I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “What do you think about vampires?”
The smile on her face tightened for just a fraction of a second. “It’s more important that I know what you think, not the other way around. So tell me, Edie. What do you think about vampires?”
“What if I told you they actually existed?” I said. Her smile appeared increasingly strained. “Here, I won’t make it into a question. I’ll tell you what I think. They do exist. There are quite a few of them out there, actually. They have human servants, some to do their dirty work, and others just to get blood from, like human cattle.”
The words just poured out. I knew I wasn’t supposed to say anything, and I knew from looking at her that she didn’t want to hear it—but it felt so good to finally talk about it. The dam had broken. I couldn’t stop now.
“And there’re werewolves, too. There were two big packs, but now there’s just one, and they race around on full-moon nights in the parks outside of town, and then there’re also zombies, and I dated this zombie for reals once—I knew he was a zombie going into things, and I still dated him. You know how I knew? He told me. I was his nurse one night. At the hospital where I used to work.”
I sank back into the world’s most comfortable couch, and pressed a hand to my chest. “I cannot believe I just told you all that. That felt so good.” Looking up, it was clear my confessions hadn’t had the same effect on both of us.
She gave me a tight high smile. “Do the vampires tell you to hurt yourself?”
“Not lately!” was the wiseass answer that I wanted to give—but everything I told her was going down into a file. If I was going to abuse her for her listening skills, the least I could do would be to take things seriously, and stay polite. “No. They don’t. They’re not in my head, either.”
She tried a different tack. “Do the vampires tell you to hurt other people?”
“Not anymore!” “No. They’re not allowed to talk to me anymore.”
I could see her measuring me, weighing my sanity. It was pull up now, and laugh, like everything I’d said had been part of a prank or crazy joke, and wasn’t I hilarious? Or sink like a stone—it could be said I lacked the gene for self-preservation that most people came installed with.
“There was this one vampire that I was really close to. She kicked me out to protect me, after I destroyed all the extra vampire blood in the county. I saved everyone … but I ruined everything, too.”
The therapist inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Edie, at twenty-five you’re a little old to be having a schizophrenic break. But we need to do some reality testing here.”
Reality testing. Like everything that’d happened to me this past winter wasn’t real. I stared at the patterned carpeting beneath my feet. “That’s the thing. It was all real. All of it. But I can’t tell anyone about it. You know what’ll happen to you when I leave this room? If you believe me?”
“No.” Her face looked like she was sucking on an increasingly sour candy. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“The Shadows will come out of the ground and erase your memory of everything I said. Maybe even of me.” I nudged the carpet with my toe.
“Edie, how long have you been having these delusions?”
I didn’t answer her.
“I know you’re a nurse, and no one wants to put you on meds less than I do, but my co-worker next door—he’s a psychiatrist. We can go together and check in with him. He could get you in as an emergency visit, and then you could go fill your prescription. Risperdal does wonders for people.”
“Risperdal?” I startled and looked up. I was crazy … but I wasn’t crazy. “No.”
“Edie—” Her voice went low. I grabbed my bag and started walking toward the door. “You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
“Not if I don’t stay here,” I said as I shut the door behind me.
In nursing school I’d done a psych rotation. The nurse I was following and I ate Risperdal-endorsed microwave popcorn out of a brand-new plastic bedpan. It was incongruous at the time, participating in even a small part of the pharmaceutical promotion machine, and eating out of bed pans like they were bowls for food. After that, I’d always made sure to bring my own Tupperware, and had limited any brand endorsement to using whatever Med of the Month–themed pens were lying around.
I didn’t want to be on the Med of the Month, though. Even though I knew meds were helpful—and vital, in some cases—for depression. It was just that … well, my problems felt situational. You would have thought that it was the stress of working with vampires and were-creatures that did me in, but no, my depression had come after that, with the onset of spring.
I drove home with the windows down, hoping that the wild air flowing over my face would make me feel more alive. It did—until I thought about the fact that I had to work tonight. My stomach curdled, and I finally put two and two together. Working at the sleep clinic was killing my soul.
There’re only so many nights you can watch someone sleep on a video monitor and stay sane. I had two years of intensive care unit–level experience, and then I’d spent the last six months watching people sleep, listening to them snore. It was like going from being a fighter pilot to a model airplane captain—the joyless kind glued to the ceiling at a Toys 
Us.
My phone rang. I saw the picture of my mom, and picked it up like you’re not supposed to in the car. “Hey, Momma—”
“Hey, Edie! Can you come over?”
A lifetime of being my mother’s child meant that I could tell from her voice that something was wrong. “Um, sure. Why?”
“You’re not on the phone in your car, are you?” she attempted to deflect me.
“No,” I completely lied. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing—I just—” she hesitated. My mother was good at many things, but lying was not among them.
My brain itemized every bad thing it could be, as I waited her out. The list was shorter than it’d been six months ago, since the supernatural community was now shunning me—back then, if she’d called me up like this, I might have panicked and hung up to call the cops, for whatever good they could do.
Thank goodness she’d never known where I’d been working, who I’d been hanging out with, or what I’d been up to.
Now, the first spot on my “reasons my mother could call me in the middle of the day” list was occupied squarely by my brother. Jake had had a brief reprieve from his heroin addiction when I’d been working at the hospital—it was the trade-off for keeping me employed. When I’d been shunned, all of that had ended though, and sure enough Jake had gotten back on the junk. I tried not to think about him, most times, now. Thinking about him only made me sad.
The awkward lull on the phone continued as I stopped at a red light. “I just got some bad news is all,” my mother went on. “You’re pulled over, right?”
Also by
Cassie Alexander
Nightshifted
Praise for Nightshifted
“Dark and clever full moon insanity that will get into your blood, crawl under your skin, and haunt your dreams.”
—Sherrilyn Kenyon, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“The best debut I’ve read all year. Nightshifted is simply amazing!”
—Kat Richardson, bestselling author of the Greywalker series