I fastened it around my neck, and the stone hit at the V of my throat. I felt slightly more magical, even though I was still minus clothes. Asher smiled at me.
“Too bad we have to go out tonight.”
“What?” I’d completely forgotten about our dinner plans. “Oh, no—let’s just stand them up.”
“That would be rude,” he said.
“So? We wouldn’t be the first rude people on vacation.” I wished that Liz’s kid hadn’t run into me today—or that Claire had had functional legs to chase after him, instead.
“Do you really think I’ll misbehave that badly?”
“Yes.”
He gave me a look.
“Not entirely,” I adjusted. “But I know you.”
“I’ll be good. And you need to eat something,” he said, standing up and then offering me a hand. I took it and tried to pull him back down, but he wouldn’t let me. I sighed and let him help me up.
“I can’t imagine what we’ll have to talk about. You’ll ask him about his vasectomy, and I’ll ask her where she gets her teeth bleached, and then where will we be?”
“We can pretend we’re private investigators,” he said, walking over to the closet to flip through hangers.
“Ugh. Please say you’re not suggesting we do role-playing outside the bedroom. Seriously.”
“Okay, I’m not. You just keep her and Thomas busy, and leave him to me.” He pulled out a blue shirt and set it on the bed.
“When you say that, what do you mean precisely?”
“There’s no harm in asking him a few questions, Edie.”
“Uh, yeah, there is. What if he figures things out and remembers you?”
Asher gave me a look. “I’m a shapeshifter. Deceiving people is my forte.”
“But it’s not mine. What if I let something on? What if I act weird and—”
“Then it’ll be different from any other time we go out to dinner how, precisely?” he said, cutting me off.
I stared at him with dagger-eyes. “You are soooooooo funny.”
He chuckled, and then sobered. “Seriously, Edie. It’s important to me. Can’t that just be enough? It would be nice if I could go into my new life with you with a clean conscience.”
“And what if you can’t?” I asked his back as he started picking out a tie.
“Then nothing’s changed, has it?” he said with a too-easy shrug. “Indulge me and my personal curiosity, Edie. Please.”
Which was as close as he might get to admitting to me how much this mattered to him. It was hard to be mad at him while he was naked, too. “All right. But after tonight—promise you’re going to cut it out. If I’m not allowed to worry about the future, you can’t keep chasing down your past. I want the whole rest of this trip to be about us. You, me, and the baby.”
He gave me a beatific smile. “Deal.”
* * *
There was no way to hide the bruise on my elbow from the incident that afternoon. But the dress I was wearing was black, so hopefully it matched. The rest of me was cute at least—being on vacation meant having time to do crazy things like blow-dry and curl my hair. It was nice to blow-dry my hair for fun, not so it wouldn’t freeze when I stepped outside.
And Asher was pulled together, as always. We made a dashing pair. If my recently purchased makeup primer packaging was to be believed, we might even stay looking this way all night.
Asher didn’t change until we were alone in the elevator. Not into another person, like I knew he could, reverting to someone he’d touched before he’d been saved, but overall. His shoulders slumped a little, and the way he held his head seemed like it became less sharp and more likely to nod and agree. He pulled at the crisp collar of his suit so that it looked more wrinkled than it was, like it hadn’t been tailored specifically for him.
“Remember, I’m Kevin tonight,” Asher reminded me.
“Got it. Kevin … Private Eye, Kevin,” I agreed, trying to lighten the mood. He smiled and his hand squeezed mine.
Liz was watching for us at the door of the restaurant and flagged us down as soon as we arrived. The décor in here seemed tasteful, at least as far as I could tell from watching HGTV shows. Subdued lighting, muted colors, staff in crisp suits. Lovely exposed beams across the ceiling that any Realtor would have commented on. I was glad I’d tried so hard to dress up nicely; otherwise it would have been more than just my bruised elbow making me feel out of place.
