Nightshifted es-1

by Cassie Alexander

  “I have something for you,” Meaty said, distracting me from my thoughts. Meaty produced a small glass vial from a breast pocket and I took it. The fluid inside was clear, and the sterile cap was gone, but the rubber stopper was still in place. There wasn’t a label, but I could feel the ridge of tackiness that indicated where there had once been one. It was about the same size as the bottles for intravenous Protonix.

  “What is it?”

  Meaty looked directly at me while answering. “It’s pope water. Don’t ask where I got it.”

  I’d inhaled to ask exactly that, but stopped.

  “What’s it do?”

  “It’s a hundred times more potent than normal holy water. You apply it topically. On them, not you.”

  I held up the little vial and looked at Meaty through it. Even distorted by the fluid, Meaty’s pale face was serious. “Save it for a rainy day, okay? Go put it in your locker.”

  I nodded and turned to do as I was told. But I refused to believe that we had a pope in a decantable jar somewhere downstairs. “Meaty—” Telling a nurse not to ask something should be considered an act of cruelty and be covered by a convention of war.

  “Don’t ask,” Meaty repeated.

  “All right, all right.” I put the med in my locker, then returned to finish my cake.

  * * *

  When I got back to the ward, someone was shouting. Their voice was muffled through the doorway, but I could see Gina watching her monitors closely.

  I walked over and followed her gaze.

  “I’ve got it under control, Edie,” Gina said, glancing at me. “This one doesn’t breathe flame.”

  I peered up at the monitor with her. The cameras inside the room were focused on the patient. He was androgynous from where I sat, with close-cropped hair that wasn’t parted. The dressing to his eyes covered up most of his face. He wore the County-issued blue-scramble puke-stain-minimizing gown that everyone had. He continued to yell—now that I was close enough, I could hear what he was saying.

  “Who am I? Tell me who I am!”

  His yells were plaintive and frightening at the same time, like they’d taken a page from the Shadows. “What kind of meds can you give?” I asked.

  She gestured to her chart. “Haldol. In intramuscular injections, mostly. Hard to keep an IV line in an unwilling shapeshifter.”

  The shapeshifter was writhing in his restraints, his body changing shapes. The monitors and cameras weren’t HD, and so I watched his fingers appear to pixilate and then resolve again, as he tried on all sorts of different forms. They went black-skinned for a moment, and I gasped in surprise.

  “Pretty cool, eh? Like a human kaleidoscope.”

  I nodded and kept watching as Gina went to the medication machine and then came back with a small bottle and a big syringe. “It’s time for another shot of Vitamin H,” she said, holding up the bottle. “And I don’t mean biotin.”

  “How can I help?”

  “You can cover me.” She opened up the drawer of the isolation cart that had the tranquilizer gun in it. “After the Haldol kicks in, we’ll do the dressing change.”

  “We?” I asked. “I meant for all my helping business to be out here. In the vicinity of your chart.”

  She snorted and handed me the gun.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The shapeshifter quieted his existential howling as soon as Gina opened the door.

  “Hey there, Mr. Huang. It’s me, your nurse for the night, Gina.” Gina had briefly explained the importance of not touching he/she/it, nor letting them touch you before going in. “I’m just coming in with a shot for your pain.”

  “Don’t touch me!” the patient said. “Don’t touch me anymore!”

  “You’re in a hospital now. I’m gonna give you something for your pain,” Gina continued, while walking toward him, syringe out. I couldn’t imagine being her, but if she’d snuck up on weres before, in their angry animal forms, she’d had practice. “It should help you calm down. We have a psychiatrist who’ll be seeing you tomorrow. I’ve got gloves on. I won’t touch you, I promise.”

  “Get away from me!” the shapeshifter howled, but he stilled and became a she, then went quiet. Gina looked to me and nodded. I put the trank gun’s butt against my shoulder.

  “I’ll be injecting you on your shoulder, sir,” Gina said. She flipped up the gown sleeve and swiped only once with an alcohol swab before pushing the needle in.

