Shapeshifted (20 page)

What had that man been reaching for? A gun? A knife? A phone? Too late now, we’d never know.

“Where did he go?” Catrina whispered, horrified.

“Do you really care?” I said, my voice rising higher. Jorgen’s formerly slack-skinned stomach was stretched taut like a drum. I thought I could see a foot pressing out from the inside, like a perverted kicking baby.

The elderly woman started babbling between us, holding her hands up in a placating fashion. I gladly concentrated on her instead.

“Grandmother—
Abuela
—” I said, trying to calm her down. She must have made it to County; I recognized the pattern of her hospital gowns. I reached out and touched her forehead, and she didn’t jerk away. She didn’t have a fever, that was good—hopefully she wasn’t contagious anymore. “What happened to you?”

She began speaking in fast Spanish that I couldn’t understand. Catrina translated quickly. “She doesn’t like it here, everyone is mean to her, there is no respect left in this world. And she’s scared of that dog.”

Well. She had every right to be. She bent over and started scrabbling on the ground, rooting through the discarded flowers like she’d lost a contact lens. I didn’t want to leave her behind here for the next Three Crosses guard to kick. “Catrina—is there somewhere you can take her?”

“Why?”

“We can’t just leave her here is why.”

“Doesn’t she have a home?”

“Look, Jorgen will only listen to me. And we’re near where your sister is. Maybe you can just trust me to find things out.” I didn’t want to state the obvious: that we both knew what the answer would be—that Jorgen would most likely lead me up the street so he could dig away at a shallow trash pit in a narrow backyard. I gestured to the elderly woman. “She needs your help. Can you take her back to the Reina’s? Get her some food?”

Catrina looked from the old woman to me, and then past us to Jorgen, whom we’d both just seen swallow a man alive. Even though she had the
don,
the weirdness tonight was mounting in a way I could tell made Catrina uncomfortable. Maybe that, and being too close to the final truth. She frowned but agreed. “Okay. But you better come to work tomorrow and you tell me what you find out.”

“I will. I swear it.”

Catrina reached out and gently herded the old woman away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“This whole night is hard to swallow. But you know all about that, huh?” I asked Jorgen in an attempt to be lighthearted. He had just eaten a person. It was weird. Should I offer him some Tums, or should I go off and violently puke out my disgust in a corner? I didn’t know, so I decided to press on. “Where to?”

Jorgen took off toward the far end of the street, and I followed him. We reached an alley, and Jorgen dove in. I chased after him. “Hey! No eating people!” I whispered as loudly as I dared.

We snaked to the back of the building we’d just been in front of. There were dogs in cages out back. They started whining as soon as they felt, or maybe saw, Jorgen. Trapped in cages, all of them were cowed.

A man came out of the back of the Three Crosses building and kicked the nearest cage. “Stop it!
¡Cállate!
”

I waited against the wall, hidden by an overflowing Dumpster, and Jorgen stood in the middle of the alley, huge and invisible.

Jorgen looked to me, then looked to the man and leapt forward, catching him in the back. I knew the landing knocked all the air out of the man—I heard it leave him in a rush once Jorgen pinned him. I raced up as the dogs whined even louder, clawing at the backs of their cages.

“Don’t kill him!” I hissed. “Just keep him from following me.”

Jorgen reached out with a massive back leg and stepped on the Three Crosses man’s leg, breaking it with a crunching sound.

“Jesus!” I yelped. The gangster’s eyes widened, and now, able to breathe he inhaled deeply to howl in pain. “No no no.” I lunged down and planted my hand over his mouth. “Can you understand me?”

His eyes were wide. He could see only me in the alley; he had no idea how I’d managed to knock him down and break his leg.

“Don’t yell.” His eyes were watering with pain. “If you yell—I’ll have my ghost here kill you.” Jorgen crouched in and exhaled on the man, breath rancid as rotten death.

He nodded, and I released his mouth.

“If you move even one inch, my ghost will eat you.”

“Like upstairs,” he whispered.

He knew other hungry ghosts? Great. Leaving Jorgen to guard him, I turned toward the door.

