Nightshifted (35 page)

“I have a friend who is a cop. I help him take care of problems, sometimes,” Ti said, deliberately slow, his
S
sounds sibilant. He, or what remained of him, looked down at his still left hand that I held. “Nerves take the longest to regrow.”

“You … just killed someone. Today. For me?”

“I didn’t kill him. I just took his face and broke off his arm.”

I blinked. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“He was alive when I left.” Ti shrugged, then continued, “It’ll be hard for him to make meth anymore, missing an arm.”

And he thought Anna was atrocious! He gets to rip off someone’s face, just because they run a meth lab? “You’re the monster.”

Ti’s bearing stiffened at this, and he turned away to look resolutely out a nearby window.

What else was there to say? Nothing. I couldn’t go back in time and undo what he’d done, or change what I’d done to set him in motion before that. I thought about all the things I should have done differently, when I’d had the chance—but I realized that this conversation here, now, had been deliberate. I’d known things were wrong for almost a mile. But I’d waited to have this conversation until we were stuck in the train together, when he couldn’t leave me, even if I wanted him to. Because deep down, I didn’t want him to go.

“Is s-s-someone having a lovers-s-s’ s-spat?” Dren asked. I glared at him, and saw his lips curve into a vicious grin. The lights in the tunnel passing outside glinted off his fangs and his hand stroked the holster of his sickle in a suggestive manner. I could see the Hound out of the corner of my eye, its clawlike hands fluttering together over its bloated torso. I swallowed, and looked back to Ti, who was still staring away from me, chin high.

“I have a thing for monsters, remember?” I said quietly. He turned to look down at me again. I pulled his scarf down and leaned up. I kissed him full on his strange new lips, which parted as he drew me near. His tongue was cool like I remembered, and I tasted metal. I pressed into him before we parted. “You’re my monster, all right?”

He nodded into my hair. “All right.”

Because the monster you knew was always better than all the ones you didn’t.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

The train made three stops, during none of which any passengers got onto or off the train. I knew it had to be someone’s stop, but they were all frozen by Dren’s look-away/stay-away. I held on to Ti’s good hand, wrapped around me, and stayed quiet.

Four stops past that, Dren snapped his fingers, and the Hound began bringing up the rear.

“Uptown?” I asked.

“It’s unsettling how well you know the trains of this, your own fine city,” Dren said, rolling his eyes. He made a gesture toward the open doors for both of us to pass. “Shamble on, sir,” he said as Ti walked by. Ti growled in response.

This platform was empty. The train behind us closed its doors. I turned and watched it go with longing.

Dren moved around us and began mounting the stairs two at a time. The Hound managed them awkwardly, sidestepping itself up. We emerged into the station, and up from there onto the surface again, and Dren began leading us deeper into the night.

“Are you sure you don’t want to run?” Dren asked as he walked ahead. He’d pulled his sickle out of its holster again, and was twirling it from hand to hand.

“Yes.” I continued to walk along the path he’d taken.

Dren turned around. “Both of you could, you know. I would give you a head start. Cross my heart.” He ran the tip of his sickle in an X over his own chest. “I’ll count to a hundred. You and your zombie lover. Take off now, go.”

“No.”

“To a hundred and three,” Dren said, matching pace with me. The Hound waddled alongside of him, gnashing its teeth. “Oh, fine, a hundred and twelve, then, will you take that?”

Ti put his hand out to stop me. “What’s your angle?” he asked Dren, sounding like he had a mouth full of marbles.

“Souls are sweeter than bloodrights. You should know that, zombie. And bloodrights are all I’m getting paid for this mess.” He pointed his sickle at me. “But fair’s fair, I’d give you both a fighting chance. No fun in chasing after you if I didn’t get to stretch my legs.”

“No,” I repeated, walking along. Our surroundings were getting noticeably more familiar. The lighting was improved, and the litter on the streets was lessening. We were near my old hospital, the one I’d worked at oh-so-briefly what felt like a lifetime ago.

“You want to know what the difference is between a reaper and a husker?” Dren asked. “A reaper—”

My nerves snapped. “Can you just tell us where we’re going? And then after that, shut up?”

Dren squinted at me. “Someplace where you should feel right at home.” He ran ahead twenty steps, then clapped his sickle against the Providence General sign behind him. “And look, we’re not alone.”

Ti and I turned toward the hospital. The lawn in front of Providence General looked like a triage zone, with clusters of people standing around. I covered one eye, and saw that most of them glowed.

“What the—” I began to ask, as a car turned beside us and pulled in. More vampires disembarked, chatting with one another. They were all dressed glamorously, in long velvet dresses, like they were attending a show.

“The Zverskiye sent out invitations to all the players. Of course their entourages came, and with the entourages, the merely curious. Vampires hate to be left out.”

Ti made another growling noise from beside me.

“Invitations to what, precisely?” I asked.

“If you don’t know, then how should I?” Dren looked back at me, eyes glittering. “But it’s all very exciting, isn’t it?” He trotted down the hillside, and more reluctantly, Ti and I followed.

*   *   *

The automatic doors of Providence’s well-appointed lobby opened up for us, and it looked like a freak circus had been set up inside. Regal-looking ladies sat across the backs of sturdy leashed men, hobbled into kneeling positions with chains, occupying open spaces where the lobby had run out of seats. Vampires who looked like British mods lounged on the coffee cart in tight leather pants, sifting their hands through open bags of beans. Others fit right into their surroundings, wearing normal clothing, leafing through the available magazines and looking like bored soccer moms detoured by skinned knees on their way home from the park.

Among all these, health care workers wandered through on nightly duties, studiously ignoring any of their activities, oblivious even to the sound of coffee beans plinking onto the floor.

