Nightshifted (31 page)

“Ti?” I came nearer, reaching for him. “Ti, are you all right?”

He turned his head farther away from me.

“Stop that, let me see.”

Ti pushed me back with his remaining good hand. And then he slowly bent forward, into the light.

I’d taken a few shifts at the burn ward, back at my prior job. I’d been given low-acuity patients; it was all I could be trusted with, without specialized training. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t walk by a burn victim’s room and look in, or see a burn victim’s family, crying by the nursing station. I’d kept the straightest of straight faces there, under any adversity. Under sheets of skin sloughing off, under charred clothing and hair, under people who smelled like homelessness and bacon. I tried to act like that again now.

I couldn’t.

His face was destroyed. I knew that it would grow back, but the knowledge of that did me no good—I recoiled at the sight of him, missing half his face, white-pink jawbone exposed, a hole blown through one cheek and out the other side. I knew now why he couldn’t call back to me—because he’d had no lips to do it with.

I braced myself with both hands on the cold floor and tried to swallow air, to push my bile and horror back down.

“The majority of him is whole,” Sike said. There was a literal cloud of dust around her, like she’d just been shot out of a cannon. “It isn’t like he’ll exsangiunate.”

“I know that,” I muttered. But hours ago I’d been kissing those lips—getting kisses from those lips, and more. And now? I wept, and Ti made a motion to come near me, then held himself back. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay,” I said, telling myself that as much as I was telling him. I closed my eyes and leaned into his waiting whole arm. “It’ll be fine.”

He squeezed me to him with his crushing strength, and then maybe remembered I was made of less stern stuff. I kept my head down, against his chest, ignoring the wet things I felt there, willing myself to be strong.

“Come on.” Sike reached her hand down to me, but I got up on my own. As I stood, Ti rising behind me, Sike went feral again—the whites of her eyes went wide. She raced off, spike heels clattering across the cement floor.

“Are we supposed to follow her?” I asked. Ti shrugged and handed me his gun. He pulled out another clip of ammunition from his waistband and handed this over as well. I loaded it in for him before handing him the gun back.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

We crossed the garage. Clouds of dust floated in midair, descending to fill in ancient oil stains like so much cat litter, leaving sheets of ash on half-fixed cars. How had Sike become so powerful in such a short time? I’d have to ask her, when I stopped being afraid of her.

She’d gone down a hallway, in the direction of an office—I could see the puddle from a water cooler that the previous violence had tipped on its side.

“Wait.” I pulled at Ti’s shirt with one hand, and covered one eye with the other. I scanned around the garage, through the flimsy office walls—and saw two yellow forms behind the office’s door. One of them was twenty times brighter than the other, so bright it burned.

“She’s not alone.”

Ti looked down at me, his golden eyes still the same—if only I could stare up at them and not see anything else. He jerked his head to the side, and pointed the gun to gesture me behind him.

I shook my head. “No.” I turned and went forward. If there was something awful there, Sike could protect me. If there was one vampire or daytimer left alive, I wanted answers.

And maybe I was running away from him a bit, that too. I pushed the door open with one hand.

“I bring you the gift of the Rose Throne. Do you accept?”

I stopped in the doorway. Sike was talking to someone I couldn’t see, someone that her frame and her coat entirely blocked. She knelt down, and I saw a face I recognized beneath the glowing light my strange sight added, rising over Sike’s shoulder like a second sun.

I had only a moment to whisper “Anna,” before she pulled back her lips like someone was zipping them off on both sides. Violently jagged teeth emerged, and she planted them in Sike’s willingly exposed neck. Sike fell forward, with a gasping sigh.

A strangled noise came from Ti—a hissing exhalation forced over the top of his tongue. He raised his gun, but I pushed his arm up and his aim off. The bullet flew out a papered-off window, shattering it, leaving a puncture mark in the paper for sunlight to pierce through.

“It’s Anna! The girl I’ve been looking for!” I explained. At the addition of natural light into the room Anna released Sike’s neck, backing hurriedly away.

“Anna,” I said, although the girl was in full vampire form. I remembered how those teeth felt, latching into me. My left hand ached in fear. Sike reached an arm straight out behind herself, not in a spasm of pain, but a firm gesture to stay away, one I was all too happy to follow. Anna slunk nearer, and set to finishing what she’d started.

I thought I had already crossed the threshold of being sick to my stomach with Ti, but watching Anna feed took my nausea to a whole new level. More blood was flowing out from Sike’s neck than Anna could dispose of. I could see the dark wool of her trench coat stain even darker, and the office was heavy with the smell.

I wanted to rescue Sike, but I couldn’t think of how. She was here, she’d chosen to do this, whatever it was—we’d heard the fragments of some ritual as we’d come in. She was a daytimer. It was … her job.

But there was just
so
much blood.

I would have turned into Ti to hide from it, only looking at him right now could only make things worse.

At last, Anna was done. Her teeth retracted, and she became the girl that I recognized. Her tongue lashed around her lips, licking up the last of it.

“Are you okay?” I asked both of them from the far side of the room. Sike sagged to her hands and knees for a moment, and it was strange to see what had been such a powerful creature powerless and winded. Like how you felt bad for the old tiger in the tiger cage, even as you knew it could still bite off your hand.

“I’ll be fine.” Sike moved to stand in one fluid movement, and flipped up her coat’s hood so that I couldn’t see the marks Anna had left on her neck.

“And—Anna?”

“Hello again, human,” Anna said, sounding pleased with herself.

“Do you two know each other?” I asked, gesturing between them.

“We do and we do not. We may discuss it in the car.” Sike pushed past me and started walking out the door. Anna smiled, and liberated a lighter from one of the clothed ash piles in the room. She flicked it on once or twice and grinned. Even without vampire teeth straining out, it was horrible.

