Deadshifted (Edie Spence 4)

“What the fuck is going on here? Where’s Asher?”

“Shhhhh,” they warned me, from the darkness inside a dead man’s mouth. “Keep your voice down. ”

I don’t know why I listened to them, but I did. “Where. Is. Asher?” I asked, my voice low.

“We don’t know. He’s not hiding in here with us. ”

In with the dead bodies, in the dark. Where there’d be a continual stream of sad people to feed on. Of course.

“Then what good are you—” I said, standing.

“Don’t you want to know why you’re on board?”

I slowly sank back down, still straddling the corpse.

“That’s more like it. Listen close—we don’t have much power here, unless you’d like to cry for us. ”

“I’m listening. ”

“We sent you here. ”

“What?” I’d never been so tempted to strangle a dead man.

“We’d heard rumors, so we decided to send you in. You’ve got a nose for trouble and a knack for staying alive—not to mention a shapeshifter bodyguard. ”

“But Asher picked out this cruise—”

“Oh, it was nothing to convince him,” they said, interrupting my protest. “So easy for us to plant a few ideas inside his overstuffed head. Plus, this mess is partially his fault—it was the least he could do to help us clean it up. He owed us, and the Consortium. ”

“So why aren’t you out there fixing things?”

“We’re not omnipotent, and we have to stay in the dark. Plus”—the voice receded, as if it was speaking from deeper inside the dead man’s throat—“we’re in hiding. ”

“From?”

“You’ll see. ”

I pounded another fist against the man’s frozen chest, and hoped to hell no one else would come in the morgue just then to see me. “Is there anything useful you can tell me?”

“Yes. Try to stay alive. You’ll see. Oh, Edie, you’ll wish you’d come back to us by the end of this. Working for us will seem like a distant dream—” they said, and then their voices abruptly stopped.

“Dammit, Shadows!” I yelled. All I got in return was silence.

“You’re all insane. ” I stood and nudged the corpse with my foot. It felt just like kicking a cement block would.

There was a knock at the freezer door, and this time I managed to whirl around without falling. Jorge was at the door, a bouquet of flowers from outside in his hands. “Everything okay?” he asked. I nodded, and he came in to set the flowers down on Stefano. “Don’t get me wrong, but you sounded a little crazy there. Talking to yourself in other voices. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing, but usually when I do I’m getting paid. ”

“I’m fine. ” I hugged myself and realized how cold I was getting. All this excitement probably wasn’t good for the baby, either.

“Was he here?” Jorge asked.

I looked down. I hadn’t made it past this first man in a suit, because of the Shadows. I surveyed the rest of the room. I wanted to believe what they’d told me—not that things would end badly, but that Asher wasn’t here. If Asher was in here dead, wouldn’t they show me his body so I would grieve and they could feed? I had to believe they would have.

“No. He’s not,” I answered Jorge with a head shake.

But if Asher wasn’t in the restaurant-sickroom or in the floral-storage-morgue, where else could he be?

What had Nathaniel done to him?

And—as I knelt to replace the sheet over the man the Shadows had violated—what was there in the world that the Shadows could possibly be scared of?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

My head was swimming with too many questions and not enough answers as we walked back to the restaurant. I asked the simplest one of Jorge. “How did you know it was a he?”

Jorge shrugged. “Trouble is almost always a man. ”

We entered the sick floor just as Raluca was mounting a chair with a megaphone for an announcement.

“Remaining volunteers—I have good news. The doctor has just informed me that the medical ship is on its way. ”