Deadshifted (5 page)

“But you think—”

I cut him off. “I don’t know what to think. My uterus isn’t always clockwork. And neither am I.”

“You should have said something.”

I made a face at him. Considering what he’d just done without any warning up above—“You are one to talk.”

He shook his head. “That was different.”

“Really?” I said, with even more sarcasm than usual.

He relented with a sigh. “Okay, no. Not really.” He looked again from my stomach to me. “You should have told me sooner, though. The instant—”

“There’s nothing to tell yet,” I interrupted, starting to chew on my bottom lip. “And I’m sorry, but I’ve never done this before. I don’t know the rules for this. I’m making it up as I go along.”

Was it really impossible? How would I feel about things then? I’d sort of maybe liked to think it was real. If only to get my mom off my back, which as everyone knew was a really good reason to have children.

“You’re sure it’s impossible?” I asked him, hoping-not-hoping for him to be right.

Asher’s brow furrowed in contemplation. “A year ago, yes. But … I’m not as positive as I used to be. Shapeshifters living into their mid-thirties is pretty impossible. Santa Muerte changed me. Maybe she did more than I know.”

I wrung my hands together in my lap. “Just once, I’d like to know everything for sure, you know?”

Asher snorted softly. “Me too.”

There was a long pause between us during which I wished he’d magically say the right thing, while at the same time knowing wishing that was epically unfair. “Is it okay?” I asked, my voice small.

He looked surprised. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t it be? Unless you don’t want it. Then—” He made a mysterious gesture in the air.

I twisted my lips to one side. “So you’re ambivalent about it, is what you’re saying?”

“I’ve had less than five minutes to think about it. It’s still a maybe. What more do you want from me?”

If he’d said that with the wrong tone, I might have lost it. I’d had a very, very long day. But he was earnestly asking what else, if anything, he could do, and I was wise enough to know he meant it.

“Let’s figure it out for sure tomorrow. And then we can celebrate, or celebrate, depending,” I said. “It would be celebrating, right? And don’t say what I want to hear because you know already. That’ll just piss me off.”

Asher looked as stunned as I’d been feeling for the past fourteen or so hours. “I never thought I would ever be a dad. I never wanted to be one. After my dad leaving us … I couldn’t ever imagine bringing a kid into the world.”

It felt like a lead fishing weight was dropping down my throat while he talked.

“But—” He took my hands in his, and calmed their wringing. “I can see doing it, with you. I’ve never thought about it before now. I just assumed we couldn’t, ever. But if I was going to have a kid, I’d want it to be with you.”

I squinted at him. “You’re not just saying that because I threatened you?”

“Not in the least. I sort of figured eventually your mom would wear you down and we’d adopt or something.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Why not? I’ve seen you. You’re good with kids. You like them. I wasn’t going to deny them to you. I just never thought they’d be from me.” He inhaled, held it, and then carefully spoke again. “What if … it’s part shapeshifter?”

I knew what he meant when he said that. What if it’d be like him, and have to grow up outside of society for his, or her, own protection, until it was old enough to deal with the strange. And if it was shapeshifter, even in part, what would happen to it when it aged? Would Asher and I get to have any grandkids? Could ligers breed? Or would it lose itself in the sea of personalities inside, like Asher had almost done?

I shook my head. All that was too far away. We didn’t need to go looking into the future for things to worry about; we had enough options in the here and now. “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. If it’s real. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he agreed.

I crawled backward onto the bed. “What are we going to do about dinner? It’s been a long day—I don’t feel like leaving the room.”

“This, I’m prepared for.” He reached over to his bedside table and got the room service menu guide for me. “Twenty-four seven. As promised.”

I hadn’t eaten all day—what with traveling, sex, and exhaustion, everything on the menu looked good, and I said so. Asher got a clever-looking smile, and I shut him down. “Don’t you dare make some lame joke about me eating for two.”

*   *   *

After the arrival of two club sandwiches with a side of french fries, we arranged a picnic on our bed, and our conversation continued.

“So it didn’t work. Not at all?” I asked, shoving around ketchup with the edge of a fry.

