Deadshifted

“I’m going with him,” the mother demanded.



It was just as well—she needed stitches, and iodine wouldn’t hurt. “Hey—” I reached out and grabbed the last medic in line. “She’s his mom, and she’s cut her hand.” No need to announce in the hall that her own boy bit her.



It was Marius, the Afrikaans man Asher’d spoken to this morning. His haircut said ex-military, but his face was kind. He nodded curtly. “Come along,” he said to her, and then “Make way! Make way!” to the still-growing crowd outside, with a booming voice.



Together, Asher and I watched them leave, running with the boy down the hall, his mother in tow. The husband stayed behind with his terrified daughter clinging to his leg, her glasses making her wide-set eyes look even bigger than they were. The crowd slowly started to disperse now that the show was over. Asher looked to the man once the medics were out of sight.



“If anything happens to either of you, fever, seizure, dizziness, anything strange—call them immediately. And we’re right next door.” He pointed at our door.



“You think it’s contagious?” the father asked, his face pale.



Asher gave me a dark glance. “I don’t know.”



CHAPTER TWELVE



We were quiet on the short way back to our room, where we performed another elaborate hand washing and showering ritual. When I finished my shower, he was waiting for me outside. “You’re on room arrest.”



I wanted to fight him. Two patients were hardly a data set. And yet—



“He’s behind this somehow.”



From the look in Asher’s eyes, he believed what he was saying completely. While I wasn’t convinced, I didn’t want to disagree. “Okay. But behind what, precisely?”



“I don’t know. Yet.”



“If there is an outbreak of meningitis or whatever this is”—I pointed behind me toward next door—“don’t you think they’ll turn the ship around?”



“Possibly. Or helicopter people off. I don’t know.” He started pacing, and I sat down on the edge of the bed in our last towel.



“Should we warn other people about it?” Not that I had any clue how to even begin warning people without causing a riot on board.



Asher dismissed the thought with a shake of his head. “Everyone with a paper cut would rush downstairs. They’d be swamped before they even got to the real cases, and the crowding would help with transmission.”



“If there even are any more cases.”



“If.” His lips thinned in contemplation.



“If he is behind it, what’s the point? Giving kids seizures is sad and all, but it’s hardly aerosolized bird flu.” I leaned forward, contemplating the worried face of the man I loved. “Is the answer inside you anywhere?”



“No. I’ve spent more time thinking about him and sifting through his memories—” Asher shuddered like someone had walked over his grave, and I wondered if going through other people’s pasts was like putting on dead people’s clothing. “He always thought big and courted danger, but nothing about anything like this. Not back then. I’ll have to go down to the sick bay tomorrow and see, doctor-to-doctor, what’s going on.”



Nurse-to-nurse, I’d been conned onto this boat believing there was a vacation inside. I couldn’t fault Asher’s humanitarian bent, but I wished all of this weren’t happening now. I was hoping everything would turn out to be some sort of dreadful coincidence, even as that seemed less possible with every passing moment or seizing child. I bit my own lip and put a nervous hand on my own belly.



“Things were easier when I could just touch people and get answers,” he said, mostly to himself.



“You miss it, don’t you?” I said, and he startled, like he’d been caught. “You hide it, but—” I shrugged.



“Sorry,” he apologized.



As happy as we both were to be alive after the events of this past summer, there’d been a time afterward when Asher had seemed withdrawn. I’d figured out he was depressed, but I hadn’t wanted to ask why—especially when I thought I already knew, and the answer was something I couldn’t fix.



“It’s okay. You don’t have to hide it—or think you’re hiding it, which you’re not by the way.”



He snorted and stretched his hand out, looking at it as though he’d just been holding something, only he couldn’t precisely remember what it was.



“It feels like I’m missing a part of me. It’s not just like having my wings clipped. It’s like missing an arm. Both arms.” He closed his hand into a fist in the air. “It was everything that I was, and then it was gone.”



“But you’re still you,” I said, smiling hopefully at him.



“Hardly.” He was still staring at his empty fist. “If I was, I wouldn’t be here.”



I stared at him blankly while my heart cracked in two.



