Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Read online

  “I hope we didn’t miss anything—” the man said as they sat down.

  “No, they haven’t started talking yet,” Claire informed them.

  A life-jacket-wearing cruise employee did a silly dance to attract our attention. He was joined by two other staff, and they mimed rowing across the stage. Oddly, their levity didn’t make me feel any safer.

  “Have you ever had to do any emergency procedures?” I asked Claire in a whisper.

  She smiled indulgently, and I noticed that for an elderly woman she had very good teeth. “Only once, dear, a long time ago. But everything worked out.”

  Hal leaned in, overhearing. “Don’t worry. This cruise line has a stellar reputation.”

  Asher elbowed me gently. “See? What’d I tell you?”

  I gave him a look. He wasn’t the one dealing with being scared of the ocean and pregnancy and old people listening to us having sex. But—he was dealing with something. Asher could camouflage his emotions more than most people, but I’d learned he had certain tells. The small crease between his eyebrows was one of them. Had he seen someone else he knew here? If so, I didn’t want to think about how he knew them. I was leaning over to ask him what had happened when a person with a megaphone started the safety lecture up front. Asher gave me a pensive look, but shrugged. His problems must not have had anything to do with the integrity of the ship, seeing as he wasn’t herding us toward the life rafts. I figured I should listen first and ask questions later.

  In the “unlikely” event of any problems, we’d meet in this room again, get life jackets handed out to us, and then be guided to the lifeboats in an orderly fashion. The demonstrated life jackets were low-rent affairs that you had to breathe into to inflate. I wondered if the adjustable straps on them would be able to accommodate some of the larger people in the room.

  Our table shook and startled me, but it was just the kids at the far end, playing some sort of hand-tapping tag with each other. As their parents tried to stop them I realized I was the only one at the table even trying to pay attention. Asher’s focus was still divided, the parents were pointing and giving their children stern looks, and Hal and Claire were absorbed in thumbing through a tour book for Hawaii, murmuring suggestions and dog-earing pages. Occasionally Claire would glance up and over at the children, giving them a wide grandmotherly grin.

  In a way, our little table here was the complete circle of human experience. Asher and I, together, maybe having a kid; that other couple with their handsome if fidgety children; and finally Hal and Claire, with matching short gray hair and wrinkles, aging gracefully. If I was pregnant, it would be weird … but we’d be doing what thousands—no, millions—of people did every day. Plunking our little car token around the game board of Life.

  I should probably just relax. About everything. No matter what happened, baby, no baby, everything would be fine. There was no reason for it not to be.

  The safety lecture was wrapping up. Our vacation had begun, and we were going to have a good time. I reached underneath the table to take Asher’s hand, feeling serene—and found his hand balled into a tight fist.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Asher’s hand relaxed and fit easily into mine, but it was too late: The tension I’d felt there relit the fears I’d been trying to smother. I found myself holding my breath as people started filtering out of the room.

  Hal stood and took the brakes off Claire’s wheelchair. “Don’t worry. This is the safest way to travel. See you all at dinner,” she said with a smile, waving as he wheeled her away.

  Voices rose as people chattered about their plans. There were a few high-pitched kid-squeals, coughing, conversations, laughter—normal life. I looked over to Asher as our table cleared.

  “We’re still on vacation, right?”

  “Of course,” he said—but I knew he was lying. We stayed seated, his eyes scanning the crowd. When the room was nearly empty, he rose at some cue I couldn’t read, and I followed his lead.

  This time I paid attention how to get back to our room. The ship had picked up enough speed for me to feel it beneath my feet, engines straining somewhere deep within the hull.

  I waited until the cabin door closed behind me before asking, “What happened out there?”

  He sat down on the bed, and I took a spot across from him, at the desk chair. “I thought I saw an old friend was all.”

  I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, I did. “Which part of that is the lie?” I held up my hands to make air-quotes as I spoke. “The ‘friend,’ the ‘old,’ or the ‘thought’ part?”

  He made a face. “I used to be a better liar.”

  “No, I just used to let you get away with it more,” I said. He snorted then looked away. I did my best not to look pained while I waited for him to share. I knew that the man I loved, the father of my potential child, had not always been a good man—but he was now, and that’s what counted, right? And everything I was imagining while he waited was probably worse than the truth would be. “So come on. ’Fess up.”

  “I’m not entirely sure and I don’t want to worry you over nothing.”

  I’m surprisingly sympathetic to that right now was what I wanted to blurt out, but I managed to smile and shrugged one shoulder in an encouraging way. “Well, tell me who you thought you saw, and we’ll be prepared for the worst together.”

  Asher’s lips twisted, and he gave me a bittersweet smile. “It’d been a while since I’d seen him. I wasn’t sure at first.”

  “But now you are?” I prompted after another pause.

  Asher nodded, slowly at first, and then certain. “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  Which answered the good-past/bad-past question. I didn’t want to give up yet, though. “Even bad guys take vacations,” I said, trying to make light of things.

  “Yeah, they do.” He snorted with irony, and then fell silent again.

