“You’re kidding, right?”
“Ask ’em why they’re here!” someone shouted from the back.
“They want to see us,” she shouted back.
“Ask them why room service is running slow!” yelled the distant voice.
The woman looked archly at me. “Well? Why is it?”
The ship swung to one side as a wave hit it. The ocean was getting rougher as the storm neared. I inhaled sharply. Jorge took my nausea-induced silence for anger and stepped in. “We’re part of a rescue mission—”
I started shaking my head as soon as the words were out of Jorge’s mouth.
“We want to go on the rescue ship. We want to get out of here,” she said, cutting Jorge off.
There was a certain kind of person who, no matter how much life had given them, would always be worried that other people were getting more. I started backpedaling. “It’s not a rescue ship, it’s a medical emergency ship. We’re here making sure that no one in this room is experiencing a medical emergency.”
“I’m almost out of wine!” shouted whomever she was related to in the back.
“That’s not a medical emergency,” I said flatly.
“It’s an emergency for me!”
Kate drew herself up to her full five-nothing height. “Look, I just watched my son die horribly downstairs. None of you all look that sick.”
Mrs. Avery looked aghast. I smiled and didn’t even care that it was fake looking. Another minute of this and I would be happy to throw up all of this lady’s shoes. “We’re glad you’re all present and accounted for. Thanks!” I reached in and slammed the door on us for her.
“That was a little abrupt,” Jorge said, finely tweezed eyebrows rising with the hint of an amused smile.
“Sorry.” Kate shrugged.
“Don’t be. I like your style.” I nodded at her. “No one calls it a rescue ship again, okay?” They both nodded.
Marius and his group reappeared in the hall. “Any luck?”
“Can I scratch a dick onto the doorjamb? I feel that symbol would be most descriptive of the occupants inside,” Jorge said. Marius made the kind of pained face that said he knew this was a bad idea all along.
“What about you all?” I asked.
“No one was home.” Marius held up the master key. “Onward.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We knocked at the next door as Marius unlocked it for us. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or upset that no one answered. I gave Jorge and Kate a look and together we pushed in.
The room was grand. Literally. It had high ceilings—and a piano, bolted in a decorative fashion to the floor. I checked the list. “Mr. and Mrs. Inman?” I called out. No response. Jorge shrugged and started walking in.
We went into a living room bigger than some apartments I’d had. Kate and I went off to the right and Jorge went left. There was a grand bathroom with a grand shower and a grand tub—miles of marble, exquisitely soft towels, and expensive creams and lotions, the spackle of the wealthy-old. Then a bedroom with a huge flat-screen TV, with clothing and shoes tossed out. No one was here. All their belongings, clothing, toiletries. It was a ghost town—a fancy-ass ghost town. Asher was nowhere in sight.
Kate’s thoughts were still next door. “Those people are in a room like this, right?”
I grunted. “Probably.”
Kate’s eyes narrowed. “How come I had to lose my son, and they got all this?”
“One of life’s shitty mysteries,” Jorge answered her from the hallway. “Nothing over here. But the door to the balcony over here is unlocked.”
The door to the balcony on our side was locked, but I still went outside, just in case. The Maraschino seesawed back and forth, and I realized that on this higher floor there was greater motion from the sea, which was doing unkind things to my stomach. I didn’t want to lean out too far and see the wino next door—although there was a large partition set up between cabins, so that each fancy room’s residents would feel like they had their own private view—but I did look over the edge. Nine floors up, the water looked very far down.
“I think we know what happened to them.” Jorge swung the open balcony door back and forth behind me. “Bye-bye birdie.”
Kate’s expression went cold. “Hopefully.”
* * *
We returned to the hallway where Marius was drawing another O on the outside of the room. “Same here,” I said, in response to his curious look. Nathaniel and Tan-man were hanging back behind him. Tan-man still looked unhappy, and Nathaniel appeared smug. What was he getting out of this? The pleasure of watching us dance?