  “Stop!” he howled, skin tone going from Asian to Anglo as Gina pushed the syringe’s plunger down. “No!”

  The hands that strained beneath the buckled leather restraints had fingers that metamorphosed between a man’s with calluses, to a woman’s dainty ones complete with perfect long nails, to an elderly person’s skeletal fingers, denuded of subcutaneous fat. The characteristics and coloration of the hands and face I could see around the dressings no longer matched. The shapeshifter appeared to be going calico.

  “Gina—” I warned.

  “You’ll be fine soon, sir,” Gina said, disposing of the syringe in the sharps container, without turning her back on him. The patient sighed aloud, relaxing into his mattress, and his face and hands, which had been the most energetic parts of him, went anonymous, slack and pink.

  “Don’t point that thing at me, okay?” Gina said.

  “I’m not.” I held my aim at her patient’s torso.

  “Like I was saying before,” she continued, as she moved around to the head of the bed, “if they touch too many other people, they end up acquiring too much … I don’t want to say DNA, though it could be DNA. Data, maybe?”

  “What’s that they say about the nature versus nurture argument, then?” I asked from the doorway. Gina was unwinding the Kerlix roll from around the patient’s head, so she could get at the dressings that stuffed his eyes.

  “Do I look like a philosopher?” she asked, looking over at me, grinning. I grinned back, lowering the barrel of the gun.

  It happened faster than I could have imagined. Gina was reaching forward, to pull out the wads of gauze that occupied the space where the shapeshifter’s eyes used to be, and then there was a spindly clawlike hand at her throat. The other hand was bloated and huge—maybe conservation of mass didn’t matter, if you could slide enough of it around.

  “No!” I shouted. The shapeshifter hauled Gina between us, blocking any possible shot I might have made. “Meaty!”

  The shapeshifter pooled mass, staying the same even hundred and fifty pounds, just rolling pieces of it around till each of its limbs were free, making each of them twig thin, while the others were trunk thick, in turn. “Make it stop! We all want it to stop! Don’t touch us!”

  “Take it, Edie!” Gina hissed, being garroted by the shapeshifter’s right hand. She kicked him but he didn’t seem to register any pain. “Any shot! Take it! Hit me! Hurry!”

  “Put her down!” I yelled, running into the room. He kept flicking Gina around like a rag doll as I tried to find a portion of him that was wide enough for a shot. Everything I’d practiced on at the range didn’t fucking move! I circled around the room. Gina stopped fighting and hung limp. Red circles were blooming around her eyes. The shapeshifter ripped her badge off her and threw it to the ground.

  “Never again!” the shapeshifter continued. He made himself look like her, mocking her shape in his blue hospital gown.

  “Meaty!” I shrieked again. He was turning toward me, and soon his back would be to the open door—

  My charge nurse came around the corner like a rhino, holding an even longer gun than my own. “Net gun!”

  I ducked, not knowing what else to do, and heard a zipping hiss of string. There was a thump as it made contact, and the shapeshifter and Gina tumbled down together in front of me, tangled in a pile of netting. A hand reached out—whose? Gina’s, or his?—and grabbed my ankle, yanking me forward. I swung the gun around and tried to find a shot—anything covered in blue was fair game—but then he looked up at me, looking exactly li
ke Gina, except for the gauze inside his eyes soaking up blood. “Don’t touch me!” he pleaded with her voice.

  I paused, and he slammed his hand forward into the barrel, making the butt of the gun jump up my shoulder and ram into my face. My lip cut against my teeth, and I scrabbled to regain the gun as my mouth filled with blood. Charles ran into the room and grabbed the tranquilizer gun from me.

  “What the fuck, you crazy loon,” Charles said, holding the trank gun up like a club. He flipped his hold on it at the last moment, to point the tranquilizer end at the shapeshifter and fire, point-blank, into his thigh.

  “About fucking time!” Gina coughed out, lying beside the patient that still wore her shape.

  “Jesus.” I started pulling the net corners up as soon as the shapeshifter sagged. “Are you okay?”