  “Hey now.” I moved over to sit beside him on the bed, and shouldered him. “I don’t mean you.”

  Asher sighed and held out both his hands. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he grit his teeth in thought. “You don’t ask many questions about my past, Edie, and I appreciate that.”

  “I don’t need to. I know who you are.” I caught one of his hands in my own, nervous that he wasn’t looking over at me. It wasn’t that I was scared of what he’d say—Asher could take a thousand different forms, but I knew I knew his heart—it was just that hated to see anything cause him pain.

  “The thing is, there was a time, when I was young—when I did stupid things. When I didn’t care about the consequences, or who I hurt.”

  “You mean like every kid, ever.” I knew his prior shapeshifting abilities lent themselves to spying and corporate espionage. And when he’d been working under the assumption that he’d soon be dead or insane—the fate of all shapeshifters eventually—what was the point in having a conscience?

  He shook his head, unwilling to let himself off the hook. “Older than that. Old enough to know better. It’s complicated—” he said, and then there was another long pause.

  “There’s nothing you can say that’s going to scare me away from you.” I nudged him again with my shoulder. “So spit it out.”

  “He hired me to acquire some data for him,” Asher said, still looking at the ground.

  “You mean steal?” I didn’t want him to lie to me—or to feel like he had to anymore.

  Asher sighed. “Technically, yes.”

  “About?” I prompted.

  “Synthetic blood.”

  I almost rolled my eyes. “What’s so bad about that? There’s a huge market for it. Whoever figures it out is going to make a jillion dollars.”

  “But not many research groups are being underwritten by vampires. Or doing drug trials on unwitting human subjects in countries with no patient protection laws.”

  That shut me up. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Asher ag
reed, then sighed again.

  “And he’s here? Like just on board?”

  “Apparently.”

  My brows furrowed in thought. “Did his research succeed? It can’t have, otherwise we’d be knee-deep in vampires and living in caves.”

  “No—I reported him. To the Consortium.” Asher twisted his lips sideways, still looking at the floor. “I reported him after his check cashed. I knew he was evil—I touched him, Edie, I knew who he was, and what he was doing—and I waited a week to make sure his money was good. Plus—” Here Asher’s voice drifted, and he shook his head again. “I didn’t want him to know it was me. It’s not like I had any protection, or a private army.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I don’t know. I checked up on him after that—at first, all the time. I was waiting to see an obituary. When that didn’t happen, I checked less. Honestly, I thought they’d wiped him off the map. But eventually he resurfaced, his name on a few medical patents that were genetically based, back when that was really starting to break out. He must have made millions on some of them.”

  “So the Consortium didn’t do anything to stop him?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t get to ask the Consortium about things like that. You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get in touch with them. They want you to think they’re always paying attention, but they’re not.”

  The Consortium was some sort of loose governing group for paranormal creatures. I’d only ever met one of their members, when it’d briefly taken up home in my old charge nurse to reprimand us after a war.

  Now I was staring at the carpet too. There were a hundred different questions I wanted to ask him, but only one that really mattered now. “Does he know this version of you?”

  This Asher was the one Santa Muerte had given me when she’d saved his life. Sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and lips that quirked up at the corners half a second before he smiled.

  Asher finally turned toward me and gave me a bemused look. “No. No one else knows this me but you, our neighbors back home, and your silly Siamese cat.”

  I gave him a hopeful grin. “She’s cross-eyed. She has no idea what you really look like.” He forced a smile back.

  This wasn’t the first time this had happened. His prior abilities—what I called the strange, in my mind—limited as they now were, still affected us, usually at intervals just long enough apart for me to forget that he had them. He’d change into looking like Hector the Doctor for work, and we’d take separate trains in, and then at work we’d pretend to be coworkers. After the first few illicit-seeming months, it hadn’t really been that hard. The shapeshifting itself wasn’t the strange part—it was all the other things. Instances when he’d made us leave diners after he’d recognized someone back in the kitchen, or him changing banks after a merger. Once he’d gotten out of a speeding ticket by reminding a cop about taking a bribe. As much as, like any girlfriend, I’d wanted to pry into Asher’s past—pasts, even, heavy emphasis on the plural—I hadn’t. Moments like this were why.

  I wished I could open the doors to our room’s balcony, let in the sea air, and let it chase out the strange. Every time I thought I’d gotten used to it, I realized I hadn’t really—I’d just gotten used to hoping the bulk of it was behind us. Sitting beside him, though, I realized there was no way we’d ever completely outrun it. It was who he was, who he’d been. It followed him wherever he went, like a tail. And right now he looked so alone. I squeezed his hand harder.

  “Well, everything’s okay now,” I said, with the same comforting tone I used on patients all the time.

  “You can’t just let me off the hook, Edie.”

  “Why not? It sounds like you’ve been carrying this around long enough.”

  “He’s not the only person I worked for. None of the rest were as bad as he was—but there’s a four-way tie for second place. And you don’t want to know how many people are in the running for third.” He carefully took my hand off his and released it back to me. “As evil as I know he was, what he was working on—with data I gave him—I can’t help but wonder what working with him once makes me.”

