Deadshifted (11 page)

“Like I told you.” I took his hand back and held it in my own. “Are they turning the ship around?”

“They can’t. We’re closer to Hawaii than we are to California. And there’s still the storm catching up behind us. Their plan is to get as close as they can to land, and have faster medical rescue ships meet us for transfers.”

“How many patients are there?”

“Twenty, so far.”

I pointed at the mask with my chin. “Where’s yours?”

“I’ve still never been sick. And it’s not me that I’m worried about. We’ve got to get you off this boat.”

While I wholeheartedly agreed with his sentiment, it seemed impossible. We were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “How?”

“I’m not sure. But you’re staying in here until I figure it out.” He took his hand back and stood, reaching for the closet doors.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he took his current shirt off, pulled a dress shirt from a hanger, and began buttoning it down. The
Maraschino
jumped sideways, and I felt sick to my stomach all over again.

“It’s him, Edie. I know it—”

“What happened to Thomas?” I interrupted.

Asher shook his head without looking at me. “He didn’t make it. He died sometime last night. I’m sorry.”

It was always a shock when a child died. Even if it wasn’t yours, and you were just watching it distantly on the news. There was no way to mitigate a child’s death, no bargaining you could do with the universe about luck, fairness, or age. It was just wrong, and everybody knew it in their gut.

“I’m sorry, Edie,” Asher repeated, finishing his last button and turning toward me.

“Me too.” I was queasy again now, for all the wrong reasons. “Was Liz with him at least?”

“Yes—but she’s sick too. It’s affecting adults now, and all sorts of people are calling down for Tylenol for fevers in their rooms.” He crouched down, his shirt still untucked, and took my hands in his. “I’ve got to go back down there, Edie.”

“To … help?” If they needed another doctor downstairs, one who couldn’t get ill, I could hardly deny the rest of the passengers that—but I didn’t want him to leave. I wasn’t normally a scared person, but this place wasn’t my home, and I didn’t have my family or my cat—Asher was the only safe thing here.

“I have to talk to Liz. Before she passes.”

“She’s going to die?” I asked, my voice rising.

“You and I both know what death’s door looks like. Antibiotics aren’t even touching her fevers—she’s over a hundred and six. She doesn’t have long.”

“Stay.” I held on to his hands as tightly as I could.

“I have to go down there, Edie. It’s the only way I’ll know. I have to talk to her while she’s still alive.” He squeezed my hands back then let go, reaching into the closet behind him for his suit pants.

“Talk to her about what?” I asked, but I already knew, watching him dress. “You’re going down there as him. To talk to her.”

He nodded and began thumbing his belt through loops.

“Then … what?”

“If I can figure out his game—”

I started shaking my head before I butted in. “I don’t want you to go. You can’t just leave me here.”

“It’s the only way I can protect you.”

“No. No no no.” I hadn’t wanted to come on this ship in the first place, and I was pregnant by accident—this was going to get to be my choice, this one thing, decided on by me. He could not leave.

But he was already laying his tie across his shoulders.

“So you’re going to go down there? And do what, precisely? Comfort her? Doing an impression of her husband?”

“No. I’m going to ask her what she knows. He’s here himself, Edie. There’s some way he’s not getting ill. Maybe she knows how.”

“While she’s delirious and you’re pretending to be related to her?” He ignored me and pulled on his suit jacket. Anger and impotence stirred in my stomach to make a nauseating brew.

“Is this what you miss about being what you were?” I asked. His hands paused over his tie, and I pressed. “All the hanging out with people that you want to push overboard?”

He finished knotting his tie, pulling the tail through with finality. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I need you here.”

“Edie, I’m doing this to save you.”

“Then I don’t want to be saved.”

He looked at me, his eyes full of sadness, and then his face settled into the shape of someone new: Nathaniel from years ago, back when Asher had still had his powers. More stern than the man we’d eaten dinner with last night. A stronger jaw, a more aquiline nose. I didn’t think he realized it, the way the lips he wore sneered down at me. “You don’t mean that. And I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you.”

