Deadshifted (Edie Spence 4)

I walked by another housekeeper on doorknob-wiping duty. When I reached the far end of the cart, I grabbed one of the extra spray bottles of cleaner dangling by its handle and held it up to my chest to hide it as I walked quickly past.

When I got up to our room, I washed my hands so long I could have sung “Happy Birthday” three times. And then I carefully got out of my dress and hopped into the shower to wash off the rest of me.

Asher opened up the door an hour later, with a bottle of cleaner also in his hands. I pointed to mine on the table. “Great minds think alike. How’s Thomas?”

“Rough. What happened with Liz?”

“I have no fucking idea. ” I’d been trying to work it out in the shower as I washed all of my makeup primer and hair spray down the drain, hopefully along with whatever germs I’d been exposed to. “It was like she was scared, but I’m not sure what of. She said something about getting him pills. What happened once I left?”

“The doctor came. This time I got to see him in action. He has no bedside manner, but he seems competent. ” Asher was holding his hands out in front of himself as if he were scrubbed in for surgery. “Mind getting the door for me?” he asked, nodding toward the bathroom.

I opened it up, and it swung shut behind him. I cleaned off the handle he’d used to enter the room with one of the bottles of cleaner. He spent as long in the shower as I had, and when he emerged he was wrapped in a fresh towel, holding his clothing with a washcloth to keep it from touching his newly washed skin. “Let’s set it all out to be cleaned. ”

“Sounds good to me. ” I held the laundry bag up, and he deposited my dress carefully inside as well. “What happened with Nathaniel?”

“Nothing. He was concerned, but only in a clinical way. He didn’t try to comfort Thomas, or soothe him, he didn’t even follow the stretcher all that closely. ”

I frowned at the thought of a little boy all alone on a gurney. I’d been right to try to get Liz to go back downstairs.

“It was like he didn’t even know him. Cold. ”

“Was he like that all the time?” I asked, well aware that Asher had a copy of Nathaniel’s older-self somewhere inside him.

“No. That’s the strange thing. He loved his daughter, back in the day. Her and money were the only two things he loved. ” He sat down on the edge of the bed, which housekeeping had kindly made up during the brief time we were out. “What were the pills for?”

“She wouldn’t say. But not for seizures—if he had a seizure history she’d know better than to give him pills. ” Sticking your fingers in the mouth of someone who was seizing was a good way to get bitten. I sat on the bed beside him. “Fevers, seizures—what’s a little meningitis between friends?”

“That is the obvious choice, isn’t it? Or something else. Worse. ”

I made a face. “What’re you saying?”

“I don’t know yet. Only that I know what he’s capable of. ” He turned toward me suddenly. “Edie, we wouldn’t have been there—you wouldn’t have been sitting across from him—if it weren’t for me. ”

“I work at a freaking public health clinic with you. And you know I’ve seen worse—been bled on by worse—before. ”

His hands kneaded the edge of the mattress. “It’s just that if anything happened to you because of me, I’d never forgive myself. ”

“Which I’ll admit is sweet, albeit in a twisted way,” I said, reaching out to put my hand on top of his nearest one to stop its wringing motion. “But I’m safe, so everything’s fine. ”

His eyes rose to meet mine, gaze somber. “You’d better stay that way. ”

“Or what?” I challenged, ludicrously imagining Asher miniaturized, going into my blood vessels to punch out germs by hand.

“Or else,” he said, leaving his threat to the universe hanging in the room.

* * *

Neither of us wanted to go to sleep. I lay pressed against his side, my head on his chest, as he flipped through TV stations. At home we didn’t really watch TV, so it was something of a novelty, even the commercials. We eventually settled on an old vampire film. It was hilariously inaccurate—all the vampires were sexy and incompetent, instead of disgusting and deadly. I found myself wishing we had popcorn to throw at the screen.

“Are you ever upset that shapeshifters don’t get TV shows?”

“No. It proves my kind’s better at hiding their tracks. ”

I thought about this. “Vampires do live longer. Presumably that means they have to work harder at hiding it. Plus, they have to drink blood. Your kind can just go to Burger King. ”

Asher’s eyebrows raised, but he was still watching the show. “Yes, but they can mesmerize people into thinking they weren’t there. ”

“But you can do that, too. Blending into a crowd, changing form—”

He made a thoughtful noise; I heard it rumble in his chest. “True. I think their real problem is that eventually they all get greedy. ”

“Probably. ” One of the vampires on screen did an awful job of chasing a hapless victim whom I was pretty much at this point hoping would die. “Anna offered to change me once. ”

“Really?”

