Nightshifted es-1

by Cassie Alexander

  “Hey—it’s not funny—” I said. It was my life—my crappy and endlessly difficult life, such as it was, but still my life!—on the line.

  “The vampires?” she said, with a mocking intonation made more cruel by her Russian accent—it sounded like I was being interrogated by a double agent in a Cold War flick. “Which ones?”

  I tried to summon up more information about them, but all I could remember was Dren’s name and the Hound. “They had long black coats,” I offered up. I knew it was lame as I said it. “And a Hound.”

  “Huskers and Hounds.” She rolled her eyes at me and then made her way to my couch. The cushions didn’t even dent beneath her weight. “Anyone can purchase their services. There’s all sorts of factions—all the Thrones, those cuckoo chick daytimers in training, pledged donors to both, ancient family allegiances.” I could tell by the set of her lips that she viewed my request as absurd, and me as an idiot for asking. It was time for a different tack.

  “Look, I saved your life—”

  “You did not save my life. I was in no danger of dying.”

  My hands curled into fists of frustration. “You didn’t really seem in any danger of being freed, though, now, did you?”

  And faster than I could see, she lunged at me, standing toe to toe, staring defiantly upward. I gulped. How foolish I’d been to think that a mere promise would hold a creature like this, but I pressed on. “Will you help me or not? Because if you won’t, I need to start opening new credit cards and figuring out where to spend the few remaining days of my life on vacation.”

  She inhaled and exhaled deeply. From so near I could smell her sweet-sour scent again, and the soporific chemicals that comprised her breath. “How do you know my name?” she asked.

  “An older man at the hospital. He told me to save you,” I said, taking a step backward, finding myself against the wall. “He wrote down your name.”

  “Who?”

  The name Mr. November would mean nothing to her, of course. My hands clenched into distracted fists, until I remembered the photo that’d sent me on my quest. “I think I have something you’ll recognize. Wait here.”

  * * *

  I went back into my bedroom and into my closet. I’d kept the pocket watch and the sepia photo it held—making my next student loan payment in a timely fashion ranked under “live through the next week” on my current to-do list.

  What was I going to tell her when I gave it to her? “Hi, I’m sorry I killed your friend and/or relative?” Promise or no promise, there was no way she was going to help me after that, and then where would I be? Dead or worse. I sat on the ground beside my bed, and Minnie peeked out. “Stay under there. There’s no way this can go well,” I told her. Then I heard German begin in the living room.

  “What kind of parlor trick is this?” she said, waving the CD player as I came out. Its light was warning yellow.

  “That’s Grandfather,” I said, as she mashed the buttons on the player. She flung it across the room and it hit the far wall. “Don’t do that!” I said, running after it.

  “I didn’t promise to not hurt your things. A pity you have so few.” She sat on my couch again.

  German continued to rise from the now red-lit player, despite the fact that the cover was clearly askew.

  “He killed a dragon once.” I picked it up and held it. It silenced in my hands as I forced the broken lid closed. “Do you want to know or not?”

  Anna crossed her arms. I dropped the watch and photo into her lap.

  She stared at the photo while she rubbed the pocket watch with her thumb.

  If I hadn’t had Grandfather to hold, the silence would have been intolerable. It was obvious that she was deep in thought, and if we’d been on Y4, I would have excused myself out of her room. Trapped in my own living room, though, I kept my hands busy by stroking the CD player’s plastic case and consciously making an effort not to speak.

  “We came to the New World together. My brother, my uncle, and I. And then I was separated,” she began, just when I thought my resolve would break. She set the watch in the lap of her skirt, and began doing something to the small photograph with her short nails that I could hear but I couldn’t see.

  “By boat?” I asked, remembering my dream.

  “How else?” She curled a lip at me, then returned to her task. “I was young then.”

  As she concentrated, I glimpsed her looking a real nine, damaged and frail. She stared into the middle distance, hands working at the photo, stirring memories inside her mind.

  “He was trying to find you, you know,” I said, because it seemed right to say.

  “He told you that?” she asked. Her hands stopped.

  “In a manner of speaking.” I rocked down to sit cross-legged in front of her, holding the CD player in my lap. Its yellow light illuminated us both. “Would you like to hear the story?”

  She nodded very slowly. So I began.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  People who can’t tell stories well don’t make very good nurses. There’s a causality between what happened yesterday to patients and what needs to happen tomorrow that people who aren’t storytellers don’t understand. I hadn’t decided exactly what to say yet, but I knew enough to start at the beginning that she needed to hear.

  “He was very old and very sick. He was found collapsed in the street, with two vials of holy water in his pockets. We took care of him as best we could, but he wanted out to find you. He wrote your name to me on a board I gave him, so I could finish the job.”

  She nodded, her gaze studious.

  “And then he pulled his breathing tube out.” The moment of truth. “It happened … while I wasn’t paying attention. The breathing machine was the only thing keeping him alive.” I braced.

  Anna stared at me, her eyes narrowing to slits. “You killed him.”

  “Yes.” Adding anything else would sound like I was making excuses, when really, there were none. There were mitigating factors surrounding the second vampire’s death—Anna being one—but as far as Mr. November’s death was concerned, his blood was clearly on my hands.

