Nightshifted es-1 Read online

  “I will not touch you here, human. Not yet.”

  “Keep out of my head.” I kept my badge out, for whatever good it was doing. “Why’ve you brought me here?”

  “Because we have need of you.”

  “What, you want to tell me how worthless I am again?” I let my badge drop against my chest. “I remember what it felt like last time, don’t need a repeat performance, thanks.”

  The creature rippled and deformed, snaking in and out of itself, shimmering lights playing across it.

  “If we wanted to destroy you, we would have already. So believe us that you still have some use.”

  I crossed my arms, suddenly aware that it was freezing down here, wherever this was, and my coat was still in the elevator. “You’re going to have to explain more than that if you want me to agree.”

  “We could crawl inside your head and make you but a shell of yourself, a puppet of meat, for which we keep the only strings.” It paused to let the impact of this settle in. “Please stop trying to be brave, and become the pathetic creature we both know you to be.”

  My short nails bit against my arms. “Fuck you.”

  The Shadow-thing laughed with other people’s voices, loud and long, before continuing. “This hospital is built on a place for gathering powers. Before it was a hospital, it was a church. Before it was a church, it was a burial ground. And before that, perhaps even passing dinosaurs walking above dipped their heads in sorrow.”

  I nodded like I understood—but really I just wanted it to stop talking with that broken voice. “So?” I asked, when the last reverberation had gone away.

  “There are lines beneath the County, Nurse Spence. They channel what we use as food into us, here. For us, they are like the circulatory system you know so well.”

  “You don’t send out oxygen or nutrients or unicorns or rainbows. You’re a bottom-feeder, and you only send out shit.”

  The Shadow let loose another mocking laugh. “Then think of us as a sponge, or a parasite, or even a baleen whale. Whatever you require in order to understand.”

  Halfway through its speech I put my fingers in my ears. It only let me better hear the pounding of my own heart and didn’t block the Shadow-voice out at all. I gave up. “What’s this have to do with me?” I prompted.

  It extruded an arm and gestured to the floor. “This is a map of all available energies.”

  All I could see were stars and whorls and bright excited jumping lines. They looked like words written in an ever-changing language that I would never learn to read.

  “A man dies near Broadway, shot by his ex-wife.” A lit spot on the floor, no wider than a pencil, rippled and raised. “A political rally, where people hope and hate in equal measure.” A thicker piece of light pulled up from the floor, maybe the width of my fist. “And lastly, here. County Hospital. Two thousand people—not so very many—but they are always in perfect agony, hoping not to die, and dying regardless.” The flat sun I’d seen before rose up like a tombstone. It beat like a glowing heart.

  I stepped backward and the floor rippled. Like a heavy stone dropped into a still pond, those ripples carried out and over to the short pillar of light, coursing up its length on one side and down on the other, in blissful ignorance of physics.

  But not everyone at County died. Surely not— “You don’t change patient outcomes, do you?”

  “We don’t need to. This is the County’s hospital. The people who come here cannot go anywhere else. They wait too long for medical attention, and when they receive it, even should they live, they often wish to die along the way.” The creature made its way out, warping the field of lights along the floor—lights that I now understood represented combined pinpricks of human suffering and pain. “It is not a thick conduit—not like a war might bring, or the weight of crushing tyranny—but it is steady. It has lasted so far. It will continue.”

  “So why do you need me?”

  “We would like you to transport us.”

  I took another step back and looked at the elevator behind me. “You’re not getting inside my head again.”

  The creature chuckled. “There are other ways.”

  “Why should I help you?”

  “We will be able to find the vampire girl you seek. Surely she is currently experiencing a certain amount of pain.”

  I nodded. Of course, when she’d been biting Mr. Galeman, she’d been causing him a certain amount of pain too. Realization dawned on me. If what they were saying was true, the Shadows had everyone coming and going.

  “When? Now?” The sooner I could save Anna, the better. Truth be told, I didn’t know how I’d protect her from another attack, or how I’d keep her fed. But wherever she was now … the images from Mr. November’s walls were burned into my brain. No one should be left there, wherever there happened to be.

  “It will take some time. One person’s pain is not very distinct from another’s. We think you might understand.”

  I nodded. Everyone at the hospital wanted to think that their case was special, and if you were a good nurse, you helped them keep that illusion alive. Knowing that someone down the hall had it worse than you never stopped your own paper cut from hurting, at least not until they came in and bludgeoned you senseless with their amputated leg.

  “We are not typically surface creatures, and we cannot come out in bright light,” the Shadow continued. Five dark columns rose out of the fluid on the floor. It moved its bulk across the floor toward these columns as it went on. “Thus our ability to interact with the outside world is limited, and there have been recent inconsistencies in our map.”

  “So?”

  “Certain areas have gone dark to us. Someone is siphoning away our rightful pain.” The Shadow gestured toward the few thin plateaus of black. “We cannot point to a simple area and say this represents a certain region above without aid. And even then, when many things are happening, triangulation can become difficult.”

  “Is it possible that everyone in those places are just happy?” I couldn’t think of any place in the County where that would actually happen, but who knew?

