Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [80]
Because he does. And he has a serial number with which he’d like to replace it.
I reached the car approximately thirty seconds after I’d launched myself off the roof, and then I spent a rather fumbly, humiliating moment searching for my keys. I wasn’t carrying a bag so they had to be in one of my pockets and yes, they were. I dug them out and my hands were shaking. No longer a blur on a sidewalk, I was now a disheveled hussy quaking her way home on a jittery, shoeless walk of shame. Or so I imagined. And so I hoped I projected, because it wouldn’t draw a second glance in that neighborhood.
Finally I got the car open, and got myself inside it. I shoved the key into the ignition and started the thing with a sigh of relief. Then I wondered how much time had passed. Three minutes? Maybe? It wasn’t like we’d stopped to synchronize our watches or anything. We’d just nodded at each other and taken off, as if by pure synchronicity we’d meet up 180 seconds later.
I pulled out into the street, cutting off some asshole in a low-riding car with a racing stripe. The driver swore and honked and flipped me the bird and I flipped it right back as I gunned the gas and heaved my big-ass car out into the street.
The diner wasn’t far away. One block? Two blocks? A couple of blocks, yes—because I was parked on the other side of the Poppycock Review. But traffic was heavy and the only streetlight I hit between my starting point and my destination surely held me up longer than the three promised minutes. I tapped my bare, wet, grimy foot against the brake and muttered, “Come on,” as if my irritation could somehow bend the universe to my whims.
If only.
And just when I was working myself up to a neurotic frenzy wherein Sister Rose had been captured, or had vanished, or was lying dead in one of those foul-smelling puddles, a knock on the passenger window gave me a shock that would’ve stopped my heart if I’d still been alive.
She was there, slapping her hands against the window and saying, “Come on,” just like I’d been saying about the stoplight. Only I couldn’t call her “she” anymore. In three minutes (or four, or five, or however long it’d taken me), Sister Rose had morphed into Adrian deJesus, brother of Isabelle and wearer of clothes that looked suspiciously like they might’ve come off a federal agent. It was the fastest identity swap I’d ever had the pleasure of witnessing.
I pressed the button to unlock the car, and with a swift yank of the handle and a sliding leap that landed him in the passenger’s slot, he was inside. I locked the doors again.
The light turned green.
We rolled through it like the most ordinary of couples, doing the most ordinary drive home ever. I saw two long black cars pulling up to the block where the drag bar had all too recently been the scene of several murders (on my part), and the fleeing of one great drag queen (on Adrian’s part).
I made a point to quit looking in the rearview mirror as I drove.
8
I took him back to my place because hell, where else was I going to take him? We were in the same boat, and I couldn’t honestly see him flipping out and calling the feds to report me. Besides, he’d talked like he knew I was a vampire back at the drag bar, and in the car we were both too damn tense and silent to converse, so we didn’t, and I needed to warm him up or lighten him up or … or something. Whatever it took to get him talking, now that I had my pronouns sorted out.
I’d sorted them thusly: When he was dressed as a man, talking like a man, and looking like a man, as far as I was concerned he was a man. In ladywear, with full lady persona, she was a woman. And if he/she had any issue with my designations, he/she