Cassie Alexander: Bloodshifted

Jackson had dark hair, a thick mustache, and soulful eyes. He looked like the poster of a young Burt Reynolds from the 1970s that my mom had had on the inside of her closet door when I was a child.

The woman in the room crossed her arms. “He’s not the only one.” She was beautiful, and she would have been without being a daytimer. She had honey-blond hair wrapped up in an expert chignon and was wearing a short black dress, with bright red lipstick—she could have been a girl in the background out of twenty different music videos from the 1980s. “Who the hell are you, and why did Raven save your life?”

That was a very good question. I didn’t know his game yet, but I was sure there was one. He hadn’t saved me out of the goodness of his heart—vampires didn’t have hearts. Except for maybe Anna.

The female daytimer took two quick steps to cross the distance between us and stood in my way. “You know something. Tell us,” she demanded. I had two inches on her, even though she was in her heels, but she probably had decades of being violent on me.

“Because Anna told him to?” It was the only answer I had. I didn’t know if Anna’s name would mean anything to them.

The female daytimer blinked, as if she hadn’t heard me right. “Anna—the Beast? The Ravenous One?”

I nodded slowly. Anna’s last words to me were a warning not to believe all the stories I’d hear about her. “Yeah.”

Jackson let out a low whistle, and the woman looked aghast. It was hard not to feel a little worried—I was an entire continent away from her almost, and these people still knew her by name. By many names, apparently. What exactly had Anna been up to while I’d been out of her life?

“So—you’re what to her, then?” The woman’s head tilted, showing me the angle of her jaw.

This, I was smarter about sharing. “I don’t know.”

“You’re a shitty liar, Edie,” Jackson said. His tone wasn’t unkind. In fact beneath his mustache he had the beginnings of a grin.

“I’ve been told that before,” I said, giving him a hesitant smile back before looking around the room. “Where are we?”

Jackson answered me. “You’re in the Catacombs. The actual catacombs beneath the Catacombs, because we believe strongly in ironic names.”

“And where is that, precisely?” I asked.

“You mean you don’t know?” the female daytimer said.

“I was wearing a hood when they brought me here.”

“The City of Angels. Los Angeles, California,” Jackson said, drawing it out dramatically the same way that TV announcers on game shows said it, as if just by being here you’d already won a prize. I realized we weren’t all that far from the docks where the Maraschino had taken off less than a week before.

Baby, I so hope Anna got your dad onto a plane.

“It’s a popular nightclub—running it’s an easy way to get fresh blood and money and other things, as our Masters desire,” Jackson continued.

I assumed all the vampires had gone to bed for the day—I had a strange feeling in my gut that the sun was shining now outside. I took another look around the room. I’d had a lot of vampire blood, more recently than either of them—

Jackson shook his head as if he was reading my mind. “No use running. He’d only catch you when he woke up in the evening, and you can’t even imagine what he’d do to you then.”

Because of where I’d worked before, as a nurse for supernatural creatures on Y4 back home in Port Cavell, it actually wasn’t so hard for me. That, plus I’d heard Raven say he technically only needed me to be alive to return to Anna after having my child.

Technically, to have a baby, you didn’t need arms. Or legs.

I inhaled deeply and swallowed. “What do you all do during the daytime?” was the only potentially safe question I could think to ask.

Jackson gestured in a circle to include all of us. “What do we do, is the question you should be asking.”

The woman checked a very expensive watch on her wrist. “I’ve got to get upstairs where there’s reception. One of my girls is going to check in.”

“Celine runs a prostitution ring,” Jackson explained. I tensed before I could hide it.

Her lips pursed and she snorted. “Don’t worry, it’s high-class. By which I mean you wouldn’t last a day.” She turned and stalked out the door Lars had taken, deeper into the building. Jackson jerked his head at her, to indicate that we should follow.

“Lars, the daytimer from earlier, keeps the books and is a dealer,” Jackson explained, holding the door open so we could pass into another tunnel set with more weak lights.

“Of?” I asked, because I honestly hoped it was something like cars, or blackjack.

Jackson chuckled, and it echoed. “Drugs. Have to keep the cattle happy, and it’s easier when they’re high.”

I felt like I’d just walked onto the set of some impossibly strange film. Los Angeles after all. “And what do you do?” I asked him.

Jackson paused at the entrance to a side tunnel and gave me a mocking bow before walking up it. “I’m the handyman. Like my Master. Which is why it’s my job to show you around.”

Despite the fact that I could find my way back, I still felt lost trailing after Jackson. The farther we walked into the catacombs, the more distant the world I’d left felt.

“You’ll learn the lay of the place. We’ve got the run of it during the day,” he explained. “There’s some places you don’t want to go, though—I wouldn’t go exploring solo if I were you.” He stopped and shouted up the hall, “Hey, Celine!”

“What?” her irritated voice echoed back.

“I’m putting Edie in your room.”

“No!”

“No choice. Otherwise she’ll be sleeping in the hall.”

“Put her with Natasha.”

“If I put her with Natasha, she won’t wake up again. She’s with you.”

If Celine was the lesser of two evils, I didn’t want to know the greater one. Was he bunking me with her as punishment for her, or as a kindness to me? I probably wouldn’t know for a while. I wanted to trust him, but I knew that was only because I was scared.

We went down another hall, and then reached an inset door, which he pushed open with one hand.

“This is it. Welcome home,” he said, and stepped in.

Celine’s room was about as big as Asher’s living room, and done in a lot of dated black lacquer and chrome. I suspected she’d been turned into a daytimer sometime in the 1980s, back when this style was in vogue, and it’d frozen her sense of interior design along with the rest of her. A massive vanity stood along one wall, the lights around its edge the only illumination in the room. It was covered in makeup and bottles of perfume, and framed head shots of Celine, a testament to her past. Being a daytimer didn’t completely suspend you in time the way becoming a vampire did, but it came close.

A Nagel painting, or forty, would not have been out of place in here, only it would have been hard to hang since all the walls were black-painted stone. The only thing on the wall was a bell contraption near the door.

“Sorry, she doesn’t have much taste.” Jackson looked out of place against her charmless décor, with his brown hair and leather vest over a black T-shirt. He started pushing a coffee table aside.

“Let me help.” I moved over to pick up the opposite side of the table.

It was a thick wood piece—quality, even if ugly—and I easily hefted it. Almost into my own face. I yelped and nearly dropped it, then caught it in time. Fast. Too fast. I carefully set my end back on the ground, staring at my hands as if they belonged to someone else.