Nightshifted (27 page)

“Gina—I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t look at me as she walked to her locker and opened it. I stood there, trapped because her locker was closer to the door than mine, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment.

“You should have shot him when it started,” she said, her voice still rough.

“I didn’t have a shot then. Honest. I swear.”

There was a long pause until her locker closed. Her lips pursed, and she still wasn’t looking at me. “If you had a shot, any shot, that wasn’t okay.”

“I didn’t.” My mind raced through the moments where she’d been trapped. I’d tried, I’d searched, I’d failed. I couldn’t even save a friend. How was I supposed to save myself? “I didn’t until the end, and then I blew it. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. I know.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like a fish out of water. I wanted to make excuses and I wanted her to forgive me. But if she was going to, she had to do it in her own good time. It was just that potentially I didn’t have much time left, and I needed all the absolution I could find.

“Thanks,” I wound up saying, zipping my purse closed. I walked carefully around her to the door. It was halfway closed already when I heard her say, “Don’t forget your extra cake.”

I went into the break room, where Meaty was giving his report to the day shift charge. I tiptoed around the table and opened the fridge. It’d be hard to find half a cake in the sea of tinfoil and leftovers.

“Just a second,” Meaty said to the other charge nurse. “Spence!”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Take tomorrow night off.”

I almost hit my head inside the fridge in surprise. “Really?”

“Really. We’re low on patients. We’ll call you if we need to. Tie up some loose ends. Take a vacation.”

Cake retrieved, I carefully stood up. “Gina needs the vacation more than I do, Meaty.”

“Don’t worry, she’ll get hers.”

I inhaled to protest. I wasn’t exactly being fired, though. And I did have a lot of things to do, assuming Anna didn’t turn up. “Thanks.”

Meaty gave me a knowing nod. “You’re welcome.”

*   *   *

I called Sike again on the way to the train station. It went to her voice mail. Of course. I stared at my phone, frowning for a second as I listened for the beep.

“Look—this is Edie—are you all doing anything? Anything at all? I need an update. Have you found her yet? I want to know what’s going on.”

The message cut off anything else I was going to say. I fought the urge to redial and just leave a message of me cussing. I shoved my phone into my purse and walked to the train station as quickly as I could.

*   *   *

Morning commuters at the station glanced at me, then quickly looked away. With a fattening lip, I was an object of curiosity, but no one wanted to add my problems to their own. I found a seat on the train when it arrived, watching the shadows underneath the seats in front of me. Were the Shadows in there, watching me back? Had they found out anything about Anna yet? My hand found my badge—I wished I had a way to ask them. Me wanting to talk to Shadows, that was a change indeed.

My train finished its downtown loop and the other commuters went away. It was just me staring at my shoes in the train when the doors across from me opened, and let in someone I didn’t really want to see.

Asher. This time without flowers. He was wearing a suit that was tailored precisely for him, sharp-shouldered and swank. He was as startled to see me as I was to see him; I could see it in his eyes for half a second before they narrowed.

“No one else should get to hit you,” he informed me with his British accent. With the apparent implication that it was still okay, sometimes, for him. Spanking was fun and all, but to the best of my knowledge it hardly ever caused fat lips.

“Not now,” I said, looking in my bag for a book to read and ignore him with. I saw the pope water sitting there, thought of Meaty, and remembered the “loose ends” comment. Well, here was one, sitting right across from me. I looked up and he had a bemused expression on his face.

“Look,” I began, inhaling deeply. I sucked at difficult conversations. And who could I have a conversation with that went “I probably won’t see you again, because I’m going to be going on trial with some vampires”? Just people at work—and Ti. That thought brightened me. “Look, I’ve met someone,” I said aloud. “They get me. They really get me. I’ve got a lot of problems, things you wouldn’t even begin to understand. It’s all very complicated, really.”

An eyebrow crept higher on his head, pulling a lopsided smile behind. I kept going in spite of myself. “It was fun, don’t get me wrong, and we had chemistry, sure, but—”

I stared at him and lost my train of thought. There was a gravitational pull between us, yes. But if I were the Earth, then he was a cool and distant moon. Light, but not heat—and I liked to be warm. “You’re a doctor, I’m a nurse, it’s just not a good idea.”

The train shuddered to a halt.

“I believe this is your stop,” he said. He stood and made no move toward the door.

“It is. See you.” I stood and walked out into the station and made it halfway up the stairs.

“I’m not really a doctor, you know,” said Asher’s accented voice. I turned and saw his suit, incongruous with the station’s milky white walls. I quickly blinked an eye and found him glowing, bright.

I inhaled. “Then … what are you?” I asked, slowly.

“I can be a doctor. I can be a lot of things. I prefer, however, to be myself.” He crossed the short distance between us. “Look at me, Edie.”

I did. It was daylight outside, just six stairs away. He couldn’t be a vampire. I reached between my breasts and pressed my badge hard against my skin.

Asher’s face slowly became the face of someone I didn’t recognize. His dark eyes were pierced with blue, until the blue overtook all the brown, like the sky after a heavy storm. His skin tone lightened from olive to become Nordic white, and the set of his jaw tilted, from angled high to low and square.

“I think I met your cousin last night,” I said.

“Now will you tell me where you work?” he asked.

“Y4.”

“It figures,” he said. He shifted back to the Asher I knew in the blink of an eye.

“Does that mean that when you feel like it, you can be me now?” I asked. I thought of Gina, on the floor with gauzed eyes full of blood.

“No, actually. I did try, though, at the club, and several times thereafter. When I found out I couldn’t, I was shocked, then intrigued. Then when I learned you were merely being protected by the proximity of your badge…”

“So you weren’t really into me for me is what you’re saying?”