  Her lips drew into a thin line, and a silence passed between us. Perhaps she was regretting her promise to not injure me. “Mere writing cannot compel,” she eventually said. “And he was a servant, not a Zver.”

  “I don’t know what a Zver is.”

  “Pray you never learn.”

  I waited for her to explain. When she didn’t, I continued. “I don’t think I was compelled. I just wanted to give his watch back to someone who knew him. To tell them I was sorry for what I’d done. When I went back to his address here,” I said, reaching forward to turn the photograph over in her hand without touching her, “I saw your file. I knew what I had to do.”

  “Saw my—file?”

  “Pictures,” I said, and left it at that.

  She recoiled, then regained composure so quickly I thought maybe it had been a trick of the light. “He knew?” she asked. “Of course he knew. My uncle was always faithful. He must have tried.” She stroked the photo again. “I wonder if his impotency ate away at him, as they ate away at me.” Her tongue played across her lips as she thought. “I always meant to kill them myself,” she said, and I believed her.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “They starved me.” She looked down at herself, at the photo she held. “Things have changed much since they captured me. Since I last saw the sky. I never knew where we were. We were moved from place to place—from pit to pit. Feeding the Tyeni with our sorrows. Even if I had escaped—perhaps even if he had saved me—there was no way they wouldn’t come after me. I am not just a vampire. I am—” she began, then looked at me like she’d said too much. She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand. I’m not meant to be merely nine, with the body of a child.” Small ripping sounds began again.

  I thought I saw in her activity the industriousness of distraction, trying to hide from some part of her past. “You’re not the one t
o blame, Anna.” I reached out and put my hand on her leg. She started like a disturbed cat, and I pulled my hand away.

  “You are a strange human. Brave and stupid at once.” She looked at me curiously, wrinkling her nose.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  She finished what she was doing, and stared at the photo anew, stroking it with her forefinger, before flicking something else off her palm. Then she addressed me. “Dawn comes. I need to sleep. But when it is night again—take me to where he lived. I want to see it.”

  I nodded. I should have bargained with her for her help at the tribunal—to seal the deal, as they say. But I’d just found out she’d been abused since she really was nine, at some point in the distant past. Pushing her didn’t feel conscionable. “Let me get you something to sleep in.”

  * * *

  I gave her old scrubs of mine, repurposed into pajamas a long time ago, and gave her an extra comforter. She wandered around my house like a bold burglar, inspecting closets, opening the oven door.

  “How light-tight does it need to be?” I asked.

  “Very,” she said, with a frown.

  “Where’ve you been up until now?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she didn’t answer. If it had to be that dark, and from the smell of her now that she was near, my guess was underground. A sewer. “Hey—”

  “Yes?” she asked archly.

  Somehow, telling her I thought I’d seen her in a dream didn’t sound like a good idea. Surely everything would be better in the morning, and by morning I meant after six in the afternoon.

  “Never mind.” I opened up my bedroom closet. “In the back there is probably safe. I can tape up the doors once you’re in.”

  Before settling herself in, she shoved out all of my shoes. I waited till she was done, closed the door, and ran a seal of duct tape around its edge. Then I tossed an extra sheet over my bedroom blinds for good measure and sat on my bed, exhausted.

  Minnie reappeared, crawling out from under my bed. “Meow,” she said, sitting on her rump, staring at me cross-eyed. “Meeeeeeow.” It was clear she disapproved. Grandfather chimed in from the living room with a few German exclamations. I went out to retrieve him.

  “I know.” I picked him up, and sat down on my couch. “But what else could I do?”

  Grandfather had a lot of vehement suggestions, it sounded like. But I didn’t have a translator on speed dial here, and really, it’d felt like I’d done the right thing. Then again, how many times had that led me into disappointment? I sat there for a bit, thinking on this, when a tan dot resolved out of the rest of my slightly more tan carpet. I reached for it and almost lost it in my carpet’s low pile before pulling it out.

  If I hadn’t seen it before, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize it; I would have placed it as a forgotten shred of newspaper or a flattened crumb of bread. But it was a tiny sepia face, the face of the brother—well, I didn’t know that for sure—but definitely the face of the boy who’d been sitting by Anna in her photo. Carefully torn out and discarded, by Anna herself.

  I felt slightly less good about things than I had before and I took Grandfather back into the bedroom with me.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I woke with a start to the sound of ripping. The room was dark and there was a monster in my closet.

  I jumped out of bed as she emerged. The closet doors were flung open, wheels rattling in their sliding tracks. Clean clothing hadn’t done much to dissipate her smell. How do you tell a vampire to take a bath?

  Once free of my closet, she turned and kicked its door, leaving a hole in the cheap particle board.

  “Hey!” I reached for the rattling door. “That wasn’t necessary.”

  She turned on me. “Take me to his home. Now.”

  I needed a shower. And she really needed a shower. But the sooner I got her to Mr. November’s place, the sooner she’d help me, the sooner she’d be out of my life—which she seemed set on destroying, one article of furniture at a time.

