Shapeshifted (10 page)

I went outside for lunch and found Olympio there. I pulled out the extra sandwich I’d made him, and today he sniffed at it.

“No thanks, I already ate.”

“Fair enough.” I opened up mine and wolfed it down. “Your grandfather cure anyone lately? Practioner-to-practioner?”

Olympio grunted. “Of course. He cures everyone he touches.”

“An older lady? Diabetes? Recently, from the sounds of it?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“You have to tell him not to say things like that, Olympio. What if that lady had gone home, not taken her medicine, and died?”

Olympio turned and began walking away from me. “Who’s to say he didn’t heal her? She’s not dead if she came down here, right?”

“That’s hardly an excuse, Olympio. And even if your grandfather doesn’t know that, you do.” I caught up to him, waiting for him to look back. No matter what bizarre claims Olympio made, he had to know his grandfather was telling lies.

Olympio inhaled like he was going to explain things to me, then turned and punched the wall behind him lightly. “Just leave me alone, okay?”

“Okay.” I stood there as he faced away from me. I wished I hadn’t pissed him off. I didn’t want his grandfather hurting anyone, but there’d probably been a more sensitive way to convey it, one I hadn’t explored in my flustered-from-this-morning mind. I sat down on the ground and sighed. He didn’t walk farther away.

I waited what might be an acceptable period of time—and then longer than that, just to be sure—before asking him, “Do you know anything about Reina de la Noche?”

He was still facing away from me. “Why?”

“I saw a woman selling their shirts get hassled this morning, by the Three Crosses crew.”

Olympio snorted, inhaling deeply, to spit out a wad of phlegm. “That’s just like them. Scared.”

“Which ones?”

“The Three Crosses. Beating up ladies. It’s like them.”

He was finally warming up to me—or the topic—again. “What are the Rulers like?”

“Rulers?”

“You know. The Reinas.”

Olympio rolled his eyes. “Reina de la Noche—it means ‘Queens of the Night.’”

“Oh.” Well, that put a lot of things in perspective. Including vampire bite T-shirts and tattoos. I wondered who the Queen was. The only person I currently knew who could lay claim to that title happened to actually be a vampire. Anna, the vampire who’d gotten me shunned. “Olympio, can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

I fished two twenty-dollar bills out of my purse and held the money out. “Can you go buy me a small silver cross?”

“Why? You don’t seem religious.”

“I could be.”

“But you’re not.”

I couldn’t lie. “No, I’m not. It’s for a friend. Look, you can keep the change, can you get me one, or not?”

Olympio eyed me for any signs of trickery. Finding none, he went back to his version of a businessman, suave and smug. “No guarantees that there’ll be anyone with those down there today. I keep a twenty just for seeing, okay? Because I could be missing people to send my grandfather’s way here.”

“Okay. That’s fair.”

He prepared to set off, then turned back. “You have to do me a favor in return, though.”

I blinked. This was new. “Sure, what?”

He gave me a wry look. “Stop pretending that you know Spanish. It’s embarrassing.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I saw myself out the door at five on the dot. While waiting for Tovar, I found Olympio. The storm drain moaned quietly behind him.

“Did you get it?” I asked him. He handed it out on his palm, a small silver cross, no bigger than my thumbnail.

“Had to look for it. So you don’t get any change.”

“That’s okay.” It didn’t have a chain attached, and I didn’t even know if it was actually silver, though it was shiny.

Olympio tsked at me. “Your
susto
is getting even worse,” he informed me. “If you don’t get a
limpieza
soon—”

“I still have that extra sandwich,” I cut him off.

“Whatever.” He crossed his arms high on his chest and looked away from me.

Stubborn, and mad at me. I had to respect him. I looked down at the sandwich. It wasn’t attractive anymore. I hadn’t been paying attention to my lunch bag on the train and it’d been squashed thin. I didn’t want to take it home, and I wouldn’t bring it back to eat it tomorrow.

I stood up, crossed the street, and chucked it into the storm drain. Maybe I’d plugged the hole, because the distant howling stopped.

The rest of the staff left—Catrina glaring at me—and then, last, Dr. Tovar came out. “How nice of you to wait for me.”

“Well, you know.” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to accidentally get involved in local politics while I was unsupervised.”

