Nightshifted es-1

by Cassie Alexander

  I did as I was told, as Ti settled into the seat beside me. The cloth was heavy and completely dark. It unfolded as I pulled at it and handed it up to her at the front of the car, momentarily holding it up between Ti and me. Like playing peek-a-boo with a corpse. I tried to smile reassuringly at him when he reappeared. “What about Ti’s car?” I asked.

  “He’ll report it stolen.” She looked over at him, at the mass of thrashed tissue that was my sort-of-boyfriend. “I suggest you do it for him.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Ti shoved his gun into his coat, and reached for a pad of paper and a pencil with his one good hand. Sirens began in the distance—this wasn’t a bad neighborhood, where people could ignore that much gunfire. It was just an empty business park on an early Saturday afternoon, and it took a while for someone to realize that that loud repeated banging sound wasn’t someone with a shitty carburetor.

  Anna raced out of the building with a massive piece of carpeting over her head as a sunlight shield. She dragged it behind her, galloping along, until Sike opened up the passenger door from the inside of the car and she could jump inside, to be enveloped in Sike’s waiting lightproof sack.

  “All done!” she said from inside the fabric.

  “Thank you,” Sike said, putting her car into drive. I turned to watch through the back window as we departed. Smoke poured out of the building as we pulled away.

  I didn’t care where we went. I didn’t feel excited, I didn’t feel sad—this was shock again, I knew it.

  Ti scratched words onto the notepad in his lap, and then nudged my shoulder with his own to get my attention.

  “I was afraid of this,” he’d written in neat capitalized print.

  “Of which part?” There was a lot to be afraid of.

  He drew out a smiley face, then wrote, “All of it?”

  “Heh.” It was hard to look at him. It took all my nursely powers not to throw up, right there, on Sike’s expensive black leather seats.

  “Of you having to see me like this. Ever,” he continued on the page.

  “I’ve seen worse,” I said bravely, when it wasn’t true. The worse that I’d seen—well, they’d already been dead. Or on the way. Not trapped in some freakish limbo. But that was the only thing freakish about Ti—he’d been injured while helping me. I couldn’t turn my back on him now.

  “Where are we taking the stinking zombie?” Sike asked, angling her mirror so that she could see me in the backseat.

  I looked over at Ti. We couldn’t go to the hospital—there was no way we could walk in during the daylight and try to explain this. I wasn’t sure how big an envelope of safety the Shadow’s abilities provided. If even one person in the parking lot saw him like this … damn. Besides, Ti didn’t actually need any hospital’s care; he wasn’t crashing. He just needed someone to watch out for him, till nightfall at least. “Madigan’s?” I asked aloud.

  Ti nodded. I tried to remember the address—then Ti wrote it down. I gave it over to Sike, who programmed it into her car’s GPS while steering with one knee.

  Anna leaned back, the fabric looped high up over her head, to look at me. “Why are you with a zombie?” She definitely, self-righteously disapproved, the way only children, vampires or not, can. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the rime of drying red around her mouth.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” I said, and turned to Ti. “Was that a trap?”

  He shook his head, and began writing. “Tip was good. But the informant was dead when I got there.”

  “Oh. Well. Saved you some money, then, I suppose.” I went back to staring straight ahead. I heard more scratching on the legal pad and glanced down.

  “I’m sorry, Edie. I never meant to hurt you.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “And you’re not. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

  “I just wanted to help,” he continued writing. “All this will heal in time.”

  “I know that too.” I took the pencil from him. “How long?” I wrote down, and nodded to the front seat, where the vampires couldn’t hear us.

  He took the pencil away and wrote back. “Depends.”

  I wanted to ask on what, but I was afraid I knew. Y4, at least for him, was for show. A place where he could heal incrementally, in the time frame it might take a normal human to heal, so that when he went back to his job, nothing out of the ordinary would be noticed. I found another pencil on the floorboard.

  “Don’t do anything stupid for my sake.” I underlined the word “anything.”

  “Too late,” he wrote. And another smiley face.

