Shapeshifted (An Edie Spence Novel)

by Alexander, Cassie

  Ti leaned forward, pressing the curandero back.

  “No. Ti—” I ran forward, so if Ti raised his hands I could put myself in harm’s way. Olympio’s grandfather hadn’t asked for this.

  The black eggs in the pie tin cracked and things slithered out of them, pouring over the edges of the shallow metal pan. Like snakes made of smoke, endless numbers of them writhed out of the broken shells, trying to crawl toward Ti’s legs. I tried to kick them out of the way. It burned where they touched me, and they bit me like tiny vipers, striking again and again with small black fangs. The curandero stayed still, the final egg trapped between Ti’s forehead and his palm. Ti blinked, coming to eerie life.

  “Ti,” I whispered.

  My legs were on fire—I could feel their bites through my shoes down to my foot bones. I didn’t know if the snakes were poisonous. I knew this couldn’t be good for me, but I couldn’t leave Ti.

  He leaned forward and lifted up one leg like he was going to walk off the foil cross.

  “Ti, don’t.”

  I got as close to him as I could. His lifted foot dropped, touching down on the carpeting outside the cross.

  “Ti—you remember me. I know you do. It’s why you didn’t hurt me the other night.” I reached out for him, and electricity snapped between us like winter static. I grabbed his wrist and it thrummed, quivering like one of those carnival games where they say they’ll test your love power.

  And that’s sort of what this was, wasn’t it? Even if we were through. There had been something there between us, once upon a time. It was gone now, but not erased. I’d never let go.

  “I know you remember me.”

  His other arm swung wide, sweeping the curandero to the ground, crutches and all. Olympio’s grandfather kept praying, even as he landed on the floor, the blackening egg he held smashed. I took his place, centering myself in front of Ti. I couldn’t give up on him, not when him being here was my fault.

  “I know you can hear me, Ti. You’re in there somewhere.” His amber eyes were staring down at me. I reached up to touch his chin with my free hand, like the last time he’d touched me. There was electricity there too, as if where we touched we completed a circuit. “Come back to me.”

  The door to the room opened up, and Luz flew in from the hallway outside. Her teeth were out, and she raced in the way full vampires can: from not there to in your face in half a second.

  “You liar!” she shouted at the top of her lungs as she lunged for me.

  Ti ripped his arm free from my grasp and punched her. She flew across the room and landed against the wall.

  She stared down at her concave chest, where Ti’s violence and her prior speed had caved it in. Snap by sickening snap, she reknitted before our eyes.

  “Don’t ever hurt Edie,” Ti said, and then sagged forward. I caught him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Luz stood as soon as she could and jerked her chin at Ti. “What is that thing?”

  “He is a zombie.” I helped set him to standing again. I stood on the side of him opposite from Luz. Even though she was injured, she was still pissed and fast. “What happened tonight? Why are you here?”

  “I went there and found nothing!”

  “You didn’t wait for Hector or me?”

  “Catrina told me—and I have waited long enough!” She pounded her fist into the wall behind her. It shook.

  I didn’t want to ask if Adriana was dead. If she was, it was something that’d be written on my conscience until the day I died. “What did you find there?”

  “The whole place was emptied out. I could smell the blood—I could smell that she’d been there. But she and everyone else, and everything, were gone.” Luz sounded mystified with herself. “I don’t know how they were keeping me from seeing it before … when she disappeared, that was the first place I checked. I know I checked it. Repeatedly. I know I did.” She sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than us.

  People remembering actions they’d never done had a feel of familiarity. Either the Shadows were here, mucking things up—unlikely, seeing as it was in their best interests that I somehow complete my quest—or it was House Grey, as Dren had suspected, loaning or teaching Maldonado their powers. They wanted Santa Muerte for themselves, even though they wouldn’t get their own hands dirty to do it—just help out Three Crosses and Maldonado.

  Ti was still leaning on me when Hector arrived with Catrina. Olympio helped his grandfather to stand. Ti turned toward the old man. “Is it broken? Am I fixed?”

