Nightshifted es-1

by Cassie Alexander

  Slow giant flakes fell from the sky. Some other time, some other place, the girl who walked beside me might have played outside of czarist mansions, throwing snowballs at daytimer children beneath the safety of the night.

  We reached the complex and I rang the bell. Explaining our reasoning to the landlady this time around would be a treat, unless Anna could do that hissy thing at her.

  I rang again. There was no response.

  “She’s very old,” I apologized. I tried the door and it was open. It dawned on me— “Anna, I don’t think this is safe.”

  “Where was he?” she asked, looking up at me. Her eyes were like burning coals inside the shadow of the hood. “Which floor? Which room?”

  For a second she stared at me harder—through me, almost—and then she was gone, bolting up the stairs, faster than I could possibly follow.

  I chased up after her. “Anna? Anna—wait!” Had she read my mind? Idiotically, I’d left my badge, with whatever protective qualities it possessed, at home.

  When I reached the topmost floor, Mr. November’s door was open, and Anna already inside.

  “I knew I’d remember his smell.”

  I shut his door behind me. She was in his hall closet, standing on his sleeping bag, her face buried in his shirts. Then she began yanking them down one by one, before handing them to me. “Take these.”

  “What the—” I began. She stalked down the hall into the bedroom without me. “Anna, no—”

  In Mr. November’s bedroom, the girls were still waiting for us.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I’d given up on asking a lot of questions since my time as a nurse on Y4: Where do vampires come from? What happens to a werewolf’s clothing? Why are some zombies seemingly Haitian, and others typical movie-style ghouls?

  But certain things I’d never give up on wondering about. They were the things that I knew if I stopped thinking on them it’d mean I was finally dead inside, that working with patients on Y4 had, one way or another, finally drained me dry.

  The depths of man’s inhumanity to other men—or women, or children, or yes, even vampires to other vampires—was one of these topics. It was illustrated on the walls here, to a horrifying extent. If I ever saw things like these and managed to be quiet inside—it would mean County had won.

  Anna stalked around the room, barely glancing at the walls. She kicked over the files, spilling out sheaves of photographs upon the floor, walking across them without looking down. Finally, she returned to me.

  “Leave so I may burn this place.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Burn it!” she said.

  “You can’t—there are other people living in this building.”

  “Burn it all down to the ground!” she shouted. “Let their blood be a sacrifice to Yuri’s memory!”

  I’d only sworn her to my personal safety—I realized now I should have expanded her promise to cover all of the inhabitants inside County lines. What exactly was she? In freeing her, what had I inadvertently set loose?

  “Anna, please—” I reached for her shoulder before she could do anything stupid. She whirled beneath me and held me in place with those emberlike eyes. Flames leaped inside my mind, hot and high. “Stop it, Anna.”

  She didn’t. The heat increased. And instead of it making me want to run away, like a deer from a forest fire, she wanted me to turn toward it, to go closer. Where was gasoline? Where were matches? This place would be so much better if it were cauterized entirely, ablated like a cancerous spot. Surely this place above all places needed to be excised—and I was a nurse, I knew all about excisions. The flames glittered in my mind like an oncoming migraine, as her will sledgehammered through my brain.

  “Stop it!” I clutched my hands to my head, dropping the shirts in a pile. “Stop it right now! You promised!”

  The urge to burn things subsided, but didn’t quiet entirely. “Look—we’ll tell the police about things. And then they’ll handle it. There’s good evidence here—they can make other arrests.”

  She kicked a stack of photos, sending them fluttering through the air. “They can arrest the servants? And full vampires? What good can your human courts do, when they did not even save me?” she sputtered. She was breathing hard. I didn’t think vampires needed to breathe. But if her huffing and puffing could have blown all the girls down, it would have. She whirled around, with her arms held up, addressing the room at large.

  “Why—why did he save them, and not me?” she howled, pointing at the walls. And then she fell to all fours in the middle of the room, creasing the photos there with her knees and fisted hands. All the other lost little girls stared down at her, at the last little girl found.

