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  “Then I promise to not kill you, your child, or anyone you mark as friend. Just find me as soon as possible.”

  Easier said than done. But if the Shadows had stuck around overnight, maybe they could be convinced, or threatened, into helping me. “I’ll start looking in the haystacks for you tomorrow.”

  A questioning look clouded his face. “There is no hay down here.”

  “It’s called an idiom. You’ve missed out on some things. Let me go back to sleep, okay? I might need the rest.”

  He looked for a moment like he might refuse me, long enough for me to wonder if even vampires could get lonely, and then acquiesced. I slept.

  * * *

  I woke up feeling unrested, but at least no one had tried to kill me during the night. Or morning. Whatever it was right now. I hadn’t felt the moment when the night had changed to dawn, but I had a feeling that Raven was asleep—it was as if a subtle weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I found the remote and clicked on the light and heard Celine complain inside her bed-palace.

  “I’m going to the restroom. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, send reinforcements.”

  Celine snorted. Her foot had pushed a corner of her curtain out of the way, and I could see her face pressed into a pillow, hiding from the light.

  I took the bag of fast food with me, to throw away, or so I could confer with the Shadows in private. The sooner I could set them loose to look for the prisoner, the better.

  I moved the bell and stepped out into the hallway—and found a pile of shirt boxes, with a nice note on top.

  Now you owe me, it said, and beneath that Estrella, with a flourish, as if she were signing an autograph for a fan.

  So that was the female vampire’s name.

  The door opened up behind me and I jumped, afraid Celine was coming after me. She held her ground. “What? You’re not the only one with a bladder,” she protested. Then her eyes flicked to the hip-high boxes of clothes, and she saw the note. Her lips, still the color of last night’s lipstick, puckered as if she’d just licked a lime.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  Celine held her hand up for silence, and then walked around me, hand still outstretched. After that she sauntered on to the bathroom, and I was afraid to follow her.

  * * *

  It was probably impossible to piss Celine off more than her Mistress’s actions already had. I opened up the top box. It had a kilted skirt, pleats ironed neatly, and a folded white top below that. The second box held shoes, for the skirt in the next box—a slinky floor-length skirt with a tight black tube top?

  Each box was as improbable as the next, and many of them came with suggested shoes or items of jewelry. Was she honestly suggesting I should wear any of these? They did look like they were my size, but they were uniformly hideous—and none of them would look good on me a month from now, or a month after that.

  Maybe Natasha would at least give me a lab coat. Hopefully not made out of test subjects’ skin. At that dark thought, I felt queasy for the first time since I’d left the Maraschino and cursed my overactive imagination—then wondered if the safety of Raven’s blood had been breached. It wasn’t only me “wearing” his blood out—it was my wonderfully immune and tenacious half-shapeshifter child too. I paused, trying to find a tickle of morning sickness in myself, not sure if I was hoping it was gone, or back—it would be nice to feel pregnant again, even if it meant throwing up some. Things are going okay in there, right, baby? Nothing in response. But I was only five or six weeks along. I hadn’t had any bleeding or cramps. I’d have to assume the best for now, because I couldn’t afford emotionally to think about anything else.

  I opened up the next box from Estrella, expecting another hideous outfit and finding it. A romper, the sort of thing that I wouldn’t have even worn back when I was thirteen. I prepared to toss it aside, and then thought better and checked. It, unlike all the other options so far, had pockets.

  Outfit acquired.

  I was wearing it by the time Celine came back, but I didn’t dare talk to the Shadows with the chance of her hearing. She took one look at me and snorted before remounting her bed. I was hoping she’d draw the curtains closed and I could turn the light off again, but there was a polite knock at the door and I answered it, knowing no one but Jackson would bother.

  His eyebrows rose, taking in my sartorial choice. “You’re wearing that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well,” he said, surveying the other boxes in the hall, “all right then. I came to get you—Natasha’s up, and she’s already sciencing away.”

