Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander

 

Welcome to the secret wing of County Hospital—where vampires get transfusions, werewolves have silver allergies, and one nurse is in way over her head…

Nursing school prepared Edie Spence for a lot of things. Burn victims? No problem. Severed limbs? Piece of cake. Vampires? No way in hell. But as the newest nurse on Y4, the secret ward hidden in the bowels of County Hospital, Edie has her hands full with every paranormal patient you can imagine—from vamps and were-things to zombies and beyond…

Edie’s just trying to learn the ropes so she can get through her latest shift unscathed. But when a vampire servant turns to dust under her watch, all hell breaks loose. Now she’s haunted by the man’s dying words—Save Anna—and before she knows it, she’s on a mission to rescue some poor girl from the undead. Which involves crashing a vampire den, falling for a zombie, and fighting for her soul. Grey’s Anatomy was never like this…

Nightshifted (Edie Spence, book one) by Cassie Alexander

Start date: August 3, 2021

End date: August 4, 2021

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars

Content warning: child abuse, sex, offensive language

Edith “Edie” Spence is a newly minted registered nurse working at Providence General Hospital. After her brother, Jake, overdoses one too many times on heroin, Edie is offered an extraordinary deal from a mysterious stranger: if she works for County Hospital on Floor Y4, the powers that be will make sure Jake stays clean. Without fully understanding what she’s agreeing to, Edie signs the paperwork. That’s when her life goes sideways—Y4 isn’t any old floor at County. It’s where firefighting zombies recuperate, syphilitic dragons get treatment, and vampire baby showers are performed.

Edie’s new coworkers aren’t as friendly to her as she would like but probably for good reason. Only one month prior, Edie didn’t know a place like Y4 existed, let alone that her patients walked the Earth. Now she’s executing medical procedures on legendary creatures during the grueling overnight shift and barely squeaking by financially for her efforts. At least her brother won’t overdose any time soon. Ah, sibling love, right?

I really enjoyed this book. Edie is a pleasantly imperfect character. She’s a nurse because she loves the work and because she’s getting paid for it.

“Because someone has to. Someone who really exists.” I crossed my arms on top of my breasts. “And also they pay me.” (Alexander 245)

Edie voluntarily takes a secret job and pay cut so her brother can live to see another day, even though it means she can’t afford things like buying back her dining room set after he pawns it in the pursuit of his next high. Her love for her brother rings true for anyone with a loved one who uses. She gives him chance after chance and even after he lets her down for the thousandth time, she forgives him because she has hope for his future.

And that’s why I worked at Y4. I wasn’t sure how the Shadows kept him clean, but when Jake treated his liver like a chemistry lab, I had no choice. (Alexander 39)

We sank into the easy silence of people who love one another—or at least one person who loved the other, and the junkie who loved her back as long as it was expedient—and who really have nothing left to talk about anymore. (Alexander 223)

She has low self-esteem. After a situation goes awry and the Shadows, a collective of otherworldly shadowy creatures that clean up supernatural messes and erase the memories from normal people, come to do their job, Edie is filled with a sense of meaninglessness by their hand.

I was me, but I was suddenly aware of how inconsequential being me was. I didn’t matter, nothing I would do would ever matter, I would eat, breathe, and shit just like everything else on this planet, but nothing would ever have a consequence. I was worthless, my small life utterly bereft of meaning, and when I died, I would die alone. (Alexander 78)

Even without the push of the Shadows, Edie has a low opinion of herself. She often describes herself in unflattering ways. Her hair is “generically brown,” and she is “bad Edie, impulsive Edie.” One such impulsive behavior is she hooks up with strangers to scratch an itch and because she thinks she doesn’t merit steady dating. Who hasn’t felt like Edie on a lonely night?

But really, it was one thing to go home with a girl like me on a Wednesday, and something entirely other to choose me…on a Friday night. (Alexander 87)

Despite this, Edie hooks up with two hunky men in the progression of the book. The first, although unknown to Edie at the time, is a shapeshifter named Asher whose interest in Edie began as a personal captivation when he discovered he couldn’t shift into her shape after touching her. His interest in her continues until the end of the book, which opens the pathway for future scenes that might better explain his pursuit of Edie. The second is the aforementioned zombie firefighter, only known as Ti, who Edie initially turns down to prevent him from getting too close to her, but as the possibility of not seeing the next week becomes more serious, she gives in to his advances. He reluctantly leaves Edie at the end of the book because he needs to maintain a low profile after a series of murders he commits, and there’s an implication he can’t return. In no way did these romantic interests feel like a love triangle, except for briefly during a scene in which Asher and Ti interact. Based on Edie’s feelings on dating, I wouldn’t be surprised if neither character shows up in the second book. This is not a paranormal romance, though.

The heart of this story involves a patient of Edie’s, Mr. November (a fictitious name given to the dehydrated man who was picked up outside with a serious case of pneumonia), who dies under her care. He was a vampire servant who with his dying breath, begged Edie to “Save Anna.” Edie resolves to find Anna to assuage her guilt for killing him. When she visits his apartment, she uncovers a room full of child pornography, and she deduces one repeated face as Anna’s. Thankfully, Edie learns that Mr. November was tracking down the children being victimized and rescuing them instead of another nefarious reason. He conveniently wrote down the address where Anna is being held, which makes Edie’s job easier. She kills one of the vampires who had been holding Anna captive via holy water (or as Edie calls it— “pope water”) and in doing so, sets into motion a series of events that leads to her sham of a trial in a vampire court. She gets a fancy vampire lawyer (Geoffrey Weatherton, Esquire), loses Anna twice, is involved in a shootout between vampires and a zombie, and is stalked by a gruesome duo called the Husker and the Hound who want to eat her soul. There’s a lot of intricate lore (vampire, dragon, zombie, shapeshifter, were, and more) that I can tell will come into play in later books in the series, and I cannot wait to see how it all plays out.

The one thing that bothered me was how an androgynous character, Meaty, was treated. Meaty is the charge nurse on Y4 and commands respect from their team. Since the book is written from Edie’s point of view, it’s hard to pinpoint whether this is a character flaw of Edie’s or a failing in the author’s writing. I don’t presume to know a lot about gender inclusive language, but I know that the phrase Edie uses when talking about Meaty, “he/she/it,” isn’t the correct pronoun usage and feels offensive to me. Edie even states that she hasn’t been brave enough to directly ask Meaty what their gender is. For the record, it’s probably never okay to ask someone what their gender is, but it’s okay to ask what pronouns someone would prefer instead of assuming. Ultimately, this is what made me lower my score on this book from 3 ¾ stars to 3 ½ stars.

                                                        Works Cited

Alexander, Cassie. Nightshifted. St. Martin's Press, 2012.