Shapeshifted Read Online Free PDF

of potholes and patches of gravel. The sidewalk wasn’t much better.
    I looked back where I’d come from. Who knew there was this whole other world that I’d never been to before, or even seen? I thought back to the train. Had I taken that line before? Yes. It’d been a while, but I had—I’d just never gotten off at this one stop. It was like Europe—you were sure it was there, but you mostly only saw it on TV.
    Kind of like cancer too.
    A car pulled up beside me, and the music playing inside it turned off. I elbowed my purse a little closer to my chest.
    “Need a ride, lady?” asked the man inside the car. I thought about ignoring him. I didn’t want to be the type of person who thought poorly of anyone, but I also didn’t want to wind up a sad morality tale that women told to other women on dark nights. Still, it was one P.M. , and there wasn’t anything in my purse worth stealing.
    I leaned over. “I’m just walking to the clinic. It’s up that way, right?”
    “Yeah. Just up the street. Tell Hector I say hi.” He nodded and turned his music back on, veering back into the center of the street and heading up to proposition another pedestrian.
    Just a gypsy cab—a cabbie without a license. I relaxed a little but kept walking quickly. There were men standing on a corner, outside what looked like a liquor store, but that was farther down. I saw the clinic itself, its name at the top of one wall, the letters painted on where the original ones had fallen off. I realized I was facing the wall that had been on the street view—but that the mural was gone, replaced with off-white paint that hadn’t been weather-beaten by an entire summer’s sun. Santa Muerte was gone.
    I wondered what that meant for me.
    I stood for a moment, trying to compose myself. Just how much of a fool’s errand this would be. An early-teens kid standing outside the clinic door walked over to me. He looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, judging me, and then he clucked, shaking his head. “You’ve got susto bad, lady. You won’t find help for that in there. You need to come with me and see my grandfather.”
    My left eyebrow rose involuntarily. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
    “Are you sure? Only farsantes in there. My grandfather is a curandero —” He kept going, his patter confident. His pants were a little short, and the center of his shirt had the logo of a brand I didn’t recognize.
    “I’m sure. Thanks, though. I appreciate your concern.” I squeezed around him and opened the door.
    “Don’t put that in your mouth, mija !” a mother told a child inside. An elderly woman coughed in a corner, running rosary beads through the fingers of one hand. A pregnant woman sat with one hand on her full belly, the other pushing a stroller back and forth with a sleeping occupant inside. And two men were having a discussion—one of them didn’t have any teeth, and the other had a grotesquely swollen hand.
    They may not have been my people, as I had come to understand it, when I was working with the vampires, daytimers, and sanctioned donors on Y4. But they were patients. And just like that, I knew where I was again. It was home.
    Hard plastic chairs lined the waiting room walls; the bulk of the clinic itself was walled off by double-paned plastic. I presented myself at the nearest window, and a woman with short dark hair and copper skin told me to wait a minute for Dr. Tovar to see me.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    “Miss Spence?” My name rang out from the side door. I stood and smiled, and went over to the woman in pink scrubs holding it open. She looked me up and down and snorted dismissively, but she still opened the door. “Dr. Tovar will see you now.”
    I followed her down a corridor with instructional posters in English and Spanish. I could count the Spanish words I knew on both hands. I knew corazon meant “heart,” sangre meant “blood,” dolor meant “pain.” Other than that, I was pretty good at guessing, and quick to call the