Listening to his words come out of someone else’s mouth—only years of attempting to seem unflappable as a nurse saved me from jumping back.

I shook my head again involuntarily, trying to negate everything that’d happened this morning—his shitty plan, this conversation, this trip, all the things I’d found out that I hadn’t wanted to know. If I kept shaking, maybe I could rewind back to the part where everything was simple again.

“Edie, I wanted to believe he was on vacation here,” Asher tried to explain. “More than anything else in the world. I wanted to believe that he could change.”

“Because if he could, you could too,” I said. Accusing him. Trying to guilt him into staying.

“I have changed. You know it.” He sank down beside me on the bed. “You do, don’t you?”

Of course I do,
I wanted to say, while being aware it made me sound like one of those hopeless women who fell for serial killers in prison. But if I said yes, then he’d leave me. Although looking into his eyes, even if they weren’t the ones I was familiar with, I could tell that if I lied and didn’t say yes, I’d break his heart.

“I do.”

He swallowed and stood. “Good. I love you—and I’m sorry. I may not have much time. I have to hurry.”

Eyes that weren’t the ones I loved blinked drily, and he shook his head before speaking with another man’s voice. “I’ll be back. Just give me twenty-four hours to see this thing through. She may not talk at first, but if she does I’ll figure out a way. Order a ton of room service now; you might not get the chance later if it spreads. Choose things that won’t go bad.”

“I’m not okay with this.”

“Just stay inside the room until I get back,” Nathaniel’s voice commanded. He leaned in to kiss me again, and this time I jerked away from him, unused to the strange face he wore. “I’m sorry,” he apologized.

I was so mad and scared that I didn’t know what to say—and it was clear he was going, no matter what. I didn’t want him to leave like this. I scrunched up my face a second time, and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see him coming in. A stranger’s lips touched mine.

“I’ll be back in twenty-four hours,” he repeated.

“Be careful. You’re not as supernatural as you used to be,” I reminded him.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,” he said, and let himself out the door.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

This was bullshit. Everything about it was bullshit.

I knew—deep-down bone-level knew—that Asher was different now. But his past seemed destined to follow us. I imagined it indistinct and dark, lurking underneath the waves outside, bigger than the boat, waiting for us to make a mistake and swallow us whole.

How could I love a man who’d facilitated, even for an instant, testing anything on people? Even if he hadn’t hurt anyone personally, he’d helped a vampire sympathizer to get ahead.

Then again, I’d saved Anna—which had been the right thing to do at the time, I was sure—but I’d also saved Dren. Who had untold deaths on his hands, maybe more since I’d set him free. It’s not like he’d converted into being a vegetarian because I’d been crazy enough to save him. Or like such a thing were even possible for a vampire.

Good substitutes for human blood didn’t exist. Red blood cells did too many things that weren’t imitable. They were small, they were flexible enough to squeeze through capillaries, and they transported oxygen everywhere. Some blood substitutes had managed to be two of those things, but never all three at the same time. Yet.

A bad allergic reaction to the fake blood, or a stroke-causing clot: That would be the end of things, and probably fatal to boot. No one would willingly volunteer for the duty, so who were they testing on? And where? And—under what conditions? If they were paying them, a big if, they’d have to be desperate, either for cures or for cash. How could I love a man who’d profited on other people’s sorrow? What kind of person did that make me for loving him—evil once removed?

I couldn’t believe I’d let him go, but I didn’t know how I could have possibly stopped him. I felt so impotent and abandoned, and that was the worst, knowing there was nothing I would have done differently.

I ordered room service angrily, and sat on the bed like it was an island, and watched piped-in programs on daytime TV. Movies slid by, family-friendly fare, where grown-ups were stupid and preternaturally smart kids saved the day, and I loathed them all.

Including the small traitor part of me that agreed with him. Not about him leaving me, but the staying-in-here-safely part, hiding from all the germs in the outside world. Protecting myself and the baby inside me.

“I hate it,” I said, unsure what I was hating precisely—this place, Asher, the baby, me—just knowing that I meant what I said.

