Nightshifted

*   *   *

“We’re here, human.” Sike pulled into a parking spot near my apartment. I got out my keys. Heat billowed out—my house was roasting inside, this month’s electric bill would be insane. And now I might actually be alive to pay it. I held the door open.

Sike had to walk around to Anna’s side of the car and prompt her awake. The smaller vampire seemed dizzy, stumbling out, and for a second I wondered what would happen if a corner of the lightproof fabric flipped back, and I watched my only hope crisp and burn in the meek afternoon sun.

Sike herded Anna toward me. She stepped up and into my house, but Sike was halted at the threshold.

“I thought you were just a daytimer?” I asked her. From the look on her face, so did she.

“I have had a lot of my Throne’s blood recently.” She stood at the edge of my doorway, looking both beautiful and perplexed. I watched her reach a hand back, into the sunlight, and it seemed no different than any other extraordinarily pale human hand I’d seen before.

Sike looked up at me. “So let me in,” she said.

I tried to remember the wording I’d used with Anna earlier, when I’d thought I was being clever. My exhausted brain wouldn’t come up with anything. “Never hurt me or my cat,” I said, instead of a more solemn vow. Sike snorted.

“I swear to never physically hurt you or your cat.”

“Good enough. Come in,” I said, and went inside. I took off my coat and set Grandfather down on my kitchen bar, where he started talking again. “Ugh,” Anna complained, on her way to my bedroom.

“Be nice.” Everyone in my house was bilingual but me. I peeked into my bedroom and saw Anna leaning against my closed closet door, the blackout fabric she had looped loosely over her head making her look like a shriveled beggar.

“I’m exhausted. Hide me,” she said, without looking up.

I walked past her and opened the other door. She knelt down and this time she shoved all of my shoes over to one side of my closet, kicking at them weakly. I tossed my extra comforter in after her.

“This house smells like zombie and worse,” Anna said, curling into a ball on my closet floor.

“Don’t worry, you’re not moving in.” I grabbed her lightproof cloth and quickly closed the closet door before slinging the black fabric up over my window to block out all the remaining light. In my kitchen, Grandfather was silent. I had collapsed onto my bed when I remembered Sike.

Home stretch, I told myself, like I told my patients when I was doing anything painful to them. Almost over. Everything’s almost over. I lurched back upright. She was standing by my thermostat in the hallway, setting it down to a more moderate setting. Should I offer her water, tea, blood? I didn’t know what I ought to be doing—all I knew was that I needed to sleep almost as badly as Anna did.

“Do you need me for anything?” I asked her.

“I presume you have a couch?” she asked.

“In the living room. You can’t miss it.” I pointed behind her, and she followed my direction. “Do I need to do anything special for the trial?” I called after her.

“Just show up.”

Worked for me, now that I might actually survive it. I sprawled atop my bed and let myself feel hopeful for the first time in what felt like forever, and then I fell asleep.

Chapter Forty-Six

I had another strange ocean dream. I was standing on the shore of a black ocean at night, and the sand beneath my feet kept shifting, no matter how hard I tried to stay still. I had to walk along it, faster and faster, until I was running, and it still kept sucking away. The tide went out and I ran down past the waterline, hoping the water-packed sand would be less treacherous, but then the stars were obscured by a huge wave of black and a roaring sound began—

My nightmare was interrupted by a familiar weight at the end of my bed. I moved my feet so that Minnie could come near.

But the weight increased. It rolled alongside me, and I wondered if it was part of my dream, or one of those dreams—even worse than the one I’d been having—where you wake up and none of your limbs work, the kind that inspired alien-abduction stories, as if aliens were the worst things there were. The weight crept higher, to be beside me, taking up more space than Minnie ever had. It fit against me, hip to hip, back to chest, the curve of legs to legs. Frizzy hair tickled underneath my chin.

I don’t think I could have been so still if I hadn’t been so exhausted. But I didn’t blink my eyes open, or scream, or shift around in bed. I thought one thing, What if she bites me? but I wasn’t alarmed by this, only deeply tired at the thought of having to be afraid again.

And then she turned to pick up my arm from where it’d been folded up against my chest to wrap it around herself, and tuck my hand against her cheek. I thought I could feel the beating of her heart, but then realized that was silly, that it just must be my own. Exhausted, I inhaled the sweet-sour scent of Anna’s still unwashed hair, sighed, and went back to sleep.

*   *   *

When I woke up I was stiff and my room was pitch-black. I checked my face for a blindfold, and then remembered the blackout sheet I’d put up over my own dark curtains. I went through my pockets and found my cell phone.

Seven fifty-five. Dark outside now, for sure, and I wasn’t any less tired. I sat up in my bed and turned on my lamp, registering that thanks to my prior exhaustion, not only was I still filthy, but all of my bedsheets were as well. I turned toward my closet, and saw its door was open.

“Ladies?” I asked, then, “Minnie?”

No response from the living room, but I heard a frightened meow from beneath my bed. I knelt down on the floor and reached out to Minnie with my hand.

“I promise you, Minnie, when I’m done with this, you’re never going to have to hide again.”

Minnie licked my extended finger as if she was sealing a pact, and I rose to walk to the living room.

Halfway down my short hallway, I realized my living room smelled. Not like fresh dirt or old sex, but like blood and bodily fluids. I ran the last few steps to turn and see Sike sprawled out on my couch like a homicide victim, and Anna nowhere to be found.

“Sike?” I dropped to my knees beside her. My instinct was to put fingers to her throat, to feel for a pulse, but—to do so would have been to stick my fingers into one of several open gashes. “Dear God, Sike—” I put my hand in front of her nose instead, and watched for her chest to rise.

“Mr. Weatherton?” she asked.

“No. It’s Edie. Stay here,” I said, though she wasn’t in danger of going anywhere. I ran to the bathroom for the plastic bin where I kept everything I’d ever “stolen” from the hospital. Maybe a hundred alcohol swipes were littered over a dense core of gauze, half-finished rolls of tape, and other stray hospital things. I grabbed a towel on my way out.

“We should wash all this out, Sike.” Sike didn’t look drained so much as she looked gnawed upon. There were multiple puncture wounds, so many that they merged together—like Anna had bitten her and then shaken her like a merciless dog. Any career Sike might have had in modeling was now at an end.

“She needed it,” Sike said. “I told her it was okay.”

I tried to parse the little girl that’d snuggled beside me, asleep, with the thing that’d left these marks, and failed. “Don’t make excuses for her. She’s mostly immortal. You’re not. Can you sit up?”

She tried to nod, hissed in pain, then tilted forward ever so slightly. I shoved the towel beneath her, for all the good it’d do now—my poor couch was ruined. I got a washcloth, soaked it in saline—an intentional hospital steal, after I’d once gotten a really bad cut on my knee—and patted her neck a few times with it, wishing the washcloth were sterile too.

“It’ll heal. Mr. Weatherton will help.”