Nightshifted es-1

by Cassie Alexander

  “Edie, they don’t own you.” He put his hand on my knee. “I know it feels like that—”

  “I have my reasons, okay?” I put my gloved hand on top of his.

  “Well, I’ll still go out and check on things.” His voice was stern. I inhaled to protest, and then realized, how much trouble could a zombie really get into?

  I squeezed his hand. “I appreciate it.”

  He took his hand back, restarted the car, and we went on our way.

  * * *

  Mrs. Madigan’s name was Rita. I looked her up and down with my wonky left eye while she stirred at the stove, but I didn’t get any strange glowing nimbus from her. And I met Jenny—a twelve-year-old girl with two glorious red pigtails; Jimmie—a six-year-old who had black hair and a cheerful disposition; and Jack—a prepubescent fourteen-year-old whose voice had a tendency to crack. They all were introduced to me very solemnly by their father, and I pretended not to know any of them from any time before.

  Rita was an excellent conversationalist, and entertained us by talking about her time in the customer service mines of the DMV where she’d once worked as a teller. Apparently Madigan had been late with a registration payment once, made her laugh, and the rest was history. Madigan and Ti told stories about their time on the firefighting brigades—that was how they’d known one another, from back in the day, and the children were endlessly polite when they weren’t blurting out “Dad, tell that story about the cat on the roof that was on fire again!” for my benefit.

  It was strange being there, eating dinner with them. They knew that I knew, and I knew that they knew, and there we all were, a zombie, an assortment of werewolves and/or weredogs, and me, a nurse who was getting used to dealing with vampires. I was struck by how completely normal it felt to be with them, for all of our differences. And seeing Ti interact with Madigan made some strange and unused part of my heart start to swell. I blinked one eye and looked down at myself just in case.

  “All right, kids—clear the table. Edie’s got to get to work,” Rita said to general complaints.

  “Can’t you stay?” Jenny asked. I’d braided her pigtails after yellow cake and chocolate ice cream, while she’d sat in my lap.

  “I wish I could, but I can’t. If we don’t leave soon, I’ll be late for work.”

  “Plates now, kids,” Rita said.

  Jenny slid off my lap and made a face, but took her dishes into the kitchen. I dutifully grabbed my plate and went in line to follow her. “When will you visit us next, Uncle Ti?” I heard Jimmie ask behind me.

  “Thanks again,” I told Rita in the kitchen, as I dropped off my dinner plate at the sink.

  “He leaves town a lot,” Rita murmured under her breath. “Make him stick around, okay? Don’t blow it.”

  I nodded. I didn’t intend to blow anything. At least, perhaps, not like that.

  * * *

  No one wanted to go to work that night less than I did. Each of the children gave me hugs before letting me go out of the door. Feeling sorry for myself consumed half my thoughts as I walked to Ti’s car. Not knowing what to say occupied the other half. He opened my door for me, and I sat down.

  “So, how long have you been alive?” I asked, as soon as he was belted in next to me.

  He chuckled as the car started. “I’m older than you.”

  “That’s not saying much.” I was twenty-five. High school, then the local college’s accelerated nursing program, courtesy of a deep desire to get the hell out of Dodge and a willingness to incur student loans. “How much older?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” he said, pulling us out of Madigan’s drive.

  “You forgot?”

  “I’m missing half my soul. It makes me a little forgetful now and then.”

  Silence reigned for half a block. Some conversationalist I was. “Are all zombies like you?”

  “Like me, how?”

  “Difficult conversationalists and ruggedly handsome.”

  He turned to look at me at the next stop. “Most people don’t get past the scars.”

  “Don’t they ever go away?”

  He shrugged. “They would if I ever gave them long enough to heal.”

  “Well, I like them,” I said.

  “Why?” he surprised me by asking.

  I inhaled to buy myself time to think. “Most people look normal on the outside, but they’re messed up on the inside. Maybe you’re messed up on the outside, but on the inside, you’re good.”