Olympio, who was ignoring us both, chose then to look over his shoulder and roll his eyes at me.

I had the silver cross in my palm. I doubted Dr. Tovar was a daytimer—a daytimer would never do anything as selfless as work at a downtrodden public health clinic—but there was the blood, and the tattoos, and too much else unexplained. I’d been thinking about it all afternoon, and this was the least-worst idea I’d had so far. I just wished I had had a chain to put the cross on; that’d make hiding what I was about to do easier.

“Dr. Tovar—” I began, as a warning, and then reached out to grab his nearest hand in both of mine, pressing the cross flush against his warm brown skin.

He looked down at our touching hands and his eyebrows rose in bemusement. “Are you trying to have your way with me?”

I studied him for any reaction, any hint of a sign—and got none. I sighed, and let go carelessly, and the silver cross dropped to the ground. He knelt and picked it up for inspection with a frown. “Really. This? Again?”

“How do you know?” I asked him.

He held up the cross and twirled it between thumb and forefinger like it was a freshly plucked daisy. “Crosses and silver, everyone knows. I do watch TV.” He shook his head while watching me closely. “You really thought I was a vampire?”

“No. You’re standing in daylight. I thought you might be working for one.”

Olympio fully turned back at this, eyes wide, and began watching our conversation, head swiveling like he was following a tennis match.

“Because of some blood?” Tovar’s expression grew darker, and his voice rose. “You jumped straight to vampires? You’re a nurse, you’re supposed to be scientific, aren’t you? If I’d wanted someone who believed in things like that, I’d just hire Olympio.”

“Hey!” Olympio protested.

“You can’t deny that it’s weird,” I went on, taking a step closer. “There’s so many coincidences. The bite tattoos, the cross tattoos, the blood—”

His hand caught mine, and I stopped talking. “And you can’t deny that you’re obsessed with it,” he said.

“Maybe,” I admitted, and I didn’t yank my hand away. He pulled my hand up and slapped the cross back into my open palm.

“I don’t know what you believe, Edie, but we’re not trapped in
The X-Files
here.” He looked from the cross to me and back again. His eyes softened with pity for me. “Whatever you think you’re seeing, whatever ghosts you’re chasing from your past, you need to forget about them. You need to move on.”

It’s not as simple as that. If I move on, my mom will die
was what I wanted to scream at him with all the breath in my chest. But what came out was a spiteful, “Okay. Fine.”

He let go of my hand and took a step back, still watching me. “I need to go now. I have some personal business to attend to this evening. But I’m sure Olympio here can take you to the station and see you off safely.”

My hand was wrapped so tight around the cross in my palm it was poking me. I shoved it in my pocket and took a huge breath of air, like I was surfacing from a deep pond. “Sure. I’m fine.”
I don’t need you, or your pity, anyway.

“Okay then.” He nodded, like we’d decided something together, and turned to go.

*   *   *

Olympio waited until Dr. Tovar had outpaced us for half a block before running ahead of me and turning back. “You really believe in vampires?”

I sighed and ignored him. Of course it would lead to this. The cross was in my pocket now. If only all of me could fit so neatly into another place, hidden from here.

“Is the Donkey Lady real?” he asked as a follow-up.

“Who’s that?”

“She’s a lady with a donkey head—if you’re under the train station bridge at night, she’ll come out and get you.”

I concentrated on this instead of my current set of problems. “Why’s she got a donkey head? And where does she find hay to eat?”

“She doesn’t eat
hay
—she eats little kids who believe in her. Which is why I don’t. I mean, I didn’t, but—” Realization dawned on him like the sun over a smooth ocean, full and bright. “Should I be? Is she real? Oh, if she’s real—”

I held my hand up, and Olympio went silent. “Vampires are real. The Donkey Lady is likely not.”

“Whoa.” He squinted at me. “How do you know?”

We were almost to the station now, and crowds of people were getting off trains, walking home. The woman’s stall that I’d seen disrupted this morning was replaced by another stall, as if it’d never been there at all. And the pyramid of single rolls of toilet paper was almost gone. “I’m in a rush right now—lunch tomorrow? I’ll explain, okay?”

