Nightshifted es-1

by Cassie Alexander

  “You could have woken me up, you know,” I said when I was through. When had this happened? Before Anna’d curled up against me, or after?

  “I was a bit occupied, you know,” she said with my tone back at me.

  “What, with all the bleeding?”

  Sike pursed her lips, then reached up to the back of the couch and pulled herself upright. The towel tried to follow her until I yanked it off.

  “Well,” I said, looking around my room. “She’s not in my oven, is she?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” If I had had my old dining room set, this was where I would have sat down, on one of the extra chairs it would have provided. I sat down, cross-legged, on the floor. “So where is she?”

  “She went out.”

  “Out … where?”

  “You don’t know what it was like. You can’t possibly understand,” Sike began. “She has not been truly free for a century—”

  “What?” I put my hands to my head. It felt like the wind was punched out of me. “Are you kidding? She left? Why?”

  “It’s not for one such as I to question—”

  “What. The. Hell.” I pointed at her neck. “Are you really going to feed me the party line?”

  “You don’t understand—” She tried to look away, then gasped in pain at the movement.

  “What’s there to understand? She almost killed you!”

  Sike grimaced. Unfortunately for her, I liked my nursing license too much to steal narcotics.

  “What happened at that garage today?”

  “I saved you and your zombie boyfriend.”

  “Don’t pretend that was altruism,” I said, and she snorted. “Why’d you even come to save me, if you were going to let her go?”

  “Because—” Sike began, and her voice faltered.

  “Because,” I began, to prompt her, but then I realized the truth. “Because it was never about me, was it.”

  Sike closed her eyes. “I was sent to save her, to feed her the blood of the Rose Throne forefathers, so that she would feel indebted to us, as much as one such as she can.”

  I could feel my brows furrow on my forehead. They’d sent Sike in like a human blood bag. I was revolted anew.

  “But I chose to come,” she continued, and after a long pause she added, “Because I knew what it was like.”

  “Tell me. I want to know.”

  Sike finally opened her eyes, and stared me down. “Do you really think Sike’s my original name? And how old do you think I am?”

  The pictures on Mr. November’s floor. The other girls he’d written “saved.” “You knew his name was Yuri,” I answered her.

  Sike swallowed and nodded. The motion made her wince in pain. “Once upon a time, I had another name. Another life. I had a family, and a home. The Zver ruined that for me, kept me alive with the dregs of vampire blood long enough to break everything I knew inside. Yuri—the man you killed”—and here her stare hardened at me, and I realized why she’d hated me, from the beginning, when we’d first met—“Yuri saved me from them. It was accidental—he was looking for her. But when he found me, he rescued me, and others like me, and took us to the Rose Throne.”

  I tensed. “Did they treat you well?”

  “Well enough. He bartered for our safety. Said that if he ever found Anna, he’d give her to them.”

  “So if the Rose Throne knew that the Zverskiye were…” I paused, unsure what to call what Anna and Sike had gone through—

  “They would never act on their own. Yuri could be their tool, and they would sometimes give him blood, but they could never announce their interest in Anna until she was actually found. If they knew the Rose Thone was interested, they would have sent her even farther away.”

  I couldn’t not ask any longer. “Why were they torturing you?”

  “Why did they torture any of us?” She gave me a haunted smile. “To feed the things that protect them. The Tyeni.”

  My mouth went dry. The Shadows had the hospital to feed on. Was that what the Zverskiye were feeding with the sorrows of little girls?

  “Their ways are the old ways, some of the oldest among us. Their daytimers are bound through strict tradition. Each eldest child from a family will go on to become a full-blooded Zverskiye—they have so many violent internal skirmishes, they need to continually replenish their supply of soldiers,” she said with a snort. Was Anna’s trip to America with Yuri and her brother intended to avoid that?

  Sike went on. “The second oldest is drowned in the Tyeni. Metaphorically. It didn’t feel like drowning at the time.”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Then what … were the pictures for?”