  “Thanks.” I was torn. Now there was no way to get to the Shadows safely. Even if I took the fast-food bag to the bathroom, Jackson would be right outside, listening in. Despite the fact that he’d trusted me with his secret, I didn’t want to share them—if they managed to find the man in my dreams, they were my ticket out of here, maybe even before Anna got involved. I looked back into the room behind me. “Hey, Celine, I want to save these fries for later.”

  “I’ll get more—” Jackson said.

  “I like cold ones, and salt.” I gave him an I’m-not-quite-in-control-of-my-hormones smile. He shrugged, and Celine groaned.

  “Fine. Leave me the remote.”

  I turned off the light and tossed it into her bed.

  * * *

  After we’d walked down half the hall he turned toward me. “You realize when you get back, those fries’ll be laced with cyanide?”

  “I’m okay with that.” I wished I’d been able to set the Shadows loose. At least I’d left them in the dark—assuming they were still in the room.

  “So what’s with the boxes?” Jackson asked, leading me back toward the crossroads.

  “Estrella wants to be on my good side.”

  “Like a lamprey eel,” he said with a snort.

  “This is better than spandex.”

  “Not by much.”

  There was an awkward silence between us when I knew what I wanted to ask, but not how to ask it. “How’d the rest of last night go?”

  “Did I find two more test subjects? Yes.”

  I twisted my lips to one side without saying anything.

  “After a while it gets easy. Until people start coming in here and looking at me like you are.” He turned away from me, as if there were something interesting passing by on the gray stone wall. “You do what you have to do to get by. The ends justify the means, and all that.”

  I had a lot of questions for him about how House Grey was “protecting” humanity by having him get people for Natasha to kill, but I knew they’d have to wait. “So all the bodies get lye’d afterward?”

  “Yeah. But there haven’t been any new ones for about a month.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure. The cages are empty, and Natasha keeps needing new people—maybe she’s doing her own cleanup now. There’s more than one key to the lye chamber.” He shrugged.

  “Were all the bodies that you disposed of … intact?”

  He gave me a surprised look. “No. Why?”

  I shrugged. “No reason.” I had a feeling I knew who was now feeding the prisoner, intermittently. The plot thickens, baby. I wondered what had changed with her research during the past month, though.

  We were almost at the crossroads. I knew we wouldn’t be going down the darker path I’d taken last night, and since I still wasn’t sure about the Shadows, my search might be on my own. I didn’t think I could ask for a flashlight, but maybe I could get away with a little less. “Jackson, can I borrow a lighter?”

  His attention was back on me in an instant, perhaps imagining Celine’s bed going up in flames like a pyre. “Why?”

  “I used to smoke,” I lied. “Might as well start again while I’m invulnerable now.”

  “No, you didn’t. Your teeth are too nice. And you don’t need to be going down dark hallways, besides. You have an assignment,” he said with a tone. To spy on Natasha on House Grey’s behalf. R
ight.

  We reached a metal door, and Jackson opened it with one hand.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The doorway led to a short hall, and I could hear the whirring of ventilation ducts. “Negative air pressure?” How’d they manage that down here?

  “Only the best for Raven’s princess,” Jackson said with a nod. He opened up the next door, and the stone floor changed to tile.

  Natasha’s room was a lab. It was twice as big as Celine’s room, and had partitions with shiny fume hoods and brown glass light-proof jars of chemicals. Several machines thrummed—I recognized some of them from biology lab, centrifuges and a spectrometer, but others I couldn’t name. Levered refrigerator doors lined one wall.

  I’d been imagining something medieval-torture-chamber-esque, not white floors and shining metal. Then again, some of the worst atrocities known to man had been done in the name of science—and revenge, if you counted the Maraschino.

  “Natasha! Delivery!” Jackson shouted beside me, then, more quietly, “She doesn’t like it when I wander around in here.”

  “Of what?” Natasha yelled back.

  “A co-scientist!”