He danced back and forth with frustration, but finally nodded. “Okay. Tomorrow. You promised. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” I said, and dove into the exodus of people coming down the stairs so I could get up to catch the next train.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After a shower and a drive, I was hauling a car full of groceries out at my mom’s. I’d brought her favorite kind of frozen pizza because I wasn’t a good cook.

I rang on the doorbell and then tried the door and found it unlocked.

“Honey, I’m home!” I called out as I wedged myself and my groceries inside. I had to go through the living room to get to the kitchen—I began waddling along, after kicking off my shoes, only to stop at the living room. “Oh. It’s you.”

My brother sat on the couch, beside my mom. He gave a short wave. “Hey, sissy.”

“Hey,” I said, flat. I’d been so worried about giving my mom MRSA that I’d gone home and showered first. And here was my homeless brother, with whatever germs he’d picked up on the streets, breathing her air with abandon.

“I should have called to tell you Jake was here,” my mom said. “The meds make me forgetful.”

She hadn’t called because she’d known that it would be like this between us, although I’d be disappointed if she thought that knowing he was here would make me leave. A dark part of me thought there’d be plenty of time to give him a piece of my mind after my mother died.

I wanted to take that part of my mind out, stomp it to death, and then throw it through a high window.

“Well, I brought Hawaiian pizza over. If I’d known he was here, I’d have brought some pepperoni along.”

“Pineapple, ugh,” my brother said.

At least I had that to hold over him.

*   *   *

Hating pineapple didn’t stop my brother from pulling it off the pizza and eating most of the slices. There wasn’t much to talk about at the table. No need to ask Jake how he was doing—the answer? Bad—or what was going on with me—same as the last time I’d seen her, when I’d first found things out. No need to tell my mom that I was hot on the vampire trail on her behalf, if me pressing things didn’t get me fired first.

“So what’s up with your boyfriend, Edie?” Jake asked casually.

I blinked. “Um—”

“The guy from Christmas? Kevin?” he helpfully provided.

“Nothing. We broke up.” “Kevin” had been my shapeshifter friend Asher, pretending to be my date so he could be nosy. He’d been a little more than a friend, if I were honest about things—but after the shun went into place, I’d had to leave him behind too.

My mom reached out to pat my hand, bringing me back to the present. “That’s okay, honey. You’ll find someone who appreciates you someday.”

I patted her hand back. “Thanks.”

She gave me a wry smile. “You know I’d make an extra effort to live if I had grandkids on the way.”

“Mom!” I protested.

“What?”

“You can’t say things like that. It’s not fair.”

“Sorry, sorry, you’re right. I just always assumed I’d live that long. Now—” She didn’t finish her sentence, and she let the thoughts drift.

I glared across the table at Jake. “I’m not the only one with reproductive organs here.”

“Hey, remember that time you walked in on me and Debbie and yelled?” Jake said. I groaned, knowing where he was going with this. “I’m just saying, if you hadn’t interrupted us, Mom might have had her chance.”

“Oh, God, don’t remind me.” I put my hand to my forehead as my mother laughed. Debbie had been my best friend in high school, until I’d found out she had the hots for my brother. “I’m permanently scarred by that, you know.” I turned toward my mother, who was still chuckling. “I thought you wanted us to be all celibate and stuff? You’re supposed to have my back on this.”

Her expression melted from amused to sick, and her pallor changed from pale pink to yellow. She put a hand to her mouth, and rushed for the downstairs bathroom door.

“What—look what you did, Edie.” Jake instantly blamed me. Old habits die hard.

“I didn’t
do
anything.” I slowly stood. The sounds of my mother hurling in the other room began.

Jake glanced back toward the bathroom, fearfully. He lived a rough life now, but I’m not sure if anything could prepare him for this. “If you didn’t stress her out so much, she’d have been fine,” he lashed out.

“Me? Stress her out? The daughter with a real career? Who do you think she stays up at night crying over? Me, or you?” I stood up, ready to take it up with him once and for all. But he looked as scared as I knew I felt about Mom. The anger washed out of me. I was a nurse; when people were throwing up, I knew what to do. I turned and went into the bathroom with my mother and closed the door.

*   *   *

Here I was again, being the good kid, in a bathroom too small for two people at once. I couldn’t even kneel beside her, so I just sat on the patch of countertop by the sink and reached down to stroke the back of her head.