“You were a novelty.”

And isn’t that what every girl wants to hear? “Fan-fucking-tastic. Good night, Asher, or good morning, or whatever the fuck it is for you now. I’m too tired for this.” I started walking the final stairs away from him.

“That’s not what I meant, Edie,” he called after me. “You have to imagine my surprise that night. I thought you were a rare beast, something that for shapeshifters is like a unicorn—someone whose spirit can’t be tamed. When I realized you worked at a hospital, and probably
the
hospital, and that was the reason I couldn’t shift into you, well … you can only imagine my disappointment.”

I whirled on him. “How about you imagine my disappointment? When some guy like you is interested in me, we have great sex, and then all of a sudden I’m not good enough anymore?”

He looked up at me like a baffled dog, and he clearly did not understand. And I didn’t want to explain it to him, how girls like me never got guys like him, how I was a Wednesday-night girl, but not a Friday-night girl. I decided it wasn’t worth the energy. I’m not sure what played on my face right then, but at least he seemed thoughtful.

“You’ve got a really confused relative at Y4 right now. You should go check him out.”

Asher held up his hands. “Edie, I’m sorry.”

I inhaled to tell him to shove it, and then shrugged instead. “Yeah. I know.” I hitched up my purse, and walked straight ahead.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I slung my purse across my chest for the short walk home from the station. I had set out across the commuter parking lot when I heard a car honk its horn. I ignored it, and it honked again. I turned, to make sure I wasn’t about to be run over, and saw my own car, with Jake sitting inside. I changed my course, picking up steam as I crossed the lot.

“How did you—” I sputtered, then realized I should be glad he wasn’t on the way to trade it in.

“I went by your place last night. I saw the car out front, and knocked and knocked, then I realized you weren’t home. So I let myself in with my spare, and decided I’d come pick you up this morning for breakfast.”

I inhaled to be angry at him—I hadn’t told him he could make a spare key for my place, but him having one was the least of my concerns. “Well—thanks.”

“Well, you’re welcome.” He pulled us out of the lot. He looked clean, physically and bloodstreamily. Maybe he’d taken a shower at my place. His hands on the wheel were solid, competent. “What happened to you?” he asked, glancing over at me. I used the rearview mirror to check out my lip. It was as swollen as it felt.

“Last night was long.” I tilted the mirror back toward him.

“Uh-huh. When’d you start taking German?”

“What?”

“That broken CD player. I tried to get the disc out, but it wouldn’t open for me.”

“Heh.”

“I figured you’d learn Spanish for work. Or French—you’ve always been a mushy romantic. But German? Odd choice.”

I crossed my arms, unaccustomed to being a passenger in my own car. He was lucky Grandfather hadn’t exploded, or shot out laser beams, or done anything else that angry German ghosts tended to do. “It was the right price at the store. Where are we going?”

“Molly’s.”

“Nice.” I knew the place; it was close to my house. They made a mean chicken-fried steak and eggs. “How’ve you been?”

“Pretty good.”

“Where’ve you been?” I pressed.

“Around.” He glanced over at me, briefly, then continued to drive. Did I even really want to know the honest answers to those questions? Probably not. We sank into the easy silence of people who love one another—or at least one person who loved the other, and the junkie who loved her back as long as it was expedient—and who really have nothing left to talk about anymore.

*   *   *

Our silence lasted until after we ordered breakfast. He had coffee, I stuck to iced tea, keeping the ice cubes against my lip with my tongue, and we pretended to catch up on things.

“So really, Jake—how’ve you been?” I wanted to reach over and roll up his sleeves to see for myself. Then again, right now, he looked so clean-cut—at least clean-shaven—that I was ill-inclined to break the illusion. I was the one who looked beaten down—hell, I had the busted lip to prove it. If everything was going to go to shit in my life, I could at least pretend that my brother was back together in his. But the nurse in me wouldn’t let me
not
ask. “Are you still … experimenting?”

He stared off into the distance, through the plate-glass window, frosted with a mural of fake Christmastime snow. It was a thousand-yard stare, but at least his pupils constricted. “I did for a while.” He inhaled and exhaled. “But I’m broke now.”

He seemed so sad and forlorn. “Do I have a couch left at home?” I asked in an overly teasing tone, to break the mood.

“Not broke as in out of money—well, yeah, that too.” He looked ruefully at me. “I mean I’m broken on the inside.”

“How so?”

“I dunno. The synapses in my head. Edie, I can’t even get all the way drunk anymore. How sad is that?” he asked me, in all seriousness.

“Not very.” Pretty soon he’d have to get a job to lose himself in, maybe a girlfriend. Soon he’d be normal. If only the spell would last.

The waitress brought our food. Molly’s chicken-fried steak and eggs slathered with gravy was as good as I remembered. “Can I tell you something? And you not think I’m crazy?” he asked.

What could be as crazy as death by vampire trial? “Sure, Jake,” I said around a mouthful.

“I think,” he said, looking around, then leaning over. “I think I’m part of some test.”

I almost choked on my eggs. I forced the bolus down, and took a long swig of tea. “Really?”

He studied my face. “You think I’m crazy.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I opted to cover my tracks. “Well, you have done a lot of drugs, Jakey.”

“Seriously, Sissy—you and I both know that this is weird, right? I mean, not even booze.” He sighed, staring into his unadulterated coffee. “Not even booze.”

“Maybe it’s a chance for you to start over?” I suggested. “I mean, now that you’re clean, you can get a fresh start.”

“I’m twenty-eight, Sissy.”

“So? It’s never too late to start over.” I tried to sound like I meant it.