Shapeshifted es-3

by Cassie Alexander

  I leaned back. “I got into some trouble after you left. There was a werewolf problem, and a vampire problem—I wound up destroying all the extra vampire and werewolf blood at County Hospital.”

  Ti’s eyebrows crept up his forehead. “When you get into trouble, you don’t do it halfway.”

  I snorted. “Seems so.”

  “Is that creepy little girl vampire still around?”

  “Anna? Yeah. I haven’t talked to her since New Year’s Eve, though.” No matter how much I might like to, to somehow make her help my mom. “She’s the one who made everyone shun me to keep me out of trouble. No one’s allowed to talk to me now, on threat of death, I think. She set me free, by making me leave.”

  He snorted. “I’ve never known anyone to get away from them before.”

  I shrugged. “Seems I have. Nothing supernatural’s come knocking at my door since I moved. Until you. Although I admit, I don’t go out at night as often as I used to.”

  “That’s probably for the best.” Another awkward silence passed between us until he spoke. “It’s almost dark. I should go.”

  I didn’t have a way to convince him otherwise. I felt helpless again, like I had the last time he’d left me behind.

  I cannot express strongly enough how much I abhor being left behind.

  He rocked to standing, and this time I didn’t fight him. “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you need, Edie. Humans and zombies just aren’t—”

  I cut him off. I didn’t want to hear it. “The time for that would have been a while ago, anyhow.” I walked around him and opened my apartment door.

  He swallowed—the vestiges of another human habit—and nodded. “I think the shun is a good idea, Edie. I want you to be well. But I don’t want to see you around.” He reached out and put his hand against my cheek. “I mean that in the best possible way.”

  I wanted to turn my head into his hand like a cat and lean into his strength, but I forced myself to stay still. “Thanks, I think,” I said as drily as I could.

  “Good-bye, Edie.” He took a step back, and I closed the door after him.

  Seven months is long enough to get over someone you loved who saved your life, right?

  CHAPTER TEN

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. I tossed and turned and Minnie got tired of putting up with me—when I woke up she was sleeping inside my closet, on the floor.

  By the third time I’d snoozed my alarm, I was doubting the wisdom of signing up for a daytime job. It wasn’t too late to call up the sleep clinic and say I’d been pulling some sort of dickish prank, quitting without notice. “They’d love that, of course,” I mumbled to myself in the shower. But I got out the door on time to make the train, and I found myself rolling downtown, yawning through the first five stops.

  “Ah, enfermera.” Dr. Tovar was standing at the bottom of the station stairs. “Decided to be on time today?”

  I wasn’t sure where he got off acting so much older than me when he wasn’t. “You haven’t scared me off yet,” I said, trying to sound brash.

  He tilted his head, as though acknowledging that fact, while still making allowances for it to happen sometime soon. As I caught up to him, he started walking, and I walked beside him.

  “So what is this place? A traveling market?”

  “People need to buy food on the way to work in the morning. And those who come in each day whose jobs require the train are better able to pay for food than others.” We ducked through the crowd. I tried to stay close enough to listen to what he was saying without being close-close. “Your old work shirt might have been torn, so you need another. Or you might have been paid well for the day, so you can buy new shoes for your child. It ebbs and flows with people’s paychecks, firsts and fifteenths.”

  The sales spaces were marked by strings tied from structure to structure, some with clothing hanging down. One of them had a pile of individually wrapped toilet paper rolls, stacked up like a pyramid. I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen that one yesterday, and I might not see it tomorrow. “I buy dinner here sometimes, on my way home,” Dr. Tovar said. “And breakfast too. If you’ll wait a moment—”

  “Sure.” The grilled stuff did smell pretty good. Better than my PB&Js, for sure. There was a stall here I hadn’t seen previously, with T-shirts silkscreened with messages in bright colors. Feeling emboldened by Dr. Tovar’s presence, I walked over to look at them. More images of Santa Muerte, with the words REINA DE LA NOCHE in elaborate script above her like the mural had featured. The woman running the show was at the back, rehanging shirts so that the artwork was facing out, no matter the direction of the wind. When she turned around, the shirt she wore had what looked like a vampire bite on the collar, in red ink, bleeding out.

  No way. “Miss—” I opened my bag, hoping that pulling out cash would attract her attention. She was walking to me with a smile when something over my shoulders made her eyes go wide.

  I turned back just as Dr. Tovar reached my side again and began pulling me away.

  Three men were pushing through the marketplace, with crosses tattooed on both sides of their necks, from windpipes to collarbones. They confronted the shirt-selling woman, saying something I couldn’t understand. I could read their body language, though—they were looming. It wasn’t good.

  “This doesn’t concern us.” Dr. Tovar kept pulling at my arm. The rest of the market had gone quiet, focusing on the work of paying studious attention elsewhere. One of the men yanked down her shirts, sending them to the ground. The woman was complaining loudly. Another man grabbed for her, and in doing so pulled down the collar of her shirt.

  Either she had two moles on her neck where fang marks would be, or they were scars, or strange tattoos—just like the man with high blood pressure yesterday. “Come on.” Tovar pulled me more firmly, and wouldn’t let go. “You go messing in other people’s business here, and it won’t go well for you.”