“I had no idea there were so many vampires in the city,” I whispered. Ti took my hand and rubbed it against his coat. I could feel the heel of something metal in his pocket. I nodded to him, as if to myself.

“You don’t often see them all in one place. This is big.” Dren directed us through the emergency medical service’s doors.

Providence was a private hospital now. It was older, but with privatization had come the funds to refurbish their facilities, one overpriced MRI at a time. I knew from prior personal experience that there wasn’t too much action here. Any real traumas they sent off to trauma centers—especially any real traumas without adequate health insurance. But you wouldn’t have known how boring it was from watching the vampires. The first cubicle had a businessman with a GI bleed set to suction—I could tell by the tube going into his nose, and the coffee-colored residue that’d been sucked into the suction canister on the wall. Vampires sat on the countertops and empty beds in the room, watching him like bored cats eyeing an errant bird.

The next cubicle had a shrieking child, holding both his ears. His mother was trying to console him, and the doctor there was writing a prescription for antibiotics as fast as he could. Only one vampire sat in this room, watching the child over steepled fingers.

“Why’re they so bold?” I asked Dren. Was it always like this? Had I just never noticed before?

“The Zverskiye have been making promises of change. We shall see. You, it seems, will have first-row seats.”

I didn’t look into the rest of the trauma bays as we passed. I pressed against Ti’s side, and felt what I hoped was Ti’s gun against my ribs, until Dren showed us to the back stairway, which had clear plastic taped up over the door and
WARNING—CONSTRUCTION
signs posted. A black-robed vampire with a waist-length beard stood in front of this, his hands hidden in his sleeves. He was metering in guests like a doorman. Two stockbroker-looking vampires were let in with a small nod. Behind us—behind the Hound, really—a woman with an ornate headdress and a corseted waist was waiting her turn.

“We’re on the guest list. Look under
D
for dinner. Or
Dren
. One of those two,” Dren said to the man.

“Who’s he?” the vampire asked, with a thick Old World accent.

“He’s her protector. He’s going to try to kill you all,” Dren said.

The vampire looked Ti up and down. “Your hat, scarf, coat, all of it, now.”

Ti unwound his scarf first. I could see the muscles of his jaw tense and release underneath the darker portion of his skin. He took off his hat then, and coat, revealing his new arm, connected just below the elbow. It was oddly larger than his own—it made him look like a mutant creature from a video game. His gloves came off last.

The vampire patted down Ti’s jacket and found the gun. He put it inside his robe. “Anything else?” he asked Ti, eyeing his tight shirt and fitted jeans. Ti shook his head, and the vampire stood aside.

We walked inside single file down the stairs. It looked like we were nearing the old operating rooms, but I couldn’t see past Ti’s shoulders. The Hound was behind me, talons clattering on the sea-foam-green tile, its hot breath foul.

“This is their home turf, you see. They don’t find you terribly threatening,” Dren explained. “Neither do I.”

“That’s too bad. By the time this night is through, I might need another arm,” Ti said ahead of me. We reached the lower level, where vampires were standing from wall to wall.

Dren laughed. “I suspect you will end up needing more than that. But now my deed is done.” He stepped aside and turned around. “It’s a pity you couldn’t be bothered to run, girl, but I’ve earned my keep. I might as well stick around to watch you die.” He dipped into one of the crowds; the Hound followed him after a final gnash in my direction, and I moved to stand beside Ti.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

In a previous incarnation, my first hospital had been a teaching institution, back before private practices had bought it out and made it into a for-profit money machine. In those days, before monitors and cameras, they’d had the grand teaching amphitheaters, with steep rows of seating so that surgeons-to-be could watch. Without the teaching angle, and with the for-profit money, building new operating rooms was sexier than remodeling old ones. These rooms had been abandoned, used for storing random items or having random hookups.

That was the basement I remembered. Waist-high green tiles, all the better to hose down with bleach later, low ceilings, and broken lights, all the better to not closely look at who you were fucking after shift. Not that I had ever done that, more than once or twice.

But what was in front of us now was different—all of the operating bays had been conjoined, the walls between them ripped out, leaving disjointed seating behind. Pipes and ducts were exposed from above and below, huge metal conduits that thrummed with live wires or running water. Lights hung from copper wires on the ceiling, shooting down thready illumination that didn’t penetrate much. And everywhere, vampires, sitting atop pipes, standing on the rubble between the rooms, crowded into the remaining seating. They were in separate groups, gathered into crowds that were dressed alike, or were at least alike in their bearing, and all of them were looking at me. I hid behind Ti.

“Let her pass!” shouted a voice from below. Ti started making his way down, and I followed him, balancing one hand on his back as we went down the rubble-strewn wall. I looked around behind us, and almost twisted my ankle on a loose piece of concrete. What was there to see, anyhow? More vampires? I stood briefly taller than Ti, as he jumped down a level, and saw Sike there, standing beside Mr. Weatherton at the bottom. I scanned desperately for Anna, but didn’t see her light, and I wondered where they were keeping her. Ti picked me up and set me down beside him.

“This is grim,” he said when I was nearest. I nodded.

*   *   *

The bottom was rubble and concrete, like a giant hand had scooped out the clearing, leaving uneven furrows behind. Geoffrey and Sike were on the opposite side of a massive drainpipe, as wide as I was tall, which had jagged cement edges exposed to air. We made our way toward them and when we passed the pipe I looked into it, expecting only hollow black. Instead, it was full of fluid, almost to the brim, and small waves caused by unseen sources made it ripple, revealing sulfurous yellows, curdled whites, and streaks of gray. The whole thing, from the cement pipe to its rotten core, reminded me of an abscessed tooth. I hoped that wasn’t what they were going to drown her in.