Liz sat by the shark-faced man we’d met the prior night. His suit was impeccable, and she was wearing a yellow designer dress with a pearl necklace. Even Thomas was adorable in a little three-piece suit, although he looked uncomfortable inside it.
“Nathaniel, this is Edie and Kevin. You remember them from yesterday, don’t you?” Liz prompted her husband.
He stood at our arrival with formal manners and looked over at me. “Of course I do. I hear you rescued our little boy this afternoon,” he said, without a change in tone. Nathaniel had a flat affect, with fish-dead eyes. It’d been a long time since I worked with vampires; I wasn’t used to being stared through anymore.
“Oh, well, you know, he ran into me,” I said with a shrug.
“No, you saved him, I saw. He gets into trouble like you wouldn’t believe,” Liz said, gesturing to the empty chair beside her, which I took, and we all sat down.
She was too sweet for him by a factor of ten—and I realized that despite the money she was flashing casually here, she hadn’t discovered she could buy friends yet. She still thought she had to be nice to get them.
That, or Nathaniel creeped out anyone who tried to get too close.
“So what do you two do?” Asher-Kevin said, with the same tone anyone trying to get to know anyone else casually would use, as the waiter came up and pressed menus into our hands.
“Investments,” Nathaniel answered flatly, then turned the question around. “You?”
“I’m a doctor,” Asher said.
Nathaniel’s chin jerked up subtly at this. “What kind of doctor?”
“What kind of investments?” Asher asked back, with the right teasing tone and a self-satisfied aren’t-I-funny laugh. “No, really, I do hospice care. But I used to do oncology.”
Well, I had no doubt that there was probably at least one oncologist inside of Asher that he could draw on.
“Oh, isn’t that sad?” Liz asked, voice full of genuine concern.
Asher changed to faux suave for her sake; being a doctor got him a lot of play. “It is, but someone has to do it.”
I could see Nathaniel writing “Kevin” off as a showboat. Maybe that was Asher’s plan.
“And, you know,” Asher went on, “that’s where I met Edie. She’s a nurse.”
Liz turned to me, delighted by this less grim turn. “You two met at work? Just like on TV?”
I had the sudden urge to pick a spoon up off the table and stab myself with it. It sounded so trite when he put it like that. I felt like by dating Asher, who could occasionally be a doctor, I was letting down all nursing-kind, most of whom wouldn’t touch doctors with someone else’s used Foley catheter. But I realized I wasn’t going to have to role-play as a PI tonight; I just needed to pretend to be nice-Edie. “Yeah. Something like that,” I said, through slightly gritted teeth. “What do you do?”
“Oh, I stay at home,” Liz said. “Watching Thomas is a full-time job. He’s a little hyperactive.”
You could say that. Thomas was the process of untucking his dress shirt. Poor kid. I gave her a comforting grin. “We’re having one too. We just found out this morning.”
“Really? That’s marvelous! Congratulations!” Liz said, clapping her hands.
“Thank you,” I said, grinning a little at her cheer.
“I’d order us champagne,” she went on. “But you know that’s off limits now.”
“Yeah.” I grinned at her infectious excitement and looked over at Asher—and I could see from his face that he was displeased. We were supposed to be
getting information from them, not sharing it. Whatever. I gave him a shrug.
For his part, Nathaniel was still watching all of us with disdain. I wasn’t sure which he was more disappointed in, Liz’s cheerful interest in me, or that Asher and I were breeding in an age without eugenics.
“So when are you due? Is it a boy or a girl?” Liz latched on to this safe conversational thread. “Have you thought of any names?”
I’d inadvertently opened us up an encyclopedia’s worth of safe small talk, and I gave Asher a look that made it clear I was abandoning him to his own devices at the manly side of the table. “Oh, we just-just found out. Like this morning. No ultrasounds or anything yet. I’m not even a month along.”
“I’ll cross my fingers then for you that it’s a girl. Because boys are just too much,” she said, leaning over Thomas to tuck his shirt back in.