  Not hardly. I stuck my hands in my new pockets and waited for her to appear.

  When she rounded the corner she was wearing a lab coat. Her hair was in a high ponytail again, safety goggles perched on top, and her lipstick was a childish shade of fuchsia pink, the only pop of color against the rest of her black. When she saw my outfit, she broke into an amused grin. Rompers were pretty nonthreatening; I’d accidentally made a good choice. She waved her hand in dismissal at Jackson. “I’m done with you now, janitor.”

  “I’m supposed to take her back whole at nightfall,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she agreed, and kept waving.

  Jackson’s face wasn’t as positive, but he left the way we’d come without comment. One of the machines in the room picked up speed, like a washing machine finishing its cycle.

  I hadn’t realized until right then how alone we’d be. The last time I’d been alone with her father he’d brutally dislocated my shoulder. Fear surged inside me at the memory—Nathaniel’d hurt me, he’d hurt Asher, and he’d killed four thousand people, all to rescue her. A tar-black flower blossomed in my heart, a petal for each dark idea of how to make her pay me back for what he’d done—

  She leaned in, startling me from my line of thought. “I said, at least you have closed-toe shoes!” she shouted as though I were deaf.

  I blinked and looked down. I was still wearing my trusty tennis shoes. The ones I’d been through hell and back in. “Yeah.” Reality was back and the darkness was gone. I wanted to keep it that way. I curled my hands into fists, biting my nails into my palms.

  “I’ll order you safety goggles and a lab coat. Try to find some pants, okay? Sometimes we use phenol, and I don’t want you melting spots into your legs. You won’t need them today, I’ve already done all the work with the last sample batch.” She turned and walked away, still talking, assuming I was following after her. The light caught the charm bracelet I’d seen before on her wrist and made it sparkle.

  Natasha paused and looked back at me. “Well? Come!” she said expectantly. I trotted up to her like an obedient dog without thinking. I’d forgotten Raven had told me to do whatever she’d said until that exact moment.

  She watched the surprise on my face and frowned. “I forgot he tied you to me, sorry. I’ll try not to use it, as long as you don’t go crazy, okay? What I’m going to show you next might startle you.”

  It felt weird to have her sympathy after I’d been guilty of such dark thoughts. “Okay,” I said with trepidation.

  She nodded and pushed the door open, revealing what was inside. “Meet test subject sixty-four.”

  I walked into a room that had a prone woman shackled to an autopsy table near one wall. She was naked and covered in wires on a table that had a basin at one end and a drain at the other. She was bound wrist and foot, with lockable leather restraints, and I bet Natasha had the only key.

  It was odd that she was strapped down and still connected by cables to an ECG. All the leads on her chest were hooked to one monitor, showing a series of completely flat lines. There was another monitor beside it, one that I was less familiar with, and leads from her shaved head were connected to it, and I realized it was an EEG machine, for electroencephalography—brain, instead of heart. Its monitor was white and had twenty or so lines, just as flat as the others. An arm from the EEG jutted out, holding a camera. I’d only seen one of these twice before, both times in a hospital setting, on patients who’d had profound brain damage due to hypoxia after heart attacks or strokes. When family members couldn’t believe that their loved ones were blinking just to blink, and wanted to read patterns into the spastic movements of the brain dead, doctors set up EEGs to prove that there was no controlled brain function left.

  I was so used to seeing people with wires on them and over them, it took me a moment to process how profoundly strange all this was: Natasha was monitoring someone who was completely, head and heart, dead.

  I looked back to her, and found her watching me. “So you really are a nurse,” she said. I gave her a questioning look. “You didn’t freak out,” she explained.

  Only on the inside. “What’s going on here?”

  “I’m running some delicate tests,” she said coyly.

  “On people.”

  “I’m not asking for your approval.” She sounded bemused.

  “Good, because you wouldn’t get it.”

  She actually laughed at this. “You’re sassy. It’s refreshing. The others are mostly scared of me.”