“The Solomons,” Marius announced, pointing behind us. I realized he’d already said it twice.
I nodded quickly. “Sure.”
The Solomons were also absent after knocking, as were the Foxes, the Doltons, the Catos, the Duffields, and the Schmidts. All of their rooms were empty museum-like testaments to capitalism with eerily open balcony doors, as though the occupants had grown wings and flown away. The sixth room had an occupant—but she was dead. Tied to a chair. Someone had had the sense to strap her down but not the time or inclination to do the same for themselves. She was facing an open balcony window.
The person left strapped behind had managed to tilt her chair over into the couch, and she’d asphyxiated on the firm-yet-giving cushions. I pulled her up and saw the teeth marks she’d left in the couch where she’d tried unsuccessfully to gnaw through its leather to escape.
“Who eats couch cushions?” Kate asked aloud.
I frowned, disgusted. “I don’t know.”
Marius’s group was having the same luck across the hall. And every time I saw Nathaniel in passing I wanted to shake him until he poured out answers. We were only halfway done with this hallway, on this one floor, and the cabins up here were twice as large as the ones below. We wouldn’t even finish a tenth of the ship before the rescue boat’s arrival put an end to our search. My stomach was churning. What if I never found Asher at all?
It was that thought that got me as we were entering yet another empty room. The Maraschino was rocked by a large swell, and I covered my mouth with my hand and pushed Kate aside.
In a large marble bathroom, the sound of me retching echoed particularly well. I didn’t make it to the toilet, I just leaned over the nearer of the two sinks, clutching its marble sides.
I hadn’t eaten anything in who knew how long. Between my jet lag and the clouds catching up with us outside I couldn’t tell what time it was, but it’d been a while. The only thing I had left to heave up was bile, and thanks to my worry about Asher, I had plenty of it, bright neon green.
I leaned over, hurled, and waited, and then hurled again. If my own stomach hadn’t been empty I wouldn’t have seen it—but there in the pit of the sink, before my own bile pushed them down, were several small frothy things, like the beads of tapioca in those gross bubble drinks that other people liked. I leaned down into the sink, trying to see. I’d been so caught up in the act of puking that I wasn’t sure whether they had been there before me or come out of my own mouth.
When I looked up, Kate was in the doorway behind me, looking horrified.
“Are you ill?”
“No, I’m pregnant,” I said, scanning the countertops. Maybe the former occupants of this room had left some rich-people version of Listerine.
Her frown grew. “I can’t believe you’re out here endangering your child!”
I swallowed drily. I knew I was taking risks, but I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t find Asher I couldn’t make things right, and I doubted Nathaniel’s plan had left any safe places on this boat. I couldn’t explain that to her, though, not when she was mad at me because her own son had died.
“I’m being as safe as I can.”
Jorge’s voice saved me from trying to explain more. “Hey, ladies? You should come see this now—” I rushed past Kate toward the sound of his voice.
“What is that?” Jorge sto
od at the edge of the second fancy bathroom in this suite, a finger pointed at the pedestal tub. I looked where he pointed—and I’d never been so glad I’d just puked.
There was a person in the tub, facedown. The jets were still on, making the water froth and the corpse—now that it had been down for longer than anyone could have possibly been holding his breath—jiggle and dance.
“He’s dead, right?” Kate asked.
“He’d better be,” Jorge said, picking up a decorative vase with a heavy base.
I reached over, took a lily out of the vase, and walked over to the side of the tub. I had to see who it was. Just in case.
I poked the body twice. It floated farther sideways but did not otherwise respond. I angled the stem in so that it slid beneath the person’s face, leveraging it toward me. An overly long tongue dangled out, bloated and purple, but as the face turned it retracted, disappearing inside a water-swollen jaw. Not Asher, I realized with full-body relief.
But.
Dead people’s tongues didn’t disappear. Fall out, maybe. But not move. Especially not after they’d been cooked.
