Shapeshifted

by Cassie Alexander

Page 12

  “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 holding 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.