  A supremely awkward, at least for me, silence passed between us. “Sooo, I like them,” I said, winding up. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a kinky fascination with them or anything.” Wow. Pull up, Edie, pull up! “It’s just not a big deal, you know?” I finished, resolving not to talk again for as long as I could help it.

  Ti nodded and kept looking out at the road. “Yeah, I do.”

  We turned onto the highway and his attention to his driving saved me from myself.

  “So what are you going to do after you drop me off?” I asked as we took the exit that would lead to County. I thought about the city as I’d seen it with the Shadows, like a map of a circulatory system sketched out, with the County Hospital as its living, beating heart.

  “I’m going to go to Seventeenth and ask about the girls those vampires were interested in. If they picked them up, or took them to another location.” He shook his head behind the wheel, at me or the situation, I didn’t know. “Someone has to help you.”

  “I’m not some sort of princess trapped in a castle. If that’s what you think, then I don’t want your help.” I didn’t mind help but I sure as hell didn’t want pity.

  I saw his hands tighten slightly around the steering wheel, and his eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

  “I choose to disagree with you,” he said, after a long pause. His reflection looked at me again. “On all points.”

  Suddenly my badge under my shirt felt sharper than it had, and the seat belt felt too tight, and the car, which’d been just fine before, felt ten degrees too warm. I fidgeted in my seat and sighed. “It just feels weird, okay? To have people care. I’m not used to that.”

  Ti pulled the car into the County’s emergency room drop-off roundabout. “I’m not sure what kind of feral child upbringing you had, Edie. But I want to help you. It doesn’t make me a bad person for wanting to help, or you a bad person for needing help. All right?”

  I gathered my belongings off the El Camino’s floor. “All right.” I opened the door and rose up out of the passenger side, then quickly sank back down, with my purse and bag still in my lap, and shut myself in again. “So—was that a date?”

  His eyebrows, or the places they would be when they grew in, rose. “Did it feel like a date?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did you want it to be a date?”

  Two could play that game. “Definitely maybe.”

  He laughed, and reached his hand out behind my head, and pulled me gently toward him. It was awkward until our lips touched, and then it felt just fine. I swooned a little bit, falling forward some, almost into him. He caught me, his hand chaste upon my shoulder, and we parted. I reached for the door handle and let myself out quickly.

  “So you’ll call me tomorrow morning and let me know what you found out, okay?” I asked, after I was safely outside.

  “Yeah.” He shook his head again at me. “Take care of yourself, Edie.”

  “I’ll try!” I said with a wave, then tried my hardest not to grin like a grinning fool until I’d turned to run inside.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I shoved my clothes into my locker and changed into my scrubs in record time, swiping my badge in just before the warning beep that meant they’d dock me a tenth of an hour of pay. Even running late and being dog—weredog!—tired, there was a spring in my step now, I’d admit. It was kinda nice to be kissed by someone, and not be sure about what would happen next.

  “You’re far too chipper for someone who the v
ampires want to see in two nights,” Charles said, coming to stand near my desk by my patients’ rooms. I’d just gotten the world’s most random report from Floater Nick. He mostly worked the rest of the hospital, and only sometimes Y4, and I think the Shadows had mucked with his brain to remove sensitive information one too many times. He didn’t know where either of my patients’ IV lines were, but he’d made sure to tell me about a satisfying conversation one of them had had with his cousin on the phone, and the exact firmness of the other’s bowel movements.

  “Thanks for bringing me down, Charles,” I said, checking over my patients’ medication lists for the night. It really didn’t matter what he said. If getting a scattershot report from Nick and knowing that some grumpy day shift person would come on shift in the morning couldn’t blow my mood, then nothing could.

  “Earth to Edie,” Charles said, snapping his fingers.

  “Sorry. You were saying?”

  Apparently, “I was reminding you you were about to die” didn’t feel appropriate for Charles to repeat. “Nothing,” he said, and shrugged.

  After assessments, Gina came over. “Too bad Ti’s gone, eh?”

  “Oh? Yeah,” I agreed. My life was my life. Mostly. “Who’s in the corrals tonight?”

