Cassie Alexander: Bloodshifted

“I was there! He thought you’d died—he was distraught—he told me to tell you something!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “I’ll tell you what it is. Just let me come up.”

The noises on the top of the trailer ceased, and all the daytimers looked at me.

“Edie, no,” Asher said.

I looked back at him. We weren’t the only ones who knew what being in love was like.

I hauled myself up before he could stop me.

Natasha was crouched there, panting with the effort of staying awake. Her face wasn’t her own; it was too small for her head, hiding behind a curtain of bangs. She looked like she’d had too many steroids and then been hit with radiation like the Hulk. Half of her skin was sloughing away, blisters forming and breaking open with tiny puffs of ash. I realized she’d doped herself so hard that she was healing almost as fast as she burned. Her cells had, for a brief moment in time, actually made her immortal. She’d become the cancer that she once feared.

My hand was over my pocket with the silver knife, like I was a gunslinger—but I had something I wanted to tell her first.

“He said if I ever saw you alive again to tell you that he loved you. And he wished everything had gone differently. You were the only thing that ever mattered to him, and all he wanted in this world was to protect you.”

Natasha hunched forward—I thought, to come for me. If she did, she was so close, there was no point in running; she’d catch me before I fell back down the hole. But her whole body was racked by sobs, and the blisters of skin were rising and popping more frequently, like miniature volcanoes, leaving a smoke trail in the wind.

The exhaustion, the sorrow, the bloodlust, and too much vampire blood—everything swirled, and she set a mighty hand down. Her charm bracelet was cutting into it like a string through dough.

“I’m so sorry, Natasha. He’s gone, and there will never be anyone like him again.”

She threw her arms back and her head up and faced the sun. It eroded her faster as the wind of our speed blew her hair back. And she made a mournful sound. I recognized it for what it was, the sound of true love lost.

The sunlight, now that it had its teeth in her, wouldn’t let go. She was disintegrating before my very eyes. She sobbed and she howled and then she lowered her voice and spoke with her misshapen jaw.

“Tell my dad I love him,” she said.

“I will,” I lied. And the sun finished her off. She exploded into a cloud of dust. Her charm bracelet fell onto the roof of the trailer as the scraps of her clothing did, and I watched it bounce once then fall, glittering to the asphalt below.

I fell to my knees and felt a profound sense of sadness at the waste of her life. Then I crawled back up to the opening of the trailer, and looked down at four separate guns. The daytimers there moved back, let me in, and resealed the hatch.

“What did you say to her?” Lilah asked as my feet touched the ground.

“What any fourteen-year-old girl wants to hear.”

“How did you know?” she pressed.

“Because I was one, once.” I refastened the button over my pocket with the knife. Like Dren had said, silver would be our secret for now. Same for my six test tubes of Raven’s blood.

I’d tell Asher when we were alone, but no one else here needed to know. Raven had said that he’d had spies on Anna, and I knew all I wanted to know about House Grey. No guarantees these other people here were safe.

But for the moment, I was. And Asher was—and our baby. I’d done it.

“Beastkiller indeed,” said the man who’d been manning the sniper rifle.

“Any casualties?” asked Vish on the radio.

“No. We’re fine,” Mr. Galeman answered.

I put a hand across my stomach—and Asher’s met me there. I looked up at him, and he was furious, but he shook his head instead of fighting with me. “I knew what I was getting into when I started dating you.”

He held my necklace up, a question on his face. He had taken it off Celine, which was a little disgusting, but it’d been mine before she’d stolen it—and I wanted it to be mine again. I turned inside his arms and he knotted the chain at the back of my neck.

“Good,” Vish responded. “Keep your wits about you. It isn’t over yet.”

I realized what she meant. Just because Natasha was finished didn’t mean others wouldn’t try. And attacks would be much more likely in daylight, when our trusty team of vampires was asleep—what with us having the added hassle of keeping away from humans who didn’t know what was going on, and the law. Port Cavell was at least two days away, driving straight through—and Anna would be dead for one day after that.

Plenty of time on the road for anyone with a grudge to start a fight. Or a war.

The shorter chain on the necklace made the stone hit at the V of my throat. I had Asher’s strong hands around me still—and now I was strong, too. I knew what I was capable of. I didn’t have to like it, but I was still alive, and so were the people I loved—and hopefully Anna was going to come back to life.

I wasn’t going to let anyone or anything change that.

No matter what.