  “We have to help—” I fought with him.

  “No, we don’t. It isn’t our job,” he said angrily, yanking me along. Halfway down the street to the clinic, getting dragged like I was an errant child, I stopped and pulled my arm back.

  “If it’s not our job, whose is it?” I practically yelled at him.

  He was quiet for a moment, fuming at me. “They’ll get what’s coming to them. Trust me.”

  Says the man whom I already know is lying to me about test tubes full of blood. “How can you be so sure?”

  He stood there in front of me, pissed off. I could see him mentally forming the words he wanted to say—so close to telling me the truth—and then restraining himself again.

  “Goddammit,” I protested. “You know something you’re not telling me.” The blood, Santa Muerte, the rulers of the night—it was all adding up to vampires down here. Somewhere.

  His eyes met mine, steely and dark. “I know that it’s a good thing I waited there this morning for you. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise what?” I interrupted him.

  “I’d probably be seeing you in the clinic, with a broken nose.”

  I frowned, waiting for him to back down, or explain. My arm throbbed. I looked down, and there was a red handprint around my wrist where he’d pulled at me. He’d been really scared for me. His eyes followed mine, and widened. “I’m sorry. That was irresponsible.”

  “What it was, was assault.” I wrung my arm in the opposite direction, to get feeling back in my hand.

  He took a step forward, still angry. “I just didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “What about her?” I pointed up the street with my good arm.

  “I don’t care about her!” he yelled at me. There was an awkward lurch where he gathered himself once and for all, regaining his temper, becoming the doctor that everyone here knew and loved. He continued on more sanely. “She’s not my employee.”

  I ground my teeth together while I tried to figure out what to say next. I was angry at him, my arm hurt from being yanked on, and him hold
ing out information was infuriating me. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  He inhaled and exhaled before answering me calmly. “They’ll probably destroy her goods. They were there to make a scene. They wouldn’t have to rough her up much for it to work. She was probably behind on her taxes.”

  “Oh, so they were from the IRS?” I said, my voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “There’s a lot of gangs in the area. That’s a profitable open space. You can’t just set up shop there without bribes.”

  “We still should have called nine-one-one.”

  He was his controlled self now, practical through and through. “Do you really think they would have come down here in time?” he asked snidely.

  I didn’t like what the answer to that might honestly be. “They’re supposed to.”

  “You’re too used to where you live.” He jerked his chin back the way my train had come. “The world doesn’t work that way here.”

  “I get that.” I didn’t understand it fully, but things down here operated by a different set of instructions, ones that hadn’t been issued to me. I’d felt like this before, though—back on Y4. “Why’d she have a bite tattoo?” It was too telling for her to have one, and those shirts, and my patient from yesterday too. Plus, the Three Crosses had permanent crosses for protection tattooed on their necks.

  Dr. Tovar looked at me like I was making things up. “You mean bullet hole marks. Bullet holes. How many times they’ve been shot.”

  I looked back behind us at the market that was becoming smaller with each step we walked, and then I looked at him, and he wouldn’t look back at me. I didn’t believe him farther than I could throw him. Everything pointed to vampires being here somewhere; the only question was how much did Dr. Tovar know—and could I get him to tell me in time to heal my mom.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I was a little cowed at work that day. Between witnessing violence and being dragged away from it, and the feeling that I had more questions than answers, especially about Dr. Tovar—I tried to keep busy. Knowing myself, it was the only thing I could do.

  If Dr. Tovar was a daytimer, then the blood was going to someone. Who? Who was the Ruler of the Night that the Three Crosses were tattooed in fear of? I watched Catrina dive in and out of patients’ rooms before and after me. I never saw her with test tubes full of blood in her hands, but her scrubs had pockets, didn’t they?

  Keep your head down, Edie, I told myself. I didn’t have the protection of my former job or my former friends anymore. And I was supposed to be shunned—there was a chance I would blow my cover here and get ushered out the door. Then where would I be?

  There had to be a way to get Tovar to confess, though. Something simple. Like holy water, or crosses. Only I didn’t have either of those on me. I snorted, alone in a room while I was waiting for a patient.

  Eduardo saw two people in, two women who bore a familiar resemblance to each other. The younger was my age, and she helped her mother up onto the table.

  “I don’t need your help, the curandero cured me,” the older woman informed me as soon as she was settled.

  Her daughter was filled with rage. “Oh, yeah? Then why was your last blood sugar four hundred and three?”

  “The curandero?” I asked. The older woman emphatically nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish to her daughter. It was clear they were retreading an argument they’d already had many times before.

  I didn’t want to rat the curandero out as needing blood sugar test strips for himself, but if he was telling people with uncontrolled diabetes they were healed, he was doing more harm than good. No matter how nice his grandson was.

  The daughter waited for their argument to subside, and then summed things up for me. “She thinks that he’s cured her. He’s prayed over her twice, and now she’s cured.”

  “¡No, si me visita dos veces más, me va a curar!”

  “You can go every day, Mom, for all I care—just keep taking your shots!”

