I thought about this. “Vampires do live longer. Presumably that means they have to work harder at hiding it. Plus, they have to drink blood. Your kind can just go to Burger King.”
Asher’s eyebrows raised, but he was still watching the show. “Yes, but they can mesmerize people into thinking they weren’t there.”
“But you can do that, too. Blending into a crowd, changing form—”
He made a thoughtful noise; I heard it rumble in his chest. “True. I think their real problem is that eventually they all get greedy.”
“Probably.” One of the vampires on screen did an awful job of chasing a hapless victim whom I was pretty much at this point hoping would die. “Anna offered to change me once.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. When I was stabbed.” I gestured to my stomach. I still had the scar. I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but now I wondered how big it would stretch as my stomach did, and if I’d have to get a C-section due to the residual damage inside. The way the vampire who’d stabbed me had been going, I was lucky to still have a uterus at all. “I still wonder how she’s doing sometimes.”
“Anna’s immortal. I’m sure she’s fine.” He pointed at the woman who’d just tripped on the screen during her escape. “Why can’t she just run? Our kid is taking track.”
I gave him a nervous grin he didn’t see. That was the first time either of us had said anything explicit about my pregnancy since our decontaminatory showers. Joking about things was the first step on the path to normalcy. “She can’t run because they couldn’t afford a bigger set.”
The woman on the screen was screaming louder now as the vampire neared. At least the on-screen vampire was hot. He looked winded from having chased her, though, in a way that a real vampire would never be.
Asher suddenly clicked off the remote. The screaming didn’t stop.
We both sat up. “It’s close,” he said.
In one move he’d stood and was pulling clothes out of the drawers on his side of the bed. I followed his lead on my side, and he looked over at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re staying here.”
I frowned at him while latching my bra closed. “I’m not like that, Asher.” I tugged a T-shirt down over my head.
“Please. For me.”
I stood there, caught between action and inaction. I wanted to go. I wanted to help. I felt trapped by motherhood, though I wasn’t even showing yet.
The screaming went on—and Asher wasn’t the only one with a stubborn past. He sighed. “If there’s trouble, promise me you’ll leave.”
“Done,” I said, and quickly yanked pants on.
I tucked a room key into my pocket as I followed him outside. There was already a stream of people traveling down the hall in assorted disarray, robes and pajamas, bare feet and slippers.
“I need a doctor!” Our next-door neighbor was in the hallway, holding his door open with one foot, looking out at the growing crowd. “Is anyone here a doctor?”
“How convenient,” I muttered as Asher elbowed forward. I imagined someone walking in on their loved one in the process of having a heart attack. Given the median age on this ship, times the ample buffets—then I realized I recognized him. It was the father of the two kids from our safety lecture the other day, the one with the boy who’d been choking this morning. He looked haggard now, but his eyes lit up in hope at seeing Asher. “Come in, please, hurry, he’s in the bathroom—”
Asher pushed past him and I followed. The mother was crouched over her son in the tub, her hand covered in blood.
“He had a fever, he wanted to take a bath—” she explained. Her hand was clutched her to chest, and she was sobbing big tears. Pillows were wedged in on either side of her boy, and everything was wet. “It’s you. From this morning—” she said, recognizing Asher. “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with my son?”
This was more how I thought Liz’s fear should be. “Let’s wash your hand off.” I knelt down and pulled her up and away, to make room for Asher to see the boy. She held her injured hand to her chest like a baby bird.
The woman and I jostled against each other in the short hallway to the other half bathroom. I got her hand underneath the sink and went into autopilot. “What happened?”
“His fever, it was so high. They gave me Tylenol downstairs, and I put him in the tub, and ran cool water on him like he wanted, and then he started to shake—like he was having a seizure—I didn’t want him to swallow his tongue so—” That explained the pillows, and the nasty gash on her hand. Too bad so many people still believed that old myth. She hissed as I scrubbed in soap.
“This’ll hurt,” I warned, too late.
“I don’t want to leave him—” She began pulling her hand away from the water flow. It was clear she was in some kind of shock. Not the blood-loss kind—her kid had been kind enough to miss any arteries—but at being bitten by her own child. No wonder all she’d been able to do was incoherently scream.
“I know. But we need to give them space to load him up, okay?” I said, pulling her back to finish my scrub-down.
There came the clattering of a gurney past our door, and then the three–two–one as medics coordinated their efforts to get the child smoothly onto the board. I wrapped the mother’s hand in a clean towel and we emerged from the bathroom after seeing the gurney pass back out into the hall.
“I’m going with him,” the mother demanded.
It was just as well—she needed stitches, and iodine wouldn’t hurt. “Hey—” I reached out and grabbed the last medic in line. “She’s his mom, and she’s cut her hand.” No need to announce in the hall that her own boy bit her.
It was Marius, the Afrikaans man Asher’d spoken to this morning. His haircut said ex-military, but his face was kind. He nodded curtly. “Come along,” he said to her, and then “Make way! Make way!” to the still-growing crowd outside, with a booming voice.
