tossed it in my purse.
Gina knocked on the door before coming in. There were still red bands around her throat.
“Gina—I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t look at me as she walked to her locker and opened it. I stood there, trapped because her locker was closer to the door than mine, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment.
“You should have shot him when it started,” she said, her voice still rough.
“I didn’t have a shot then. Honest. I swear.”
There was a long pause until her locker closed. Her lips pursed, and she still wasn’t looking at me. “If you had a shot, any shot, that wasn’t okay.”
“I didn’t.” My mind raced through the moments where she’d been trapped. I’d tried, I’d searched, I’d failed. I couldn’t even save a friend. How was I supposed to save myself? “I didn’t until the end, and then I blew it. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I know.”
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like a fish out of water. I wanted to make excuses and I wanted her to forgive me. But if she was going to, she had to do it in her own good time. It was just that potentially I didn’t have much time left, and I needed all the absolution I could find.
“Thanks,” I wound up saying, zipping my purse closed. I walked carefully around her to the door. It was halfway closed already when I heard her say, “Don’t forget your extra cake.”
I went into the break room, where Meaty was giving his report to the day shift charge. I tiptoed around the table and opened the fridge. It’d be hard to find half a cake in the sea of tinfoil and leftovers.
“Just a second,” Meaty said to the other charge nurse. “Spence!”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Take tomorrow night off.”
I almost hit my head inside the fridge in surprise. “Really?”
“Really. We’re low on patients. We’ll call you if we need to. Tie up some loose ends. Take a vacation.”
Cake retrieved, I carefully stood up. “Gina needs the vacation more than I do, Meaty.”
“Don’t worry, she’ll get hers.”
I inhaled to protest. I wasn’t exactly being fired, though. And I did have a lot of things to do, assuming Anna didn’t turn up. “Thanks.”
Meaty gave me a knowing nod. “You’re welcome.”
I called Sike again on the way to the train station. It went to her voice mail. Of course. I stared at my phone, frowning for a second as I listened for the beep.
“Look—this is Edie—are you all doing anything? Anything at all? I need an update. Have you found her yet? I want to know what’s going on.”
The message cut off anything else I was going to say. I fought the urge to redial and just leave a message of me cussing. I shoved my phone into my purse and walked to the train station as quickly as I could.
Morning commuters at the station glanced at me, then quickly looked away. With a fattening lip, I was an object of curiosity, but no one wanted to add my problems to their own. I found a seat on the train when it arrived, watching the shadows underneath the seats in front of me. Were the Shadows in there, watching me back? Had they found out anything about Anna yet? My hand found my badge—I wished I had a way to ask them. Me wanting to talk to Shadows, that was a change indeed.
My train finished its downtown loop and the other commuters went away. It was just me staring at my shoes in the train when the doors across from me opened, and let in someone I didn’t really want to see.
Asher. This time without flowers. He was wearing a suit that was tailored precisely for him, sharp-shouldered and swank. He was as startled to see me as I was to see him; I could see it in his eyes for half a second before they narrowed.
“No one else should get to hit you,” he informed me with his British accent. With the apparent implication that it was still okay, sometimes, for him. Spanking was fun and all, but to the best of my knowledge it hardly ever caused fat lips.
“Not now,” I said, looking in my bag for a book to read and ignore him with. I saw the pope water sitting there, thought of Meaty, and remembered the “loose ends” comment. Well, here was one, sitting right across from me. I looked up and he had a bemused expression on his face.
“Look,” I began, inhaling deeply. I sucked at difficult conversations. And who could I have a conversation with that went “I probably won’t see you again, because I’m going to be going on trial with some vampires”? Just people at work—and Ti. That thought brightened me. “Look, I’ve met someone,” I said aloud. “They get me. They really get me. I’ve got a lot of problems, things you wouldn’t even begin to understand. It’s all very complicated, really.”
An eyebrow crept higher on his head, pulling a lopsided smile behind. I kept going in spite of myself. “It was fun, don’t get me wrong, and we had chemistry, sure, but—”
I stared at him and lost my train of thought. There was a gravitational pull between us, yes. But if I were the Earth, then he was a cool and distant moon. Light, but not heat—and I liked to be warm. “You’re a doctor, I’m a nurse, it’s just not a good idea.”
The train shuddered to a halt.
“I believe this is your stop,” he said. He stood and made no move toward the door.
“It is. See you.” I stood and walked out into the station and made it halfway up the stairs.
“I’m not really a doctor, you know,” said Asher’s accented voice. I turned and saw his suit, incongruous with the station’s milky white walls. I quickly blinked an eye and found him glowing, bright.
I inhaled. “Then … what are you?” I asked, slowly.
“I can be a doctor. I can be a lot of things. I prefer, however, to be myself.” He crossed the short distance between us. “Look at me, Edie.”
I did. It was daylight outside, just six stairs away. He couldn’t be a vampire. I reached between my breasts and pressed my badge hard against my skin.
Asher’s face slowly became the face of someone I didn’t recognize. His dark eyes were pierced with blue, until the blue overtook all the brown, like the sky after a heavy storm. His skin tone lightened from olive to become Nordic white, and the set of his jaw tilted, from angled high to low and square.
“I think I met your cousin last night,” I said.
“Now will you tell me where you work?” he asked.
“Y4.”
“It figures,” he said. He shifted back to the Asher I knew in the blink of an eye.
“Does that mean that when you feel like it, you can be me now?” I asked. I thought of Gina, on the floor with gauzed eyes full of blood.
“No, actually. I did try, though, at the club, and several times thereafter. When I found out I couldn’t, I was shocked, then intrigued. Then when I learned you were merely being protected by the proximity of your badge…”
“So you weren’t really into me for me is what you’re saying?”
“You were a novelty.”
And isn’t that what every girl wants to hear? “Fan-fucking-tastic. Good night, Asher, or good morning, or whatever the fuck it is for you now. I’m too tired for this.” I started walking the final stairs away from him.
“That’s not what I meant, Edie,” he called after me. “You have to imagine my surprise that night. I thought you were a rare beast, something that for shapeshifters is like a unicorn—someone whose spirit can’t be tamed. When I realized you worked at a hospital, and probably
I whirled on him. “How about you imagine my disappointment? When some guy like you is interested in me, we have great sex, and then all of a sudden I’m not good enough anymore?”
He looked up at me like a baffled dog, and he clearly did not understand. And I didn’t want to explain it to him, how girls like me never got guys like him, how I was a Wednesday-night girl, but not a Friday-night girl. I decided it wasn’t worth the energy. I’m not sure what played on my face right then, but at least he seemed thoughtful.
