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My eyes went wide. It was him—Asher—wearing someone else’s form. I didn’t dare say his name, because if I did I would tackle him and cry. He stepped closer to me. “Did you honestly think I got back on some plane?”
I shook my head. “I hoped you had, though. You don’t know how dangerous it is here—”
“All the more reason I should stay.”
“If something happened to you, though—” I cast another nervous look around before turning back to him. “I couldn’t do this without you.” Where this was the next thirty minutes, or thirty years.
“I’m going to be fine. It’s you that I’m worried about.”
Says the shapeshifter who came into a vampire enclave, unarmed. After watching Raven dispatch Rex—I shook my head to dispel the thought.
“What do you need this for?” he asked, handing the lighter over. I took it from him, fingers thrilling at the slight touch.
“To go places I shouldn’t. And also maybe set things on fire.”
His lips pursed. “And you’re worried about me?”
“Asher.” I lowered my voice so that only he could hear. “It’s bad. They’ve come up with some way to speed up the changing process, to turn someone overnight.” I saw the look on his face and went on. “Don’t tell me it’s impossible—I saw it happen with my own two eyes.”
His face turned grim. “That changes things.”
“I know.” As desperately as I wanted to be saved by him right now, this very instant, Natasha’s experiment trumped everything else. “I have to get back and figure out how so we can stop it.”
“Don’t do anything foolish,” he warned, his voice low.
“I’ll be as careful as I can,” I said, taking a step back, even though I wanted to throw my arms around him and never let him go.
“You’d better be. We’re coming for you.”
“I know.” I bit my lips together so I wouldn’t say anything more, and then turned around quickly and counted to ten. When I looked back after that, he was gone. The only thing I had to prove he’d ever been there was the lighter in my hand. I pushed it into the cleavage Estrella’s bra gave me, and scooped the bar glasses back up.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A girl was puking into a bush outside the entrance to Hell and I stopped to help her to the bathroom—it gave me the perfect excuse for why glass retrieval was taking so long.
By the time I did make it back to Hell’s bar to drop off its corresponding glasses, Estrella had noticed my absence. “Where’ve you been?” she asked, sniffing the air before stepping away.
“Someone puked. I had to clean it up.” It was hard not to grin at her displeasure. Your dad’s coming for us, baby.
She was still frowning, but I knew there was no way for her to monitor all three floors, much less their bathrooms. And smelling of puke was better than smelling of lighter fluid.
The rest of the night it was easy to stay busy. I worked without complaint through closing, and helped check the bathrooms for drunks and herd the last few of them out the door.
“Good job tonight,” Jackson said after paying the last of the DJs out.
“Thanks, boss,” I said with more than a little sarcasm.
He snorted. “Go change, and we’ll get to vacuuming.”
Nice to see that the industry standard for cleaning up vampire dust hadn’t changed while I’d been trying to have a normal life.
I’d hardly seen Celine all night, she’d been so busy celebrating her “birthday” upstairs. She’d beaten me back to the room, though, since as soon as the bar closed all of her chores were done.
She’d showered and changed into something frilly, and was blow-drying her hair in front of her mirror. She hardly noticed me when I came in, and I changed quickly, middle-school-locker-room-style, not showing any skin. I managed to shift the lighter from my cleavage to the pocket of the rompers without her seeing it in her vanity.
Celine finished with the blow dryer, set it down, and opened up a makeup bag. She touched a roller ball of perfume to the inside of her wrists. It was such a subtle scent that I could hardly smell it.
“Why’re you doing that?” The club was closed. Who cared anymore?
Celine looked back in the mirror at me. “So I don’t smell like you.”
“Sorry. I got puked on. And now I have to go clean up dust.” I could see myself in her mirror now—after a night of hustling in the club I looked bedraggled.
She set the perfume down and pulled out lipstick instead. “He’s never going to want you, looking like that.” She dabbed a fingertip against the red, and then patted it against her own lips, giving them a calculated natural flush.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re not just interested in blood. They’re interested in life—what goes with the blood when they drink it, the life, the soul, the fragile part of you that wants to stay alive. That’s what they like—and it’s something only humans can give them.” She smeared the same color from her fingers on her cheeks, livening herself up. “It’s easy for us to forget that sometimes. We try to be too much like them, when that’s not really what they want.”
I bit my lips in thought. “Thanks.” Baby, I’d say we should always try to be uninteresting to vampires, but I’m afraid that it’s too late. “I’ll try to be quiet when I get back.”
She waved me off, and I headed for the door.
* *
*
Jackson was waiting for me in Natasha’s lab, where everything was just as we’d left it. They’d always wanted us to wear masks on Y4 when we were dealing with ash, but I hadn’t seen any when I’d scouted the drawers earlier, which pissed me off. I was a daytimer now, true, but I didn’t want particulate vampire crap in my lungs. I’d be really sad if I came down with mesothelioma later, and I didn’t want to think about what it could do to my child.
Jackson had brought a vacuum cleaner with a long attachment, and I used paper towels and cleaning solution to start cleaning off the loose wire leads for the EEG and the ECG. Because each of the pad’s sticky surfaces were completely bonded to vampire dust, there was none of that tape-sticking-to-fingertips-or-gloves action you got at the hospital. I put as many as I thought I could get away with in my pocket. Between them and the lighter, I could make a rudimentary bomb. If the Shadows could find the prisoner and his silver grate, I might actually be able to set him free.
“Jackson,” I began when he’d turned the vacuum cleaner off, hoping talking would distract him from my last palmed handful of stickers. “Celine told me something just now.”
“I’m sure it was profound.” He was scrubbing at the tabletop angrily.
It sort of had been. “About vampires being more interested in life than blood.”
He paused, mid-arc. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Is life blood? Is blood life? Where’s the line?” Dren had once wanted to murder me for my soul. Was that the same sort of thing?
“I couldn’t say.”
“Do vampires have souls? Or lives, really? As daytimers, do we?” I didn’t ask what I really wanted to know—if I was losing my soul because of vampire blood, what did it mean for my baby? I wouldn’t have ever believed in a soul if vampires hadn’t once threatened to take it from me.
“I don’t know, Edie.” Jackson sounded exasperated, and started scrubbing again. “I feel alive. Do you?”
“So far.” Alive, but not the same as I had been before I’d gotten Raven’s blood. I’d never been violent before—or been in helpless thrall.
