Shapeshifted

him to tell me in time to heal my mom. 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I was a little cowed at work that day. Between witnessing violence and being dragged away from it, and the feeling that I had more questions than answers, especially about Dr. Tovar—I tried to keep busy. Knowing myself, it was the only thing I could do.

If Dr. Tovar was a daytimer, then the blood was going to someone. Who? Who was the Ruler of the Night that the Three Crosses were tattooed in fear of? I watched Catrina dive in and out of patients’ rooms before and after me. I never saw her with test tubes full of blood in her hands, but her scrubs had pockets, didn’t they?

Keep your head down, Edie, I told myself. I didn’t have the protection of my former job or my former friends anymore. And I was supposed to be shunned—there was a chance I would blow my cover here and get ushered out the door. Then where would I be?

There had to be a way to get Tovar to confess, though. Something simple. Like holy water, or crosses. Only I didn’t have either of those on me. I snorted, alone in a room while I was waiting for a patient.

Eduardo saw two people in, two women who bore a familiar resemblance to each other. The younger was my age, and she helped her mother up onto the table.

“I don’t need your help, the curandero cured me,” the older woman informed me as soon as she was settled.

Her daughter was filled with rage. “Oh, yeah? Then why was your last blood sugar four hundred and three?”

“The curandero?” I asked. The older woman emphatically nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish to her daughter. It was clear they were retreading an argument they’d already had many times before.

I didn’t want to rat the curandero out as needing blood sugar test strips for himself, but if he was telling people with uncontrolled diabetes they were healed, he was doing more harm than good. No matter how nice his grandson was.

The daughter waited for their argument to subside, and then summed things up for me. “She thinks that he’s cured her. He’s prayed over her twice, and now she’s cured.”

“?No, si me visita dos veces mas, me va a curar!”

“You can go every day, Mom, for all I care—just keep taking your shots!”

Together they were a mirror image of my mother and me. And as with my own mother currently, I felt at a loss. I was sure the older woman had heard all the reasons why she should keep taking her medicine, and the daughter was tired of making her try.

I went for extreme science. “There’s no miracle cure for diabetes. Just rigorous control. Without that, the sugar crystals in your blood will rip up your kidneys and the blood vessels in your hands and feet. You’ll lose your nerves; you won’t know what’s hot or cold. And if you get an infection, because of all the sugar in your blood for the germs to feed on, you might die.”

Although I felt like the mother already understood me, her daughter translated, adding her own inflection, especially on the you-might-die part. Her mother stayed proud and obstinate, and addressed me in English. “I believe I will be better. And so it will happen for me.”

“That’s not how it works,” the daughter said.

The mother jerked her chin up. “That’s how it will work for me.”

I jumped in before things got any worse. “I know it’s hard to accept that there’s nothing that will fix the situation.” I realized as I said it that I could be talking to myself. I could ignore everything strange I’d seen here and just try to be normal for once, to have a normal life, doing normal things, helping normal people. And my mom would die, like people with stage four breast cancer mostly, normally, do.

“You were saying?” the daughter prompted me.

I turned to face the mother and focused my attention on her. “You have to take the medicine. Your daughter loves you; she doesn’t want to be without you. You can’t blame her for wanting you to live, can you?”

The older woman’s face crumpled a bit at this, but then she recovered and gave a dramatic sigh. “For your sake, I suppose I can pretend that the shots work.”

“Good.” The daughter shook her head and rushed her mother off the table, happy to take any victory she could. She ushered her mother out of the room, then leaned back to roll her eyes in commiseration with me. Aren’t stubborn old people crazy? her look said. I nodded, yes, yes, they were.

* * *

I went outside for lunch and found Olympio there. I pulled out the extra sandwich I’d made him, and today he sniffed at it.

“No thanks, I already ate.”

“Fair enough.” I opened up mine and wolfed it down. “Your grandfather cure anyone lately? Practioner-to- practioner?”

Olympio grunted. “Of course. He cures everyone he touches.”

“An older lady? Diabetes? Recently, from the sounds of it?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“You have to tell him not to say things like that, Olympio. What if that lady had gone home, not taken her medicine, and died?”

Olympio turned and began walking away from me. “Who’s to say he didn’t heal her? She’s not dead if she came down here, right?”

“That’s hardly an excuse, Olympio. And even if your grandfather doesn’t know that, you do.” I caught up to him, waiting for him to look back. No matter what bizarre claims Olympio made, he had to know his grandfather was telling lies.

Olympio inhaled like he was going to explain things to me, then turned and punched the wall behind him lightly. “Just leave me alone, okay?”

“Okay.” I stood there as he faced away from me. I wished I hadn’t pissed him off. I didn’t want his grandfather hurting anyone, but there’d probably been a more sensitive way to convey it, one I hadn’t explored in my flustered-from-this-morning mind. I sat down on the ground and sighed. He didn’t walk farther away.

I waited what might be an acceptable period of time—and then longer than that, just to be sure—before asking him, “Do you know anything about Reina de la Noche?”

He was still facing away from me. “Why?”

“I saw a woman selling their shirts get hassled this morning, by the Three Crosses crew.”

Olympio snorted, inhaling deeply, to spit out a wad of phlegm. “That’s just like them. Scared.”

“Which ones?”

“The Three Crosses. Beating up ladies. It’s like them.”

He was finally warming up to me—or the topic—again. “What are the Rulers like?”

“Rulers?”

“You know. The Reinas.”

Olympio rolled his eyes. “Reina de la Noche—it means ‘Queens of the Night.’”

“Oh.” Well, that put a lot of things in perspective. Including vampire bite T-shirts and tattoos. I wondered who the Queen was. The only person I currently knew who could lay claim to that title happened to actually be a vampire. Anna, the vampire who’d gotten me shunned. “Olympio, can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

I fished two twenty-dollar bills out of my purse and held the money out. “Can you go buy me a small silver cross?”

“Why? You don’t seem religious.”

“I could be.”

“But you’re not.”

I couldn’t lie. “No, I’m not. It’s for a friend. Look, you can keep the change, can you get me one, or