  “A shapeshifter.”

  “Into?” I prompted. She looked blank for a moment.

  “Oh! No one. At the moment. It’s a weird case.” She glanced over her shoulder down to her side of the hall. The room that the weredragon had been in had supposedly been overhauled and strengthened. Still paid to be wary, though. Or were-y, as the case may be. “Weres only have one additional form. Any animal, really, only they just get one particular one. Werebats, werewolves, werewhatevers. A shapeshifter can only be other humans, and only replicas of ones that they’ve touched once before. To be honest, I think being a shapeshifter is more traumatic. Changing into fur is nothing compared to changing into other people. For example—this one’s lost his mind. For real.” She twirled her finger beside her ear.

  I curled my lip. I felt bad for patients with psych issues, but they were draining to deal with. “I wish we had a psych ward for them.”

  “We do. But he’s got a feeding tube in. He’d go over there with it, and the other patients might think they were helping him, by yanking the plastic worm out of his nose.”

  I tried for a moment to imagine the Y4 version of a psych ward and utterly failed. And I thought we had it bad here. “So what’s he in with?”

  “His technical diagnosis is schizophrenia, but I think he really falls under shapeshifteritis. Sometimes it’s a her. He changes back and forth a bit. He’s lost control.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s like having multiple personality disorder, with a different body for each personality. It takes a really emotionally and psychically healthy person to keep mentally stable—and they’re better off if they don’t touch too many other people, ever. It contaminates their DNA or something. He’s in restraints and isolation now, but it’s a little late.” Her lips pressed together in sympathetic pain. “He plucked out his own eyes. Said he didn’t want to see himself anymore.”

  “Ugh.” I shuddered in revulsion. “Can’t he just shift them back?”

  “Nope. It’s a conservation of mass thing. They can’t shrink down to become children again, for instance, or enlarge to become obese. But weres can go from human-sized to bear-sized, go figure.”

  And I thought I’d had tough patients. Then again, it wasn’t like the shapeshifter patient could see Gina being disgusted, as long as she could keep her tone of voice straight. “That’s gotta be difficult.”

  “You’re telling me. I have to do a dressing change on his mangled eye sockets every six hours. It’s fucking grim.”

  “Well, let me know if you need help.” Night shift bore the brunt of things that were every six hours, hitting both midnight and six A.M. Nothing like having to do a dressing change right after and right before report.

  “Will do.” She took two steps away from me, and then came those two steps back. “You know, you could pull his information up in the computer.”

  “What? Whose?”

  “Mr. Smith’s. I’m just saying.”

  “You mean Ti?” I asked and grinned at her, maybe a little too widely. “That’s creepy and stalkery, and completely unethical—not to mention a violation of patient privacy laws.”

  Gina rolled her eyes, then looked at me more closely again. “You—you already went on a date!”

  “Who, me? No.” I shook my head in an exaggerated fashion and laughed.

  Gina clapped her hands together. “Charles owes me twenty dollars.”

  “You were taking bets?” I forced another laugh as my stomach clenched. Maybe Ti dated a different nurse every time he came through? “On what?”

  “How fast you two would go out. Charles thought you’d spend more time being depressed and withdrawn. What with the…” and Gina gestured over her head, indicating perhaps the bad-news cloud that must follow me around. “But I figured you for a fast mover.”

  I snorted. “Um, thanks. I guess.”

  “Not like that.” She paused for a moment, choosing the right sentiment. “I think you’d rather live your life than wish you’d lived it, you know?”

  Not entirely inaccurate. “Yeah, I do. Thanks,” I said, and smiled.

