“You’re sure you’re okay?” He tried to put a hand on my forehead, and I ducked.
“Yeah. Just morning sickness. How many people are ill? What’s going on downstairs?”
“They’re presuming it’s meningitis and everyone’s in isolation gear now.”
“Oh, no.”
He nodded in agreement, reaching for my forehead again. I sighed and relented, feeling like a kid trying to play hooky from school.
“No fever,” he announced.
“Like I told you.” I took his hand back and held it in my own. “Are they turning the ship around?”
“They can’t. We’re closer to Hawaii than we are to California. And there’s still the storm catching up behind us. Their plan is to get as close as they can to land, and have faster medical rescue ships meet us for transfers.”
“How many patients are there?”
“Twenty, so far.”
I pointed at the mask with my chin. “Where’s yours?”
“I’ve still never been sick. And it’s not me that I’m worried about. We’ve got to get you off this boat.”
While I wholeheartedly agreed with his sentiment, it seemed impossible. We were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “How?”
“I’m not sure. But you’re staying in here until I figure it out.” He took his hand back and stood, reaching for the closet doors.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he took his current shirt off, pulled a dress shirt from a hanger, and began buttoning it down. The Maraschino jumped sideways, and I felt sick to my stomach all over again.
“It’s him, Edie. I know it—”
“What happened to Thomas?” I interrupted.
Asher shook his head without looking at me. “He didn’t make it. He died sometime last night. I’m sorry.”
It was always a shock when a child died. Even if it wasn’t yours, and you were just watching it distantly on the news. There was no way to mitigate a child’s death, no bargaining you could do with the universe about luck, fairness, or age. It was just wrong, and everybody knew it in their gut.
“I’m sorry, Edie,” Asher repeated, finishing his last button and turning toward me.
“Me too.” I was queasy again now, for all the wrong reasons. “Was Liz with him at least?”
“Yes—but she’s sick too. It’s affecting adults now, and all sorts of people are calling down for Tylenol for fevers in their rooms.” He crouched down, his shirt still untucked, and took my hands in his. “I’ve got to go back down there, Edie.”
“To … help?” If they needed another doctor downstairs, one who couldn’t get ill, I could hardly deny the rest of the passengers that—but I didn’t want him to leave. I wasn’t normally a scared person, but this place wasn’t my home, and I didn’t have my family or my cat—Asher was the only safe thing here.
“I have to talk to Liz. Before she passes.”
“She’s going to die?” I asked, my voice rising.
“You and I both know what death’s door looks like. Antibiotics aren’t even touching her fevers—she’s over a hundred and six. She doesn’t have long.”
“Stay.” I held on to his hands as tightly as I could.
“I have to go down there, Edie. It’s the only way I’ll know. I have to talk to her while she’s still alive.” He squeezed my hands back then let go, reaching into the closet behind him for his suit pants.
“Talk to her about what?” I asked, but I already knew, watching him dress. “You’re going down there as him. To talk to her.”
He nodded and began thumbing his belt through loops.
“Then … what?”
“If I can figure out his game—”
I started shaking my head before I butted in. “I don’t want you to go. You can’t just leave me here.”
“It’s the only way I can protect you.”
“No. No no no.” I hadn’t wanted to come on this ship in the first place, and I was pregnant by accident—this was going to get to be my choice, this one thing, decided on by me. He could not leave.
But he was already laying his tie across his shoulders.
“So you’re going to go down there? And do what, precisely? Comfort her? Doing an impression of her husband?”
“No. I’m going to ask her what she knows. He’s here himself, Edie. There’s some way he’s not getting ill. Maybe she knows how.”
“While she’s delirious and you’re pretending to be related to her?” He ignored me and pulled on his suit jacket. Anger and impotence stirred in my stomach to make a nauseating brew.
“Is this what you miss about being what you were?” I asked. His hands paused over his tie, and I pressed. “All the hanging out with people that you want to push overboard?”
He finished knotting his tie, pulling the tail through with finality. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I need you here.”
“Edie, I’m doing this to save you.”
“Then I don’t want to be saved.”