  Together they were a mirror image of my mother and me. And as with my own mother currently, I felt at a loss. I was sure the older woman had heard all the reasons why she should keep taking her medicine, and the daughter was tired of making her try.

  I went for extreme science. “There’s no miracle cure for diabetes. Just rigorous control. Without that, the sugar crystals in your blood will rip up your kidneys and the blood vessels in your hands and feet. You’ll lose your nerves; you won’t know what’s hot or cold. And if you get an infection, because of all the sugar in your blood for the germs to feed on, you might die.”

  Although I felt like the mother already understood me, her daughter translated, adding her own inflection, especially on the you-might-die part. Her mother stayed proud and obstinate, and addressed me in English. “I believe I will be better. And so it will happen for me.”

  “That’s not how it works,” the daughter said.

  The mother jerked her chin up. “That’s how it will work for me.”

  I jumped in before things got any worse. “I know it’s hard to accept that there’s nothing that will fix the situation.” I realized as I said it that I could be talking to myself. I could ignore everything strange I’d seen here and just try to be normal for once, to have a normal life, doing normal things, helping normal people. And my mom would die, like people with stage four breast cancer mostly, normally, do.

  “You were saying?” the daughter prompted me.

  I turned to face the mother and focused my attention on her. “You have to take the medicine. Your daughter loves you; she doesn’t want to be without you. You can’t blame her for wanting you to live, can you?”

  The older woman’s face crumpled a bit at this, but then she recovered and gave a dramatic sigh. “For your sake, I suppose I can pretend that the shots work.”

  “Good.” The daughter shook her head and rushed her mother off the table, happy to take any victory she could. She ushered her mother out of the room, then leaned back to roll her eyes in commiseration with me. Aren’t stubborn old people crazy? her look said. I nodded, yes, yes, they were.

  * * *

  I went outside for lunch and found Olympio there. I pulled out the extra sandwich I’d made him, and today he sniffed at it.

  “No thanks, I already ate.”

  “Fair enough.” I opened up mine and wolfed it down. “Your grandfather cure anyone lately? Practioner-to-practioner?”

  Olympio grunted. “Of course. He cures everyone he touches.”

  “An older lady? Diabetes? Recently, from the sounds of it?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “You have to tell him not to say things like that, Olympio. What if that lady had gone home, not taken her medicine, and died?”

  Olympio turned and began walking away from me. “Who’s to say he didn’t heal her? She’s not dead if she came down here, right?”

  “That’s hardly an excuse, Olympio. And even if your grandfather doesn’t know that, you do.” I caught up to him, waiting for him to look back. No matter what bizarre claims Olympio made, he had to know his grandfather was telling lies.

  Olympio inhaled like he was going to explain things to me, then turned and punched the wall behind him lightly. “Just leave me alone, okay?”

  “Okay.” I stood there as he faced away from me. I wished I hadn’t pissed him off. I didn’t want his grandfather hurting anyone, but there’d probably been a more sensitive way to convey it, one I hadn’t explored in my flustered-from-this-morning mind. I sat down on the ground and sighed. He didn’t walk farther away.

  I waited what might be an acceptable period of time—and then longer than that, just to be sure—before asking him, “Do you know anything about Reina de la Noche?”

  He was still facing away from me. “Why?”

  “I saw a woman selling their shirts get hassled this morning, by the Three Crosses crew.”

  Olympio snorted, inhaling deeply, to spit out a wad of phlegm. “That’s just like them
. Scared.”

  “Which ones?”

  “The Three Crosses. Beating up ladies. It’s like them.”

  He was finally warming up to me—or the topic—again. “What are the Rulers like?”

  “Rulers?”

  “You know. The Reinas.”

  Olympio rolled his eyes. “Reina de la Noche—it means ‘Queens of the Night.’”

  “Oh.” Well, that put a lot of things in perspective. Including vampire bite T-shirts and tattoos. I wondered who the Queen was. The only person I currently knew who could lay claim to that title happened to actually be a vampire. Anna, the vampire who’d gotten me shunned. “Olympio, can you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  I fished two twenty-dollar bills out of my purse and held the money out. “Can you go buy me a small silver cross?”

  “Why? You don’t seem religious.”

  “I could be.”

  “But you’re not.”

  I couldn’t lie. “No, I’m not. It’s for a friend. Look, you can keep the change, can you get me one, or not?”

  Olympio eyed me for any signs of trickery. Finding none, he went back to his version of a businessman, suave and smug. “No guarantees that there’ll be anyone with those down there today. I keep a twenty just for seeing, okay? Because I could be missing people to send my grandfather’s way here.”

  “Okay. That’s fair.”

  He prepared to set off, then turned back. “You have to do me a favor in return, though.”

  I blinked. This was new. “Sure, what?”

  He gave me a wry look. “Stop pretending that you know Spanish. It’s embarrassing.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I saw myself out the door at five on the dot. While waiting for Tovar, I found Olympio. The storm drain moaned quietly behind him.

  “Did you get it?” I asked him. He handed it out on his palm, a small silver cross, no bigger than my thumbnail.

  “Had to look for it. So you don’t get any change.”