  I waved my hands placatingly in the air. “Let me get dressed.”

  “Hurry,” she said, and turned around.

  As I rummaged for jeans behind her, I realized I hadn’t thought to steal blood ahead of time for the future, nor was I keen on offering up mine or my cat’s. “Hey, how have you been feeding?” I asked.

  “On the homeless.” Anna sighed. “They taste like booze—it helps to mask their other flaws.”

  I pulled my shirt over my head. “Ugh.”

  She chuckled. “Don’t worry. I haven’t killed any of them yet.”

  “Are you going to need blood tonight?”

  “I can go longer than most vampires. I am used to dealing with less.”

  Phew. It was one thing to go off on a crazy goose chase, and another to aid and abet an attack on somebody else. I nodded and reached into my closet to find my old coat, the one she’d helped me to ruin, what with all the blood.

  “You might remember this article of clothing,” I said, handing it over for her to wear. Her affect was flat, the way certain schizophrenic people’s were. No life, just a dead stare, the kind I thought the phrase “thousand-yard stare” referred to in books. Only the people who wore it at the hospital weren’t survivors from back in ’Nam—they were surviving whatever personal story was playing out all the time inside their own minds.

  “I don’t feel the weather as you do, human.”

  I shook the coat. “We’re taking public transportation. I can’t take you in what you’re wearing. You’ll make a scene.”

  She grabbed it from me, and sniffed the collar. “It smells.”

  You’re one to talk, I thought as she put it on. “Sorry.” I reached over and flipped the hood up over her head. The clock on my bedstand said six-thirty. “Is it night now?”

  She nodded, though the hood itself did not move. “I am awake,” she said, as if that was answer enough.

  I imagined her, my only witness, catching on fire or turning to stone or whatever else it was that full vampires did underneath the glare of sun. And then I shrugged that off and helped her put on three pairs of my socks so my old rain boots would fit. Last but not least came gloves. By the time I was done stuffing and layering she looked like a very unhappy Michelin man.

  “Are you done yet?” she asked, as I zipped myself up in my remaining winter clothes.

  All the ways this was a bad idea were like an echoing Greek chorus in my mind. I’ll die, she’ll die, we’ll all die—I shook my head to clear it. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The main commuter rush home had finished, but there were still people waiting for the southbound train at the station. When it arrived and the doors opened, I walked in and Anna followed hesitantly—did the rules of invitations apply to public transportation?—and when she was done we sat together on a bench.

  She stared around at the train itself, from the gum stains on the floor to the maps with multicolored tangles near the ceilings. Her gaze lingered on a poster featuring a nearly naked woman selling watches, with one hand cast out protectively, and her entire other arm covered in watches across her chest. Anna touched this image like she expected the hair to be hair, the skin to be skin, and the schnozberries to be schnozberries. I watched her, while everyone else studiously ignored her in the way only other commuters can, before she came to sit beside me again.

  “Was Mr. November your uncle?” I asked. She glanced up at me, her eyes still shaded by the hood.

  “His name was Yuri.” She went back to looking resolutely at the seat ahead of us.

  I fully expected that to be the end of our conversation, but then she continued in her lisping accent. “We were a family of Dnevnoi, the loyal ones. As is our custom, the first child, when it was time, was pledged to our Throne. They would drink the blood, and become one of the Zverskiye. The second child was sacrificed to the Tyeni.” She closed her eyes. “I was the first child. Koschei was the second.”

  Silence passed between us as the
train stopped and people milled about. When it left the station, she continued.

  “My parents wanted differently for us. When the revolution began, they thought we were both saved—factions in the Zverskiye were fighting as brutally as the Socialists and the Marxists were for control. In the confusion, they sent us off with Uncle Yuri to the New World to escape our respective fates.” She crossed her arms over her chest, as though she was fighting off a chill.

  “When we arrived it did not take long for them to find us. In America, there were no factions, only Zver. And for them to let any Dnevnoi escape, well.…” Her voice drifted off.

  We were two stops from where we needed to get off, and I wanted to know the ending. “Then what?”

  “Then we were captured, separated, and I was fed to the Tyeni regardless.”

  “But—” I’d seen most of her while helping her change. She had all her limbs, fingers, toes. Unless they’d taken a lung or a kidney, I wasn’t sure what she’d lost.

  “Not all feeding requires teeth. And not all bites leave scars,” she said cryptically.

  “What does that even mean?” I asked her.

  “I would prefer not to talk about it.”

  The train shuddered to a stop and a man got onto the train and walked down the aisle to purposefully sit across from us. He looked both of us over and leered. Anna hissed at him, under her breath, and he suddenly decided that seats nearer the other exit were better for him instead.

  “How did you do that?” I asked her.

  “Easily,” she said, and no more.

  * * *

  The train released us into the station and we walked up to face the cold evening outside.

  We waddled down the street together toward the complex where Mr. November had lived. “What was his full name?” I asked. It might help when talking to the landlady again, assuming he’d used it.

  “Yuri Arsov,” she said, trundling along beside me. The clothing had muted her feline grace, but she was still scanning back and forth across the street inside the confines of her hood.