Together, Asher and I watched them leave, running with the boy down the hall, his mother in tow. The husband stayed behind with his terrified daughter clinging to his leg, her glasses making her wide-set eyes look even bigger than they were. The crowd slowly started to disperse now that the show was over. Asher looked to the man once the medics were out of sight.
“If anything happens to either of you, fever, seizure, dizziness, anything strange—call them immediately. And we’re right next door.” He pointed at our door.
“You think it’s contagious?” the father asked, his face pale.
Asher gave me a dark glance. “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
We were quiet on the short way back to our room, where we performed another elaborate hand washing and showering ritual. When I finished my shower, he was waiting for me outside. “You’re on room arrest.”
I wanted to fight him. Two patients were hardly a data set. And yet—
“He’s behind this somehow.”
From the look in Asher’s eyes, he believed what he was saying completely. While I wasn’t convinced, I didn’t want to disagree. “Okay. But behind what, precisely?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“If there is an outbreak of meningitis or whatever this is”—I pointed behind me toward next door—“don’t you think they’ll turn the ship around?”
“Possibly. Or helicopter people off. I don’t know.” He started pacing, and I sat down on the edge of the bed in our last towel.
“Should we warn other people about it?” Not that I had any clue how to even begin warning people without causing a riot on board.
Asher dismissed the thought with a shake of his head. “Everyone with a paper cut would rush downstairs. They’d be swamped before they even got to the real cases, and the crowding would help with transmission.”
“If there even are any more cases.”
“If.” His lips thinned in contemplation.
“If he is behind it, what’s the point? Giving kids seizures is sad and
all, but it’s hardly aerosolized bird flu.” I leaned forward, contemplating the worried face of the man I loved. “Is the answer inside you anywhere?”
“No. I’ve spent more time thinking about him and sifting through his memories—” Asher shuddered like someone had walked over his grave, and I wondered if going through other people’s pasts was like putting on dead people’s clothing. “He always thought big and courted danger, but nothing about anything like this. Not back then. I’ll have to go down to the sick bay tomorrow and see, doctor-to-doctor, what’s going on.”
Nurse-to-nurse, I’d been conned onto this boat believing there was a vacation inside. I couldn’t fault Asher’s humanitarian bent, but I wished all of this weren’t happening now. I was hoping everything would turn out to be some sort of dreadful coincidence, even as that seemed less possible with every passing moment or seizing child. I bit my own lip and put a nervous hand on my own belly.
“Things were easier when I could just touch people and get answers,” he said, mostly to himself.
“You miss it, don’t you?” I said, and he startled, like he’d been caught. “You hide it, but—” I shrugged.
“Sorry,” he apologized.
As happy as we both were to be alive after the events of this past summer, there’d been a time afterward when Asher had seemed withdrawn. I’d figured out he was depressed, but I hadn’t wanted to ask why—especially when I thought I already knew, and the answer was something I couldn’t fix.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to hide it—or think you’re hiding it, which you’re not by the way.”
He snorted and stretched his hand out, looking at it as though he’d just been holding something, only he couldn’t precisely remember what it was.
“It feels like I’m missing a part of me. It’s not just like having my wings clipped. It’s like missing an arm. Both arms.” He closed his hand into a fist in the air. “It was everything that I was, and then it was gone.”
“But you’re still you,” I said, smiling hopefully at him.
“Hardly.” He was still staring at his empty fist. “If I was, I wouldn’t be here.”
I stared at him blankly while my heart cracked in two.
If I’d said something half a second faster I could have covered it up. I could have glossed over it, and things would have gone on and been fine and I would have learned my Very Important Lesson about Hope and the Girl Who Shouldn’t Pry.
But the record scratch of silence between us went on too long to be ignored. He looked over at me, at the expression on my face, and then blanched in turn. “Oh, God. And you think you say the wrong things sometimes, Edie—”
“We wouldn’t be a thing if you were still a shapeshifter, would we?” I blurted out before he could apologize. It was too horrible for me to contemplate, and so I hadn’t, this whole time. Which was funny, because part of me had always known the truth.
At least now it wouldn’t be hanging over me anymore like a sword.
Asher inhaled to protest, to give me the easy answer—but we were past that, weren’t we? I looked deep into his eyes, and he let out a long head-shaking sigh. “No.”
I nodded, trying to be both brave and understanding, like a woman watching someone she loves go off to war.
“Shapeshifters aren’t supposed to make friends with humans, much less fall in love with them. We’re like parasites.” He was trying to soften the blow by explaining. “There wasn’t any room for you in my past life. Hell, there wasn’t even any room left inside me.”
And I knew that too. I’d known him back then, back when being what he was almost made him go insane. It’s just that despite the fact that I was a completely nonmagical human, I’d always hoped, in some tiny-twelve-year-old part of my brain, that I’d been the woman to tame the monster. That he’d chosen me because I was special. Not that I’d won his love by default.
I swallowed. The next logical question was Would he give up everything we had here, now, to be a shapeshifter again? But for once I kept my mouth shut and didn’t run toward the spinning knives.
He took my nearer hand in his own and squeezed it until his knuckles were white. “I love you more than anything, Edie. Please, don’t let me have ruined that.”