*   *   *

The man had left the door open when he’d come outside. I hoped Jorgen wouldn’t eat him while I wasn’t looking—I wasn’t sure I could handle that on my conscience. I swung the door open and looked inside before entering. It was dark. Disconcertingly so.

This was for my mom. I’d find out what had happened to Adriana, and then Luz would owe me, no matter what. The small voice that kept telling me what a bad idea this was in the back of my head—I told that voice to shut the hell up.

I reached in and fished past the doorjamb for the light switch. As my hand passed into the darkness, I felt an odd static in the air. About as far as I could reach my hand into the room, I felt the chipped plastic switch against the wall and flipped it. It wasn’t wired to the light overhead, but to a light at the top of the stairs that rose from this bottom entryway. I stepped fully in, and felt enveloped by the charge—as if it were crawling up and down my skin, inside my clothing, like electric pins and needles.

It smelled in here too. Worse than Jorgen’s breath. Like rotting meat. Not good. I was prepared to find one dead body, but the smell promised more.

Jorgen had followed me from the alley to look inside. He leaned forward through the door, but it seemed to be blocked to him. Maybe by whatever I was feeling right now.

“Can you come in?” Screw the man in the alley. I’d feel better with Jorgen at my back.

The Hound shook his head. Whatever felt weird about the air in here was actually barring him. “Shit.”

The room I was in was just a communal room, a landing for the rooms that branched off it. Two doors to either side, and then the stairs leading up. I didn’t know where to go next; I was going to just try the door on my right when I heard a groan.

Up the stairs. Of course.

I’d left the door open behind me, in the hope that Jorgen would follow me or stay in my line of sight. I took the first stair, listened to it creak, and then took the next three stairs more slowly before looking back at Jorgen’s disappearing form.

Whatever I’d thought I’d be doing tonight, I didn’t think I’d actually be doing it alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I reached the top of the stairs as quietly as I could. As I walked up, I could see there was another landing, and again, more doors.

Another groan. Louder. Longer. But I couldn’t locate it—there was a door in front of me, and a door to my left. I opened the one in front of me first.

This place reeked. As a nurse, I’d smelled ten different kinds of death before, seen maggots feasting on someone’s gangrenous leg, and this smelled worse. It was dark inside too, of course. It felt humid, probably from the rain, but my skin imagined it as the dampness of spoiled things. With extreme reluctance I fumbled inside for a light switch. My hand found something smooth and round instead. I patted up and down, more strange things, and started panicking. I inhaled, exhaled, imagined where the hell the light switch would be if this fucking place were built to code, and went in for it, finding the tiny plastic nub of a switch between two smoother surroundings.

This time, the light illuminated the whole room. Which let me see that the things I’d been touching on the wall … were bones.

“Oh, God.” The entire wall I was walking out of was faced in bones. Long femurs and short tarsals, and broken-up pieces of skull wedged between. The entire wall—and half the ceiling. And part of the floor.

I took a few steps in, careful not to touch anything else. Not all of the bones had been bleached, which was the reason for the smell. Nuggets of flesh, strings of tendon, all remained attached.

“¿Hola?”
said a very weak voice, hoarse.

I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from at first. The jagged outlines of the bones on the walls prevented me from seeing what was there, like an optical illusion—a cage made of bones, set on the room’s far side.

“¿Que está ahí?”

Whoever was talking sounded frail. I walked nearer, reminding myself that cages were a two-way street. They could be cruelly used on good dogs—or used on bad dogs, to keep good dogs safe.

The bones were wired up with curling rebar, ornate, disgustingly beautiful, Giger-esque. I stopped a body length away from the cage to peer inside.

“Por favor, ayúdame.”
It was a woman, dressed in a thin nightgown. I thought she was a child at first, but then I realized she’d been starved. Her hair was in front of her face, her arms were stick-thin, and—
“Por favor, por favor.”

“Please?” I knew
por favor.
She started speaking, more quickly, and I held up my hands. “I don’t know what else you’re saying. Are you okay?
Se habla ingles? Dolor?”

“Mucho dolor.”
Much pain,
she agreed. She reached for the bars of her cage, and I knew what I thought I saw was true. The outlines of the bones under her skin had been tattooed on her arms. There was a tattoo on the back of her ring finger on her right hand, one that I knew I’d seen before, but her hands were so thin, so thin.