“Yeah. When I was stabbed. ” I gestured to my stomach. I still had the scar. I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but now I wondered how big it would stretch as my stomach did, and if I’d have to get a C-section due to the residual damage inside. The way the vampire who’d stabbed me had been going, I was lucky to still have a uterus at all. “I still wonder how she’s doing sometimes. ”

“Anna’s immortal. I’m sure she’s fine. ” He pointed at the woman who’d just tripped on the screen during her escape. “Why can’t she just run? Our kid is taking track. ”

I gave him a nervous grin he didn’t see. That was the first time either of us had said anything explicit about my pregnancy since our decontaminatory showers. Joking about things was the first step on the path to normalcy. “She can’t run because they couldn’t afford a bigger set. ”

The woman on the screen was screaming louder now as the vampire neared. At least the on-screen vampire was hot. He looked winded from having chased her, though, in a way that a real vampire would never be.

Asher suddenly clicked off the remote. The screaming didn’t stop.

We both sat up. “It’s close,” he said.

In one move he’d stood and was pulling clothes out of the drawers on his side of the bed. I followed his lead on my side, and he looked over at me.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re staying here. ”

I frowned at him while latching my bra closed. “I’m not like that, Asher. ” I tugged a T-shirt down over my head.

“Please. For me. ”

I stood there, caught between action and inaction. I wanted to go. I wanted to help. I felt trapped by motherhood, though I wasn’t even showing yet.

The screaming went on—and Asher wasn’t the only one with a stubborn past. He sighed. “If there’s trouble, promise me you’ll leave. ”

“Done,” I said, and quickly yanked pants on.

I tucked a room key into my pocket as I followed him outside. There was already a stream of people traveling down the hall in assorted disarray, robes and pajamas, bare feet and slippers.

“I need a doctor!” Our next-door neighbor was in the hallway, holding his door open with one foot, looking out at the growing crowd. “Is anyone here a doctor?”

“How convenient,” I muttered as Asher elbowed forward. I imagined someone walking in on their loved one in the process of having a heart attack. Given the median age on this ship, times the ample buffets—then I realized I recognized him. It was the father of the two kids from our safety lecture the other day, the one with the boy who’d been choking this morning. He looked haggard now, but his eyes lit up in hope at seeing Asher. “Come in, please, hurry, he’s in the bathroom—”

Asher push

ed past him and I followed. The mother was crouched over her son in the tub, her hand covered in blood.

“He had a fever, he wanted to take a bath—” she explained. Her hand was clutched her to chest, and she was sobbing big tears. Pillows were wedged in on either side of her boy, and everything was wet. “It’s you. From this morning—” she said, recognizing Asher. “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with my son?”

This was more how I thought Liz’s fear should be. “Let’s wash your hand off. ” I knelt down and pulled her up and away, to make room for Asher to see the boy. She held her injured hand to her chest like a baby bird.

The woman and I jostled against each other in the short hallway to the other half bathroom. I got her hand underneath the sink and went into autopilot. “What happened?”

“His fever, it was so high. They gave me Tylenol downstairs, and I put him in the tub, and ran cool water on him like he wanted, and then he started to shake—like he was having a seizure—I didn’t want him to swallow his tongue so—” That explained the pillows, and the nasty gash on her hand. Too bad so many people still believed that old myth. She hissed as I scrubbed in soap.

“This’ll hurt,” I warned, too late.

“I don’t want to leave him—” She began pulling her hand away from the water flow. It was clear she was in some kind of shock. Not the blood-loss kind—her kid had been kind enough to miss any arteries—but at being bitten by her own child. No wonder all she’d been able to do was incoherently scream.

“I know. But we need to give them space to load him up, okay?” I said, pulling her back to finish my scrub-down.

There came the clattering of a gurney past our door, and then the three–two–one as medics coordinated their efforts to get the child smoothly onto the board. I wrapped the mother’s hand in a clean towel and we emerged from the bathroom after seeing the gurney pass back out into the hall.