  I knelt beside her. “He was trying to, Anna. You were on his mind—he said your name with his dying breath.”

  She grabbed one of the shirts I held and savagely rubbed her eyes with the sleeve. “It should have been him to find me! Not you—him!”

  “I know.” I reached out a hand—if she’d been any other human in the world, I would have hugged her just then, but I was scared to. But then she sobbed, a gut-wrenching sound. I’d made noises like that before; I knew what they felt like, what they meant, from the bottom of my heart. I dropped the shirts and wrapped my arms around her before I could talk myself out of it.

  She went stiff and quiet, and just when I thought I’d horribly overstepped myself and ruined everything—she collapsed against me and cried, deep and hard, squeezing me tight. I was glad for each and every layer I’d put on under my coat and I prayed for my ribs to hold. I hugged her back until she released me, rocking back and turning away from me to blot at her eyes again with Yuri’s sleeves.

  “You are a foolish human. A greater fool than any I have met before. Yuri would have approved of you.” She unzipped her jacket and stuffed several of Yuri’s shirts into it. Then she wiped her nose with the back of one hand, and picked up the final shirt, the one she’d cried upon, and held it out to me. “I will help you.”

  I took the shirt as though I was shaking her hand. “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome,” she said solemnly, and left the room. I shoved the shirt in my coat pocket and followed.

  * * *

  We walked down the stairs together. It was quiet except for the echoing sound of our steps. It wasn’t usual for places like this to be so quiet. Surely someone here slept with the TV on—and surely these walls were so poorly insulated that we ought to be able to hear it.

  “Do you hear that?” Anna asked, just as I’d been making sure I’d heard nothing at all. She fell to a crouch and shot down the stairs.

  “Wait!” I shouted, and ran down after her.

  A group of ten men met us in the street, their black stockbroker-style suits casting stark outlines against the snow. They didn’t need snow gear—they wouldn’t feel the cold, nor would they care if anyone saw them. They were all alike, vampires or daytimers.

  “Help!” I shouted. “Someone—help!” I knew this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that worked in. No one knew us, it was none of their business, and I was sure one of the vampires here would be able to bend human attention away like so many of them could. Still— “Call 911!”

  One of the men advanced.

  “I’m a noncombatant! She’s under my protection!” I addressed him, putting myself in front of Anna. I didn’t have my badge on me, but—

  She raced around me, up the street, peeling off layers of clothing. She ran three steps at a time up a stoop and then launched herself horizontally at a suited man who clearly wasn’t ready.

  Maybe they were so used to thinking of her as weak that they were unprepared. Or maybe she’d gotten better faster than they could have imagined. She flew by the outlier, one hand out, and snatched half his neck from him as she passed. His head lolled to one side, clearly showing the stub of his spine before dust started pouring out of the hole she’d left.

  The next one was even faster—guts strewn for
an instant, and then many soft popping sounds, as he turned into a suit full of dust.

  There were so many of them, and she was awesomely fast—I wondered again what she was. I’d never seen a vampire in action—maybe they were all like this? As she dispatched one after another, I realized I was seeing what she was doing now. She was slowing down. Whatever superstrength homeless blood, a half-empty blood bag, and a century’s worth of rage had given her was waning. Eventually one of them fought back and tossed her on her rear into the snow. I ran forward to where she’d fallen, but she wasn’t there anymore—he’d kicked her like a soccer ball up into the streetlight on the curb. She’d dented its base and recovered, but then five of them were on her.

  “Please help! Someone help!” I shouted, and I ran forward, trying to pull the last of them off. He swatted me aside. I fell on my ass in the snow.

  He could have killed me—any of them could have. But I didn’t matter to them—why should I, when without her at the tribunal, I was already dead without consequence, and for whatever purposes they wanted me?