  “Dammit, Ti—” I forced myself to look up at him, to try and see past the mess he now was, to rewind the time back to this afternoon. I reached up to push an errant lock of hair back up over his ear. Then I discovered it wasn’t hair, but a piece of scalp. I inhaled to scream, or at least squeak really loudly—but what came out was a snicker, then “Ewwww!”

  I laughed at myself, and I carefully cleaned my finger on his shoulder. “You know, I’ve had men tell me I’ve fucked their brains out before. I just never thought they meant literally.”

  Ti drew another quick smiley face. “We’re okay?” he wrote down, right afterward.

  “As okay as people like us ever get. Messed up in the head, yeah—but okay.” I smiled up at him. He was disgusting and smelly and falling apart and he looked like half of death warmed over—but he was here, now, with me. I took his good hand and squeezed it.

  “Thanks, Edie,” he wrote when I was done. He paused, then continued. He finished an “I” before I snatched the pencil up from him, and put it behind my ear. Any statement beginning with “I” was bound to be bad. I didn’t want to hear “I am sorry” ever again in my life or, God forbid, “I love you.” Loving someone had never gotten me anything good. Silence, right now, was better. I closed my eyes, leaned over and aimed high, to kiss him near his temple on his unmarked cheek.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  I made Ti wait in the car while I went up to Madigan’s door. Rita answered the knock, though I heard dogs barking farther back in the house.

  “Ti needs a favor, Rita,” I said.

  She took me in, and then one eye squinted in disapproval. “You look a mess, and smell worse than that. Come in!”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. You should send the little ones away. There’s been a fight, and Ti needs someplace to hole up for a while.”

  Jimmie’s black wide-jawed face made it up to the screen door. Too late. I made a shooing hand gesture and he yawned, then sat down.

  “What’s this?” Madigan asked, coming in from the back.

  “There was a vampire fight. Ti was injured—it’s gross, and I’m telling you that as a nurse.” I glanced over my shoulder back at the car, glad the windows were tinted black. “We found the girl I was looking for, and I’ve got until tonight to finalize things.”

  “So everything’s okay?” he asked.

  Was it? It didn’t feel okay. Then again, how often did anyone see their boyfriend blown to bits in front of them, and manage to survive? “I think so. I hope so. But really—your kids don’t want to see this.”

  Jimmie pressed his nose up against the screen door and whined. He might not be able to see Ti, but he could smell me.

  “All right.” He leaned down and swatted Jimmie’s rear. “Go to your room. All of you,” he said to the other dogs I hadn’t had the chance to see. I heard nails on tile through the mudroom until they hit carpet again.

  “Do you have a sheet you don’t mind losing? So that no one else can see?” I asked. Rita nodded and ducked away, quickly returning with a blue cotton sheet. “Thanks,” I said to her, and louder, so that anyone who could hear—as I imagined werewolves and weredogs had pretty good hearing—could hear what I said. “Thanks, really. I mean it.”

  Rita nodded, and crossed her arms up over her chest.

  * * *

  I ran back out to Sike’s car and opened the back door. Ti
was waiting there. His eyes appeared dark with concern, and I tried not to look at the rest of him.

  “They’ll take you in for now.”

  He nodded. I handed him the sheet and he unfolded it one-handedly, draping it around himself to look like a spectacularly creepy ghost.

  It was his turn to reach up and put hair behind my ear—no, to retrieve the pencil I’d tucked there. He wrote down, “Don’t trust anyone” on the pad, before he stood up and saw himself out. I didn’t have to ask who it was that he meant.

  * * *

  “My car’s going to smell like zombie for weeks. You can’t detail out that stench,” Sike complained from the driver’s seat as we pulled away from Madigan and Rita’s home. “Where to now?”

  Where to, indeed? “My place, I guess.” I gave her the address.

  “They don’t pay you much, do they?” she stated.

  “No.”

  Anna tented the lightproof sheet over her head. She and Sike were sharing a low conversation in a language I didn’t understand but that I thought was Russian. I wondered if they had vampire business to discuss, or vampire gossip. I fiddled with my cell phone, feeling lost and forgotten in the expansive back seat.