I’d never seen someone boiled alive before, and some function of the fancy jet control was keeping the water piping hot. The musky scent in the air was stewed human, mixed with churning effluvia. There was a greasy film, which provided just enough tension to create bubbles. Still—something about the way that tongue had moved was wrong. Not that I wanted to reach in there and find out, not even with my worst enemy’s hand … I grit my teeth. Real nurses don’t hide—from anything.
“Hang on.” I hooked the stem into the man’s mouth and used it to keep his head tilted up at me. I dug around, trying to determine if I could even see a tongue. I couldn’t, but—I floated his whole body back inside the tub, and intestines were spooled out underneath. Somehow they were wrapped around one of the jets near the floor of the tub. He’d boiled and split open, like an overripe sausage.
“He’s clearly dead. Can we go?” Kate said from the doorway.
“Motion to leave, seconded,” Jorge said.
There was no point in searching further. It was wrong, but it wasn’t Asher—and there were still hundreds of rooms to go. “Sure.”
I dropped the lily, and it bobbed inside the tub with the rest of him.
* * *
Marius’s group was waiting for us in the hall. “Sorry,” I said, apologizing for our delay. “There was a dead man floating in a tub.”
Tan-man stood a little behind the other two—which was why they didn’t see him shaking.
“Oh, my God—” Kate gasped and pointed at him like he was unclean. Nathaniel glanced at him and watched him slide down the closed door beside them both, making no effort to catch him. Marius turned and, seeing the man fall, whirled into action.
“Are you okay?” He went into medic mode, helping Tan-man lie down without hitting his head. “No fever,” he announced to the rest of us, gawking above.
It wasn’t a seizure, it was just profound shaking, the kind that in the hospital made the monitors scream that your patient was having ventricular fibrilation, Come defib me!—when really he was just cold.
Or—I groaned. “How long’s it been since you had a drink, sir?”
“A few hours.”
The whites of his eyes were subtly yellowed—I hadn’t seen it before, I’d been too wrapped up in my own problems. But I bet the rest of him was yellow too, underneath all that fake tanner.
“You’re detoxing?” Marius accused him.
“I told you I didn’t want to come along! That doctor made me!” the man shouted, from the floor.
No wonder he’d been trying to steal Valium—benzos were among the only things that helped when detox was inevitable.
Marius looked up at me. We both knew the score. The good news was, Tan-man wasn’t dying of whatever mysterious ailment was going around. The bad news was, Tan-man would be useless to us here, or more useless than he already had been. “We’ve gotta get him downstairs,” Marius said, leaning forward to indicate that “we” meant me.
I shook my head. Even if finding Asher was statistically impossible at this point. “I don’t want to go.”
“I’ll take him,” Kate volunteered.
Marius grabbed the man by the shoulders. “Can you stand?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He let Marius hoist him aloft, and Marius looked at the woman.
“Go straight back the way we came. No detours.”
“Sure.” She herded the man slowly, him leaning on every passing door, and cast a glance back at me, eyeing my belly. “You should try to be safe.”
Easier said than fucking done, but I smiled and waved anyhow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The four of us looked at one another in the hall.
“I believe Edie and I would like to be paired together now,” Nathaniel said, gazing coolly at me.
Jorge’s face screwed up into a question, but I shook my head so he wouldn’t argue. “You’re right. I think we would.”
“For whatever good it will do,” Marius said. “This is a useless goose chase. Everyone’s already gone.” Which was, in itself, creepy. Marius gathered himself and held the sheet of paper up with all the names. “Fine. You two—the Kontises; we’ll take the Morkins.”
Marius naming everyone all the time only made it worse. Marius unlocked the door for us and Nathaniel started rapping on it. “Mr. and Mrs. Kontis?” he said archly as we stepped in. No response. He pressed the door open and gestured with his other arm, looking at me. “After you.”
