Shapeshifted (22 page)

My fists curled in impotent rage. “But I saved your life!”

“And I thank you for that. But I also swore an oath not to hurt her, whoever she may be. Trust me that my blood would only do that. I would see to it, in fact.”

I leaned forward and screamed at him, “I did not come all the way down here just to save you! If I had known, I would have tried harder to save the girl instead!” I whirled on Hector. “Give me the tire iron.”

He took a step back. “I thought we weren’t supposed to kill him?”

“That was before,” I said, my hand still out.

“Edie—he has a point.”

“Fuck both of you, then.” I walked in a small circle. I ran my hands up through my hair. “We have to go back for her.”

“Not tonight. We’re not going anywhere tonight.” Hector brought the tire iron down with finality.

“We may not be—but Luz, I mean Reina, is going to be all over Maldonado when she hears about this. Do you have her phone number? Does she have a phone?”

“And what do you think she will do to your precious zombie when she finds him there, girl?” Dren said from his position on the ground.

“You shut up.”

“Go on. Tell him about the zombie,” Dren crooned. “I’d love to hear you explain him away.”

I knelt down to be on a level with him. “How is it you were stupid enough to get caught?”

“What’s it matter to you?” he challenged me.

“More mouth from you, and we’re going to wait out here for the sun,” Hector threatened, waving the tire iron. I blinked, startled that he knew how to kill a vampire. Then again, it was on every other TV show right now. At least Hector was still on my side, even though he had to know I was holding out information on him.

Dren sighed in exaggerated exhaustion. “I came looking for Santa Muerte. The Shadows sent me in. She’s got a high bounty.”

“Did you find her?”

“No. Those fools are trying to summon her. The girl in the cage is meant to be some sort of sacrifice.” He shrugged his weak shoulder, which yanked his limp arm up in a grotesque fashion. “Santa Muerte herself is still loose—and they’ve almost got enough magic to draw her there. I’ll give them that. I sorely underestimated the magician inside.”

“That’s because he’s a
bruja,
” Hector said. I didn’t know what that meant yet, but somebody was going to be explaining it to me soon.

“Someone is helping them,” Dren went on. “You don’t get knowledge like they’ve gained through experimenting on your own. You try magic that strong without practice and you’d blow yourself up.” His eyes narrowed. “I suspect House Grey is funding them, or helping them outright. I didn’t meet any of them personally, but my torture did have the feel of poetic justice to it.”

The last time I’d seen any vampires from House Grey, Dren had been lopping their arms off at Anna’s command. His torture had a grim symmetry to it. Vampires didn’t forgive, and they sure as hell never forgot.

“What would they want with Santa Muerte?” I asked aloud.

“She’s hugely powerful. Who wouldn’t want death on their side?”

“Why didn’t the Shadows send anyone in after you?”

“And admit defeat? Or that they’d sent me to begin with?” He snorted, pushing himself up against the car’s open door with his good arm. “I sent my Hound out for help—and the stubborn thing spent a month trying to run away before admitting defeat and realizing it couldn’t. I think it was hoping I would die. Little does it know, that wouldn’t free it. Our fates are linked.”

“Why did it find me?”

Dren rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t like the weres would help me now, was it? And I’d kept him away from other vampire kind. In the circles of the people he could find, and the people who were likely to be stupid enough to help me, the only overlap was you.”

“You always know how to make a girl feel special, Dren.” I rocked back up. My calves ached from all the crouching and pulling I’d done tonight. “Look, where can we take you? You need to go somewhere.”

“I need blood is what I need.” His eyes shone in the car-door shadow, backlit like a cat’s.

“Neither of us is going to give you any.” I did feel bad for him. He was a shade of his former self here. Still frightening, but also sad.

Throughout all this, Hector was surprisingly nonplussed. He still held the tire iron at the ready, but he didn’t seem as ready to use it as when he’d first gotten out of his car.

“Once, I made it halfway down the stairs,” Dren went on. “The sun began to come up. I had to crawl myself back up again before I passed out in the light. And your boyfriend—he’s a piece of work.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, Dren.” Whatever we saw on the stairs tonight … it was not Ti.

“You should have seen him, rooting around inside my thigh every other night. Like he was gutting a chicken.” Dren played with his damaged leg, rolling it back and forth on the ground. It flopped from side to side like a twisted toy. “What did I ever do to him, other than threaten to kill you?”