  “To create more despair. Even distant pain caused by the Zver was theirs to claim. Imagine pain trickling like water down a cave wall, until it joins other threads of itself, finally dripping into the river flowing underneath.”

  “And I thought bookies and drug running was bad,” I murmured to myself.

  “Oh, no. That’s just to get money. Power’s an entirely different thing.” She closed her eyes again, and seemed to be steeling herself to attempt to stand.

  “Sike—why couldn’t you just get her to stay?”

  Sike stopped in her progression and looked at me. “You mean you don’t know?”

  The list of everything I currently did not know would fill a fucking library. Sike saw the look on my face, and took pity on my ignorance.

  “The Zver call them nochnaya. She is a vampire child from two daytimer parents, an actual child of the night. She’s the reason they keep us daytimers tame, in the hopes that someday, one of us, one of our children, will be like her.” Sike inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Right now, she is still a little girl. A hungry, angry little girl. But she can grow, and change. Because unlike all the rest of them, she is actually alive. Hadn’t you noticed it?”

  I pursed my lips, remembering imagining her heart beat the night before. Maybe I hadn’t known it—but I’d felt it.

  “She’ll live forever until she chooses not to,” Sike continued. “And then when she dies, and rises again after three days … To vampires, she will be like unto a god.” She looked at me, her eyes daring me to challenge her. “One doesn’t tell a god when to stay, or when to go. She wanted to be free, and so she left.”

  I didn’t think Sike would have stopped Anna, even if the Rose Throne had directly told her to. There was too much similar between them. She touched her bandaged wounds with curious fingers.

  “She’s been so hungry, for so long. I am lucky that she let me live.”

  And the thought that I might have come into my living room and found Sike’s corpse lying on my couch was the last straw. I almost shouted at her, “You would have let her kill you?”

  “I would have died for her, and welcomed it.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t mean that, Sike—”

  A slow, true smile spread across her face. “I’ll never be powerful enough to exact vengeance for all that was done. But someday? She will be.”

  She pondered this for a cheerful moment more, before lurching up into a stand. I jumped up after her, ready to catch her if she fell.

  “I have to go now to get ready for your trial,” she said, folding the tatters of her shirt over her shoulder before picking up her coat.

  I shook my head. “Stay here.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, right.” And maybe her car was so fancy it’d drive itself. “Sike, you’ve lost a lot of blood. They’ll understand.”

  She shouldered her coat on, with a hiss of pain, and straightened its collar before speaking again. “Mr. Weatherton signed a contract. That is all that matters now.” She stalked toward my front door.

  “Will she show up?” I called after her.

  Her hand was on my door handle. “I would shrug, but it would hurt,” she said, and let herself out.

  And then I was alone with my bloodstained couch. If Anna didn’t show up tonight, I wasn’
t so sure Mr. Weatherton would still want the case.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I sat in the middle of my very empty living room for a moment, gathering my thoughts. First off—I needed a shower. Badly. I was ten different kinds of gross.

  Secondly, I should have written a letter to Jake and given it to Sike before she’d left. It wasn’t too late, though. I got paper from my nightstand and rummaged in my purse for a pen. Then I remembered about the pope water. I swirled my hand around inside my half-closed purse, searching, and found nothing.

  I unzipped my purse all the way and dumped all of its contents out on the floor. I still had my wallet and keys, but the pope water was gone.

  I tried to remember the last time I’d seen it. Meaty’d given it to me, and right after that I’d tucked it away. Ti wouldn’t have stolen it, and Sike surely wouldn’t have. Who else had I seen, between then and now?

  Jake. Dammit to hell.

  When I’d been in the bathroom at Molly’s. He’d been looking for money, no doubt. When he found an unlabeled but obviously medically related bottle in my bag, the temptation had been too great. It could have been a bottle of spit for all he knew … but of course he hoped that it wasn’t. He’d hoped that his nurse kid sister was bringing something illicit home, something that he could shoot up.