I hesitated long enough that he had to know I was thinking too hard. Should I show him my back so he’d know I wasn’t scared of him, or not, so he’d know I was? I went with caution, edging down the narrow entry hall, my back to the wall, until we reached the cabin’s main living space. I heard the door shut softly behind us.
My back still against a wall, I watched him enter the room. “What’s your game?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” he said, with a malevolent smile. “I’m flattered by your attention to me, but I’ve only just become a widower. I’m afraid a year must pass before we can date.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I wished Asher had told me more while he could.
“I’ll take this side,” Nathaniel said, and went into a darkened room.
We were supposed to be searching. But fuck all these other people, I went into the room after him.
My safe time away from supernatural creatures other than Asher had made me soft. I walked into the room, assuming I’d find him in the bathroom, or at the balcony door, but he was waiting just inside for me. He grabbed one of my arms and twisted it up and behind me, making me rock forward on my toes as he caught me around the chest with his other arm and pulled me close, like we were lovers dancing.
“Let us be clear on two things,” he whispered, his voice in my ear. “I could kill you before they heard you scream, and I could fling your body over the edge without thinking twice.”
“Let go of my arm,” I said, trying not sound scared.
He didn’t. He hoisted it higher. I grit my teeth not to yelp in pain, eyes watering.
“What did you do with Asher?” I hissed.
“Is that his real name?” he said. I didn’t respond. “I suppose next you’ll tell me he’s not even a doctor?” Nathaniel went on, voice dripping with irony like venom.
“Where is he?” I couldn’t turn around, I couldn’t even squirm away from his hot breath in my ear.
“Are you really pregnant by him? I’ll know if you’re lying.”
I didn’t want to say anything. His grip on my arm tightened and pulled.
It went. It just went. I could feel a tearing and then heard a pop and it was too late, he’d dislocated my arm. I gasped and cursed in a huge rush. “Yes! Yesyesyes!” He still didn’t let go. The pain radiated away from my shoulder in waves, like the ocean outside.
“Good,” he said, his voice stretching out the wor
d in my ear like a purr.
I started panting in pain and blinking back tears from my eyes. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
“Revenge. You’ve heard the saying an eye for an eye? Well, I want a child for a child.”
He let me go and shoved me forward with a laugh. My arm flopped down, disconnected from the rest of me. Unwhole, I staggered forward—anything to get away from him.
“Where’s Asher?” I fell to my knees and crawled away before he could think to kick me.
“You won’t be seeing him again. I’m feeding him to the fishes, one piece at a time.” He peered clinically down. “I love how after everything you’ve seen in the past two days, you’re only interested in one man. One would think your nurse’s heart would bleed for the rest of the innocent souls that’ve been lost, and not that monster you were in love with.”
Panic started choking my throat. “What have you done with him?” I begged, my voice raw. I held my loose arm to myself, trying to get my back against a wall, where I could kick out at him if he came for me, someplace where I could protect my belly. “Where is he?” I asked, my voice shrill, as we heard the cabin door open.
“If you want to see what’s left of him alive, you’ll do what I say. Sort yourself out.” He straightened his suit by way of example.
“Edie?” Jorge called from the doorway. “You okay?”
“She’s in here,” Nathaniel said. When Jorge got to the door, he added, “She fell.”
Jorge saw me, eyes wide with panic, clutching my drooping arm. “Oh, honey—” and then he looked at Nathaniel and his fists clenched.
I’d let him get the better of me—and worse yet, I’d have to support him in his lie.
“I fell—I fell!” I said before Jorge could do anything. I could feel myself turning red with pain and shame. I lurched up to standing, ungainly with a quarter of my body knocked out. “I’m clumsy sometimes. I tripped and hit the couch wrong. It’s gone out before.” I held my arm to me tighter. “Please, can you go get Marius?”
Jorge gave Nathaniel a look, and then leaned out of the room to call for Marius without leaving me alone. I would have hugged him, only I couldn’t. Marius came in and looked at me with a cluck.
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 14