  “It is highly unlikely. We feed off happiness too—it just never lasts as long as pain.”

  “Great.” I pursed my lips. “So you currently have a lack of information? From somewhere above?” I asked, gesturing grandly up toward the rock ceiling.

  “Yes. Which, given our rights to all free energies within this County’s lines, should be impossible.”

  In its creepy multivoice, I could hear a thousand different kinds of frustration.

  “So everyone inside these five areas is either dead or—”

  “Blocked from us, in breach of our contract with the Consortium. And we do not know where the perpetrators physically are. We cannot sense the absence of something.” The Shadow multivoice narrowed down to one distinct voice that was somehow worse than all the rest. “We have an ancient contract. We cannot be denied,” it hissed.

  I did not ever want to meet that voice in a dark alley. “But what can I do? I’m only me.”

  “Rest assured we have other pieces of meat performing surveillance,” the Shadow’s other voices returned. “We have learned, however, that having minions capable of independent thought is sometimes useful too.”

  I snorted.

  “Do you have something that you can keep on you at all times?” the Shadow continued, beginning to swirl near.

  I looked down at myself. I took everything off for work—no earrings or necklaces, and I’d never worn any rings. “This is it,” I said, holding up my badge, which still held a faint orange glow of its own.

  “Give it here.”

  I unlooped the lanyard from around my neck and handed it over carefully, so as not to touch the Shadow. My badge already had some qualities imbued by Y4’s mysterious nursing office, prior to being assigned to me. My employee number was only on the back with label tape, and my name was just written on the front. It didn’t even have my photo on it.

&
nbsp; The creature took my badge and enveloped it entirely into its black, lanyard and all. Then it extruded my badge again through the other side, and passed it back toward me. I grabbed it as carefully as I’d handed it over.

  “If you wear this, we will see through your eyes,” the Shadow said, as I looped the lanyard around my neck again. “Skin contact is best.”

  “I bet.” I left the badge on the outside of my scrubs. Behind me, the elevator doors made their opening ding.

  “Never take it off,” the Shadow continued.

  “Fine.” The elevator’s light outlined the Shadow like an eclipse. It melted into the ground, making a minature tsunami on the floor.

  I couldn’t wait to leave—and I also remembered my lawyer appointment that I was now becoming late for. Surviving just today wasn’t enough, not when there was the tribunal in three days. “How will you let me know when you’ve found her?”

  “When we know, you will know as well.”

  The Shadow was gone, so I addressed the ground. “And when do I start looking for you?”

  “Now.” Its voice was a faint echo, the rind of a distant, aged fear.

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I—” I began, but I closed my mouth. Whatever. I began shuffling my way back toward the elevator, watching the patterns on the floor ripple as I did so. Did I have any control over the pains of the outside world from here? I hoped not. I took three big steps and made it into the elevator, never so happy to smell were piss in my entire life. As the doors began to close, I thought of one more question I had to ask.

  “Hey!” I shouted, cupping my hand against one door to keep it open. This time it held. “Why didn’t you erase Shawn’s memory all the way? That night in pediatrics, with the dragon?”

  “And miss a chance to feed on all of his delicious subsequent fear?” asked the Shadows’ voice, in return.

  I couldn’t see the creature out there anymore—but I could hear its refracted and reflected mirth, resonating up from whatever fragments of humanity it currently had hold of. I stepped back, revolted, and let the doors slide shut in front of me.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The elevator rose the requisite forty seconds and then released me into the hallway that it joined. I walked quickly, down the hall and up the stairs, until I reached a room with windows. Dawn, even murky cloud-covered dawn, had never looked so good. But sunlight—shit. I glanced at my watch and sprinted for my car.

  Traffic was light driving uptown. People from uptown drove downtown to work, or took trains, or had drivers drop them off. People from downtown didn’t go up so much, unless they were washing other people’s dishes, or mowing lawns—but there wasn’t so much mowing now, in winter.

  I stopped at the address the lawyer had given me, a small business park where all the building’s windows were covered in heavily tinted glass. I parked in a spot near a double-parked Jag and gave serious thought to keying his car on principle, before going up to the set of equally tinted glass doors.

  I double-checked the address I’d written down, noted that I was thirty minutes late, and tried the door.

  It was locked.

  “Hello?” I pushed and pulled the simple loop of steel, not so much as rattling the door in its daylight-proof frame. I beat it with the palm of my hand. “Hello?”

  Nothing. I looked at my reflection—a little blurry from where my hand had left a smudge print. My ponytail was spiky, there were circles beneath both eyes, and I still had more than just a whiff of were piss about me. Not that I could see that in my reflection, but I could maybe understand why a place like this was also not a place for me.

  But on the phone he’d said he’d help. “Come on!” I kicked the bottom of the door with the toe of my shoe.

  As this felt particularly satisfying, I was preparing to do it again, when—the door opened inward, slowly. I quickly made to stand on my own two feet and look innocent of any crimes.

  “We feared you were not coming, Miss Spence,” said a sensuous female voice.

  “I got held up at work. I’m sorry,” I told the darkness in front of me.

  As the door’s gap widened, I took a step inside. I could see who was holding the door now, and she was beautiful.