He shook his head. A little too hard. Was I being hypervigilant, or was he overprotecting me?

I pressed on. “What were you hoping to even accomplish?”

“Other than ruining everything?” he said, brows raised, sort of teasing, sort of not.

“Yeah.”

He heaved a sigh. “I just wanted to see. Maybe if he’d become some great humanitarian in the last few years. Or if a lot of bad things had happened to him, if karma had won out.”

“And what if neither of those things had happened?”

Asher snorted. “I don’t know. It’s a big boat. I bet people fall overboard all the time.”

The fry I’d been raising to my mouth paused in midair. “Did you just hear yourself say that?”

He made a face at me. “Oh, come on, Edie, I was teasing.”

“It’s only teasing if you’ve never done anything like that before.” I carefully set the fry with its burden of ketchup back down. “If you have, then it’s kind of a threat.”

Asher groaned and swung his gaze to look up at the ceiling, pondering it for a moment before looking again back at me. “I’m not that person anymore. Honestly.”

“It isn’t that I want you to change, Asher. It’s just that—” The words hung between us as I tried to think of a phrase that would prove my point, because I really, really really, did want him to change, or at least pretend that killing people wasn’t okay, no matter how awful they might be.

“You don’t want to be in love with a murderer,” he said, cutting me off with a resigned nod. “I get that. It’s fair.”

I gave him a halfhearted grin and tried to lighten the mood. “You know I can’t take time out of my busy schedule to visit you in jail. When would I get my nails done?” I looked down at my hands—I had gone and gotten a rare manicure for this trip, scheduled it yesterday after work, when I’d be safe from my own overzealous hand sanitizing habit. The red nail polish was already chipping a little bit at the edges, where only I could see.

“When indeed,” he said drily, and poached a fry off my plate.

CHAPTER SIX

After our picnic, we crawled into bed. Asher slept soundly and I envied him. I wanted to, but couldn’t. I missed my Ambien prescription. Ironically, I could get Hector MD to write me one, but I felt stupid needing it now that I was supposedly on a day-shift schedule. I hadn’t thought about the stresses of jet lag, finding out my period was late, and discussing whether my morally ambiguous boyfriend should kill someone, even if he was a really bad someone, on my vacation trip. Oh, well, I didn’t know if Ambien was safe for indeterminately pregnant people, either.

I was too keyed up to sleep. My mind was an angry dog, chasing after endless cars.

Would Asher make a good dad? I thought he would. Then again, his own dad sucked. But what better excuse to overcompensate than to fix your own past?

Would I make a good mom? Oh, God, who knew. I knew I’d be full of good intentions—just like the proverbial path to hell.

I threw the sheets off me and walked across the room to the balcony, unlocked the doors, and stepped outside into the night.

The
Maraschino
put out too much light pollution itself for me to see the stars. But the newly waning moon was overhead. I knew all weres were safe from its pull for now. I leaned against the railing, looking out at the water.

Was it even safe to bring a kid into this world? One that I knew had vampires, and weres, and a hundred other things that could go bump in the night in it? If we did have a kid—ours, or adopted—and it was scared of something under the bed, would I honestly be able to tell it that things would be just fine?

“Edie?” I heard Asher’s voice from the room behind me and turned around. There were no lights in the room; his disembodied voice was coming from the dark. “Come back to bed.”

I walked back into our cabin, blindly. I didn’t lock the balcony doors behind me, because really, we were six floors up and in the middle of the ocean. It wasn’t like we were expecting a visit from Batman. I took three steps in—and then I turned around and walked back and did lock the doors, because, well, who knew.

When I slid back under the sheets Asher moved to spoon me. “Why’re you so cold?” he murmured, and threw an arm across me to pull me close.

*   *   *

In the morning, the ship was bucking against the waves. I didn’t know if this was normal or not, but it felt as if the ocean were trying to throw the
Maraschino
off, and it was making me seasick.

Asher was already awake, reading a book beside me. “You ready?” he asked as I wiped the sleep out of my eyes.

“Not really. But let’s go.” I knew that you were supposed to use your first pee of the day for pregnancy testing, and I didn’t want to wait too long.

