Deadshifted (2 page)

His question was maybe a little too close to the truth. I stood up quickly. “Just jet-lagged. Sorry.” I smiled at him like I was carefree. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

And my heart melted when he smiled back at me.

*   *   *

He led us down the hallways without stopping to look at any signs, and I wondered if he or one of his other personalities had been on this same ship before. I held his hand but trailed behind him, as the hallways weren’t very wide.

I concentrated on the warmth of his hand as he held mine. He had a normal body temperature, which I liked. I’d dated zombies before, and they were cool, while werewolves could be too hot. If I were Goldilocks, Asher-the-shapeshifter was just right. Apparently my uterus agreed.

We reached the entrance to a grand banquet room together. There were multiple hand sanitizer stations right outside its doors.

“Look, it’s like we never left home!” I let go of his hand to cup mine beneath the automatic foam. Asher snorted but followed my lead. It was easy for him to blow things off; he never seemed to get sick. But he grinned at me, and I found myself grinning back.

The cruise employees inside the banquet room’s entrance checked our names off their list, and Asher led us to the table that corresponded to our room number.

The room itself was huge. Strange to think that such a big space was confined inside a ship, itself another big space. And that together, we, with those spaces, were hurtling over the ocean. I hadn’t really gotten a sense of our movement yet, and I looked around for cues. The chandeliers overhead were brightly colored ornate glass affairs, like the tops of tropical trees, complete with glass flowers and glass birds, all fixed so as not to swing, and the chair Asher pulled out for me to sit down on felt stable against the low carpet underneath. So far the only indication I was even on a ship was the waves I could see out the window, three tables down.

A crowd of people pushed in and slowly filled every chair. Kids too young to be back in school just yet, a few lucky though sullen teenagers whose families were letting them escape school for enforced family bonding, a lot of older adults who could afford to take two weeks off work, and lastly us. I felt very sympathetic toward the teenagers just then.

An older man with short gray hair and wearing a suit jacket pushed a woman up in a wheelchair to join us. She had a blanket covered in pink-and-purple paisley tucked around her legs. He was barrel-chested, one of those old men who’d managed to hold on to his bulk as he aged, betrayed only by the pull-tabs of his hearing aids just barely poking out of his ears. But she had aged even better than him, with bright eyes darting behind her librarian-style half-lenses and short hair smartly styled. Everyone ages, and as a nurse I was forced to be more aware of my mortality than most, but I also knew that some few are lucky enough to age well, and it was clear she fell into this happy category.

He positioned her at the table, put on the wheelchair’s brakes, and then sat down beside her. I inhaled to ask her why she was in a wheelchair, then stopped myself and gave her a big camouflaging smile. At my job, being nosy was practically mandatory. But in real life, asking random people rude questions about their health doesn’t make you many friends—and makes you seem a little creepy.

Despite my attempts not to stare awkwardly at her wheelchair, she smiled. “Car accident.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” I backpedaled—this was a vacation, after all. “Is this your first cruise?”

“No. Yours?”

“Yes. I’m kind of nervous about it.” That’d be a good excuse for my rude behavior, and it wasn’t that far from the truth. “I don’t really like the sea.”

The cant of her left eyebrow rising over her glasses’ frame said she thought this was an odd vacation choice for me, but age had also given her more tact than I possessed. “We’ve been going on one a year for the past forty-five years. On our anniversary.”

“How nice,” I said and gave Asher a side-eye look, hoping he could rescue me from myself, only to find he was looking at something over his shoulder and not currently paying attention. He’d seemed so pleased with himself when he’d planned this trip for us. I couldn’t help but wonder just what traditions we’d create together or where we’d be in the next forty-five years.

Asher stood suddenly and gave me a tight hold-that-thought smile. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he walked quickly across the room without another word.

“Are you all newlyweds?” the wheelchair woman’s husband asked. I flushed bright red.

“Um, no…” Even though I might be pregnant by him. Way to stay classy, Edie. But people made mistakes, and besides, if everything worked out, it wasn’t a mistake now, was it? Just a happy accident. That was okay, right? This wasn’t 1887 anymore. Or even 2007.