He looked at me, his eyes full of sadness, and then his face settled into the shape of someone new: Nathaniel from years ago, back when Asher had still had his powers. More stern than the man we’d eaten dinner with last night. A stronger jaw, a more aquiline nose. I didn’t think he realized it, the way the lips he wore sneered down at me. “You don’t mean that. And I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you.”
Listening to his words come out of someone else’s mouth—only years of attempting to seem unflappable as a nurse saved me from jumping back.
I shook my head again involuntarily, trying to negate everything that’d happened this morning—his shitty plan, this conversation, this trip, all the things I’d found out that I hadn’t wanted to know. If I kept shaking, maybe I could rewind back to the part where everything was simple again.
“Edie, I wanted to believe he was on vacation here,” Asher tried to explain. “More than anything else in the world. I wanted to believe that he could change.”
“Because if he could, you could too,” I said. Accusing him. Trying to guilt him into staying.
“I have changed. You know it.” He sank down beside me on the bed. “You do, don’t you?”
Of course I do, I wanted to say, while being aware it made me sound like one of those hopeless women who fell for serial killers in prison. But if I said yes, then he’d leave me. Although looking into his eyes, even if they weren’t the ones I was familiar with, I could tell that if I lied and didn’t say yes, I’d break his heart.
“I do.”
He swallowed and stood. “Good. I love you—and I’m sorry. I may not have much time. I have to hurry.”
Eyes that weren’t the ones I loved blinked drily, and he shook his head before speaking with another man’s voice. “I’ll be back. Just give me twenty-four hours to see this thing through. She may not talk at first, but if she does I’ll figure out a way. Order a ton of room service now; you might not get the chance later if it spreads. Choose things that won’t go bad.”
“I’m not okay with this.”
“Just stay inside the room until I get back,” Nathaniel’s voice commanded. He leaned in to kiss me again, and this time I jerked away from him, unused to the strange face he wore. “I’m sorry,” he apologized.
I was so mad and scared that I didn’t know what to say—and it was clear he was going, no matter what. I didn’t want him to leave like this. I scrunched up my face a second time, and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see him coming in. A stranger’s lips touched mine.
“I’ll be back in twenty-four hours,” he repeated.
“Be careful. You’re not as supernatural as you used to be,” I reminded him.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,” he said, and let himself out the door.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
This was bullshit. Everything about it was bullshit.
I knew—deep-down bone-level knew—that Asher was different now. But his past seemed destined to follow us. I imagined it indistinct and dark, lurking underneath the waves outside, bigger than the boat, waiting for us to make a mistake and swallow us whole.
How could I love a man who’d facilitated, even for an instant, testing anything on people? Even if he hadn’t hurt anyone personally, he’d helped a vampire sympathizer to get ahead.
Then again, I’d saved Anna—which had been the right thing to do at the time, I was sure—but I’d also saved Dren. Who had untold deaths on his hands, maybe more since I’d set him free. It’s not like he’d converted into being a vegetarian because I’d been crazy enough to save him. Or like such a thing were even possible for a vampire.
Good substitutes for human blood didn’t exist. Red blood cells did too many things that weren’t imitable. They were small, they were flexible enough to squeeze through capillaries, and they transported oxygen everywhere. Some blood substitutes had managed to be two of those things, but never all three at the same time. Yet.
A bad allergic reaction to the fake blood, or a stroke-causing clot: That would be the end of things, and probably fatal to boot. No one would willingly volunteer for the duty, so who were they testing on? And where? And—under what conditions? If they were paying them, a big if, they’d have to be desperate, either for cures or for cash. How could I love a man who’d profited on other people’s sorrow? What kind of person did that make me for loving him—evil once removed?
I couldn’t believe I’d let him go, but I didn’t know how I could have possibly stopped him. I felt so impotent and abandoned, and that was the worst, knowing there was nothing I would have done differently.
I ordered room service angrily, and sat on the bed like it was an island, and watched piped-in programs on daytime TV. Movies slid by, family-friendly fare, where grown-ups were stupid and preternaturally smart kids saved the day, and I loathed them all.