to indicate where we were standing. “This is the crossroads.” He pointed down two of the tunnels. “Those ones we don’t go down. They belong to our Masters, and if you snoop you’ll be killed on sight. And that one”—he pointed to a third—“is where Natasha’s lab is.”

  I reached out for the dangling boy’s hand, digging my fingers in for a pulse. “He needs medical attention—he’s only barely alive—”

  “I know. Let’s get to the car,” he said, and started going back the way we’d come.

  * * *

  Tunnels intersected, forming a map in my mind. I definitely knew how to get up to the club now—and how to get out to the garage. Jackson flipped open a metal box on one wall, revealing a wall of key hooks like what you’d find at a valet station. It was open—of course it was. The only person here who wanted to leave was me.

  We walked down a row of cars until we reached a Honda Civic. “I don’t get to drive the fancy ones. Wouldn’t want to, either, with him on board.” He clicked the doors open and settled the boy into the back. I crawled in through the opposite door to keep an eye on him. Jackson gave me a look, but closed the door and settled into the driver’s seat.

  * * *

  “So it’s like this all the time?” I asked, lips pursed into a frown.

  “Yeah. Rex—the other male vampire—picks out a few candidates and dopes them up for himself and the others. GHB, MDMA, coke, whatever suits their moods. Do they want an easy meal? To fuck or to fight? Even without the drugs, they’ve got their own powers, the mind-control thing they can all do, and I don’t have you tell you that they’re strong.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to give him an out, for making something so awful sound so commonplace.

  “Sorry if I sound clinical,” Jackson said, after a long silence, looking back in the rearview mirror at both of us. “I realize this is your first time with it—but this sort of shit is my every night. Most times their victims are convinced, the way vampires are good at convincing people, that they were lucky to be chosen and that they had an amazing time. They got picked to go to Heaven and drank top-shelf drinks and danced with beautiful girls, and they got a little overdone. Sometimes there’s sex, even willingly, and sometimes there’s not. And sometimes I get to put on a plastic apron and cut corpses up with chain saws and put body parts into buckets of lye.”

  “So where are we going now?” If he said we were going to a chain-saw-and-ly
e-atorium, I would have to jump him.

  But then what? Wreck the car and fight out by the roadside? If it were only me I could risk that—I wouldn’t think twice. But not with you here, baby. I looked down at the slender cool wrist in my hand.

  This boy beside me had been someone’s baby once, too.

  “Relax. We’re getting him somewhere safe. And then we’ll call him in. Between the drugs and the narcotics in vampire saliva, he won’t remember what happened to him enough to explain it to the police.” He took a right-hand turn. “You don’t know how lonely this town is, Edie. And Rex has a way of picking out people who just got here—with no connections, no friends, no past.”

  “And sometimes no future,” I said.

  “I don’t kill them, I just dispose of the bodies.”

  “And that makes it better somehow?”

  He took his eyes off the road to look at the rearview mirror again. “What do you think you are now? What do you think you’ll grow up to be?”

  My lips thinned into a line. I hadn’t gotten a choice. Natasha’s dad had taken that away.

  * * *

  Jackson pulled over to a desolate side road in a bad neighborhood and put the car into PARK. I opened up the backseat door and got out, and he took the man out, laying him carefully on the side of the road. He flipped back a corner of the man’s shirt. “See? One bite’s self-sealing. There’s no reason for anyone to find it. And they’ll test what little blood he has left and find out that he went out and got drugged, only he won’t remember where he was going.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I listened to him report hearing a gunshot and seeing someone fall by the side of the road, sounding like a gruffly concerned bystander too nervous to get out and check on his own, and I waited until he’d hung up to speak.

  “You do this every night?”

  “No—most of the people go home happy with strange hangovers they can’t quite explain, and feel strangely exhausted the next day. They stumble out of the Catacombs on their own two feet—some of them even come back the next night. But our Masters live on blood, and it’s either them, or donors—which we have precious few of right now, thanks to Natasha—or us.”

  He got back into the car, and I took the seat beside him this time. He kept speaking while he disassembled the cell phone. “I doubt they’ll be here soon, but the system works. He’s young, and if he’s managed to hold on this long, he’ll make it a few more hours.” I was surprised when he turned the ignition key and slid the car into drive.

  “Aren’t we staying here? To make sure he’s safe?”

  “Can’t be seen.”

  “But—”

  “Edie, no matter your relationship with the Beast, you’re a good person, I can tell.” He pulled out and hit the gas. “I really like you. But in the Catacombs, having a heart is an expense you can’t afford.” When we hit the highway, he rolled down the window and flicked out the phone’s sim card onto the asphalt like so much cigarette ash.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Looking out the window, I realized I’d been so involved in being worried about the boy that I’d missed my chance to run.

  I already knew all the reasons why running would be a bad idea, and none of them had changed since I’d thought about them last. I reached for the door, for the window switch—and found it locked. Go figure. Jackson snorted and released it with a button on his door, and I set the window down a few inches so I could feel the night breeze. Los Angeles’s air was much drier than Port Cavell’s. We were cruising past what I assumed was downtown, where old roads that hadn’t been built for such a big city were looped over one another like concrete shoelaces.

  “I’m sorry. I know your last twenty-four hours have been rough.” He sounded sincere.