  * * *

  My patients were easy. One eight-year-old kid—he of the bowel movements—whose parents were on guard at his bedside. He had a high fever, had gotten dehydrated, and was here for antibiotics and supervision. He was asleep in his bed, but both of his parents were up, watching the late-night infomercials. I did a quick blinking thing, and realized that while both parents glowed, the child did not. As far as I could tell—and I wasn’t well-versed on my new superpower just yet; thanks for not giving me an instruction manual, Shadows—they were daytimers, but their son was entirely human. Either he’d have to be given transfusions of vampire blood to jumpstart the gene that would set him on his vampiric path—gee, you should be meaner to other kids on the playground, here’s some steak tartare?—or else he would be made a donor for the rest of his life. Like I would, assuming that I lived.

  I wondered if they wanted differently for him, like Anna’s parents had wanted differently for her, but it wasn’t exactly a subject I could broach. Telling them to give the kid more fiber to eat was one thing—asking them if they wanted out of the system would be another. I stayed there staring for a moment too long, wondering if there was some sort of vampire and vampire-related-humans underground railroad that could help either them or me. When the mother glanced over, I pretended to be watching the same juicing infomercial they were before making my escape.

  The second patient had recently been ICU level, but was now on the mend. Three stab wounds to the chest and a shattered kneecap that probably didn’t get busted on its own. But his daytimer body was taking care of business, with the help of a few small vamp blood transfusions, just a cc or two at a time. He wouldn’t get off the phone, too busy making deals with his bookie, so I took his temperature in his armpit instead of his mouth. Maybe that’s what’d gotten him into this mess. I wasn’t in the mood to fight him on it, regardless.

  I was finishing up all my charting, taking enough time to keep my handwriting legible, when I heard “Edie—come into the break room now!” in Meaty’s nursing voice.

  I jumped up and looked around. Everyone else on the floor was gone. Oh, shit.

  I ran into the break room and saw Gina, Charles, and Meaty standing there, around … a commemorative cake. It was shaped like a coffin, frosted by hand, and my name was scrawled across the top in blue icing.

  Perhaps in any other setting it would have been morbid or tacky—no, it was still morbid and tacky—but I could tell from the expectant looks on their faces that it was morbid and tacky with love. Tears welled up. I looked from one to the other of them. “Thanks, guys. Really. You’re too sweet.”

  “Wel
l, you know—” Meaty said, and shrugged.

  “Gina did all the hard work. I just tasted this part back here, for quality control,” Charles said, pointing to a discreet finger swipe in the icing on the cake’s far side.

  Gina stuck her tongue out at Charles. “Hey—have I told you you owe me twenty bucks?”

  “What flavor is it?” I asked quickly, hoping to deflect attention.

  “Twenty bucks, eh?” Charles asked, looking askance at me. I started blushing furiously.

  “How did you spend twenty bucks on cake mix?” Meaty wondered aloud. “You’ll have to spot me. I’ve only got a five.”

  * * *

  Charles and Gina went back to the floor soon after, and Meaty followed them, leaving me to eat alone. The cake was a delicious chocolate with blackberry filling, and I realized it was the second time I’d had cake that night. Usually I’d feel guilty, but hey, if this particular cake was accurate, I might as well eat up. My patients were fine, anyhow. I wondered who Ti was out there scaring by being a frighteningly scarred-up and pissed-off zombie, and if Sike and Mr. Weatherton, Esquire, were doing anything at all yet on my behalf.

  Leaving half of my piece of cake behind, I trotted back to where my phone was in the locker room and made a phone call. This time Sike recognized my number.

  “Nothing yet,” she said, and hung up.

  “But—” I stared at the “call ended” symbol on my phone. No way. I was beginning to wonder if Mr. Weatherton’s services weren’t some sort of time-wasting ruse. I redialed Sike to tell her so.

  “I told you—”

  “Look, I just want to know—”

  “We’re working on it,” she interrupted me. We were both silent on the line, and then she took a deep inhale. “If you hadn’t killed Yuri, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  I couldn’t refute that. She hung up on me again, more slowly this time, and I didn’t wonder until afterwards how she’d known Mr. November’s real name.

  * * *

  I went back to my half-eaten piece of cake, and shoved most of it around my plate. If the day had come that Edie Spence was too depressed to eat an entire piece of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting— Meaty opened the break-room door, interrupting my personal pity party.