  The curandero spoke, and Olympio translated. “Fixed for now. No guarantees, though. Once you’ve been touched by a bruja, he can always find a door.” He looked at me and said something else, but Olympio didn’t translate it. The curandero laughed aloud, triumphant, holding the smashed remains of the last black egg. The snakes—or whatever it was that they’d been—were gone. I looked at my ankles and they were covered in red welts, oozing serous fluids. I’d worry about that later.

  “Luz—are you okay?” Luz was touching herself like she couldn’t believe what had just happened. Either Luz’d never seen herself heal as a vampire before, or she was used to beating on people a lot more fragile than a zombie.

  Catrina and Hector arrived. “What happened?” Catrina asked.

  “I went there, and she was gone.” Luz glared at me. “If you’d come to me sooner, last night—”

  “Then you’d have been killed. He’s more powerful than you think,” Hector said, surveying the room. His gaze landed on me, still holding Ti, and looked displeased. “We came as soon as we could.”

  “Thanks.” I turned toward Ti. “Are you better?”

  “I’m not homicidal anymore. Better might take a while.” He pushed himself up. “What’s the vampire’s deal?”

  “Ti—now that you’re fixed, what do you remember?”

  “How does this help?” Luz demanded.

  I ignored her. “Ti—there was a girl incarcerated with you. The one I told you about. Do you remember any more now than you did earlier today?” Incarcerated sounded better than jailed. They’d both been prisoners, in a sense. Unwilling.

  Ti’s brow furrowed as he tried to retrieve information that House Grey magic had shoved aside. “Just the bones. So many bones.” He looked down at his hands as if they still might be covered in gore. “Rooms that there was no daylight in, and bones. That’s all I see when I think of her.”

  “I went to that room. She was gone,” Luz said.

  “Ti—rooms?” I gently prodded.

  He nodded. “There was … more than one. Only one girl, though.” His eyes fixed on mine. “What kind of monster was I that I helped keep her there?”

  What kind of guard would be more fearsome and invulnerable than a leashed zombie? I took his hands in mine. “It wasn’t you, Ti. You weren’t yourself.”

  “I swore no one would ever control me again, once my old master died—that I’d never be how I used to be. Used. Again.” He slowly shook his head. “I can’t believe it happened to me. That I came here to offer myself over to him—”

  “Only because you wanted to be healed. How were you to know?” It was hard to see him in so much pain. He wouldn’t be the first person to fixate on a goal so much that he lied to himself about its outcome. If anyone about knew that, it was me.

  “If there was more than one room, where’s the second one?” Hector asked. I looked back at him—at Asher—and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Their new church. The one I was doing construction on during the day. It’s behind the main altar there.”

  “That’s where they’ve taken her?” Luz stood, pushing Catrina aside, but Hector blocked the door.

  “We go together, Reina. You cannot do this alone,” Hector said as she prepared to shove past him. There was irony in the situation. If only Luz had bitten Adriana, Luz would know exactly where she was now—vampires could find anyone they’d ever bitten before. But because she’d followed Anna’s instru
ctions to the letter, she was blind. And healing my mother was that much farther away from me, still.

  Luz deflated. “I’ve searched there too, and missed her before.”

  Olympio’s grandfather said something, and Olympio translated him. “Because they would not let you see. But someone who has had the bridle taken off their mind will not so willingly put it on again.”

  “She has a bridle, but I have a door?” Ti asked ruefully.

  Olympio held up his hands and shrugged. “It’s magic. Do you expect it to make sense?”

  Ti looked around the room. “I’m going with you all. I know the layout of his new church. And I want revenge.”

  Luz’s lips lifted in a feral grin. “Then you’re on our side.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Hector drove us. It seemed for the best. He knew where we were going, and that way I could sit in middle of the backseat in case I needed to stop Ti from going crazy again, in theory. Hector was silent, and I wondered if he had anything in his glove box that’d stop a zombie. Luz sat in the front seat, and Catrina sat beside me. Outside, it started to rain, hard, and I wondered if Maldonado was somehow behind the storm.