  I was so tired, so worn out, so exhausted—and yet—fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck.

  I called Jake a thousand different names under my breath as I drove to the Armory. At least I knew where he was staying—that was a change. I parked a block away, and trusted my ancient car, my current appearance, and my crappy mood to protect me as I walked the block in.

  “We’ve already closed for the night,” the lady at the front informed me.

  “I’m looking for my brother. I have to talk to him. It’s a medical emergency.”

  She frowned at me. “Who?”

  “Jake Spence.” I held my hand up to indicate his relative height. “Dark hair, healthy looking?” Asshole, thief, my mind continued.

  “We really don’t allow visitors—”

  I fished my badge up and out of my shirt. The County logo gleamed clearly under the cheap lighting, a tree reaching up from three hills. “I’ll just be a minute. It’s an emergency, I swear.”

  She frowned but relented. “Fourth floor, a few cots in. If he leaves, he can’t come back in tonight.”

  I nodded curtly. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  I raced up the stairs, fueled by anger and fear. I had to stop myself at the landing and breathe a few times, not to catch my breath, but to calm down. I wanted to slam the door open and go in yelling, but the other people here didn’t deserve that—just Jake. I went in.

  The room had a five-by-five grid of cots. There were signs on the walls posting the rules of the Armory, reminding people to take showers, cajoling them to come to church on Sunday.

  Three heads bobbed up at my entrance. Each of their faces had the exhausted look of hypervigilance, wiped out by PTSD from some previous personal war. I waved my hands negatingly at them and made my way to where I saw Jake, asleep.

  “Jake, wake up.” I kneed his cot. He continued to snore. Just because he couldn’t kill himself with drugs didn’t mean he couldn’t keep trying. My brother was never a quitter. As I knelt down to whisper louder, I smelled beer on his breath. This time, I shook him hard.

  His eyes fluttered open and slowly focused on me. “You look like hell, Sissy,” he said.

  “I feel like hell. Where is it?” I shook his shoulder again.

  “Where’s what?”

  I inhaled and exhaled very slowly, and then addressed him like I would a patient I was about to throw down with. “Jake, I don’t have time to play games.” I watched realization dawn on his face—perhaps he saw the look in my eyes now that he most frequently saw in the mirror. Want.

  “But it’s just water, Edie. It didn’t do anything.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Why? What is it?” he asked, sitting up.

  “Jake—I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you! You can’t just take things from me. You can’t take anything from me anymore!”

  “Fine. Hang on.” He yawned, then reached over to rummage in his bag, retrieving the bottle. Turning back toward me, he finally took all of me in, the shirt covered in zombie scrapings, the splashes of almost-vampire blood. “Edie, are you in some sort of trouble?”

  I snatched the bottle from his hands and held it up in front of my eyes. Empty. Dry. I slammed it down onto my thigh.

  “If you wanted to care—it’s too late.” I didn’t want these words to be the last ones out of my mouth at him, but I’d been holding so much in for so long. “You never cared about anyone but yourself, Jake. You always came first for you. I gave up so much to help you out, and you never even said so much as thanks.” I inhaled deeply and blinked back tears. “This is good-bye, Jake. I love you, I’ll always love you, but this is good-bye.”

  He reeled backward, stunned. I stood up and stalked down the stairway, past the disapproving shelter manager, straight out to my car. I unlocked my door, sat down inside, put my forehead against the steering wheel, and sobbed.

  * * *

  When I could drive again, I got home quickly. Exhaustion helped. I was too wrung out to care. Everything felt dry—the bloodstains on my shirt, the cardboard taste on my tongue—and the events of the past few days felt distant and blurry, like I’d watched them happen to someone else.

  Anna was gone. I’d rescued her twice, and she’d abandoned me. Ti cared, but he was gravely injured. The lawyers didn’t care if I lived or died, and Meaty, Charles, and Gina thought I was dead already.