  I took his hand back fiercely. “It makes you someone who changed. That’s not a bad thing. I love you.” Suddenly I didn’t want him to tell me anything else about his past. It was behind us, and it could stay there, forever, where it couldn’t hurt us ever again.

  He swallowed and stared down at my hand, covering his. “I know you love me. But sometimes I think back on all the things I’ve done, and I can’t see why.”

  This wasn’t the brash devil-may-care Asher I usually knew. I leaned up and kissed his forehead, where wrinkles were starting to show. “I can’t speak to all those other Ashers. But the one I love saved my life a few times, and he takes care of people who need him. I love him quite a lot.”

  A soft smile took the edge off his serious face. “I love you, Edie.”

  “Not to mention, he brought me on this excellent vacation,” I went on.

  He gave me a wry look. “I thought you weren’t completely sold on the ocean?”

  I elbowed him. “I’m trying to make you feel better. Stop making it hard.”

  He laughed, turning toward me and taking me in his arms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sex was always easy with Asher.

  Being with him had always been the kind of hot trouble that normally only strangers can get into, the fearless kind that makes you demanding and loud, both people fighting to take control, neither stopping until they’d been satisfied.

  And this time was no different. Arms still around me, Asher’s mouth found mine at the same time his hands reached for the button of my jeans.

  Just like that, I was ravenous for him as well. Mouths dueling, I returned his kiss with aggression, as he growled low in his throat.

  My hands yanked off his shirt, reveling in the feel of his skin against mine, soft and warm, rippling over muscles. I ran my hands down his tightly muscled back and down into his jeans, pulling him close. At the feel of my hands, he shuddered and broke our contact, pulling back to free himself from his clothes, and then to pull my clothes off me.

  Returning to me naked, cock erect, he lay down on top of me, forcing his legs between my own. I wrapped my legs around him, trying to urge him farther, desperate for more. But just when I thought he was going to ram inside me, he paused, hot and heavy against me. To prove he could control himself, and that he was in charge of my desire.

  “I hate it when you do that,” I whispered to him.

  “No you don’t,” he whispered back.

  Slowly, he lowered himself so that the smooth underside of his cock ran against me. I shuddered as he began to kiss my breasts and throat. He rubbed himself against me, soft, then hard, but never entering like I wanted him to, instead teasing me, making me wait. I knew if I asked for it I’d get it, he just liked to hear me beg—or make me so hot I couldn’t control myself anymore.

  Suddenly I needed to be in charge. I pushed him back, off me, to one side, rolling him onto his back. He fought me only for a second then went with it, watching me rise up to straddle him, all of us touching, but still separate. Now it was my turn to grind, chastely, against him. He laughed, pleased to be beneath me, his hands tickling up the insides of my thighs.

  “My turn,” I announced, reaching down to set the tip of him inside me. His hips arched and I rose to deny him what he’d been denying me. “Tell me that you’ll always be mine,” I said from above him.

  He stopped playing around, sensing the solemnity of my request. “Of course.”

  “Say it.”

  His hands slid down my back to rest against my buttocks. “I’ll always be yours. Assuming you’ll have me.”

  I grinned down at him, showing teeth. “Oh, I’ll have you all right.” I shifted my hips as I rocked back down, his cock sliding home. He hissed with the sensation, and I let out a low moan.

  After that, there were no more words; we moved as one. I
leaned over him, my breasts against his chest, and his hands on my ass to trap me there, as his cock pulsed up and into me and my hips rocked downward to meet him. We found a rhythm together, one that matched the rocking of the boat and the sound of the waves, sweat soon drenching both of us like the sea spray outside. I took his cock deep inside me, arching my whole body forward until it found that secret place deep within that only this position hit. His hands clenched at my ass, pulling me closer, forcing him in deeper, the skin above his cock grinding into my clit—I knew we were both on the edge of coming, that any second now one of us would be thrown overboard and we’d take the other with us when we went. I fought it, I didn’t want release yet, I wanted us to stay here forever, the head of his cock rubbing that spot inside, making me feel electrified.

  Asher’s breathing was ragged now and I realized I’d been moaning with each of his strokes, trying to hold on and not let the moment go. His eyes met mine, dark, wild.

  “You’re mine,” he said, his voice thick.

  If any other man had ever said that in the entire history of my sexual career I probably would have laughed him out of bed. But right then I wanted to be Asher’s, I wanted him to be right, I wanted it to be true. His motions became exaggerated, sliding all of himself into and out of me. The third time he buried himself inside me, his thick cock rubbing that spot and him grinding against my clit. I screamed, arcing forward against him, as I finally let myself go.

  He rode me through my spasms, my body grabbing him tight. And then it was his turn. His cock rock-hard, his thrusts trying to find the deepest part of me, almost desperately. I watched his face as he suddenly let go, his last thrusts quick and sharp, making one low moan of my name.