Dinner arrived, and I found myself liking Liz more and more. She and Nathaniel lived a few hours away from us, in the next biggest city over, a fact I pretended to be surprised about. It gave us even more safe topics of conversation to have. I couldn’t tell how Asher was faring, which was fine. He could make it on his own.
Thomas was good for his part, if messy. Liz was wiping spaghetti sauce off his face when he shook his head violently. An experienced mother, she followed with her napkin—only he didn’t stop shaking, and his arms and hands followed.
“What’s happening?”
“Seizure,” I said just as he threw his head back stiffly.
Liz gasped, and Asher rushed in, pulling Thomas gently to the floor. “He’s burning up.”
“What’s happening?” Liz repeated. She looked from Asher to me. I kept hold of Thomas’s side so he wouldn’t flop around like a dying fish.
“He’s just having a seizure is all,” I said, trying to sound calm.
“What a shame,” Nathaniel said, his voice actually calm, no pretending. He squatted beside us, taking in the situation clinically. Asher gave me a worried look.
Liz’s mouth dropped in horror. She looked from Thomas to Nathaniel and then back again, and then reached over and shoved Nathaniel, hard. He fell back off his heels, onto his ass.
“You!” she exclaimed, stood abruptly—and then ran off.
I looked over to Asher for explanation, but he looked as bewildered as I was. He didn’t need me here—he was, after all, a doctor. I stood and chased after her.
“Liz? Liz!” Luckily, I’d worn flats. I dodged around the same people she had, the crowd that seemed to spring fully formed around any medical emergency. She drew up short outside an opening elevator door and rushed inside. I waved my hand to hold it just in time and followed her in.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, panting. We weren’t the only ones inside the elevator, just the only ones out of breath.
“I’ve got to get his pills,” she said, but her face was completely panicked. She looked flushed, beyond what the run should have done; sweat was showing through her dress’s armpits as she repeatedly hit the button for her floor.
“Pills for what?” You didn’t give seizing people pills.
She opened her mouth to tell me, then closed it resolutely again.
“I’m a nurse, remember?”
“You don’t understand.” She hit her floor button a few more times, like it would speed the elevator up.
I decided to try a calming tack. “Look, seizures happen all the time. Kids just get them. Sometimes no one even knows what causes them—and they go away on their own.”
Her head began shaking halfway through my explanation, as she held down the button for her floor. “It’s not that. You don’t understand!” she said, in a pleading voice.
“Then tell me—what’s going on?” I got the feeling it was something bigger than just Thomas’s illness, but whatever it was, it was no excuse for this. “Your son is back there. You need to go be with him. He needs you.”
The elevator rose, stopping on floor after floor, people shoving inside with us, our loud conversation and her radiating crazy making them regret their choice. “This isn’t right, Liz—” I put a hand out to stop her from holding the button down. “If you’re scared, don’t be—”
The elevator settled onto her floor and I tried to block the door bodily. “Let me go! You can’t help us!” she protested.
“I can if you’ll tell me!” I wanted to spill it all then—what I knew about Nathaniel’s past from Asher—but I didn’t dare. “Liz—”
She gave me another torn look, but she didn’t respond—and there was nothing else I could do without restraining her physically. I moved out of her way before she could elbow me aside, and she began running down the hall.
“You’ll regret this!” I shouted after her. Because how could she not? What mother in her right mind would leave her sick child behind? I shook my head in disbelief and dismay. “What the—” I began, ready to curse. Then I saw another woman looking traumatized at the back of the elevator, with her child smashed protectively in the corner behind her. That was more like it. And then I realized between the two of us, Liz and I must have been a frightening scene.
“Sorry about all that,” I apologized, and hit the button for my own floor.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was no point in going back to the restaurant, so I walked down the hall to our room. Just what the hell had happened back there? With Liz, with Nathaniel, and most especially with Thomas? Was he okay? I assumed by now he was in the medical center, getting treatment. I thought about things that would cause a sudden seizure in a child—most of them were not good, and some of them were contagious. Meningitis was the worst, and fever and seizure were its typical presentation in children.
