Edie Spence (Book 5): Bloodshifted (12 page)

I walked into a room that had a prone woman shackled to an autopsy table near one wall. She was naked and covered in wires on a table that had a basin at one end and a drain at the other. She was bound wrist and foot, with lockable leather restraints, and I bet Natasha had the only key.

It was odd that she was strapped down and still connected by cables to an ECG. All the leads on her chest were hooked to one monitor, showing a series of completely flat lines. There was another monitor beside it, one that I was less familiar with, and leads from her shaved head were connected to it, and I realized it was an E
E
G machine, for electroencephalography—brain, instead of heart. Its monitor was white and had twenty or so lines, just as flat as the others. An arm from the EEG jutted out, holding a camera. I’d only seen one of these twice before, both times in a hospital setting, on patients who’d had profound brain damage due to hypoxia after heart attacks or strokes. When family members couldn’t believe that their loved ones were blinking just to blink, and wanted to read patterns into the spastic movements of the brain dead, doctors set up EEGs to prove that there was no controlled brain function left.

I was so used to seeing people with wires on them and over them, it took me a moment to process how profoundly strange all this was: Natasha was monitoring someone who was completely, head and heart, dead.

I looked back to her, and found her watching me. “So you really are a nurse,” she said. I gave her a questioning look. “You didn’t freak out,” she explained.

Only on the inside.
“What’s going on here?”

“I’m running some delicate tests,” she said coyly.

“On people.”

“I’m not asking for your approval.” She sounded bemused.

“Good, because you wouldn’t get it.”

She actually laughed at this. “You’re sassy. It’s refreshing. The others are mostly scared of me.”

Just like I probably should be.
I need to stop thinking with my mouth, baby.
I looked at her. She was young, yes, a little too pretty for her own good, yes, but she didn’t look like a serial killer—which was probably test subjects one through sixty-three’s last thought. “What’s the EEG for?”

“So I know the exact moment when things work. Raven’s right—I haven’t gotten more than four hours of sleep in a row in months. I do need a helper, and I don’t trust the rest of them. I don’t trust you either,” she said with a snort, “but you might actually be competent. Jackson’s just a butcher, you know? And Celine’s too obsessed with being pretty to be smart, and Lars—” She rolled her eyes. “He thinks he’s too good for this because he’s been Raven’s servant longer than I have.”

I looked to the monitors. There was a blood pressure cuff set up, reading question marks, and a blue oxygenation monitor cable stuck to the woman’s right big toe, reading zero. At least all the alarms were off; otherwise everything that could be beeping a warning, would be. “But she’s dead,” I said.

“Yeah, she is. That’s the whole point.” Natasha gave me a smug smile. “Ever drawn blood from a dead person?” I shook my head, and she went on. “Of course not. Whatever, I can teach you. It’s not that hard—and it’s not like they’re a moving target.” She handed me gloves and a face shield. I’d learned in the past that if someone ever offered you a face shield, you put it on
immediately
. But I didn’t think Miss No-Pulse here was going to start spitting. Natasha read the confusion on my face. “It won’t spurt out at you—no heartbeat means no blood pressure. I just don’t want you shedding skin cells and germs into my sample. Lean in and see.”

I watched her work with the efficiency of someone who had done this sixty-three times before, possibly multiple times per patient. She swiped a cleaning agent over the woman’s chest, and I saw several other tiny holes there in among the leads and cords.

“I try to go into the same hole, but the heart only has so much blood in it—it doesn’t matter which ventricle you use. You don’t just randomly jab in the torso—even if you do get blood, you’ll get too many other tissues and by-products of decay. If you run out—sometimes Jackson gets lazy and the test subjects are small and their hearts don’t hold that much—you can milk it from a subclavian or the fem, but then you have to squeeze their leg or arm while you’re pulling the syringe plunger out—that’ll be easier with extra hands, for sure. I tell him not to get women with fake breasts too, but this
is
LA.”

By the time she was done talking, she’d pulled out ten ccs of blood. The charms on her bracelet dangled as she held up the syringe. There were only two of them, a heart with a
C
engraved on it, and ballet shoes. It didn’t match the rest of her hand, holding up a syringe of a dead person’s blood.