“How can I help you out of here?” I had never wished so hard to know another language in my life.

She turned toward me, and the hair slid away from her face. The outline of her skull had been tattooed on her, the outlines of teeth pulled up on either side of her mouth, forcing her face into a cruel smile, just like Santa Muerte in the altar outside.

“We have to get you out,” I said more loudly. I didn’t know how, but—I touched the cage carefully. The bones weren’t solid, but the rebar beneath them was. I searched for any cracks.

“Come on—” I found a loose bone, and pulled, and it came off with a crack, but the rebar below didn’t budge. The bars were welded too close together for me to manage to pull her through. I groped over bones not long removed from their owners, searching for a door—Maldonado had gotten her in there somehow, and that’s how I’d get her out again—then I found it. A knot of rebar, double-wrapped, in between pierced vertebrae.

It wasn’t a lock, and there wasn’t a key. Whoever had twisted this cage shut on Adriana never meant to open it again.

I put my hands on either side of the knot’s tail and prayed that I somehow could Hulk out and get Adriana free. “Come on, come on—”

“Edith?” came a weak voice from outside the room. Almost no one called me Edith anymore. I stood up straighter and looked around. The woman in the cage, nearly skin and bones, pulled herself halfway up.

“I’m so sorry—hang on—I’ll be right back.” I started backing out of the room. The woman in the cage reached a bony arm through its bars out at me.

She didn’t cry. She might have been too dehydrated to cry.

*   *   *

I made it back to the landing without fishing around inside bones to find the light switch again. I went to the second door and opened it up.

“Edith—I smell you.”

“Dren?” Jorgen’s owner, my erstwhile Husker, the vampire who’d tormented me, whom I’d cost a hand. “Dren?” I asked again, my voice rising.

“Don’t turn on the light. Just come here.”

I stood in the doorway. “Dren, what’s going on? Why are you here?”

“It took Jorgen long enough to find you. Come here.”

Was this where Jorgen had wanted me to come all along? Nice. And ironic. No wonder he’d been so pleased.

“Come here,” Dren demanded again.

“No.” He sounded weak, but that didn’t mean that it was safe to wander in blindly and say hi. “How about you come here? I need your help to free this girl.”

“I’m not in a position to free anyone right now. Get in here.” There was a long pause, and then a word I never thought I’d hear. “Please.”

That was weird—and frightening. “Dren, tell me what’s happening. Now.”

“Edie—I’m weak. They’ve…” His voice sunk low. “If you turn on the light, we might be seen. We don’t have much time before he comes back. Hurry.”

“Hurry and do what?”

“Help me, goddammit! Please!”

A piece of vampire lore returned to me. Honor and whatnot, when sworn. “Swear not to hurt me.”

There was a dry laugh. “I swear it. I couldn’t hurt a fly. Come closer, Edie. I’ll need to lean on you.”

There was movement at the back of the room, him, fabric, the bang of something metal. I took a step inside, and another, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness ahead of me. He was laying on a metal table, draped in a sheet not unlike a gown, one hand folded in across his lap, the other hand missing.

“Come on already.” I waved him to come forward. The charge around me, what I’d felt when I first came into this cursed place, was increasing now. The pins and needles were beginning to feel more like teeth.

“I can’t. I need your help.” He reached out to me, with his arm that ended in a stump.

“And swear to help my mom,” I added.

“I swear, but only if you hurry the fuck up,” he hissed.

I’d wanted to save my mom, right? And I’d found Adriana. Only I couldn’t get her out. I was torn between the two rooms, like a kid frozen between horrors at a haunted house. Neither of the rooms was a good option, and everything felt like it was getting worse, fast—it was
act, or run, and don’t stop running, don’t think of looking back.

I ran toward him instead, and drew myself up short at his bedside. He was lashed down, restrained across his chest, abdomen, thighs, and feet. I ratcheted the ties off him, unlacing their ends, freeing him. He gasped as the last one came loose, and pushed himself up.

He lurched up, swung his arm around my neck, and shoved himself off the table. He hobbled, as if one of his legs didn’t work. Because it didn’t. I looked down at his other flaccid arm.