  “Me, or the Lord?” Gina asked, her voice raspy. She grabbed hold of my shoulder and I pulled her out from underneath the net.

  “You.” Her eyes were circled in red and there was a handprint on her throat. “That—that was awful.”

  “You think?” Gina said, her anger palpable. I looked past her at the mess of netting and patient on the floor. It looked like an alternate-universe Gina. He’d peed himself, I could smell it.

  “From here on out, shapeshifters get chemically sedated,” Meaty announced. “Sux or propofol for the lot of them, I don’t care what Turnas thinks.”

  Gina took a few deep breaths as we both stood. My lip was throbbing, and I could still taste fresh blood. “You’d better wash that out,” Meaty said, pulling a packet of gauze out of a pocket to press into my hand.

  I nodded and took it, and went to the sink in the corner of the room. There was no mirror, but I could see my blurry reflection in the paper-towel dispenser. I covertly looked around the room with one eye, and then the other. The shifter glowed, yeah, but nothing else in the room did.

  Then I looked down. Beneath my scrubs, I had a subtle nimbus. And the splotch of blood on the gauze that I held was glowing bright. “Shit,” I said.

  “You can say that again,” Charles said, standing over the shapeshifter, tranquilizer gun at his shoulder, like an infantry guard.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I gave the report to the day shift nurse. For once, it wasn’t upsetting. In one more day, what would anything I say or charted matter, anyhow? My encounter with the shapeshifter had made me morose, seeing Gina there upon the floor, sprawled out and sodden. It could have been me. It might still be me.

  After my fast report, I was the first in the locker room. I toyed with the idea of cleaning out my locker. Better to do it now, while I had the time, instead of tomorrow, all rushed. I could donate my stethoscope to the future unwilling nurses of Y4. I looked at my extra coat and boxes of oatmeal—taking them home somehow seemed like defeat. I knew if I didn’t get a chance to reclaim them, they’d donate the coat to a shelter. While I was considering the fate of the oatmeal, I saw the vial of “pope water” Meaty’d given me earlier on my locker’s small shelf. I hefted it, imagining myself holding it out at other people—vampires—like a badge, or throwing it at them like a grenade. I tossed it in my purse.

  Gina knocked on the door before coming in. There were still red bands around her throat.

  “Gina—I’m so sorry.”

  She didn’t look at me as she walked to her locker and opened it. I stood there, trapped because her locker was closer to the door than mine, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment.

  “You should have shot him when it started,” she said, her voice still rough.

  “I didn’t have a shot then. Honest. I swear.”

  There was a long pause until her locker closed. Her lips pursed, and she still wasn’t looking at me. “If you had a shot, any shot, that wasn’t okay.”

  “I didn’t.” My mind raced through the moments where she’d been trapped. I’d tried, I’d searched, I’d failed. I couldn’t even save a friend. How was I supposed to save myself? “I didn’t until the end, and then I blew it. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like a fish out of water. I wanted to make excuses and I wanted her to forgive me. But if she was going to, she had to do it in her own good time. It was just that potentially I didn’t have much time left, and I needed all the absolution I could find.

  “Thanks,” I wound up saying, zipping my purse closed. I walked carefully around her to the door. It was halfway closed already when I heard her say, “Don’t forget your extra cake.”

  I went into the break room, where Meaty was giving his report to the day shift charge. I tiptoed around the table and opened the fridge. It’d be hard to find half a cake in the sea of tinfoil and leftovers.

  “Just a second,” Meaty said to the other charge nurse. “Spence!”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Take tomorrow night off.”

  I almost hit my head inside the fridge in surprise. “Really?”

  “Really. We’re low on patients. We’ll call you if we need to. Tie up some loose ends. Take a vacation.”

  Cake retrieved, I carefully stood up. “Gina needs the vacation more than I do, Meaty.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll get hers.”

  I inhaled to protest. I wasn’t exactly being fired, though. And I did have a lot of things to do, assuming Anna didn’t turn up. “Thanks.”