  “How was she? Last night, when you saw her?” Catrina asked me.

  I didn’t want to lie, but I was afraid Luz would throw herself out of the car and race ahead without us if I told the truth. I wondered if Hector had had the sense to child-lock his car. “She was starved, but still alive. And covered with tattoos of bones.”

  Catrina pulled her head back at this. “Why?”

  “She couldn’t say. I don’t speak Spanish.”

  Catrina’s hands found each other in her lap, and she touched the tattoo on her right ring finger. “I wonder if—”

  “Don’t,” Luz advised from the front of the car.

  “What?” I asked.

  Catrina finally held her hand up for me to see. The tattoo there was hard to make out with only streetlamps outside the car for light. “When we were eighteen—we went out and got them done. So we’d be sisters forever. To the bone.” It was a stylized drawing of a finger bone, tattooed on her first knuckle, like the funny bone from an Operation game, only fatter. “Maybe that was why,” Catrina went on.

  “No,” Hector said, looking back at us in the rearview mirror. “Who better to serve the house of Santa Muerte than a dead man? And who better to steal away than the love of a dead girl?”

  “I’m not dead,” Luz protested.

  “You are. You just don’t get it yet,” Hector said. “Look—whoever they are, they stole Adriana out from underneath you. Edie tells me that probably means Maldonado’s a shapeshifter,” he added, leaving himself out of it.

  “That explains a lot,” Ti said, making a fist and cracking the knuckles of his right hand.

  “What it means for us, though, is that we shouldn’t touch him. We should try to corner him and disarm him, but not touch him skin-to-skin. And we should stay line-of-sight to one another, so that no one gets lost or left behind.”

  Luz groaned. She could be much faster than any of us. It would pain her to be so close, and be slow. I wondered if she’d still give me blood at the end of this; if my participation on this trip was enough to count. She turned back, as if she felt me thinking about her. “I know why she shunned you now.”

  I nodded in the dark. People who were islands couldn’t get hurt.

  “How do you know where it is?” Ti asked Hector.

  “They nailed a flyer to the clinic door this morning with the address. Made it hard to miss.” Hector turned off the headlights and coasted to a stop. “It’s at the end of the block. If I get any closer, they’ll know we’re here.”

  “They’re going to know we’re here soon, anyhow.” Luz sat straighter in her seat. “I’ll see you all on the inside,” she said, and she leapt out of the car.

  “Reina!” Catrina called after her. I leaned over Ti to look out, but I couldn’t see her; she’d already run away.

  “Think we can count on her to take out snipers?” Ti asked aloud.

  “They don’t snipe down here. They spray,” Hector yelled, just barely louder than the rain coming down on the car roof. A lightning bolt illuminated him gesturing his hand back and forth, like a running machine gun.

  “You two should stay here then,” Ti said, looking at Catrina and me. I wanted to go in with them, but I wasn’t supernatural, or bulletproof. And if I went, there’d be no way to convince Catrina to stay behind.

  “Okay.” I looked back and forth between the two of them. It might be the last time I’d see one or both of them alive. “Protect each other, okay?”

  Hector nodded and Ti grunted—and as one they went into the rain. There was a distant shout—louder than the rain—and shots were fired.

  “Come on.” Catrina huddled behind the driver’s seat, where Dren had been last night, and pulled me down to do the same. “This isn’t the first gunfight I’ve been in,” she explained.

  It killed me to wait there, to hear sounds of violence, guns, and not know what was going on. When I peeked up like I shouldn’t, and a lightning bolt shot down, all I could see was a warehouse down the block and gates that were wide.

  “Stay down!” Catrina hissed.

  “How can you be so calm?”

  There were more shots. I tried to convince myself that it was thunder, but I hadn’t seen any lightning bolts to cause it.

  I wanted my friends to be all right. I wanted my mother to be all right. I just wanted everything to be right in the world for once, for one soul-shattering moment of calmness when I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else, or even myself.

  Another gunshot, a scattered grouping. I pressed my forehead to the window like I shouldn’t, trying to see anything through the rain.