Hector turned to me. “Where are we taking him? We need to take him somewhere, before I beat his head in.”

“Okay.” I fanned out my hands. As much as I didn’t want to take him back to my place, I inhaled to offer it up. Then Jorgen appeared, racing back down the street, a nightmare in full flight. “Oh, thank God.”

Hector groaned. “Goddammit, not that thing again.” We moved out of Jorgen’s way as he came to kneel down, offering his neck to Dren.

“You’d better behave this time, or I’ll skin you, I swear I will,” the vampire warned.

Jorgen closed his eyes, and Dren bit in. Hector made a repulsed face, and there was no way not to hear the slurping noises while Dren sucked at Jorgen’s neck. Just when I thought the noises alone would make me wretch, Dren pulled back and tottered up to standing. Hector and I jumped even farther back. “How can you—”

“I’m a vampire. I heal quickly, when fed. Even on blood as disgusting as a Hound’s.” He was still emaciated, but at least his bones were whole. A trail of Jorgen’s blood stained his chin. “That’s why they used the zombie. I couldn’t feed on him.” Jorgen lurched up, and Dren leaned against his side.

“Where are you going, Dren?”

“Away. To shun you,” he said, and laughed. “To heal. And sleep. And leave this place for good.”

“Whatever magic those people are using—it’s powerful, Dren. You know it yourself.” I took a step nearer to him, hands out, pleading.

“Please don’t try to appeal to the altruist in me. There is none.” Dren started walking away, one arm slung around Jorgen’s neck.

“Don’t kill anyone tonight, Dren,” I called after him.

He turned back to smile wickedly. “You’re not the boss of me.” And then waved weakly with his healing arm.

Dammit. I still wanted him to help me. If only I’d made him promise more precisely—and if only he weren’t a jerk. I didn’t want to admit that maybe he was right, maybe by denying me he was actually helping my mother. And yet I didn’t want all this to be for nothing. I’d almost gotten killed, I’d left an innocent person behind, and I still hadn’t saved my mom. I wanted to run after him, yelling at him until he changed his mind. But I couldn’t. He was running now. Not to avoid me, but because he—a vampire, fearless and occasionally psychotic—was afraid.

I watched him rush down the street until he was hidden in shadow.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Good riddance.” Hector rounded his car, tossed the tire iron back into his trunk, and slammed it shut.

“What time is it? We’ve got to go tell Luz.” I started pacing. I didn’t want to get back into the car. It felt like maybe three or four. Plenty of time for Luz to go in and rescue Adriana.

“You can’t tell her, Edie—you’ll start a war.”

I stopped and stared at him. “Luz wouldn’t be starting anything—she’d be finishing it. You did not see what I saw.”

“Innocent people would die, Edie—”

I pointed back the way we’d come. “There’s an innocent person up there being starved to death and tattooed with bones. I don’t really care if some other people die, as long as she gets free.”

“No,” Hector said, decisively.

“Why are you protecting them? I thought you hated Maldonado?”

“You don’t understand—”

“Because you haven’t told me!” I yelled. After tonight, I had no patience for games.

“Edie!” He took hold of my shoulders and shook me. And then his face changed. His tan skin lightened, and his dark eyes went blue.

It took me a moment longer than it should have to place what was happening, it had been so long. Hector wasn’t Hector anymore. His face was changing, into the face of someone else I knew. “Asher? Oh, my God.” I put my hand to my mouth to muffle a scream. “Why—why didn’t you tell me he was you?”

He let go of me and stepped back. “I was trying to hide.” His face changed, more slowly, toward the Asher I used to know.

“No. Don’t. Just stay Hector, okay?” I didn’t need any more blasts from my past tonight.

“Okay,” he said, his voice low.

I couldn’t believe that Hector had been Asher this entire time. That he’d known me, from before. We’d been friends, and more than friends, and he’d hidden himself from me—why?

“Have you been him … all along?” I asked. He nodded slowly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Edie.”

“Oh. Tell me. How was it supposed to be? I would have wanted to know!” I wanted to lean in and hit him. I couldn’t believe he’d lied to me. “All this time I’ve been trying to do things and get help, and you knew who I was, and you knew what I’d seen—you could have fucking helped me.”

