Shapeshifted (An Edie Spence Novel) by Alexander Cassie

Author:Alexander, Cassie [Alexander, Cassie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-06-03T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

After enough locks to successfully win a car on The Price Is Right were opened, Luz pushed open a very squeaky gate. “Rust, my last defense,” she said, closing the gate behind us—and, to my dismay, redoing all the locks. Once finished, she repocketed the keys.

She flipped on a light and gestured me farther in.

The basement was small and open, with cement floors and walls. A couch, a coffee table, an unmade bed. A single lamp hung over the bed, a tissue paper heart stapled to its shade, casting a pink shadow down. With the exception of her excellent collection of capless test tubes scattered on the floor, Luz had fewer belongings than me.

“Luz, this is a pit.”

“Call me Reina. Everyone else does,” she said as she kicked test tubes aside. Thank God the things were made of plastic, not glass, or this’d be like some sort of torture-porn horror film.

“Okay, Reina, what—” I watched her sink onto the cement floor, and went to kneel beside her. Her eyes were flat and cold, like a shark about to bite. I scooted back a bit, and she nodded. “What the hell happened to you?”

Focusing on me, she pushed herself up on one elbow. She stirred the test tubes nearest her until she found one with its contents still intact. “Since this is all your fault, I’ll tell you the truth.”

I cleared a spot from test tubes on the floor, thanked God that Hector had dressed me in jeans not shorts two nights ago, and carefully sat down.

“After I was bitten I slept for three nights. When I woke, I was unguarded and hungry. So I went out.” She cracked the cap off the test tube and daubed the contents out with a dainty fingertip. “My first thought was to use all my power to tear apart the gang that’d crippled Javier. I went to see him immediately after I was reborn.

“He didn’t understand what had happened. No one had explained things to him. He just knew he was well now and that I’d been gone, that was all. No one told him that I was asleep. Dying. Then becoming alive again.” She tilted her head and finished off the blood in the tube like it was the last gulp of beer from a bottle, then she tossed the empty tube away. “I found him at a party.”

I imagined her, starving, entering a room of humans, the sound of their blood singing in her ears.

“He said I’d been cheating on him, and went to hit me. I stopped him. For good.”

I wondered if Javier had realized the mistake he’d made—right before Luz had broken his head off. “The party ended after that. I ate him. It was awful, in retrospect. At the time?” She picked up another test tube and looked at it as though it paled in comparison, then threw it aside. “At the time I was hungry. And then she arrived to claim me. Your friend.”

I wasn’t sure friend was the best term to describe the bond between Anna and me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.