Nightshifted

“Are you done yet?” she asked, as I zipped myself up in my remaining winter clothes.

All the ways this was a bad idea were like an echoing Greek chorus in my mind. I’ll die, she’ll die, we’ll all die—I shook my head to clear it. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The main commuter rush home had finished, but there were still people waiting for the southbound train at the station. When it arrived and the doors opened, I walked in and Anna followed hesitantly—did the rules of invitations apply to public transportation?—and when she was done we sat together on a bench.

She stared around at the train itself, from the gum stains on the floor to the maps with multicolored tangles near the ceilings. Her gaze lingered on a poster featuring a nearly naked woman selling watches, with one hand cast out protectively, and her entire other arm covered in watches across her chest. Anna touched this image like she expected the hair to be hair, the skin to be skin, and the schnozberries to be schnozberries. I watched her, while everyone else studiously ignored her in the way only other commuters can, before she came to sit beside me again.

“Was Mr. November your uncle?” I asked. She glanced up at me, her eyes still shaded by the hood.

“His name was Yuri.” She went back to looking resolutely at the seat ahead of us.

I fully expected that to be the end of our conversation, but then she continued in her lisping accent. “We were a family of Dnevnoi, the loyal ones. As is our custom, the first child, when it was time, was pledged to our Throne. They would drink the blood, and become one of the Zverskiye. The second child was sacrificed to the Tyeni.” She closed her eyes. “I was the first child. Koschei was the second.”

Silence passed between us as the train stopped and people milled about. When it left the station, she continued.

“My parents wanted differently for us. When the revolution began, they thought we were both saved—factions in the Zverskiye were fighting as brutally as the Socialists and the Marxists were for control. In the confusion, they sent us off with Uncle Yuri to the New World to escape our respective fates.” She crossed her arms over her chest, as though she was fighting off a chill.

“When we arrived it did not take long for them to find us. In America, there were no factions, only Zver. And for them to let any Dnevnoi escape, well.…” Her voice drifted off.

We were two stops from where we needed to get off, and I wanted to know the ending. “Then what?”

“Then we were captured, separated, and I was fed to the Tyeni regardless.”

“But—” I’d seen most of her while helping her change. She had all her limbs, fingers, toes. Unless they’d taken a lung or a kidney, I wasn’t sure what she’d lost.

“Not all feeding requires teeth. And not all bites leave scars,” she said cryptically.

“What does that even mean?” I asked her.

“I would prefer not to talk about it.”

The train shuddered to a stop and a man got onto the train and walked down the aisle to purposefully sit across from us. He looked both of us over and leered. Anna hissed at him, under her breath, and he suddenly decided that seats nearer the other exit were better for him instead.

“How did you do that?” I asked her.

“Easily,” she said, and no more.

* * *

The train released us into the station and we walked up to face the cold evening outside.

We waddled down the street together toward the complex where Mr. November had lived. “What was his full name?” I asked. It might help when talking to the landlady again, assuming he’d used it.

“Yuri Arsov,” she said, trundling along beside me. The clothing had muted her feline grace, but she was still scanning back and forth across the street inside the confines of her hood.

Slow giant flakes fell from the sky. Some other time, some other place, the girl who walked beside me might have played outside of czarist mansions, throwing snowballs at daytimer children beneath the safety of the night.

We reached the complex and I rang the bell. Explaining our reasoning to the landlady this time around would be a treat, unless Anna could do that hissy thing at her.

I rang again. There was no response.

“She’s very old,” I apologized. I tried the door and it was open. It dawned on me— “Anna, I don’t think this is safe.”

“Where was he?” she asked, looking up at me. Her eyes were like burning coals inside the shadow of the hood. “Which floor? Which room?”

For a second she stared at me harder—through me, almost—and then she was gone, bolting up the stairs, faster than I could possibly follow.

I chased up after her. “Anna? Anna—wait!” Had she read my mind? Idiotically, I’d left my badge, with whatever protective qualities it possessed, at home.

When I reached the topmost floor, Mr. November’s door was open, and Anna already inside.

“I knew I’d remember his smell.”

