Nightshifted (16 page)

“That’s too bad,” he said. He was grinning even wider.

“Well!” I said, walking again toward the door. “I guess there’s not much that I can do for you tonight, Mr. Smith.”

“Call me Ti.”

“Ti,” I said, then managed to balance the tray on one hand and open the door behind me with the other. “So—just hit the call light if you need anything,” I said, all in one breath. “I’ll be right outside.”

“All right…” He squinted, his eyes searching my chest for my badge. “Miss Spence.”

“Call me Edie,” I blurted out, and made my escape.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“So, Gina—what’s Mr. Smith’s story?” I tried to sidle around to the were-corrals without anyone noticing. It wouldn’t do for Charles or Meaty to hear the tone of my voice.

“Just read the chart. Wait—why are you not reading the chart?” She stopped her own charting and clicked her pen. “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh,” she said, her inflection a wave. I sighed. It would be nice to someday live in a world where what I was thinking wasn’t always written on my face.

Gina grinned and rocked back in her chair, suddenly all business. Girl business.

“Frequent flyer. This is the third time he’s been here. He’s a nice guy, I’ve helped out with him sometimes. He just needs a place where human is on the menu to hide out while he heals,” she said and shrugged.

My stomach wanted to turn. But in comparison to everything else I’d seen or done in my nursing career so far—like, say, that I’d had stolen blood sitting in my fridge the previous night—I didn’t think I could throw any culinary stones. “Anything else?” I pressed.

“Nope. Keeps to himself. I don’t even know his first name.” She shrugged. “Mr. Smith is one of those made-up protective names—” she said.

“At least it’s not a month.” A fake name meant he had a name, at least. Was Ti his real name? I hoped so.

“Anyhow,” she continued, “not much else I can do for you. Half his chart’s made-up data, anyhow. Meaty’s going easy on you. You’re going to have a slow night.”

A slow night of sitting outside his room with far too long to think. My choices were obsess over a mostly unknown patient, obsess over my upcoming tribunal, or obsess over how I was going to get Anna to finally come talk to me at my house. None of those choices felt very appealing.

“Do you need any help?” I asked.

“I’ve got a blood draw I could use an extra hand on.”

The corners of my lips drew up into almost a vampiric grin. “Then I’m your girl.”

*   *   *

I used one wrong tube on purpose, in addition to the right tubes, and pocketed it instead of putting it into the room’s biohazard bin. Gina’s patient had been a nice elderly gentleman. I had a strange feeling that, once transformed, he’d make a very charming wolf.

I waited up that morning after getting home. The vial was in the parking lot between my car and my apartment. It’d still be dark for an hour, it was worth a shot. What else could I do to gain Anna’s trust? Maybe I should have asked Gina for some tips on taming feral things …

Dawn neared. As I thought about getting my blood samples to reuse at dusk, a white figure emerged. Anna again. I sat very, very still.

She was beautiful in a wild way, like a caged cat at the zoo. Now that she was nearer, I knew she was something I only wanted to appreciate with a moat and a safety fence between us.

She found the plastic vial in the snow, cracked its lid off with her teeth, and poured its contents out onto her tongue like a rare elixir. Then she spat in the snow with her lips curled high.

“Were-blood!”

“So you can talk—” I said quietly, knowing that at this distance her vampire ears would hear me just fine.

She turned and threw the vial at my window. I flinched as it came through the metal burglar bars and bounced off the window screen into the snow.

“I’m sorry. I was trying to help.”

“By poisoning me?” she asked. She had an accent—Russian for sure. She licked her tongue across the back of one arm, as if to clean it. Then she swiveled her head to stare at me, more animal than child. I blinked, and one second later, she was at my bars, her hands curling around them, peering in.

My heart pounded. The vampires and daytimers at Y4 had a thin veneer of humanity—the worst of it, yes, but some. Anna was entirely other and frightening.

“You can’t come in unless I invite you,” I said.

“Blood is like an invitation,” she said with her accent. She pressed her forehead against the bars, and reached forward to scratch a fingernail against the flimsy screen. The sound resonated through my room.

“I need your help,” I said.

“Really?” Her eyes lit up, and she laughed aloud. “Why should I help you?”

“You came here even before the blood,” I said, playing my biggest—perhaps only—card. “I saw your footprints in the snow. I know you want something from me—we can trade.”

Her eyes narrowed in cunning I knew no true nine-year-old possessed.

“Invite me in, then we will talk.”

I tried to remember exactly what Paul’d told me about vampires and their promises. “Swear not to hurt me or my cat in any way, shape, or form. And don’t compel me either.”

Half of her upper lip curled in amused disgust. “I swear not to hurt you or your cat.”

I nodded. “Meet you at the door,” I said, and she practically disappeared.

I got up to close my bedroom window first and noticed that my wrought-iron burglar bars now had ripples in them where her hands had held them. I shivered, tried to tell myself it was just because of the cold, and turned my thermostat up as I went down the hall.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

She was so short I couldn’t see her through the peephole. Steeling myself, I opened the door.

“Invite me,” she said. With her dingy shift still on, she looked like something the wind had blown into my alcove, a sun-bleached trash bag, or a flurry of dirty snow. She had a faintly sour scent, like barely off milk.

“Please come in.”