  “You could say that.” I brushed my hands through my hair. If this was my safe chance to ask him questions I needed to hurry up. “So why did Anna save you?” he asked—and I realized I wasn’t the only one in a querulous mood.

  “We’re friends.”

  “Friends,” he repeated, like he didn’t believe me. I shrugged.

  “She moved heaven and earth to get blood for you. She warned it might take a lot. Many of the Houses were unwilling to risk it. If you give blood to someone, and you can’t cure them or bring them over, then you have to take that blood back … and Anna said if anyone killed you, they’d die.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “You’re sure you’re not related somehow? Distantly?”

  “No.” I plucked at the elastic edge of my skirt. I’d saved Anna’s life twice. The first time was after I’d accidentally killed her sickly guardian at work. With his dying breath, he’d asked me to find her—and I’d found her chained up and being abused, and saved her when he couldn’t.

  The second time wasn’t so much a saving as just being willing to go back. I didn’t run away from her when I could have—when I probably should have, since it might have saved me from getting stabbed. But I tried to save her and proved that someone cared, and that had been enough. She’d saved herself in the end, breaking free from the other vampires who’d chained her, but she might not have done it without me being willing to risk my own life for her first. There was no good way to put all that into words, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to share it with Jackson besides.

  “Do you know what she’s been up to while you’ve been apart?”

  I frowned. “I heard you all call her the Beast last night.”

  “Yeah. Other names for her haven’t been quite so kind. She’s consolidating her power. Either Houses and Thrones pledge to her and take her blood—so she knows where they are at all wakeful times—or they die. In less than a year the Rose Throne, under her leadership, has come to completely dominate the East Coast.” He swung us into a wide turn. “You do know what she is, right?”

  This time I nodded. “She’s alive.”

  “Like the rest of them aren’t. She can make an infinite amount of blood. Which gives her the ability to create an infinite number of vampires,” he said.

  I nodded again.

  “And that doesn’t worry you?”

  “Should it?” I said. As much as I trusted Anna, an infinite number of vampires did sound bad.

  Jackson wheeled over to the side of the road and parked, putting hazard lights on, then turned so he could look at me. “I’m going to take a big risk here, Edie, because this might be the only time we can get away from them to talk. You were horrified by what you did to Lars, and you didn’t kick Celine out afterward. Hell, you didn’t even make her sleep on the floor. And you tried to save that kid just now—you’re not like one of us and you don’t want to be. So I think that even if you disagree with what I tell you next, you can manage to keep it a secret.”

  I wondered what confession my agreement would bring. “I can’t promise but I can try.”

  “I get the feeling you take your tries more seriously than most.” He gave me a halfhearted smile, and then his expression became worried. “I’m not just with Raven—I’m not just black and white. I’m Grey. With House Grey.”

  “No. No no no—” I backed up physically in the car seat, pressing against the door. Members of House Grey had tried to ruin Anna’s ascension to the Rose Throne’s ruling body. They were some secret organization inside the vampire Houses and Thrones that had their own obscure agenda—one that had it out for Anna and hadn’t minded trying to kill me along the way.

  “If I was going to hurt you, I wouldn’t be telling you about it now, would I?”

  I got my legs up on the seat so that if I had to I could kick him back. “Why are you telling me at all?”

  “I know you’ve had some run-ins with us in the past, and I’m sorry for that. But we had reasons for doing what we did. Anna’s messing up the game—the field, the ecosystem, whatever you want to call it. It’s not supposed to be like this for us. There’s only supposed to be scattered pockets of vampires, groups in urban areas, loners out in the rural ones. We’re conni
ving and we’re jealous as hell, and that keeps us self-policing. And when that doesn’t work, House Grey steps in and starts killing to keep the numbers down.” The sound of cars driving by at speed five feet away from us punctuated every other word of his.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to understand. House Grey isn’t your enemy, Edie. We’re here to maintain balance. Anna’s not the first living vampire, you know. One comes along every few hundred years, blood runs in the streets, and we’re almost discovered—or we are discovered, and hunted down. Back in the day our wars could be written off as plagues or genocides—but the world has changed now, there’s too much technology. We won’t get a second chance to hide this time around when things explode—and if we fight, we’ll take a fair chunk of humanity out with us.”

  “But she’s not like that—she’s my friend—” I protested, shaking my head.

  “You’re right, she seems to be. But there might come a time when you’re the only thing standing between her and her vampire army. I just want you to think about that.”

  I hugged my folded-up knees, trying not to think at all. “How can you claim that House Grey is on the side of humanity?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but we are. Or at least on the side where vampires stay the same. Vampires kill a few thousand people a year, or a few tens of thousands. It’s less than heart disease or cancer. But an army of vampires, led by a dictator, no matter how benevolent, has to feed. And God forbid something does happen to her, and all of them are set free from their bonds—what then?”

  “I’m not hurting her.”

  “I’m not putting a stake in your hand. I just want you to start to think. Please don’t make me regret talking to you like this.” He looked so earnest—I knew he believed what he was telling me.

  I just hoped I wouldn’t start believing it too. Anna was my friend. She’d saved me. She had to have her reasons for grabbing power back home—and hopefully she’d thought out all the repercussions of her actions. “I won’t.”