  Tonight Dren would come to take me away and there’d be nothing I could do.

  Worst of all, I hadn’t even saved Jake, goddammit. It was all for nothing. All of it.

  I went into my house and picked up all my medical things, shoving them back in the box, and took that box with me into the bathroom. Heaven forbid my landlord should find alcohol swabs littering the floor—he might think I was a junkie! I set the box down and kicked it as hard as I could, sending it skidding into the far tile wall.

  Then I pulled the bottle of pope water out of my pocket, fully expecting to throw it in the trash. But the heat from my body or the angle I’d carried it had made two infinitesimally small drops coalesce on its glass wall. I flicked it with my fingernail, sending them to the bottom of the vial.

  What, if any, good would that be? I couldn’t even get them out. Unless—

  “No way,” I whispered. Then I ran to my box of supplies and hauled it out of the bathroom and dug through everything until I found an insulin syringe. Diabetic medicines were given in minute quantities, units so small you felt stupid double-checking them with another nurse. I popped it out of the package and pulled its orange cap off with my teeth—and really quickly remembered to hit the cap of the bottle with an alcohol swab, as Lord only knew what needle Jake had shoved in there before me.

  I pierced the cap, and slowly drew the pope water out. Three units worth—0.03 milliliters, written down. Barely anything. It was so clear it was hard to convince myself that there was anything in the syringe but air.

  What to do with it now? I held the tiny syringe upright. I could drop it onto my tongue. Or—I could do what this syringe was designed to do. I tore open a new swab, lifted my shirt, made a circle on my stomach near my belly button, and then shoved the needle in before I could talk myself out of it. I’d given a hundred-million subcutaneous injections on other people before, but this was the first one I’d ever done on myself. I pushed down on the plunger, barely feeling it move, pulled the needle out, and waited for some response.

  Pain? Heat? Bruising? Swelling? I watched the tiny pinprick, hoping for some reaction, and got nothing instead. I only knew where I’d been injected because I’d been the one to do it—I couldn’t have pointed out the spot to anyone else. What if to make pope water work, you had to believe in the p
ope? I laughed, and even to my own ears, it sounded a bit hysterical.

  I pushed the syringe’s safety cap out to shield the needle, and tossed it into my trash. Littering biohazards was becoming a hobby of mine. I caught sight of myself in my bathroom mirror, across the hall.

  Damn, did I need a shower. Of course what I really needed I wouldn’t get—a break.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  I stripped, leaving everything on the floor where it landed, before getting into the shower with just my lanyard around my neck.

  My water and its heating was the only utility bill I personally was not responsible for. The purpose of this shower would be to ensure that I got my last month rent of money’s worth. I scrubbed myself and my funky lanyard double-clean. Then I stood there, head bowed, and let the water rush over me. It beat against my face and torso, until I was numb to the sensation and inured to the heat. I opened my mouth to inhale and the sheet of water parted for me—and more water instead of air rushed in, bitter and vile. I gagged and opened my eyes and my shower walls were gone. My lungs spasmed, the water I’d inhaled making me want to cough, and if I coughed—I looked up and couldn’t see any light. Endless ocean all around. No boat, no shore, just salt water. The cold buffeted me, moving with the wake of something I knew I did not want to see. My eyes stung, my throat knotted, and I drifted, suspended in the viscous dark.

  With no other choice, I took a breath. I could feel the cold grabbing at my cheeks, forcing its way inside me, crawling into my mouth and down my throat. It flowed in me and through me, against my struggles and gagging, until all the water around me flowed inside me and disappeared, like I was inhaling it against my will and couldn’t stop, and I plummeted down, back into my shower, falling into a fetal position curled around the drain.

  When I could move, I crawled out of my shower and puked dark salt water onto my bathroom floor.

  Chapter Forty-Nine