Bloodshifted (Edie Spence 5)

Raven got up gracefully and offered his hand to Natasha, who took it to rise. He bowed deeply to her, kissing her hand in a formal fashion. “Soon,” he told her, then released her hand and walked out.

The vampires left the room first, then Lars and Celine trailed after them toward the dance floors. Natasha watched Raven leave with a soft smile on her face. She looked young. Asher said she should have been my age—but if she’d been turned into a daytimer when Nathaniel’s blood-testing scheme had been found out, that would have been seven years ago. She’d first gotten vampire blood when she was what, nineteen? Twenty? But she didn’t look like she’d aged a day since sixteen.

When she turned to look at me, though, her eyes were ancient—and I realized Raven’s command had given her utter power over me.

Jackson stepped up quickly as we became the last people in the room. “She’ll help me tonight—she can be yours tomorrow,” he warned.

“What, you don’t trust me?” Natasha teased, giving him a lopsided grin. “Does Jackson have a crush?”

“What kind of lab is it?” I interrupted. Her father had been doing illegal research on humans for vampires when he’d gotten in trouble with the Consortium. If she’d continued it on her own and been successful where he’d failed—

“Stem cell. Have you ever done anything like that before?” She sounded genuinely hopeful. I shook my head. “But you’re familiar with sterile procedures, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“And you can draw blood?”

“Like a vampire,” I said flippantly.

Natasha blinked, and then broke into a smile. “Good enough for me,” she said. She looked to Jackson next, much more business-like. “I’ll expect my subjects by dawn. I want a male and a female, and try to make sure they’re not addicted to anything. The last set—”

“I’ll get them to you after my disposal run,” he said, cutting her off.

Natasha nodded curtly at him, then smiled again at me and walked out of the room. I turned to Jackson once she was gone. “You don’t just clean the bathrooms, do you?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jackson raised a hand and pushed it through his hair while bowing his head a little. “Not really, no.”

“Why did you sell me out to Raven?” Not that I should have expected any loyalty—I hardly knew him and he was a daytimer, come on. Baby, your mother really ought to know better by now.

“Everybody here has to pull their own weight—” he began, making excuses while I frowned, more at myself than him.

I’d never worked in a lab but I’d had to have been living under a rock not to have heard of stem cells—cells that were undifferentiated, that could grow into other cell types depending on where they were used and what factors they were exposed to. Scientists were busy trying to use them to cure all sorts of things, but the research, while promising, was complicated and slow.

What the hell was Natasha using stem cells for? Was she still trying create blood substitutes like her father had been? I realized that if she was—I needed to know. She couldn’t be allowed to succeed. A world where vampires didn’t need humans for blood would be a world overrun—and no safe place for you, baby.

At the thought of that dismal future, I frowned even harder. “And what’s a disposal run?”

“It’d be easier to show you on the road. Assuming you want to come.”

I hesitated. I should be volunteering to help Natasha immediately. The sooner I figured out what she was up to, the sooner I could report her to the Consortium. It was another possible way out of here: calling the group that seemed to loosely govern supernatural creatures down on her and Raven’s heads. Unfortunately, the only time I’d met a representative from them they hadn’t handed me a business card.

“She doesn’t have any work for you yet—she’s out of human-shaped lab mice,” Jackson said. “And it does involve leaving here for about an hour in a car.”

At the thought of getting outside and being able to ask Jackson questions in the car safely, like just what Natasha was testing, I was sold. “Let’s roll.”

* * *

Jackson led me through another warren of hallways until we reached a point where the walls widened and our tunnel was intersected by another one—and a prone person’s leg was visible on the far side, as if whomever the leg had belonged to had fainted dead away. I looked at Jackson, whose demeanor said that this was normal for him, and then ran ahead.

“Are you okay?” The leg belonged to a man, a boy really, some pale club kid—made paler by blood loss. “Sir? Can you hear me?” I felt for a pulse, and it was there, but weak and slow. I shook him hard. “Hey!”

Jackson put restraining hands on the boy’s chest. “Don’t wake him up—it’s not good for him, or us. He doesn’t want to remember this, and it would only make our job harder.” He easily picked the man up and hoisted him over his shoulder.

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think happened? Raven gave you a huge amount of blood the other night. He had to get it back from somewhere—or someone.” Jackson shrugged and the man jiggled. “He’s lucky to be alive—it’s not as powerful for them when they don’t kill the victim. Something about eating the spark of life fills them up faster.”

“Psychophagy.” Once upon a time, a vampire had wanted to eat me.

Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “Is that what it’s called?”

“Yeah.” It was hard standing beside him when I ought to be calling 911 and starting warm IV fluids on the boy.

“Huh.” Jackson turned to indicate where we were standing. “This is the crossroads.” He pointed down two of the tunnels. “Those ones we don’t go down. They belong to our Masters, and if you snoop you’ll be killed on sight. And that one”—he pointed to a third—“is where Natasha’s lab is.”

I reached out for the dangling boy’s hand, digging my fingers in for a pulse. “He needs medical attention—he’s only barely alive—”

“I know. Let’s get to the car,” he said, and started going back the way we’d come.

* * *

Tunnels intersected, forming a map in my mind. I definitely knew how to get up to the club now—and how to get out to the garage. Jackson flipped open a metal box on one wall, revealing a wall of key hooks like what you’d find at a valet station. It was open—of course it was. The only person here who wanted to leave was me.

We walked down a row of cars until we reached a Honda Civic. “I don’t get to drive the fancy ones. Wouldn’t want to, either, with him on board.” He clicked the doors open and settled the boy into the back. I crawled in through the opposite door to keep an eye on him. Jackson gave me a look, but closed the door and settled into the driver’s seat.

* * *

“So it’s like this all the time?” I asked, lips pursed into a frown.

“Yeah. Rex—the other male vampire—picks out a few candidates and dopes them up for himself and the others. GHB, MDMA, coke, whatever suits their moods. Do they want an easy meal? To fuck or to fight? Even without the drugs, they’ve got their own powers, the mind-control thing they can all do, and I don’t have you tell you that they’re strong.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to give him an out, for making something so awful sound so commonplace.

“Sorry if I sound clinical,” Jackson said, after a long silence, looking back in the rearview mirror at both of us. “I realize this is your first time with it—but this sort of shit is my every night. Most times their victims are convinced, the way vampires are good at convincing people, that they were lucky to be chosen and that they had an amazing time. They got picked to go to Heaven and drank top-shelf drinks and danced with beautiful girls, and they got a little overdone. Sometimes there’s sex, even willingly, and sometimes there’s not. And sometimes I get to put on a plastic apron and cut corpses up with chain saws and put body parts into buckets of lye.”

“So where are we going now?” If he said we were going to a chain-saw-and-ly

e-atorium, I would have to jump him.

But then what? Wreck the car and fight out by the roadside? If it were only me I could risk that—I wouldn’t think twice. But not with you here, baby. I looked down at the slender cool wrist in my hand.

This boy beside me had been someone’s baby once, too.

“Relax. We’re getting him somewhere safe. And then we’ll call him in. Between the drugs and the narcotics in vampire saliva, he won’t remember what happened to him enough to explain it to the police.” He took a right-hand turn. “You don’t know how lonely this town is, Edie. And Rex has a way of picking out people who just got here—with no connections, no friends, no past.”

“And sometimes no future,” I said.