“No. I couldn’t have.” He stepped back closer to the streetlight and arched his back, running his hands through his dark hair, changing fully back to Hector. “You don’t know what I’ve been through—”

“Because I didn’t know!” I accused him.

He turned and I saw him fight to keep his emotions in check, stopping himself from yelling back at me. “You’re not the only one who has problems, Edie.”

That shut me up. I was still pissed off, but leery. “What’s wrong?”

His eyes scanned the ground, as if he were looking for where to begin. “Do you remember when that shapeshifter punched you on Y4?”

“Yeah.” Gina and I had been taking care of him, and he’d gone wild, trying to escape. He’d lost control of his ability to shapeshift, and had wound up going through everyone he’d ever met before. “He was insane.”

“Funny you should put it like that.” Asher inhaled and exhaled deeply. “What was happening to him happens to all shapeshifters, eventually. If they don’t take steps.”

I frowned, and thought back to the event. “But you said he’d been tortured by vampires, I remember—”

“I lied.” Asher cut me off. “That was only half the truth. I didn’t want to explain at the time.” His frown deepened as he stared at the ground. “No one likes to talk about how they’re going to die.”

I waited for him to go on.

“You can’t be a shapeshifter forever, Edie. You either touch too many people, or you get too old, and something starts to break inside.” He touched his chest. “You can’t hold yourself together like you used to. The person you know you are fades, and if you’re not careful, you get replaced by all the people you’ve touched—by everyone else you have inside. There’s only two ways out: Either you go crazy, or you pick someone else inside to be.” Asher stretched his hand out and looked at it as if the fingers there were unfamiliar to him. “It happens to all of us eventually.”

“I don’t understand.” Asher was supposed to be gone, just like everything else from before the shun. And now he was here—and I was going to lose him again, already? “So you picked being Hector? Over … going crazy?”

Asher nodded.

“Is Hector real?”

“He’s a clinic doctor in Miami. I touched him years ago, and started being him in Port Cavell after New Year’s. We were the same age, and he has no family. The real Hector doesn’t know he has a doppelgänger here, and he never will.”

“And so … who are you then, now?” I asked, squinting at him.

“Asher all the way. Still. But I’ve been trying to be Hector. To let him win.” His eyes finally found mine again. “I need to let myself go. But seeing you every day has been making it hard.”

I bit my lip for a moment before asking him my next question. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “How long do you have?”

He looked away from me. “Not long now. Every day I wake up, and everything’s cloudy. It’s hard to sort out what’s me and what’s him. And I shouldn’t even try, because if I don’t forget, if I don’t give myself over to really being Hector, I’ll—” His voice drifted off.

“Go insane,” I finished for him, remembering the tortured patient we’d had to tranquilize back on Y4. I hadn’t realized that being a shapeshifter was like having the supernatural version of Huntington’s. “Is there any way to stop it?”

“No one in the entire history of shapeshifters has ever managed to escape before.” Asher sighed. “Except for maybe one.”

I pounced on the idea. “Who? Can we find them? Talk to them? Get them to tell you how?” I couldn’t stomach the thought of losing Asher again so soon.

“He’s already been trying to contact me. He found me a few months ago.” Asher stared stonily at the ground. “Sometimes he sends thugs over to paint my birthday on the clinic walls.”

“No way—Maldonado’s a shapeshifter?”

“Yeah. Who also happens to be my dad.”

My jaw dropped. Maldonado being a shapeshifter made sense; it explained how Adriana had been duped. But him being Asher’s father— “How can that be?”

“I don’t know. It shouldn’t be possible.” Asher tensed as he faced his past. “He left when I was a kid, abandoned me and my mom. She said he knew his time was coming, and he was going to try to find a way to survive. What my mother didn’t tell me was that it happened all the time—and that everyone who went out like that almost surely went insane. I spent my whole childhood waiting for him to come back.” He snorted softly. “Talk about a waste of time.”

I sat on the hood of his car, giving him room to pace. “How do you know it’s him now, though? Do they look alike, or what?”

“No. It’s his interest in me. Things he says, the way he acts. And the fact that everything is going to happen on my birthday, on the seventeenth? It’s his way of letting me know he’s still in there, even if he’s not completely in charge. I always wondered what happened to him…” Asher frowned and shook his head. “He must have gone out and looked for the most powerful person he could find, to touch them so that he could mimic them before he went insane.”