“Hal—” she chastised.

“If we’re at the same table here our cabins are probably next door. I just want to know if I should take my hearing aids out at night is all,” Hal went on, giving me a knowing look.

I caught his gist, with horror, and felt myself turning a Technicolor shade of red.

“Hal, shush!” she said with a laugh at my rising discomfort. She leaned over to pat my hand. “You’ll have to ignore him. Lord knows I do.”

And to think I’d thought I had the lock on awkward questions. “Ha ha,” I forced out.

She leaned forward and gave me a confessional look. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you not to have a good time when you can, dear. Married or not.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” Anything to not discuss my sex life with the elderly. “I’m Edie. My erstwhile boyfriend is Asher.” I resisted craning my head around to look for him, so he could help get me out of this mess.

“I’m Claire and he’s Hal,” the woman replied. Hal gave me a nod and a jowly smile.

“Nice to meet you all,” Asher said, returning to the table. About time.

An Indian family of four sat down in a rush at the far side of our table before I could ask him where he’d been. The couple was a little older than Asher and me, but they had their acts more together, as evidenced by their two children, a boy, ten, and a girl, maybe eight. The girl was wearing Coke-bottle glasses over wide-set eyes and her face was cherubically round. Both the girl and the woman had long black hair—the mother’s was up, expertly coiffed, showing off large diamond earrings, while the girl’s trailed down her back in one thick jealousy-inducing braid.

“I hope we didn’t miss anything—” the man said as they sat down.

“No, they haven’t started talking yet,” Claire informed them.

A life-jacket-wearing cruise employee did a silly dance to attract our attention. He was joined by two other staff, and they mimed rowing across the stage. Oddly, their levity didn’t make me feel any safer.

“Have you ever had to do any emergency procedures?” I asked Claire in a whisper.

She smiled indulgently, and I noticed that for an elderly woman she had very good teeth. “Only once, dear, a long time ago. But everything worked out.”

Hal leaned in, overhearing. “Don’t worry. This cruise line has a stellar reputation.”

Asher elbowed me gently. “See? What’d I tell you?”

I gave him a look. He wasn’t the one dealing with being scared of the ocean and pregnancy and old people listening to us having sex. But—he was dealing with something. Asher could camouflage his emotions more than most people, but I’d learned he had certain tells. The small crease between his eyebrows was one of them. Had he seen someone else he knew here? If so, I didn’t want to think about how he knew them. I was leaning over to ask him what had happened when a person with a megaphone started the safety lecture up front. Asher gave me a pensive look, but shrugged. His problems must not have had anything to do with the integrity of the ship, seeing as he wasn’t herding us toward the life rafts. I figured I should listen first and ask questions later.

In the “unlikely” event of any problems, we’d meet in this room again, get life jackets handed out to us, and then be guided to the lifeboats in an orderly fashion. The demonstrated life jackets were low-rent affairs that you had to breathe into to inflate. I wondered if the adjustable straps on them would be able to accommodate some of the larger people in the room.

Our table shook and startled me, but it was just the kids at the far end, playing some sort of hand-tapping tag with each other. As their parents tried to stop them I realized I was the only one at the table even trying to pay attention. Asher’s focus was still divided, the parents were pointing and giving their children stern looks, and Hal and Claire were absorbed in thumbing through a tour book for Hawaii, murmuring suggestions and dog-earing pages. Occasionally Claire would glance up and over at the children, giving them a wide grandmotherly grin.

In a way, our little table here was the complete circle of human experience. Asher and I, together, maybe having a kid; that other couple with their handsome if fidgety children; and finally Hal and Claire, with matching short gray hair and wrinkles, aging gracefully. If I was pregnant, it would be weird … but we’d be doing what thousands—no, millions—of people did every day. Plunking our little car token around the game board of Life.

I should probably just relax. About everything. No matter what happened, baby, no baby, everything would be fine. There was no reason for it not to be.