  Jake’s number was first on my speed dial. I sank lower in my chair. I was still mad at him for ditching me the other day. He’d keep going on his self-destructive path, but at least he’d be alive. Finding Anna had saved me that conversation. In the front seat, their conversation ended, and Anna slumped over in the passenger seat, lightproof fabric crumpled around her. Sleeping, perhaps.

  I stared out the window and watched the gray of snow and gray of asphalt go by, all tinted to the same monotone moon-surface shade by the car’s windows. I fell asleep too.

  * * *

  “We’re here, human.” Sike pulled into a parking spot near my apartment. I got out my keys. Heat billowed out—my house was roasting inside, this month’s electric bill would be insane. And now I might actually be alive to pay it. I held the door open.

  Sike had to walk around to Anna’s side of the car and prompt her awake. The smaller vampire seemed dizzy, stumbling out, and for a second I wondered what would happen if a corner of the lightproof fabric flipped back, and I watched my only hope crisp and burn in the meek afternoon sun.

  Sike herded Anna toward me. She stepped up and into my house, but Sike was halted at the threshold.

  “I thought you were just a daytimer?” I asked her. From the look on her face, so did she.

  “I have had a lot of my Throne’s blood recently.” She stood at the edge of my doorway, looking both beautiful and perplexed. I watched her reach a hand back, into the sunlight, and it seemed no different than any other extraordinarily pale human hand I’d seen before.

  Sike looked up at me. “So let me in,” she said.

  I tried to remember the wording I’d used with Anna earlier, when I’d thought I was being clever. My exhausted brain wouldn’t come up with anything. “Never hurt me or my cat,” I said, instead of a more solemn vow. Sike snorted.

  “I swear to never physically hurt you or your cat.”

  “Good enough. Come in,” I said, and went inside. I took off my coat and set Grandfather down on my kitchen bar, where he started talking again. “Ugh,” Anna complained, on her way to my bedroom.

  “Be nice.” Everyone in my house was bilingual but me. I peeked into my bedroom and saw Anna leaning against my closed closet door, the blackout fabric she had looped loosely over her head making her look like a shriveled beggar.

  “I’m exhausted. Hide me,” she said, without looking up.

  I walked past her and opened the other door. She knelt down and this time she shoved all of my shoes over to one side of my closet, kicking at them weakly. I tossed my extra comforter in after her.

  “This house smells like zombie and worse,” Anna said, curling into a ball on my closet floor.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not moving in.” I grabbed her lightproof cloth and quickly closed the closet door before slinging the black fabric up over my window to block out all the remaining light. In my kitchen, Grandfather was silent. I had collapsed onto my bed when I remembered Sike.

  Home stretch, I told myself, like I told my patients when I was doing anything painful to them. Almost over. Everything’s almost over. I lurched back upright. She was standing by my thermostat in the hallway, setting it down to a more moderate setting. Should I offer her water, tea, blood? I didn’t know what I ought to be doing—all I knew was that I needed to sleep almost as badly as Anna did.

  “Do you need me for anything?” I asked her.

  “I presume you have a couch?” she asked.

  “In the living room. You can’t miss it.” I pointed behind her, and she followed my direction. “Do I need to do anything special for the trial?” I called after her.

  “Just show up.”

  Worked for me, now that I might actually survive it. I sprawled atop my bed and let myself feel hopeful for the first time in what felt like forever, and then I fell asleep.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  I had another strange ocean dream. I was standing on the shore of a black ocean at night, and the sand beneath my feet kept shifting, no matter how hard I tried to stay still. I had to walk along it, faster and faster, until I was running, and it still kept sucking away. The tide went out and I ran down past the waterline, hoping the water-packed sand would be less treacherous, but then the stars were obscured by a huge wave of black and a roaring sound began—

  My nightmare was interrupted by a familiar weight at the end of my bed. I moved my feet so that Minnie could come near.