We got up and dressed, and the elevator we rode down was full of people. Many of them got off and immediately went to queue up at the guest services station, where I could see them handing out seasickness bags. Maybe somehow we’d gotten contaminated with norovirus, like I’d privately feared, after all those shows about “my cruise ship tried to poison me” on the news. Whatever it was, I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one who found the current motion disconcerting.

We reached the first floor alone, although I realized when we got there the ship was actually deeper than this—there must be floors underneath that were all engines, laundry, and rooms for the crew. The medical center was down the rightmost hallway. I walked through the open door into a small waiting room, with another open door beyond, and I peeked into it. There was a short examination bed, a desk, some cabinets, and a chair—and a man sitting in it with his back to me. I went back to Asher. There was only room for one of us in the medical room, really. “I appreciate the moral support, but you can stay here.”

“I’ll be right outside.”

I knocked on the doorjamb and took a step inside. “Hello?”

“We are not open yet,” the man said curtly, without turning around. There was a clock fastened to one wall; it was 7:45
A.M.
ship time, which made it almost noon back home.

I didn’t want to wait, and more important I wasn’t sure how much longer I could not pee. “I just need a pregnancy test.”

He made an irritated noise, spinning around in his chair to look at me. He had brown skin, and an accent, and he made a pointed look at my ring finger. “Where is your husband?”

“Does that matter?”

He didn’t answer me.

I knew from having worked with people of different ethnicities that certain cultures had ways of acting, talking, or gesturing that could be perceived as rude from the outside when compared with one’s own cultural norm without that being their intended gist at all. I’d learned to look past a lot of that, because I knew it wasn’t personal, and because I realized it was mostly in my head.

However, as both a woman and a nurse, I could also identify a judgy doctor at twenty paces.

“Is it an emergency?” he asked archly, looking me up and down, as if I were unclean.

“No.”

“Then can’t it wait?”

“Look, I can pay you for it. I’d just like to know.”

“So you can drink,” he said, and I had a feeling it wasn’t just me he hated, but possibly his job, and possibly all Americans. I bet he did see a ton of alcohol poisonings on these trips—were I in his likely Muslim and abstemious shoes, that might bias me, too.

“Nope. Mormon,” I lied. Super-lied, come to think of it, seeing as I was asking for a pregnancy test, and I clearly wasn’t the Virgin Mary. “Look, I just want to know.”

He started going through the drawers of his desk. When those didn’t produce what he was looking for—probably a card with a disappointed-looking face that said
YOU SHOULD HAVE WASHED YOUR HANDS BETTER!
in twenty languages—he started looking in the cabinets above his desk, where the contents of each shelf were held in with slide-stoppers and/or bungee cord.

He produced a pregnancy test at long last from the back of one of these. If it was possible for one to expire, I’m sure this one would have. I’d seen less wrinkled packaging emerge on strips of gum that I’d lost in my purse.

“Do you know how to use it?” he asked again.

“Pretty sure I just pee on one end.”

“That might be the last one I have. So don’t come back here looking for more.”

“I won’t. I swear.”

He snorted to let me know what he thought of that. And then swiveled back around on his chair.

*   *   *

I emerged in the hall to find Asher speaking something that sounded like German to a crew member with a crew cut. He wrapped up their conversation quickly when he saw me, and the crew member gave me a courteous nod before leaving.

“Did they have one?” he asked once we were in the elevator, alone.

“Yeah. Was that German?”

“Nope. Afrikaans.” I hadn’t known that Asher spoke Afrikaans. That was my boyfriend, perpetually full of surprises. “How’d it go?”

I made a face. “I wish I’d taken you in with me instead.”

“Yeah—Marius was telling me the doctor was a prick. On the downlow, you know, countryman-to-countryman.”

“Well, he’s right. I almost had to promise him our firstborn to get this.” I held the test up. The wrapper was illegible. “What language is this in, polylinguist?”

Asher inspected it. “Cantonese?”

“Great.”

Asher grinned at me. “Even people in China want to know if they’re pregnant, Edie. I’m sure it’s fine.”