The question I wanted to shout to the heavens was,
Why?
I assumed we were continuing her father’s illegal research into creating blood substitutes. If so, there might be some value in blood samples, yes, but not in leaving all these leads hooked up—or shackles on. People who’d been poisoned by off-brand fake blood didn’t wake up.

“I think from here on out, you’ll be doing all the body work. I’ll show you how to prep the subjects, shave the heads, affix the leads—both machines have diagrams on them to show you where the stickers go—”

“I know where to put ECG leads.” There was probably value in letting her think I was dumb, but I still had some nursing pride. “What I don’t get is why you’re killing people.”

She looked at the blood in the syringe she held and then at me. “Would you believe me if I told you it was for a greater good?”

Not in the least. But if I told her that, our conversation would shut down and I wouldn’t discover anything. “I’m listening.” It wasn’t hard to sound realistically reluctant.

Natasha gestured at the body with the syringe. “You already know what vampire cells do for us. What if we could use them for other things? Like, say, to cure cancer?”

That struck remarkably close to home, and my mom. To think that once upon a time I’d tried to sign her up for this. With Dren, of all vampires. “But you’re killing people.”

“Be honest, Edie. If she was here, she probably wasn’t going to amount to anything. I know everyone wants to think their kid’s going to do something remarkable, but how often is that really the case? Your kid excluded, of course. I’m sure yours will be quite the special snowflake.”

I tried not to react, but it was too late. She shook her head. “Raven doesn’t hide anything from me—and I don’t hide anything from him.”

“So you’re saying he wants you to cure cancer?” I found that hard to believe, and I wanted to get the topic off me and my baby.

“Among other things. But first I have to know fully how vampirism works. How the cells transfer and take hold, how they propagate—why they kill first, how they revive later, and what happens in between.” Intellectually, I could see how that would be fascinating, apart from the killing-people part. She waggled the syringe between us. “Honestly, she wasn’t going to amount to anything in the scheme of things.”

“But how do you know?”

Natasha snorted. “Statistically, I think I’m pretty safe.”

I frowned. “So you think only big things count?”

“Yeah. That’s why they’re big. Besides, why should life be more fair to someone else than it was to me?” She tossed the syringe into the air and caught it with the preternatural agility of a daytimer. “I’ve got to go start the cycle. I’ll be right back,” she said, and left me alone with the corpse.

*   *   *

Natasha’s “body work” didn’t involve washing the woman off—she still had on the smoky makeup she’d arrived at the Catacombs with, plucked eyebrows, and tastefully nude lips. Her arms ended in delicate fingertips with clear nail polish on them, and her toenails were painted red. If she hadn’t had the leads on, she would have made the perfect mannequin. I assumed Natasha had just cut her clothes off her instead of wrestling her out of them.

She looked young, not just because of her makeup, but because she was. At the hospital, when people look a certain way—homeless, drugged out, worn out by alcohol or life—you shrug and say “Okay.” A girl like this, though—she might have been running away, but someone knew she was gone. She wasn’t old enough and didn’t look lost enough to have fallen off the map yet. She looked like a sleeping beauty, waiting for a rescuing prince.

I stepped away from her, emotions welling up. I had a hard time being mad for things that happened to me, but I was good at standing up for other people, and I felt like this woman needed protecting.

What promises could I make to her, though, when she was already dead? I’d missed my chance when I hadn’t tackled Jackson before he’d chosen her last night, and God or fate or karma had let her fall through the cracks. I stepped away from the table suddenly feeling exhausted and looked for a place to sit.

There was only one chair in this room—in front of a sleek computer. I heard a machine winding up from the other room, so I quickly sat down and touched the keyboard. The monitor woke, and a pad by the keyboard lit.

A biometric lock. Medication machines at the hospital used them so that visitors couldn’t get bad ideas and sticky fingers. I pressed my forefinger to the pad; it glowed but didn’t unlock. Of course not.

I sighed and played through my next three fingers, just to have something to do besides thinking about sharing a room with a cruelly used corpse. The computer glowed a warning about running out of attempts, but whatever, who were they sending it to? Raven wasn’t up. And playing with it was a way to forget how I’d failed the woman the night before—a way to ignore her corpse.