  Just like I probably should be. I need to stop thinking with my mouth, baby. I looked at her. She was young, yes, a little too pretty for her own good, yes, but she didn’t look like a serial killer—which was probably test subjects one through sixty-three’s last thought. “What’s the EEG for?”

  “So I know the exact moment when things work. Raven’s right—I haven’t gotten more than four hours of sleep in a row in months. I do need a helper, and I don’t trust the rest of them. I don’t trust you either,” she said with a snort, “but you might actually be competent. Jackson’s just a butcher, you know? And Celine’s too obsessed with being pretty to be smart, and Lars—” She rolled her eyes. “He thinks he’s too good for this because he’s been Raven’s servant longer than I have.”

  I looked to the monitors. There was a blood pressure cuff set up, reading question marks, and a blue oxygenation monitor cable stuck to the woman’s right big toe, reading zero. At least all the alarms were off; otherwise everything that could be beeping a warning, would be. “But she’s dead,” I said.

  “Yeah, she is. That’s the whole point.” Natasha gave me a smug smile. “Ever drawn blood from a dead person?” I shook my head, and she went on. “Of course not. Whatever, I can teach you. It’s not that hard—and it’s not like they’re a moving target.” She handed me gloves and a face shield. I’d learned in the past that if someone ever offered you a face shield, you put it on immediately. But I didn’t think Miss No-Pulse here was going to start spitting. Natasha read the confusion on my face. “It won’t spurt out at you—no heartbeat means no blood pressure. I just don’t want you shedding skin cells and germs into my sample. Lean in and see.”

  I watched her work with the efficiency of someone who had done this sixty-three times before, possibly multiple times per patient. She swiped a cleaning agent over the woman’s chest, and I saw several other tiny holes there in among the leads and cords.

  “I try to go into the same hole, but the heart only has so much blood in it—it doesn’t matter which ventricle you use. You don’t just randomly jab in the torso—even if you do get blood, you’ll get too many other tissues and by-products of decay. If you run out—sometimes Jackson gets lazy and the test subjects are small and their hearts don’t hold that much—you can milk it from a subclavian or the fem, but then you have to squeez
e their leg or arm while you’re pulling the syringe plunger out—that’ll be easier with extra hands, for sure. I tell him not to get women with fake breasts too, but this is LA.”

  By the time she was done talking, she’d pulled out ten ccs of blood. The charms on her bracelet dangled as she held up the syringe. There were only two of them, a heart with a C engraved on it, and ballet shoes. It didn’t match the rest of her hand, holding up a syringe of a dead person’s blood.

  The question I wanted to shout to the heavens was, Why? I assumed we were continuing her father’s illegal research into creating blood substitutes. If so, there might be some value in blood samples, yes, but not in leaving all these leads hooked up—or shackles on. People who’d been poisoned by off-brand fake blood didn’t wake up.

  “I think from here on out, you’ll be doing all the body work. I’ll show you how to prep the subjects, shave the heads, affix the leads—both machines have diagrams on them to show you where the stickers go—”

  “I know where to put ECG leads.” There was probably value in letting her think I was dumb, but I still had some nursing pride. “What I don’t get is why you’re killing people.”

  She looked at the blood in the syringe she held and then at me. “Would you believe me if I told you it was for a greater good?”

  Not in the least. But if I told her that, our conversation would shut down and I wouldn’t discover anything. “I’m listening.” It wasn’t hard to sound realistically reluctant.

  Natasha gestured at the body with the syringe. “You already know what vampire cells do for us. What if we could use them for other things? Like, say, to cure cancer?”

  That struck remarkably close to home, and my mom. To think that once upon a time I’d tried to sign her up for this. With Dren, of all vampires. “But you’re killing people.”

  “Be honest, Edie. If she was here, she probably wasn’t going to amount to anything. I know everyone wants to think their kid’s going to do something remarkable, but how often is that really the case? Your kid excluded, of course. I’m sure yours will be quite the special snowflake.”