She tilted her head graciously. “Thank you.” She stepped over my threshold with physical effort, like there was a trip wire she had to be careful not to set off. And then she was in my front hall, looking at my family pictures on the wall—which now I wished I’d had the foresight to remove—and she moved past me into my dining/living area as I followed. I had a couch, a wireless modem for my ancient laptop, a TV that only got three stations, and an end table with Grandfather’s CD player on it. It hadn’t talked again since I had brought it home but I couldn’t bear to throw it away.

“You don’t have many things.”

I shrugged, even though she was looking elsewhere.

“Most humans have many things,” she continued.

“Most humans don’t talk to vampires.”

“And live,” she added, with a tone that sent a jolt down my spine.

“Remember your promise, Anna,” I said.

And she turned around and looked at me curiously again. “Why do you call me that?”

I opened my mouth to respond—and then I realized that might be the only reason she was here now. “Is that what you want to know?”

“Perhaps.” She licked her lips. “Tell me what you want, first.”

“The vampires think I killed another vampire for no good reason—I need you to testify for me at a tribunal, to tell them your side.”

She stared at me for a moment, and then laughed out loud.

“Hey—it’s not funny—” I said. It was my life—my crappy and endlessly difficult life, such as it was, but still my
life!
—on the line.

“The vampires?” she said, with a mocking intonation made more cruel by her Russian accent—it sounded like I was being interrogated by a double agent in a Cold War flick. “Which ones?”

I tried to summon up more information about them, but all I could remember was Dren’s name and the Hound. “They had long black coats,” I offered up. I knew it was lame as I said it. “And a Hound.”

“Huskers and Hounds.” She rolled her eyes at me and then made her way to my couch. The cushions didn’t even dent beneath her weight. “Anyone can purchase their services. There’s all sorts of factions—all the Thrones, those cuckoo chick daytimers in training, pledged donors to both, ancient family allegiances.” I could tell by the set of her lips that she viewed my request as absurd, and me as an idiot for asking. It was time for a different tack.

“Look, I saved your life—”

“You did not
save
my life. I was in no danger of dying.”

My hands curled into fists of frustration. “You didn’t really seem in any danger of being freed, though, now, did you?”

And faster than I could see, she lunged at me, standing toe to toe, staring defiantly upward. I gulped. How foolish I’d been to think that a mere promise would hold a creature like this, but I pressed on. “Will you help me or not? Because if you won’t, I need to start opening new credit cards and figuring out where to spend the few remaining days of my life on vacation.”

She inhaled and exhaled deeply. From so near I could smell her sweet-sour scent again, and the soporific chemicals that comprised her breath. “How do you know my name?” she asked.

“An older man at the hospital. He told me to save you,” I said, taking a step backward, finding myself against the wall. “He wrote down your name.”

“Who?”

The name Mr. November would mean nothing to her, of course. My hands clenched into distracted fists, until I remembered the photo that’d sent me on my quest. “I think I have something you’ll recognize. Wait here.”

*   *   *

I went back into my bedroom and into my closet. I’d kept the pocket watch and the sepia photo it held—making my next student loan payment in a timely fashion ranked under “live through the next week” on my current to-do list.

What was I going to tell her when I gave it to her? “Hi, I’m sorry I killed your friend and/or relative?” Promise or no promise, there was no way she was going to help me after that, and then where would I be? Dead or worse. I sat on the ground beside my bed, and Minnie peeked out. “Stay under there. There’s no way this can go well,” I told her. Then I heard German begin in the living room.

“What kind of parlor trick is this?” she said, waving the CD player as I came out. Its light was warning yellow.

“That’s Grandfather,” I said, as she mashed the buttons on the player. She flung it across the room and it hit the far wall. “Don’t do that!” I said, running after it.

“I didn’t promise to not hurt your things. A pity you have so few.” She sat on my couch again.

German continued to rise from the now red-lit player, despite the fact that the cover was clearly askew.

“He killed a dragon once.” I picked it up and held it. It silenced in my hands as I forced the broken lid closed. “Do you want to know or not?”

Anna crossed her arms. I dropped the watch and photo into her lap.

She stared at the photo while she rubbed the pocket watch with her thumb.

If I hadn’t had Grandfather to hold, the silence would have been intolerable. It was obvious that she was deep in thought, and if we’d been on Y4, I would have excused myself out of her room. Trapped in my own living room, though, I kept my hands busy by stroking the CD player’s plastic case and consciously making an effort not to speak.

“We came to the New World together. My brother, my uncle, and I. And then I was separated,” she began, just when I thought my resolve would break. She set the watch in the lap of her skirt, and began doing something to the small photograph with her short nails that I could hear but I couldn’t see.

“By boat?” I asked, remembering my dream.

“How else?” She curled a lip at me, then returned to her task. “I was young then.”

As she concentrated, I glimpsed her looking a real nine, damaged and frail. She stared into the middle distance, hands working at the photo, stirring memories inside her mind.

“He was trying to find you, you know,” I said, because it seemed right to say.

“He told you that?” she asked. Her hands stopped.

“In a manner of speaking.” I rocked down to sit cross-legged in front of her, holding the CD player in my lap. Its yellow light illuminated us both. “Would you like to hear the story?”

She nodded very slowly. So I began.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

People who can’t tell stories well don’t make very good nurses. There’s a causality between what happened yesterday to patients and what needs to happen tomorrow that people who aren’t storytellers don’t understand. I hadn’t decided exactly what to say yet, but I knew enough to start at the beginning that she needed to hear.

“He was very old and very sick. He was found collapsed in the street, with two vials of holy water in his pockets. We took care of him as best we could, but he wanted out to find you. He wrote your name to me on a board I gave him, so I could finish the job.”