  I didn’t excel at being a girl. I could fake it for a night out—I could buy the right clothes, strap up the right shoes, and put on a good game. But it’d always be just that—a game, one that I was fully aware of playing. A façade that was fun to wear, but which would eventually flake. If a guy spent long enough with me, by which I meant maybe forty-eight hours, he’d eventually see frayed jeans, sweatshirts, ratty tennis shoes, and probably one of Minnie’s hairballs dried and forgotten behind the couch. Not even my cat could be counted upon to help create my allure.

  But this woman in front of me—she didn’t have to pretend. She’d go to sleep wearing makeup and wake up with it precisely, sexily smudged the next day. Skirts that would be too tight or short on me would fit her perfectly, pertly, and if they were snatched up off the floor after a night out, they would possess wrinkles that were totally in or ahead of style. Her hair would look beautiful in all of its stages, from shower-clean to four-day bedhead, locks merely growing more defined and exotically chunky as time passed, making people on the train—should she ever deign to ride it—bold enough to ask her what styling products she preferred.

  Her lips were crimson, naturally so, and her waist-length hair was the color of deep, dark, arterial blood, a blue-red entirely unnatural and entirely unfair.

  And as I took all of her in, feeling ashamed for the state in which I’d presented myself, I realized with a start that I’d seen her before. On the train, no less. All of her, except for the part she’d been hiding with watches.

  “You’re the girl from the watch ad,” I blurted.

  A faint smile set her lips aflame and made her glorious cheekbones rise. “You’re familiar with my work?”

  “I’ve seen it before. Them before. The watches.” I pointed to my own empty wrist. I didn’t tell her that the last train I’d ridden in had had a huge cock painted near her face. Maybe not being a fashion model did have some advantages.

  Her smile tightened in a way that said she was used to people acting dumb around her, myself included. “Please come in.”

  She led me down a short corridor, and I was still staring. I supposed it was rude of me, but it’s not every day you have someone semifamous opening a door for you. I knew some vampires had a look-away power that they used around humans—maybe this was the reverse of that, where my eyes were glued. I glanced at my badge to see if it would show me anything. She paused and opened up a door.

  “Please go sit down,” she said.

  This new room had no windows, all of the glass outside obviously just for show. The majority of it was decorated in blacks and grays that I could barely differentiate in the low lighting. Now that my eyes had adjusted I could see an elegant-looking man with gray hair and long sideburns. He’d been changed when he was old, elderly, even, looking frail inside a suit the same color as his chair’s upholstery, sitting across an expansive dark wood desk. “We do prefer the night, Miss Spence,” he said, and gestured to a chair across from him.

  I walked over and sat down. “I’m sorry. Work.”

  “This time, I’ll forgive you. But it does not do to keep those who do you favors waiting.”

  I nodded, and glanced over to my left. The model woman sat behind him on a plush leather couch, legs crossed, a lip of skirt pulled tight across her perfect knee. “Are you the man I spoke with?” I asked.

  “The same. Not a man, though. But you should know that.” His thin lips pulled into an amused smile, and he stared at me. Through me. My badge glimmered in the room’s eerie twilight.

  I put my hand around my badge. His look—it was like Gaius, the vampire boy-child I’d seen, on that other patient’s transfusion night. “Please stop.”

  The man shrugged, and my badge went dim. “I just wanted to see what prot
ections your badge afforded you.”

  “Apparently not hearing you in my head, or vice versa, is one of them.” I let my badge drop, and kept my best game face on.

  “Again, we are the ones doing you favors here, Miss Spence,” he said, regarding me casually with half-lidded eyes.

  “Vampires never do anything for free.”

  “And yet you saved one, not long ago. Risked your life for her, you told me, on the phone.”

  “Yes. But that hasn’t worked out well for me so far.” I scooted to the edge of the chair. Its plush seat and high armrests threatened to envelop me. “So how can I help you help me?”

  He laughed, and behind him, the glorious woman smiled. “All right, Miss Spence. I’m sure you are tired, and your occupation requires a certain forthrightness.”

  He stood. “My name is Geoffrey Weatherton, Esquire. Before I became a vampire, I was a lawyer, and I am still one now. It runs in my blood, you could say.” His lips pulled wide at his joke, revealing the fanged teeth that would, once revealed outside of this room and on any day but Halloween, give him away.

  “You said that you spoke with her, yes? The girl?” he continued.

  “Anna.”

  “Before she was kidnapped—and she promised to come to your trial?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Then I’ll take your case.” He opened up a folder in front of him—I hadn’t noticed it before, black leather against the mahogany wood. “I just need your signature is all.”

  I leaned forward and took the papers he was offering me. “Want to explain this while I read?”

  “I’m offering to take your case in exchange for your bloodright. Which would indebt you and any of your children into perpetuity to me and my Throne. Your bloodline would be our donors under permanent retainer.”

  I was relieved to find that the pages I held were computer printouts, not handwritten calligraphy on vellum. It made it feel slightly less like a devil’s deal.

  “Which Throne do you belong to?” I asked, looking at the papers in my hands.

  “The Rose Throne. We have a vested interest in humanity.”