  A car arrived and their tide shifted course, drawing her toward its opening door. I saw into the backseat—and a face I recognized looked out at me. Stone-gray eyes and, when he saw me, a mocking grin. The vampire who’d first held Anna captive was there for half a second before he pulled back into the darkness of the car like a trapdoor spider. The remaining suits shoved Anna in. The car drove away and those who lived dispersed, running to the ends of the earth like so many ninjas on a late-night cartoon.

  I stood up, knocked the ice off my rear, and looked around. Not a single window had opened on the street, not a single blind or curtain was raised, and there were no sirens in the distance. No one had noticed our altercation at all.

  The dented street lamp looked like any other street lamp that’d met a buzzed driver. The vampire dust looked like soot in the snow. Yuri’s shirts were dark where they’d absorbed the melting snow, watermarks spreading out like blood. And I was alone, again. I shoved the last shirt, the one Anna had given me, deeper into my pocket, and walked as fast as I could back to the train station.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  What would I do now? Where would I go? Where had they taken her? I was sore, I was cold, and I was royally pissed off. The clouds hid the moon from me, but I didn’t need to see it to know my time was winding down. I sat on a different train with the same watch advertisement, only this time someone’d drawn a cock by her mouth. The graffiti matched my sentiment. I’d been dicked over. Worse yet, Anna’d been dicked over. God, to get free after a hundred years, only to be trapped again? How horrible was that? I shuddered inside my jacket, even as I began to sweat. I stared at the advertisement, and felt like if I looked at the watch faces closely enough, I could see the remaining time in my life tick away.

  A group of young men loaded on. It was technically late at night. I pretended to ignore them while paying attention out of the corner of my eye. They were busy discussing something exciting among themselves, and I tried to be charitable and think they were high-spirited instead of dangerous.

  One of them spotted me, and broke from their pack. He came over, and I stiffened.

  “Miss?” I didn’t respond. My mouth was dry. “Yo, miss?” he said, waving a hand in front of my face.

  I glared up at him. “What do you want?” I said, in a voice that encouraged no further interaction.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said, pointing at my lap. “Are you okay?”

  I looked down, and saw Yuri’s shirt, with blood on the cuff where Anna had wiped her eyes. And his hand shifted, to point at my coat shoulder, where there was even more blood—from when we’d hugged, I guessed. I stared at my shoulder in disbelief for a moment, before looking up at the man whom I’d erroneously judged. Someone’s mother, somewhere, had raised them right.

  “It’s all right. It’s not mine.”

  His eyebrows rose, but he nodded and sidestepped back to his friends. I got off at the next stop.

  * * *

  I trudged the rest of the way home, with Anna’s bloodlike tears, or tearlike blood, on my shoulder and on Yuri’s cuff. What was happening to Anna now? What were they doing to her? I couldn’t leave her like that. I just couldn’t.

  I went inside my house and found the lawyer’s number. He’d said not to call back if I hadn’t found her—but I had, then I’d lost her again, and someone had to help.

  The phone rang four times. I expected voice mail soon—maybe vampires had caller ID. It was night at least, just before two A.M. I paced around inside my kitchen as it rang again. Who else could I call afterward?

  “Hello,” said the voice I remembered. It sounded like it was going to go into a voice mail message after all, the tone was so formal and low—but there was a pause. “Hello?”

  “You’re awake!” I exclaimed in relief.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s Edie Spence. We spoke the other day, about the murder and the girl.”

  There was a pause. “Go on.”

  “I found her.” Then I stopped and thought about what next to say. How could I sum up the events of the night and not sound insane?

  “But?” the anonymous voice on the other end of the line asked archly.

  “She was kidnapped.”

  “Really.” His inflection on the word rose and fell in ironic disbelief.

  “Really. She swore she’d help me before that … but…” I stood in front of my refrigerator, staring at its ivory-colored door, as blank as my mind of good sense.

  “You tell the most interesting tales, Miss Spence.”