*   *   *

Sike had a long black car parked out front, windows as tinted as its color. The doors chirped audibly as she approached, and she opened up the passenger side rear door.

“Get in.”

I did so, sliding all the way across the leather. Her backseat was full of yellow legal pads and pencils.

“Look under your seat. There’s a sheet there—pull it out.”

I did as I was told, as Ti settled into the seat beside me. The cloth was heavy and completely dark. It unfolded as I pulled at it and handed it up to her at the front of the car, momentarily holding it up between Ti and me. Like playing peek-a-boo with a corpse. I tried to smile reassuringly at him when he reappeared. “What about Ti’s car?” I asked.

“He’ll report it stolen.” She looked over at him, at the mass of thrashed tissue that was my sort-of-boyfriend. “I suggest you do it for him.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Ti shoved his gun into his coat, and reached for a pad of paper and a pencil with his one good hand. Sirens began in the distance—this wasn’t a bad neighborhood, where people could ignore that much gunfire. It was just an empty business park on an early Saturday afternoon, and it took a while for someone to realize that that loud repeated banging sound wasn’t someone with a shitty carburetor.

Anna raced out of the building with a massive piece of carpeting over her head as a sunlight shield. She dragged it behind her, galloping along, until Sike opened up the passenger door from the inside of the car and she could jump inside, to be enveloped in Sike’s waiting lightproof sack.

“All done!” she said from inside the fabric.

“Thank you,” Sike said, putting her car into drive. I turned to watch through the back window as we departed. Smoke poured out of the building as we pulled away.

I didn’t care where we went. I didn’t feel excited, I didn’t feel sad—this was shock again, I knew it.

Ti scratched words onto the notepad in his lap, and then nudged my shoulder with his own to get my attention.

“I was afraid of this,” he’d written in neat capitalized print.

“Of which part?” There was a lot to be afraid of.

He drew out a smiley face, then wrote, “All of it?”

“Heh.” It was hard to look at him. It took all my nursely powers not to throw up, right there, on Sike’s expensive black leather seats.

“Of you having to see me like this. Ever,” he continued on the page.

“I’ve seen worse,” I said bravely, when it wasn’t true. The worse that I’d seen—well, they’d already been dead. Or on the way. Not trapped in some freakish limbo. But that was the only thing freakish about Ti—he’d been injured while
helping
me. I couldn’t turn my back on him now.

“Where are we taking the stinking zombie?” Sike asked, angling her mirror so that she could see me in the backseat.

I looked over at Ti. We couldn’t go to the hospital—there was no way we could walk in during the daylight and try to explain this. I wasn’t sure how big an envelope of safety the Shadow’s abilities provided. If even one person in the parking lot saw him like this … damn. Besides, Ti didn’t actually need any hospital’s care; he wasn’t crashing. He just needed someone to watch out for him, till nightfall at least. “Madigan’s?” I asked aloud.

Ti nodded. I tried to remember the address—then Ti wrote it down. I gave it over to Sike, who programmed it into her car’s GPS while steering with one knee.

Anna leaned back, the fabric looped high up over her head, to look at me. “Why are you with a zombie?” She definitely, self-righteously disapproved, the way only children, vampires or not, can. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the rime of drying red around her mouth.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” I said, and turned to Ti. “Was that a trap?”

He shook his head, and began writing. “Tip was good. But the informant was dead when I got there.”

“Oh. Well. Saved you some money, then, I suppose.” I went back to staring straight ahead. I heard more scratching on the legal pad and glanced down.

“I’m sorry, Edie. I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know,” I whispered. “And you’re not. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

“I just wanted to help,” he continued writing. “All this will heal in time.”

“I know that too.” I took the pencil from him. “How long?” I wrote down, and nodded to the front seat, where the vampires couldn’t hear us.

He took the pencil away and wrote back. “Depends.”

I wanted to ask on what, but I was afraid I knew. Y4, at least for him, was for show. A place where he could heal incrementally, in the time frame it might take a normal human to heal, so that when he went back to his job, nothing out of the ordinary would be noticed. I found another pencil on the floorboard.

“Don’t do anything stupid for my sake.” I underlined the word “anything.”

“Too late,” he wrote. And another smiley face.

“Dammit, Ti—” I forced myself to look up at him, to try and see past the mess he now was, to rewind the time back to this afternoon. I reached up to push an errant lock of hair back up over his ear. Then I discovered it wasn’t hair, but a piece of scalp. I inhaled to scream, or at least squeak really loudly—but what came out was a snicker, then “Ewwww!”

I laughed at myself, and I carefully cleaned my finger on his shoulder. “You know, I’ve had men tell me I’ve fucked their brains out before. I just never thought they meant literally.”

Ti drew another quick smiley face. “We’re okay?” he wrote down, right afterward.

“As okay as people like us ever get. Messed up in the head, yeah—but okay.” I smiled up at him. He was disgusting and smelly and falling apart and he looked like half of death warmed over—but he was here, now, with me. I took his good hand and squeezed it.

“Thanks, Edie,” he wrote when I was done. He paused, then continued. He finished an “I” before I snatched the pencil up from him, and put it behind my ear. Any statement beginning with “I” was bound to be bad. I didn’t want to hear “I am sorry” ever again in my life or, God forbid, “I love you.” Loving someone had never gotten me anything good. Silence, right now, was better. I closed my eyes, leaned over and aimed high, to kiss him near his temple on his unmarked cheek.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I made Ti wait in the car while I went up to Madigan’s door. Rita answered the knock, though I heard dogs barking farther back in the house.