Cassie Alexander - Bloodshifted

“It’d be easier to show you on the road. Assuming you want to come.”

I hesitated. I should be volunteering to help Natasha immediately. The sooner I figured out what she was up to, the sooner I could report her to the Consortium. It was another possible way out of here: calling the group that seemed to loosely govern supernatural creatures down on her and Raven’s heads. Unfortunately, the only time I’d met a representative from them they hadn’t handed me a business card.

“She doesn’t have any work for you yet—she’s out of human-shaped lab mice,” Jackson said. “And it does involve leaving here for about an hour in a car.”

At the thought of getting outside and being able to ask Jackson questions in the car safely, like just what Natasha was testing, I was sold. “Let’s roll.”

Jackson led me through another warren of hallways until we reached a point where the walls widened and our tunnel was intersected by another one—and a prone person’s leg was visible on the far side, as if whomever the leg had belonged to had fainted dead away. I looked at Jackson, whose demeanor said that this was normal for him, and then ran ahead.

“Are you okay?” The leg belonged to a man, a boy really, some pale club kid—made paler by blood loss. “Sir? Can you hear me?” I felt for a pulse, and it was there, but weak and slow. I shook him hard. “Hey!”

Jackson put restraining hands on the boy’s chest. “Don’t wake him up—it’s not good for him, or us. He doesn’t want to remember this, and it would only make our job harder.” He easily picked the man up and hoisted him over his shoulder.

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think happened? Raven gave you a huge amount of blood the other night. He had to get it back from somewhere—or someone.” Jackson shrugged and the man jiggled. “He’s lucky to be alive—it’s not as powerful for them when they don’t kill the victim. Something about eating the spark of life fills them up faster.”

“Psychophagy.” Once upon a time, a vampire had wanted to eat me.

Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “Is that what it’s called?”

“Yeah.” It was hard standing beside him when I ought to be calling 911 and starting warm IV fluids on the boy.

“Huh.” Jackson turned to indicate where we were standing. “This is the crossroads.” He pointed down two of the tunnels. “Those ones we don’t go down. They belong to our Masters, and if you snoop you’ll be killed on sight. And that one”—he pointed to a third—“is where Natasha’s lab is.”

I reached out for the dangling boy’s hand, digging my fingers in for a pulse. “He needs medical attention—he’s only barely alive—”

“I know. Let’s get to the car,” he said, and started going back the way we’d come.

Tunnels intersected, forming a map in my mind. I definitely knew how to get up to the club now—and how to get out to the garage. Jackson flipped open a metal box on one wall, revealing a wall of key hooks like what you’d find at a valet station. It was open—of course it was. The only person here who wanted to leave was me.

We walked down a row of cars until we reached a Honda Civic. “I don’t get to drive the fancy ones. Wouldn’t want to, either, with him on board.” He clicked the doors open and settled the boy into the back. I crawled in through the opposite door to keep an eye on him. Jackson gave me a look, but closed the door and settled into the driver’s seat.

“So it’s like this all the time?” I asked, lips pursed into a frown.

“Yeah. Rex—the other male vampire—picks out a few candidates and dopes them up for himself and the others. GHB, MDMA, coke, whatever suits their moods. Do they want an easy meal? To fuck or to fight? Even without the drugs, they’ve got their own powers, the mind-control thing they can all do, and I don’t have you tell you that they’re strong.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to give him an out, for making something so awful sound so commonplace.

“Sorry if I sound clinical,” Jackson said, after a long silence, looking back in the rearview mirror at both of us. “I realize this is your first time with it—but this sort of shit is my every night. Most times their victims are convinced, the way vampires are good at convincing people, that they were lucky to be chosen and that they had an amazing time. They got picked to go to Heaven and drank top-shelf drinks and danced with beautiful girls, and they got a little overdone. Sometimes there’s sex, even willingly, and sometimes there’s not. And sometimes I get to put on a plastic apron and cut corpses up with chain saws and put body parts into buckets of lye.”

“So where are we going now?” If he said we were going to a chain-saw-and-lye-atorium, I would have to jump him.

But then what? Wreck the car and fight out by the roadside? If it were only me I could risk that—I wouldn’t think twice. But not with you here, baby. I looked down at the slender cool wrist in my hand.

This boy beside me had been someone’s baby once, too.

“Relax. We’re getting him somewhere safe. And then we’ll call him in. Between the drugs and the narcotics in vampire saliva, he won’t remember what happened to him enough to explain it to the police.” He took a right-hand turn. “You don’t know how lonely this town is, Edie. And Rex has a way of picking out people who just got here—with no connections, no friends, no past.”

“And sometimes no future,” I said.

“I don’t kill them, I just dispose of the bodies.”

“And that makes it better somehow?”

He took his eyes off the road to look at the rearview mirror again. “What do you think you are now? What do you think you’ll grow up to be?”

My lips thinned into a line. I hadn’t gotten a choice. Natasha’s dad had taken that away.

Jackson pulled over to a desolate side road in a bad neighborhood and put the car into PARK. I opened up the backseat door and got out, and he took the man out, laying him carefully on the side of the road. He flipped back a corner of the man’s shirt. “See? One bite’s self-sealing. There’s no reason for anyone to find it. And they’ll test what little blood he has left and find out that he went out and got drugged, only he won’t remember where he was going.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I listened to him report hearing a gunshot and seeing someone fall by the side of the road, sounding like a gruffly concerned bystander too nervous to get out and check on his own, and I waited until he’d hung up to speak.

“You do this every night?”

“No—most of the people go home happy with strange hangovers they can’t quite explain, and feel strangely exhausted the next day. They stumble out of the Catacombs on their own two feet—some of them even come back the next night. But our Masters live on blood, and it’s either them, or donors—which we have precious few of right now, thanks to Natasha—or us.”

He got back into the car, and I took the seat beside him this time. He kept speaking while he disassembled the cell phone. “I doubt they’ll be here soon, but the system works. He’s young, and if he’s managed to hold on this long, he’ll make it a few more hours.” I was surprised when he turned the ignition key and slid the car into drive.

“Aren’t we staying here? To make sure he’s safe?”

“Can’t be seen.”

“But—”

“Edie, no matter your relationship with the Beast, you’re a good person, I can tell.” He pulled out and hit the gas. “I really like you. But in the Catacombs, having a heart is an expense you can’t afford.” When we hit the highway, he rolled down the window and flicked out the phone’s sim card onto the asphalt like so much cigarette ash.