The safety lecture was wrapping up. Our vacation had begun, and we were going to have a good time. I reached underneath the table to take Asher’s hand, feeling serene—and found his hand balled into a tight fist.

CHAPTER TWO

Asher’s hand relaxed and fit easily into mine, but it was too late: The tension I’d felt there relit the fears I’d been trying to smother. I found myself holding my breath as people started filtering out of the room.

Hal stood and took the brakes off Claire’s wheelchair. “Don’t worry. This is the safest way to travel. See you all at dinner,” she said with a smile, waving as he wheeled her away.

Voices rose as people chattered about their plans. There were a few high-pitched kid-squeals, coughing, conversations, laughter—normal life. I looked over to Asher as our table cleared.

“We’re still on vacation, right?”

“Of course,” he said—but I knew he was lying. We stayed seated, his eyes scanning the crowd. When the room was nearly empty, he rose at some cue I couldn’t read, and I followed his lead.

This time I paid attention how to get back to our room. The ship had picked up enough speed for me to feel it beneath my feet, engines straining somewhere deep within the hull.

I waited until the cabin door closed behind me before asking, “What happened out there?”

He sat down on the bed, and I took a spot across from him, at the desk chair. “I thought I saw an old friend was all.”

I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, I did. “Which part of that is the lie?” I held up my hands to make air-quotes as I spoke. “The ‘friend,’ the ‘old,’ or the ‘thought’ part?”

He made a face. “I used to be a better liar.”

“No, I just used to let you get away with it more,” I said. He snorted then looked away. I did my best not to look pained while I waited for him to share. I knew that the man I loved, the father of my potential child, had not always been a good man—but he was now, and that’s what counted, right? And everything I was imagining while he waited was probably worse than the truth would be. “So come on. ’Fess up.”

“I’m not entirely sure and I don’t want to worry you over nothing.”

I’m surprisingly sympathetic to that right now
was what I wanted to blurt out, but I managed to smile and shrugged one shoulder in an encouraging way. “Well, tell me who you thought you saw, and we’ll be prepared for the worst together.”

Asher’s lips twisted, and he gave me a bittersweet smile. “It’d been a while since I’d seen him. I wasn’t sure at first.”

“But now you are?” I prompted after another pause.

Asher nodded, slowly at first, and then certain. “Yes. Unfortunately.”

Which answered the good-past/bad-past question. I didn’t want to give up yet, though. “Even bad guys take vacations,” I said, trying to make light of things.

“Yeah, they do.” He snorted with irony, and then fell silent again.

“Hey now.” I moved over to sit beside him on the bed, and shouldered him. “I don’t mean you.”

Asher sighed and held out both his hands. “Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he grit his teeth in thought. “You don’t ask many questions about my past, Edie, and I appreciate that.”

“I don’t need to. I know who you are.” I caught one of his hands in my own, nervous that he wasn’t looking over at me. It wasn’t that I was scared of what he’d say—Asher could take a thousand different forms, but I knew I knew his heart—it was just that hated to see anything cause him pain.

“The thing is, there was a time, when I was young—when I did stupid things. When I didn’t care about the consequences, or who I hurt.”

“You mean like every kid, ever.” I knew his prior shapeshifting abilities lent themselves to spying and corporate espionage. And when he’d been working under the assumption that he’d soon be dead or insane—the fate of all shapeshifters eventually—what was the point in having a conscience?

He shook his head, unwilling to let himself off the hook. “Older than that. Old enough to know better. It’s complicated—” he said, and then there was another long pause.

“There’s nothing you can say that’s going to scare me away from you.” I nudged him again with my shoulder. “So spit it out.”

“He hired me to acquire some data for him,” Asher said, still looking at the ground.

“You mean steal?” I didn’t want him to lie to me—or to feel like he had to anymore.

Asher sighed. “Technically, yes.”

“About?” I prompted.

“Synthetic blood.”

I almost rolled my eyes. “What’s so bad about that? There’s a huge market for it. Whoever figures it out is going to make a jillion dollars.”

“But not many research groups are being underwritten by vampires. Or doing drug trials on unwitting human subjects in countries with no patient protection laws.”