The computer, assuming I was an idiot, gave up on me and went to a password prompt. I hadn’t expected that—but maybe if Natasha was using solvents like phenol in her lab she wanted secondary access in case she ever burned the crucial fingerprint off.

Of course I didn’t have a password for it either. I made sure to switch to caps before I typed
RAVENISADICK
in one and
VAMPIRESSUCK
in the next one and hit
RETURN.

Not surprisingly, those didn’t log me in. I went through a few more curse words, and then just bashed at the keys because it felt good. When I was done, I fumbled around the back of the screen to turn the monitor off.

“What are you doing?” Natasha asked, coming into the room.

“I just wanted to check my email,” I said, deadpan.

“Yeah, no.” Natasha rolled her eyes. “Two hours from now you’re going to need to draw blood again. I’ll be back by to supervise. You’re welcome to wait here—if you leave, Jackson’ll make you scrub more toilets.” She glanced back at the prone woman. “And if anything happens with her—make sure you get on this side of the door and lock it.”

My eyebrows rose. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. “Nope!” she said and waved as she shut the door behind her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A human body had ten pints of blood, roughly four liters. If we were taking ten ccs out at a time, and there were thirty ccs in an ounce, and sixteen ounces in a pint, and a northbound train was coming at sixty miles an hour while Jimmy was biking south on the tracks … I looked around the sterile room again, and then at the body. This was sort of how I imagined a waiting room in hell would be. Natasha did have a point. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else, or better, to go. I didn’t want to hang out with Celine after Estrella’s earlier display, or try Jackson’s patience—or have him try to pump me for information that I didn’t have.

At least here I could snoop around.

I stood and walked over to the closed door, trying the handle. She hadn’t locked it. I noticed the door itself was solid steel, and the frame had been reinforced, which seemed odd. I opened it, peeked out, and—finding myself alone—closed it and started opening drawers.

Most of the cabinets were empty, but there was a drawer full of neatly stacked medical supplies. Butterfly needles in all gauges for blood draws on normal people with blood pressure, boxes of alcohol wipes, rolls of tape, and individually wrapped packets of gauze. A drawer full of test tubes, another of sterile ten-cc syringes; one had a whole box of needles.

There were also more mysterious implements, loose, with flecks of blood. I made sure not to touch any of them. One of them was definitely a bone saw. I hadn’t seen an autoclave on my way in, but maybe sterility didn’t matter all that much since everyone Natasha experimented on died.

I was in the same position I’d been in since I’d gotten here—no power, no chance to fight back or even warn anyone. I could destroy her computer, but then what? There was a chance that I’d fatally piss off Raven, and Natasha would be shaving my head next. Maybe afterward she’d send my arm down to the prisoner.

Baby, usually the world is not this bleak, I swear.

I turned back to the woman on the table. If Natasha was waiting for someone to come back from the dead, I might be interested in getting a heads-up too. All her lines were still flat, and none of her had moved. It was easy to be freaked out because she was so lifelike.

Even though I didn’t see dead bodies often, I knew they had signs. I leaned over to look at the backs of her legs, where her unused blood should have been pooling into vasodilated capillaries, making her look like she was half bruised, but it wasn’t. And she wasn’t bloated. There was a chance that she’d just finished being “subjected” before I got into the room. But still—I took her hand in mine. Her fingers slipped into my grasp and were as supple as they’d probably been in life.

She didn’t feel dead. Or look dead. But—Natasha had all as much admitted that she’d been dosed with vampire blood. The only question was how long ago—and from whom.

I set her hand back down where it had been—facing up, fingers slightly curved—carefully, as if I might wake her up. One of the services on floor Y4, where I’d been a nurse and gotten started on my supernatural path, was to stockpile blood for some of the local vampire Thrones. The Shadows had given the place enough security that they could feel comfortable banking blood there for later, should they need to change anyone fast. But it always-always-always took three days. I’d only seen one transfusion where a daytimer had gotten enough blood to change. At the time, it had seemed like that person had died. And once I’d kept a changed daytimer in my closet for three days to help out Anna. She’d seemed dead right up until she’d woken up hungry and gone berserk on an unlucky werewolf burglar.