  Meaty gave me a knowing nod. “You’re welcome.”

  * * *

  I called Sike again on the way to the train station. It went to her voice mail. Of course. I stared at my phone, frowning for a second as I listened for the beep.

  “Look—this is Edie—are you all doing anything? Anything at all? I need an update. Have you found her yet? I want to know what’s going on.”

  The message cut off anything else I was going to say. I fought the urge to redial and just leave a message of me cussing. I shoved my phone into my purse and walked to the train station as quickly as I could.

  * * *

  Morning commuters at the station glanced at me, then quickly looked away. With a fattening lip, I was an object of curiosity, but no one wanted to add my problems to their own. I found a seat on the train when it arrived, watching the shadows underneath the seats in front of me. Were the Shadows in there, watching me back? Had they found out anything about Anna yet? My hand found my badge—I wished I had a way to ask them. Me wanting to talk to Shadows, that was a change indeed.

  My train finished its downtown loop and the other commuters went away. It was just me staring at my shoes in the train when the doors across from me opened, and let in someone I didn’t really want to see.

  Asher. This time without flowers. He was wearing a suit that was tailored precisely for him, sharp-shouldered and swank. He was as startled to see me as I was to see him; I could see it in his eyes for half a second before they narrowed.

  “No one else should get to hit you,” he informed me with his British accent. With the apparent implication that it was still okay, sometimes, for him. Spanking was fun and all, but to the best of my knowledge it hardly ever caused fat lips.

  “Not now,” I said, looking in my bag for a book to read and ignore him with. I saw the pope water sitting there, thought of Meaty, and remembered the “loose ends” comment. Well, here was one, sitting right across from me. I looked up and he had a bemused expression on his face.

  “Look,” I began, inhaling deeply. I sucked at difficult conversations. And who could I have a conversation with that went “I probably won’t see you again, because I’m going to be going on trial with some vampires”? Just people at work—and Ti. That thought brightened me. “Look, I’ve met someone,” I said aloud. “They get me. They really get me. I’ve got a lot of problems, things you wouldn’t even begin to understand. It’s all very complicated, really.”

  An eyebrow crept higher on his head, pulling a lopsided smile behind. I kept going in spite of myself. “It was fun, don’t get me wrong, and we had chemistry,
sure, but—”

  I stared at him and lost my train of thought. There was a gravitational pull between us, yes. But if I were the Earth, then he was a cool and distant moon. Light, but not heat—and I liked to be warm. “You’re a doctor, I’m a nurse, it’s just not a good idea.”

  The train shuddered to a halt.

  “I believe this is your stop,” he said. He stood and made no move toward the door.

  “It is. See you.” I stood and walked out into the station and made it halfway up the stairs.

  “I’m not really a doctor, you know,” said Asher’s accented voice. I turned and saw his suit, incongruous with the station’s milky white walls. I quickly blinked an eye and found him glowing, bright.

  I inhaled. “Then … what are you?” I asked, slowly.

  “I can be a doctor. I can be a lot of things. I prefer, however, to be myself.” He crossed the short distance between us. “Look at me, Edie.”

  I did. It was daylight outside, just six stairs away. He couldn’t be a vampire. I reached between my breasts and pressed my badge hard against my skin.

  Asher’s face slowly became the face of someone I didn’t recognize. His dark eyes were pierced with blue, until the blue overtook all the brown, like the sky after a heavy storm. His skin tone lightened from olive to become Nordic white, and the set of his jaw tilted, from angled high to low and square.

  “I think I met your cousin last night,” I said.

  “Now will you tell me where you work?” he asked.

  “Y4.”

  “It figures,” he said. He shifted back to the Asher I knew in the blink of an eye.

  “Does that mean that when you feel like it, you can be me now?” I asked. I thought of Gina, on the floor with gauzed eyes full of blood.

  “No, actually. I did try, though, at the club, and several times thereafter. When I found out I couldn’t, I was shocked, then intrigued. Then when I learned you were merely being protected by the proximity of your badge…”