I shut his door behind me. She was in his hall closet, standing on his sleeping bag, her face buried in his shirts. Then she began yanking them down one by one, before handing them to me. “Take these.”

“What the—” I began. She stalked down the hall into the bedroom without me. “Anna, no—”

In Mr. November’s bedroom, the girls were still waiting for us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I’d given up on asking a lot of questions since my time as a nurse on Y4: Where do vampires come from? What happens to a werewolf’s clothing? Why are some zombies seemingly Haitian, and others typical movie-style ghouls?

But certain things I’d never give up on wondering about. They were the things that I knew if I stopped thinking on them it’d mean I was finally dead inside, that working with patients on Y4 had, one way or another, finally drained me dry.

The depths of man’s inhumanity to other men—or women, or children, or yes, even vampires to other vampires—was one of these topics. It was illustrated on the walls here, to a horrifying extent. If I ever saw things like these and managed to be quiet inside—it would mean County had won.

Anna stalked around the room, barely glancing at the walls. She kicked over the files, spilling out sheaves of photographs upon the floor, walking across them without looking down. Finally, she returned to me.

“Leave so I may burn this place.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Burn it!” she said.

“You can’t—there are other people living in this building.”

“Burn it all down to the ground!” she shouted. “Let their blood be a sacrifice to Yuri’s memory!”

I’d only sworn her to my personal safety—I realized now I should have expanded her promise to cover all of the inhabitants inside County lines. What exactly was she? In freeing her, what had I inadvertently set loose?

“Anna, please—” I reached for her shoulder before she could do anything stupid. She whirled beneath me and held me in place with those emberlike eyes. Flames leaped inside my mind, hot and high. “Stop it, Anna.”

She didn’t. The heat increased. And instead of it making me want to run away, like a deer from a forest fire, she wanted me to turn toward it, to go closer. Where was gasoline? Where were matches? This place would be so much better if it were cauterized entirely, ablated like a cancerous spot. Surely this place above all places needed to be excised—and I was a nurse, I knew all about excisions. The flames glittered in my mind like an oncoming migraine, as her will sledgehammered through my brain.

“Stop it!” I clutched my hands to my head, dropping the shirts in a pile. “Stop it right now! You promised!”

The urge to burn things subsided, but didn’t quiet entirely. “Look—we’ll tell the police about things. And then they’ll handle it. There’s good evidence here—they can make other arrests.”

She kicked a stack of photos, sending them fluttering through the air. “They can arrest the servants? And full vampires? What good can your human courts do, when they did not even save me?” she sputtered. She was breathing hard. I didn’t think vampires needed to breathe. But if her huffing and puffing could have blown all the girls down, it would have. She whirled around, with her arms held up, addressing the room at large.

“Why—why did he save them, and not me?” she howled, pointing at the walls. And then she fell to all fours in the middle of the room, creasing the photos there with her knees and fisted hands. All the other lost little girls stared down at her, at the last little girl found.

I knelt beside her. “He was trying to, Anna. You were on his mind—he said your name with his dying breath.”

She grabbed one of the shirts I held and savagely rubbed her eyes with the sleeve. “It should have been him to find me! Not you—him!”

“I know.” I reached out a hand—if she’d been any other human in the world, I would have hugged her just then, but I was scared to. But then she sobbed, a gut-wrenching sound. I’d made noises like that before; I knew what they felt like, what they meant, from the bottom of my heart. I dropped the shirts and wrapped my arms around her before I could talk myself out of it.

She went stiff and quiet, and just when I thought I’d horribly overstepped myself and ruined everything—she collapsed against me and cried, deep and hard, squeezing me tight. I was glad for each and every layer I’d put on under my coat and I prayed for my ribs to hold. I hugged her back until she released me, rocking back and turning away from me to blot at her eyes again with Yuri’s sleeves.

“You are a foolish human. A greater fool than any I have met before. Yuri would have approved of you.” She unzipped her jacket and stuffed several of Yuri’s shirts into it. Then she wiped her nose with the back of one hand, and picked up the final shirt, the one she’d cried upon, and held it out to me. “I will help you.”

I took the shirt as though I was shaking her hand. “Thank you.”