  A bloody hand slapped against the top of the glass. I screamed and jumped back.

  The hand slid down, horror-movie style, like a drowning man’s last wave good-bye. The unrelenting rain made the bloody droplets race down.

  Ti wasn’t going to bleed, and Luz bleeding was unlikely. “Hector?” I said, my voice cracking in fear.

  “Don’t do it!” Catrina warned me.

  I ignored her and opened up the car door, glad to find it was someone I didn’t know. With the help of the overhead car light, I could see a young Latino man with three cross tattoos on the visible side of his neck. He was prone on the sidewalk, and the rain was washing his blood away.

  “Oh, God.” I reached for my phone. I didn’t know where we were, but Catrina did. I handed my phone to her. “Call nine-one-one. Tell them someone’s been shot.”

  Maybe I should have pre-reported our arrival here, seeing as gunfire was almost a given. This kid was technically a bad guy—but we were the ones who’d come in asking for trouble. I couldn’t just watch him die.

  Hector was a doctor—he had to have a first-aid kit in his car somewhere. All self-respecting doctors did. I reached and felt under the chairs, found nothing, then hopped into the driver’s seat to pull the lever for the trunk. A spare tire, the tire iron and duct tape from last night, and lastly a paper bag full of medical supplies. I looked inside it as the rain pelted the bag and started soaking the equipment inside.

  What good was gauze going to do right now? Not very damn much, in this fucking rain. I took it back to the prone man.

  “Where did you get hit?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He was far away from the compound—I assumed he’d run this whole way. Or maybe crawled. I pushed him so he was on his back, and tried to look him over. There was a welt on his arm. I unspooled a roll of gauze, lassoed it around his armpit, and tied it tight. Until I could figure out where he was bleeding, I was going to cut off blood flow to all his extremities on principle.

  His shirt was full of holes. The crosses hadn’t protected him from anyone but Luz—and even that was iffy. I started when I thought I’d found a gun—but it was just the outline of a gun, tattooed on his stomach, roughly done. This kid wasn’t much older t
han Olympio was. Jesus.

  “Hey!” I shouted at him, shaking him. He groaned. I could feel a pulse at his neck. “Help is coming, okay? Just hang on.”

  I went through his limbs more systematically now, looking for holes in the fabric in addition to blood, and undid one arm and a leg. Then I planted the rest of the gummed-up gauze over a wound on his thigh. I hoped it wasn’t his femoral—I didn’t think I was strong enough to haul him into Hector’s car.

  There was another burst of gunfire. “Edie!” Catrina shouted at me.

  “Hang on. I’m almost done, okay?” I wasn’t sure whom I was addressing, him or her.

  “Edie—Edie?” Catrina made a question of my name, and I turned around. “I think I got shot.”

  She was still crouched behind the seats, but she was holding her side. “Oh, God—can you lie down on the backseat? Lie down right now.” I tied down the dressing on the gangbanger’s leg, and took my soggy bag of gauze back into the car. “Shit shit shit—where?”

  “Here.” It was the side of her stomach—could be a flesh wound, could be halfway to peritonitis.

  “Okay. I want you to lie still.” I opened up as much gauze as I could. “Is there an exit wound?” I slid my hand under her back to feel for any other, potentially worse, openings. Finding none, I shoved all the gauze into the bleeding spot on her stomach. “Shit. Catrina—hold this here, okay?” I fished my phone out of my pocket with bloody hands. Not that now was a great time to text Asher, but he had the fucking car keys and I didn’t know what else to do. Emergency vehicles should already be on their way. Should.

  “How did it happen? I was being careful.” She was gritting her teeth from the pain. I wondered where the bullet had wound up inside her. God-fucking-dammit. If anyone should have gotten hit, it was me, gallivanting around outside.

  “What have you done?” Luz was outside, standing in the rain, looking at the bleeding man. Her eyes went wide when she saw Catrina.

  “Did you find her?” Catrina reached a red hand out.

  “No. She wasn’t there—” Luz looked between the gangbanger and Catrina and made an assumption. She put her foot on his tattooed neck.