I threw up a couple more times, out of anger or regret, and returned to my perch on the bed. The ocean raced by outside the closed balcony doors, waves sharply drawn like carved stone.

*   *   *

When room service arrived I tipped them all the money left in Asher’s wallet as a small act of rebellion.

I set the room service trays out—sandwiches and cheese platters and cookies, anything that might possibly sound good over the course of the next day—and left all the silver lids on, so I wouldn’t have to smell all of them at once. I carefully tested my stomach’s tolerance of a french fry. My stomach disagreed with everything but the salt. I licked the fry clean, and chunked it into the trash can afterward.

I was licking the salt off another fry when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A man, splay-legged, tumbling like a snowflake, outside my window. Down to the sea.

I raced to the balcony doors and flung them open. Cold salt air smacked me like a wall. My bare feet slid across the short space to the railing, slick with condensation from the coming storm. I clung to the railing, my T-shirt and jeans not up to the task of keeping me warm, and leaned over, trying to see where he’d fallen. Trying to prove that I’d seen him at all. The churning ocean beneath the
Maraschino
was the color of the mist enveloping us—I couldn’t see anything, really.

But I knew I’d seen a man fall.

I closed my eyes, trying to pull up the memory precisely, to slow it down and really see it. I pictured the railing like a microscope’s cover slip—and a man falling, like a protozoan darting beneath.

Where did he come from? And why? I leaned out and looked up, in case anyone else was staring down like me, but I couldn’t see past the bottom of the balcony above. And no one else was leaning out on my deck, or staring like me, below. I was alone. Again.

I carefully stepped back inside my room and called the front desk.

*   *   *

I couldn’t make a decent report, as I wasn’t even sure who I’d seen, just that I’d seen someone. I could tell that the person listening to me was trying to be considerate, but I knew I sounded insane.

“I just saw a man go overboard. You need to stop the boat. I’m in room six thirty-one. He fell down from above me somewhere. I think he was older, and he had a green shirt on.”

“Please calm down, Mrs. Stonefield,” she said. Of course. Asher had booked our rooms under his own name. I had to bite my tongue not to correct her. “We’ll be looking into things,” she went on.

“He might still be alive—” I said before I stopped to ponder the odds. Could anyone survive the fall? How high up had he started, anyhow? And how much would the water have felt like cement when he hit it? I sat on the bed, staring out at the ocean through the balcony doors, as though I might catch sight of someone else falling there. It didn’t look like we were plowing through the waves any more slowly.

“We’ve already sent out a tender boat—”

“Someone else saw him?” If so, how had they managed to call in faster than me?

“Uh—” The woman paused on the far end of the line.

Either she was lying to me—or she wasn’t. And there’d been another reason for a search boat to already be out in the sea.

“How many people have gone overboard?”

The woman cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you official ship’s business. Please trust that we’re looking into things, though, Mrs. Stonefield, honestly we are.” And the line clicked dead.

I tried calling back, but the line was busy and went to hold music immediately. I waited for five minutes and then gave up in disgust.

Maybe they couldn’t stop the ship if we were going to outrace the storm and get the sick people safely off. That was better than thinking that they didn’t care—or that they were already overwhelmed. I went out on the balcony for a second look.

The ship hadn’t even tried to slow down, but even if it had, what would be the point? I assumed cruise ships were like trains: It would take the
Maraschino
miles to decelerate at the speed we were going, and after that, who knew how much longer to turn around? The ocean outside was as wild as it had been the day before, when I’d been pushing Claire. Knowing it had taken someone made it seem worse somehow, more stark and unforgiving, even hungry.

I returned to the warmth of the cabin and locked the balcony doors behind me, pulled the curtains tight, and tried to ignore the fact that the bed I curled up on was far too big for just me.

Had that man been pushed overboard? By … Asher? I grimaced and rolled my eyes at the thought. No, he hadn’t been screaming on his way down—I would have heard. He’d jumped.

Inside my mind, I made up a whole story for him. He was on board with his only daughter; his wife had died in childbirth long ago. When his daughter got sick, coming down with whatever Thomas had had, and died, he’d flung himself overboard in grief.