I swallowed again, and breathed, slowly. “You haven’t. It’s okay. I love you, too.”
“We’re okay?” he asked, his voice tight.
“We’re fine.” I squeezed his hand back, and then took my own away from him. “Let’s just go to sleep. It’s been a long night.”
It was the truth, and a way out of the tar pit we’d both fallen in. “Okay.”
We crawled into bed together, lying side by side. He wrapped his arm around me like he always did, and I snuggled back against him like I always did. Pretending to be fine is half the battle of actually being fine. I was tired, and it had been a long day. I closed my eyes, and waited for sleep.
I’d always wanted to think that love could heal anything. But I realized lying there, eyes closed, listening to Asher breathe, that really love is what happens when you find out that it can’t.
* * *
I wasn’t sure what time it was when I woke in the morning; all I knew was that I wanted to throw up, and apparently I was alone.
“Asher?” I knocked on the second bathroom door before taking my place inside the first one as nausea hit me. Dammit to hell. If someone had ever explained to me to what extent being pregnant would make me intimate with a toilet, and if I’d been wise enough to believe them at the time, I wouldn’t have been on the pill, I’d have been on a freaking IUD. Three IUDs. Twelve. The number rose with each involuntary spasm. My uterus would have been like Christmas Day for copper thieves.
I puked down to bright green bile before I was done, and I wanted to scrub my tongue down with an entire tin of Altoids. I staggered to standing and poked my stomach. “Thanks for nothing, kid, I mean it.”
I rinsed with water and spit without swallowing so I couldn’t trigger anything else. My morning sickness had better resolve before I got home, otherwise I was going to be having middle-of-the-night sickness, and the thought was too awful to comprehend.
I heard the cabin door open and went outside, catching Asher in the hall. “I didn’t want to wake you. Are you okay?” he asked, solicitously—like there wasn’t an N95 mask dangling from his hand.
N95 masks were the highest-grade filters you could get. They were only for serious germs like tuberculosis and meningitis, or weird ones, like H1N1 and SARS. When I’d worked at the hospital I’d been fitted for a new one each year. It’d lived in my locker afterward, a worst-case-scenario reminder every time I opened the metal door.
I ignored his question and nodded at the mask. “So it’s like that, is it?”
“I’m afraid so.” He set the mask down by the spray bottles of cleaner we’d stolen. “People started dying last night. Let me wash my hands.”
“Shit.” I staggered back to the bed. He didn’t let me touch him as I passed, and he stepped into the other non-puke-scented bathroom. I was still perched on the edge of the bed feeling green when he returned.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” He tried to put a hand on my forehead, and I ducked.
“Yeah. Just morning sickness. How many people are ill? What’s going on downstairs?”
“They’re presuming it’s meningitis and everyone’s in isolation gear now.”
“Oh, no.”
He nodded in agreement, reaching for my forehead again. I sighed and relented, feeling like a kid trying to play hooky from school.
“No fever,” he announced.
“Like I told you.” I took his hand back and held it in my own. “Are they turning the ship around?”
“They can’t. We’re closer to Hawaii than we are to California. And there’s still the storm catching up behind us. Their plan is to get as close as they can to land, and have faster medical rescue ships meet us for transfers.”
“How many patients are there?”
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“Twenty, so far.”
I pointed at the mask with my chin. “Where’s yours?”
“I’ve still never been sick. And it’s not me that I’m worried about. We’ve got to get you off this boat.”
While I wholeheartedly agreed with his sentiment, it seemed impossible. We were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “How?”
“I’m not sure. But you’re staying in here until I figure it out.” He took his hand back and stood, reaching for the closet doors.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he took his current shirt off, pulled a dress shirt from a hanger, and began buttoning it down. The Maraschino jumped sideways, and I felt sick to my stomach all over again.
“It’s him, Edie. I know it—”
“What happened to Thomas?” I interrupted.
Asher shook his head without looking at me. “He didn’t make it. He died sometime last night. I’m sorry.”
It was always a shock when a child died. Even if it wasn’t yours, and you were just watching it distantly on the news. There was no way to mitigate a child’s death, no bargaining you could do with the universe about luck, fairness, or age. It was just wrong, and everybody knew it in their gut.
“I’m sorry, Edie,” Asher repeated, finishing his last button and turning toward me.
“Me too.” I was queasy again now, for all the wrong reasons. “Was Liz with him at least?”
“Yes—but she’s sick too. It’s affecting adults now, and all sorts of people are calling down for Tylenol for fevers in their rooms.” He crouched down, his shirt still untucked, and took my hands in his. “I’ve got to go back down there, Edie.”
“To … help?” If they needed another doctor downstairs, one who couldn’t get ill, I could hardly deny the rest of the passengers that—but I didn’t want him to leave. I wasn’t normally a scared person, but this place wasn’t my home, and I didn’t have my family or my cat—Asher was the only safe thing here.
“I have to talk to Liz. Before she passes.”
“She’s going to die?” I asked, my voice rising.
“You and I both know what death’s door looks like. Antibiotics aren’t even touching her fevers—she’s over a hundred and six. She doesn’t have long.”
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 8