I walked by another housekeeper on doorknob-wiping duty. When I reached the far end of the cart, I grabbed one of the extra spray bottles of cleaner dangling by its handle and held it up to my chest to hide it as I walked quickly past.
When I got up to our room, I washed my hands so long I could have sung “Happy Birthday” three times. And then I carefully got out of my dress and hopped into the shower to wash off the rest of me.
Asher opened up the door an hour later, with a bottle of cleaner also in his hands. I pointed to mine on the table. “Great minds think alike. How’s Thomas?”
“Rough. What happened with Liz?”
“I have no fucking idea.” I’d been trying to work it out in the shower as I washed all of my makeup primer and hair spray down the drain, hopefully along with whatever germs I’d been exposed to. “It was like she was scared, but I’m not sure what of. She said something about getting him pills. What happened once I left?”
“The doctor came. This time I got to see him in action. He has no bedside manner, but he seems competent.” Asher was holding his hands out in front of himself as if he were scrubbed in for surgery. “Mind getting the door for me?” he asked, nodding toward the bathroom.
I opened it up, and it swung shut behind him. I cleaned off the handle he’d used to enter the room with one of the bottles of cleaner. He spent as long in the shower as I had, and when he emerged he was wrapped in a fresh towel, holding his clothing with a washcloth to keep it from touching his newly washed skin. “Let’s set it all out to be cleaned.”
“Sounds good to me.” I held the laundry bag up, and he deposited my dress carefully inside as well. “What happened with Nathaniel?”
“Nothing. He was concerned, but only in a clinical way. He didn’t try to comfort Thomas, or soothe him, he didn’t even follow the stretcher all that closely.”
I frowned at the thought of a little boy all alone on a gurney. I’d been right to try to get Liz to go back downstairs.
“It was like he didn’t even know him. Cold.”
“Was he like that all the time?” I asked, well aware that Asher had a copy of Nathaniel’s older-self somewhere inside him.
“No. That’s the strange thing. He loved his daughter, back in the day. Her and money were the only two things he loved
.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, which housekeeping had kindly made up during the brief time we were out. “What were the pills for?”
“She wouldn’t say. But not for seizures—if he had a seizure history she’d know better than to give him pills.” Sticking your fingers in the mouth of someone who was seizing was a good way to get bitten. I sat on the bed beside him. “Fevers, seizures—what’s a little meningitis between friends?”
“That is the obvious choice, isn’t it? Or something else. Worse.”
I made a face. “What’re you saying?”
“I don’t know yet. Only that I know what he’s capable of.” He turned toward me suddenly. “Edie, we wouldn’t have been there—you wouldn’t have been sitting across from him—if it weren’t for me.”
“I work at a freaking public health clinic with you. And you know I’ve seen worse—been bled on by worse—before.”
His hands kneaded the edge of the mattress. “It’s just that if anything happened to you because of me, I’d never forgive myself.”
“Which I’ll admit is sweet, albeit in a twisted way,” I said, reaching out to put my hand on top of his nearest one to stop its wringing motion. “But I’m safe, so everything’s fine.”
His eyes rose to meet mine, gaze somber. “You’d better stay that way.”
“Or what?” I challenged, ludicrously imagining Asher miniaturized, going into my blood vessels to punch out germs by hand.
“Or else,” he said, leaving his threat to the universe hanging in the room.
* * *
Neither of us wanted to go to sleep. I lay pressed against his side, my head on his chest, as he flipped through TV stations. At home we didn’t really watch TV, so it was something of a novelty, even the commercials. We eventually settled on an old vampire film. It was hilariously inaccurate—all the vampires were sexy and incompetent, instead of disgusting and deadly. I found myself wishing we had popcorn to throw at the screen.
“Are you ever upset that shapeshifters don’t get TV shows?”
“No. It proves my kind’s better at hiding their tracks.”
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 7