If I’d said something half a second faster I could have covered it up. I could have glossed over it, and things would have gone on and been fine and I would have learned my Very Important Lesson about Hope and the Girl Who Shouldn’t Pry.



But the record scratch of silence between us went on too long to be ignored. He looked over at me, at the expression on my face, and then blanched in turn. “Oh, God. And you think you say the wrong things sometimes, Edie—”



“We wouldn’t be a thing if you were still a shapeshifter, would we?” I blurted out before he could apologize. It was too horrible for me to contemplate, and so I hadn’t, this whole time. Which was funny, because part of me had always known the truth.



At least now it wouldn’t be hanging over me anymore like a sword.



Asher inhaled to protest, to give me the easy answer—but we were past that, weren’t we? I looked deep into his eyes, and he let out a long head-shaking sigh. “No.”



I nodded, trying to be both brave and understanding, like a woman watching someone she loves go off to war.



“Shapeshifters aren’t supposed to make friends with humans, much less fall in love with them. We’re like parasites.” He was trying to soften the blow by explaining. “There wasn’t any room for you in my past life. Hell, there wasn’t even any room left inside me.”



And I knew that too. I’d known him back then, back when being what he was almost made him go insane. It’s just that despite the fact that I was a completely nonmagical human, I’d always hoped, in some tiny-twelve-year-old part of my brain, that I’d been the woman to tame the monster. That he’d chosen me because I was special. Not that I’d won his love by default.



I swallowed. The next logical question was Would he give up everything we had here, now, to be a shapeshifter again? But for once I kept my mouth shut and didn’t run toward the spinning knives.



He took my nearer hand in his own and squeezed it until his knuckles were white. “I love you more than anything, Edie. Please, don’t let me have ruined that.”



I swallowed again, and breathed, slowly. “You haven’t. It’s okay. I love you, too.”



“We’re okay?” he asked, his voice tight.



“We’re fine.” I squeezed his hand back, and then took my own away from him. “Let’s just go to sleep. It’s been a long night.”



It was the truth, and a way out of the tar pit we’d both fallen in. “Okay.”



We crawled into bed together, lying side by side. He wrapped his arm around me like he always did, and I snuggled back against him like I always did. Pretending to be fine is half the battle of actually being fine. I was tired, and it had been a long day. I closed my eyes, and waited for sleep.



I’d always wanted to think that love could heal anything. But I realized lying there, eyes closed, listening to Asher breathe, that really love is what happens when you find out that it can’t.



* * *



I wasn’t sure what time it was when I woke in the morning; all I knew was that I wanted to throw up, and apparently I was alone.



“Asher?” I knocked on the second bathroom door before taking my place inside the first one as nausea hit me. Dammit to hell. If someone had ever explained to me to what extent being pregnant would make me intimate with a toilet, and if I’d been wise enough to believe them at the time, I wouldn’t have been on the pill, I’d have been on a freaking IUD. Three IUDs. Twelve. The number rose with each involuntary spasm. My uterus would have been like Christmas Day for copper thieves.



I puked down to bright green bile before I was done, and I wanted to scrub my tongue down with an entire tin of Altoids. I staggered to standing and poked my stomach. “Thanks for nothing, kid, I mean it.”



I rinsed with water and spit without swallowing so I couldn’t trigger anything else. My morning sickness had better resolve before I got home, otherwise I was going to be having middle-of-the-night sickness, and the thought was too awful to comprehend.



I heard the cabin door open and went outside, catching Asher in the hall. “I didn’t want to wake you. Are you okay?” he asked, solicitously—like there wasn’t an N95 mask dangling from his hand.



N95 masks were the highest-grade filters you could get. They were only for serious germs like tuberculosis and meningitis, or weird ones, like H1N1 and SARS. When I’d worked at the hospital I’d been fitted for a new one each year. It’d lived in my locker afterward, a worst-case-scenario reminder every time I opened the metal door.



I ignored his question and nodded at the mask. “So it’s like that, is it?”



“I’m afraid so.” He set the mask down by the spray bottles of cleaner we’d stolen. “People started dying last night. Let me wash my hands.”



“Shit.” I staggered back to the bed. He didn’t let me touch him as I passed, and he stepped into the other non-puke-scented bathroom. I was still perched on the edge of the bed feeling green when he returned.