  But the weight increased. It rolled alongside me, and I wondered if it was part of my dream, or one of those dreams—even worse than the one I’d been having—where you wake up and none of your limbs work, the kind that inspired alien-abduction stories, as if aliens were the worst things there were. The weight crept higher, to be beside me, taking up more space than Minnie ever had. It fit against me, hip to hip, back to chest, the curve of legs to legs. Frizzy hair tickled underneath my chin.

  I don’t think I could have been so still if I hadn’t been so exhausted. But I didn’t blink my eyes open, or scream, or shift around in bed. I thought one thing, What if she bites me? but I wasn’t alarmed by this, only deeply tired at the thought of having to be afraid again.

  And then she turned to pick up my arm from where it’d been folded up against my chest to wrap it around herself, and tuck my hand against her cheek. I thought I could feel the beating of her heart, but then realized that was silly, that it just must be my own. Exhausted, I inhaled the sweet-sour scent of Anna’s still unwashed hair, sighed, and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  When I woke up I was stiff and my room was pitch-black. I checked my face for a blindfold, and then remembered the blackout sheet I’d put up over my own dark curtains. I went through my pockets and found my cell phone.

  Seven fifty-five. Dark outside now, for sure, and I wasn’t any less tired. I sat up in my bed and turned on my lamp, registering that thanks to my prior exhaustion, not only was I still filthy, but all of my bedsheets were as well. I turned toward my closet, and saw its door was open.

  “Ladies?” I asked, then, “Minnie?”

  No response from the living room, but I heard a frightened meow from beneath my bed. I knelt down on the floor and reached out to Minnie with my hand.

  “I promise you, Minnie, when I’m done with this, you’re never going to have to hide again.”

  Minnie licked my extended finger as if she was sealing a pact, and I rose to walk to the living room.

  Halfway down my short hallway, I realized my living room smelled. Not like fresh dirt or old sex, but like blood and bodily fluids. I ran the last few steps to turn and see Sike sprawled out on my couch like a homicide victim, and Anna nowhere to be found.

  “Sike?” I dropped to my knees beside her. My instinct was to put fingers to her throat, to feel for a pulse, b
ut—to do so would have been to stick my fingers into one of several open gashes. “Dear God, Sike—” I put my hand in front of her nose instead, and watched for her chest to rise.

  “Mr. Weatherton?” she asked.

  “No. It’s Edie. Stay here,” I said, though she wasn’t in danger of going anywhere. I ran to the bathroom for the plastic bin where I kept everything I’d ever “stolen” from the hospital. Maybe a hundred alcohol swipes were littered over a dense core of gauze, half-finished rolls of tape, and other stray hospital things. I grabbed a towel on my way out.

  “We should wash all this out, Sike.” Sike didn’t look drained so much as she looked gnawed upon. There were multiple puncture wounds, so many that they merged together—like Anna had bitten her and then shaken her like a merciless dog. Any career Sike might have had in modeling was now at an end.

  “She needed it,” Sike said. “I told her it was okay.”

  I tried to parse the little girl that’d snuggled beside me, asleep, with the thing that’d left these marks, and failed. “Don’t make excuses for her. She’s mostly immortal. You’re not. Can you sit up?”

  She tried to nod, hissed in pain, then tilted forward ever so slightly. I shoved the towel beneath her, for all the good it’d do now—my poor couch was ruined. I got a washcloth, soaked it in saline—an intentional hospital steal, after I’d once gotten a really bad cut on my knee—and patted her neck a few times with it, wishing the washcloth were sterile too.

  “It’ll heal. Mr. Weatherton will help.”

  “Help how? More blood?” I opened up every piece of gauze I had and moistened them with saline. We hadn’t broached the topic of Anna yet. I couldn’t leave her like this.

  Sike smiled weakly. “I am feeling human again.”

  I snorted. I folded up the wet pieces of gauze and wedged them into the flayed pieces of her neck. Then I found a roll of pressure tape and pulled off strips long enough to keep them there.

  I did a serviceable job. By the time I was done, she looked all right. Even paler than usual, which was pretty damn pale, but instead of a victim she looked like an accident survivor.