Cassie Alexander - Bloodshifted

By which they meant they’d help me as long as I helped them … but if they found their own way back, they’d ditch me without a second thought. Still, it was more than I’d had last night. As far as deals with the devil go, baby—well, at least it’s a devil we know.

There was a knock at the door. “Edie? You still alive?” Jackson’s voice. I dropped the shoe and stood up to shimmy down my skirt, which had become a belt on me the second I’d turned in my sleep. Then I swooped up the hammerhead and makeshift stake, just in case.

“Still breathing,” I said as he pressed the door open and came inside.

“Glad to hear it.” He gave me a genuine smile, then shook his head after looking at my hands. “We’re not allowed to have weapons here.”

I set the hammerhead back onto the post left in the hammer and held the whole thing with one hand. “Look, now it’s back to being just a tool!” I said in my best magician’s-assistant voice.

Jackson snorted. “Points for trying. I figured I could make an exception for you last night, but you can’t walk around with it—I can’t have you killing anyone by accident. Give the stake to me to dispose of.” I handed it over reluctantly. “You can hide the hammerhead somewhere in here for now. No promises it’ll be there when you get back, but it might, if you make it hard enough to find. I’ll wait outside.”

I knew he was probably right outside the door, which given his hearing meant I wasn’t all that private. And the hammer wasn’t the only thing I wanted to ditch—I didn’t like the idea of the Shadows hanging out with me all day. I looked around the room trying to find a place for both things, and my eyes lit on Celine’s mattress.

She was shorter than me—and she wasn’t a princess. I didn’t think she’d feel something if I jammed it into the end of her bed. I pulled up the lip of the fitted black satin sheets and used my unreal strength to shove the hammer head inside, after making a hole. Then I picked up my shoe. “You guys too,” I whispered, shaking it.

For all their blustering, in a lit room they were really at my mercy. I thought I saw something scurry from my shoe to the mattress, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. Maybe they were dividing up again, splitting their chances. I squinted into the depths of the hole I’d made in the mattress, and then into the toe of my shoe, where I didn’t see any abnormal darkness, then I pulled the sheets back down and tucked them into place.

I pulled on my shoes, and rescued my vaguely clean underwear from the corpse of the cot to pull them on too, then went out to join Jackson in the hall.

“What now?”

“Now I finish showing you around and make you useful,” he explained as he started walking.

I remembered Raven’s comment from the prior night. “Will you be teaching me more manners?” I said, half teasing, half not.

“Yeah, I’m a regular finishing school,” Jackson chuckled, leading us around a corner and down a hall. Other tunnels branched off to either side, lit, but led to doors or sharp turns, so I couldn’t see where they finished, although I got the idea that this place was enormous. “Today we’ll just go clean the club, and then we’ll see what Raven has in store for you later.”

I wondered if our tour would conveniently include the prisoners’ cages, so I could say hi to my dream-time friend. Then I realized that if we were up, probably everyone else was too.

“Will Lars be helping us?” I stroked one hand over the other—it was too easy to remember the feel of my knuckles hitting his ribs, the unreal strength I’d had, and the unfamiliar urge to use it on him.

“No. But he’ll be there when Raven convenes us all tonight.” We reached a set of stairs and Jackson headed up. I stood at the bottom, pondering.

“How did I know what to do? When he attacked me, that is.”

Jackson stopped and turned. “The blood told you.”

“What—how?”

“You’re part of the system now. Blah blah death, blah blah life, black and white, yin and yang, epic struggle, entropy. You’ve heard it all before. What it means is that you’re now on the dying side, and you’ll naturally want to kill things.”

“What?” I said, like I hadn’t heard him.

“It’s worse when the blood’s fresh. Don’t worry, it’ll fade in time, unless you get a new transfusion.”

“But I don’t want to kill anything.”

He snorted. “That’s what everyone says in the beginning.”

“No, really, I mean it—” I said, determined to convince him.

“Well, I’ve never met a vampire who could live without death before. But you’re welcome to try to be the first.” He turned around and kept walking up, and I trotted after him. I felt the need to prove myself.

“What would you have done, if you were me?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard your first night. You seem to know the score, so you must have had some dealings with our system before now. And vampires don’t give blood to complete idiots, so—well, I don’t know. Before here I had what you would call a troubled past. Add to that the fact that I have a temper and I’m a man, and we’re more prone to beating each other’s heads in, and I’m older than I look—yeah. I probably would have killed him. And you should have no doubt in your mind that he was out to kill you.”

The chip of rock Lars had taken off the floor with his first blow was a pretty big clue.

“I’m not telling you to sympathize with him, but the day you don’t get enough blood to be able to fight back is usually the day you die.” Jackson inhaled deeply. We’d reached the top of the stairs, and he pulled a large key ring off his belt. “If you and I had to share the same Master, I’m not sure what I would have done in his place. And if you’d been stupid, or complacent, or scared, or naive, well, his problem would have been solved, neatly. But he failed, and you didn’t kill him, so we’ll all have to keep on being one big happy vampire family.”

I frowned. “The last time someone told me that, she died.” And she’d been a daytimer too—Sike. I remembered her cruel smile and her red hair—and the lengths to which she’d gone to rescue Anna and her final sacrifice to save me. I had so much more sympathy for her now that I knew what it was like to be like this. And whatever being a daytimer was, it hadn’t wrung all of the human out of her. I looked back up and found Jackson watching my face.

“Were you close to her?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Not as close as I am now.” I didn’t know what else to say—all the questions I wanted to ask him were too leading. I’d just said I didn’t want to kill anyone, and yet killing Raven was my quickest ticket out of here. I could hardly ask Jackson for help with that, though.

“Stop worrying about hypotheticals,” he said sagely. “The only thing you’ll be killing today is germs in the bathroom with me.”

He unlocked a closet, revealing a panoply of cleaning supplies, and then we carried the tools of our trade through two more locked doors. Locks were fine up here—because they were meant to keep prying people paying to dance out of the real catacombs below. The final door led into a basement, and I was hit by a wall of scent. Smoke, old and new, sweat, sex, fear—I stood in the doorway for a second, overwhelmed, but Jackson walked on in.

He gestured grandly. “May I present Hell. Like so many other things in life, it looks better in the dark.”

The room was huge, with flames painted on the walls, in colors that were garish now but probably looked better when the club’s light show was running. Mirrors curved up and down among the flames so that people could watch refracted images of themselves as they danced. A well-stocked bar stretched the entire length of one wall, two shelves of liquor illuminated by red lights from below.