  “It’s not a story.” I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the door. The cheap metal dimpled inward, with a thunk. “She needs our help, they took her away—you don’t understand.”

  “She promised you she’d be there?”

  “She did.”

  “Well, then.” I heard papers shuffling in the background. “My appointment book is already full until dawn tonight. But I may have time to see you early tomorrow, before sunrise.”

  “You—you’re taking my case?”

  “If she swore she’d be there she’ll try.”

  “You … believe me?” I stood up straight, and my fridge door popped back into place.

  “I’m your lawyer. It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is that she wouldn’t have sworn it if she hadn’t intended to help you. Unlike humans, vampires are creatures of their word.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I get off at seven-thirty tomorrow morning—”

  “Eight A.M., then.” He started spouting off an address, which I wrote quickly down. “Be on time.”

  “You’ll help me save her, right?”

  The voice on the other end of the line paused. “You should worry about your own fate first, Miss Spence. Eight tomorrow,” he said, and the line went dead.

  I leaned back against my cheap fridge again, and again felt it buckle behind me. Worry about my own fate first—but how could I live with myself while knowing about Anna’s?

  * * *

  The address the lawyer’d given me was off the public transport routes, so I drove to work that night. It was unfair that I had to keep going to work with all my personal drama. But I didn’t have much time off saved, and every time I called in, I was worried I’d be fired without cause—it wasn’t like Y4 nurses had a union to protect us. With my luck, I’d be fired just as Jake was shooting up the eight ball to end all eight balls, and then what would happen to him? He’d find out he wasn’t superman and that he could still get high five seconds before his happy heart stopped cold.

  Besides, what would I be doing at home, anyhow? Doing my depressed-oversleeping thing? Or eating everything I had in my fridge because it was there? Worrying about resaving Anna? Pacing around, listening to Merle Haggard, like Dad always did?

  I pulled my Chevy into the empty visitor’s lot and pulled on the parking brake. No, being at work would be better than all of those. I hoped.
r />   * * *

  I had both of Maganda’s patients. I always felt good about following her—she was tiny, Filipino, and full of energy. If there’d been anything pressing that needed to be done, she would have done it already. She reminded me of the nurses at my last job.

  “Mr. Smith, you know him?” she asked.

  “Had him the other night.”

  She nodded, making her gold earrings jingle. “No change!” She passed the chart over to me to co-sign.

  “And him?” I asked about room four, as I finished my nearly illegible “Spence, RN.”

  “Not so good. Out of the woods now, but this afternoon? Full of trees.” She laughed at her idiom, and I grinned along with her.

  “So, room four came up this morning with massive blood loss. At first, they thought he was just hypothermic, or hyper-ETOH, you know? But his hematocrit came back very low. Turns out he had no blood—and bite marks. He came down here, and we’ve been transfusing him all afternoon. Three units of packed red blood cells so far, and then I sent off a crit. Waiting on the results right now.”

  I nodded. I could wait for test results. And I could hang more blood if his crit came back low again. Easy-peasy. “How’d he get like that, though?”

  “Don’t know.” She handed over the chart, and I signed it.

  “Was he a donor before?” I asked, looking past her into the room, where the dregs of a blood bag were running into the patient’s antecubital IV line.

  She took the chart back and closed it. “Doesn’t matter—he is one now.”

  I nodded and waited for her to walk away before flipping through the charts. As curious as I was to see Ti again—and I wasn’t sure why, I just was—I knew the fresh donor needed my attention first.

  His initial ED report included this gem: “status/post rabid cat attack.” Really? That was the best cover we could use? I wrote down all the meds he needed, tucked my paper in my pocket, suited up on principle, and entered the room.

  “Hello there, Mr. Galeman,” I said, smiling by the foot of the bed. Mr. Galeman’s chart said he was only forty, but a lifetime of sun had made his skin creased and tan, and he looked nearer to sixty to me. Not the kind of man you’d think a vampire’d have much cause to run into. But his neck had a pressure dressing taped thickly on it all the same.