When Edie was fired from her paranormal nursing job at
County Hospital, her whole world came crashing down. Now she is once again
shaken to her core. Her mother is deathly ill and there’s only one thing that
will save her: vampire blood. But with the paranormal community shunning Edie,
where can she find it…without losing her own life in the process?
Edie hopes to procure it at her new job at the clinic across
town, where the forces of evil loom large. Vampire gang wars are rampant. Old
underground enemies are rising to the surface. And Eide’s zombie ex-boyfriend
has arrived at the scene—but is he the same man he used to be? And what should
she make of the enigmatic doctor with whom she shares an unexpected connection?
She’ll have to figure it out soon, because all hell is about to break loose—literally—and
time is running out…
Shapeshifted
(Edie Spence, book three) by Cassie Alexander
Start date: November
17, 2021
End date: November 19,
2021
Rating: 4 ½ out of 5
stars
Trigger warning: gang violence
Each novel gets better as the series
progresses.
Shapeshifted picks up a little
bit after Moonshifted left off. After Edie was shunned, she lost her job
at County Hospital, meaning the protection that the Shadows gave to Jake, her
brother, was gone. He’s back on drugs, and Edie is back to worrying if he’ll
overdose and die in a ditch somewhere. She’s working overnights at a sleep
clinic now. Not only would her previous job have no record of her working there
(so Edie has a gap in her résumé), but none of her coworkers remember her either
(so no current references). When Edie runs into her former coworker Gina in
town, it becomes obvious the Shadows wiped her memory.
“You don’t remember me?”
She frowned deeply. “No. Should I?”
I blinked. Oh, no. I’d told the Shadows I didn’t want them to change my memories—maybe instead they’d changed everyone else’s?
“I’m sorry—I must have you confused with someone else,” I said. It wasn’t worth Gina wondering who the Shadows had stolen away from her for the rest of her day. I’d been the one to choose remembering. I didn’t think she would have chosen to forget. (Alexander 111)
For now, it seems like Edie’s time
spent working on Floor Y4 was all a bad dream. Then Edie’s mom hits her with a
bombshell revelation: she has stage four breast cancer and only a few months to
live. In her panicked state of mind, Edie zeroes in on the need to cure her
mother—by feeding her vampire blood and turning her into a daytimer. Kind of
hard to do when she’s currently experiencing a lifelong, permanent shunning
from the paranormal community at large. Edie pleads with the Shadows to allow
her to work on Y4 again, and they acquiesce if Edie finds the entity that they
lost at the very end of Moonshifted: Santa Muerte.
That search plunges Edie into the majority Hispanic
neighborhood within Port Cavell, which is experiencing a gang turf war between Three
Crosses and Reina de la Noche. After seeing a mural for Santa Muerte outside of
the Divisadero clinic, Edie decides to apply for a job there believing it will
bring her closer to finding Santa Muerte. She’s reluctantly hired by Dr. Tovar,
the head doctor of the clinic, when Edie steps in to help a bleeding gang
member in the lobby.
“You do seem to understand some of our natural expediencies, and actually have basic nursing skills. Those things might be more valuable to me than you speaking Spanish, the way our summer’s going so far.”
I squinted at him. “Are you offering to hire me?”
“Yes. If you want it, against my better judgment, the job’s yours.” (Alexander 38)
All is not
as it seems at this clinic. On her first day, Edie finds unlabeled test tubes of
blood in a locked room. She witnesses a coworker drawing blood from a patient
even though he wasn’t ordered to take blood from them. When confronted with
this information, Dr. Tovar brushes Edie’s concerns aside.
“We see a lot of patients each day. Mistakes happen. We should be lucky if they’re all so benign.”
I regretted his choice of words. It was too easy to slide in my mind from things that were benign to things that weren’t, currently growing inside my mom.
“I will talk to him,” Dr. Tovar assured me after seeing the look on my face.
“It’s not that—” I began to explain, but saw my train coming down the line. I knew I hadn’t seen a refrigerator full of blood-draw mistakes—but I wasn’t sure they were worth throwing down with my day-old boss over just yet. (Alexander 62)
At the
train station, Edie sees a woman in a booth selling T-shirts with “Reina de la Noche”
on them as well as observing that the woman has a tattoo on her neck that looks
like a vampire bite mark. Speaking to Edie’s state of mind, this business coupled
with the secret test tubes of blood makes her immediately suspect vampires in the
area.
“Why’d she have a bite tattoo?” It was too telling for her to have one, and those shirts, and my patient from yesterday too. Plus, the Three Crosses had permanent crosses for protection tattooed on their necks.
Dr. Tovar looked at me like I was making things up. “You mean bullet hole marks. Bullet holes. How many times they’ve been shot.” (Alexander 76)
I liked this aspect of the story.
Even though the reader is aware that this story takes place in a world where
supernatural creatures exist, Edie’s disconnect from the paranormal community while
simultaneously seeing paranormal things everywhere she looks plants a seed of
doubt in the reader’s mind. Is Edie even a reliable narrator? “When you hear
hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Everywhere in this small community, Edie thinks
she sees signs of vampires.
[Dr. Tovar] held up the cross and twirled it between thumb and forefinger like it was a freshly plucked daisy. “Crosses and silver, everyone knows. I do watch TV.” He shook his head while watching me closely. You really thought I was a vampire?”
“No. You’re standing in daylight. I thought you might be working for one.”
…“Because of some blood?” Tovar’s expression grew darker, and his voice rose. “You jumped straight to vampires? You’re a nurse, you’re supposed to be scientific, aren’t you? If I’d wanted someone who believed in things like that, I’d just hire Olympio.” (Alexander 84-85)
[Dr. Tovar] looked doubtful. “You don’t look so fine. Can I come in?”
I leaned forward and put a finger on his chest. “Are you a vampire?” I had seen him in the daylight, but who knew?
“No. I wish you’d get over your vampire delusions.”
“You would be deluded too if you were me!” (Alexander 137)
Other characters
include Catrina, a medical assistant at the clinic who dislikes Edie, and
Olympio, a scrawny, teenage boy who hangs outside of the clinic offering his
grandfather’s magical cures to the people seeking medical assistance. He has the
gift of magical sight, which allows him to see a darkness growing out of Edie’s
chest. His grandfather rescues Edie when she has a magical attack from an unhygienic
encounter with an elderly woman in the underground tunnels near the clinic.
As it turns out, Reina de la Noche
isn’t the name of a gang so much as the name of a boss. She is, in fact, a
vampire and none other than Luz, a woman Edie met in Moonshifted at County
Hospital. Her boyfriend had been paralyzed in a drive-by shooting, and she attempted
to cure him with a bottle of Luna Lobos—a “supplement” Jake was peddling that
was water taken from a werewolf pawprint, which when drank by a human, would turn
them into a werewolf. Anna, Edie’s sort-of vampire friend, turned Luz into a vampire
as payment for saving Javier’s life.
“After I was bitten I slept for three nights. When I woke, I was unguarded and hungry. So I went out…My first thought was to use all my power to tear apart the gang that’d crippled Javier. I went to see him immediately after I was reborn…He didn’t understand what had happened. No one had explained things to him. He just knew he was well now and that I’d been gone, that was all. No one told him that I was asleep. Dying. Then becoming alive again…He said I’d been cheating on him, and went to hit me. I stopped him. For good…And then she arrived to claim me. Your friend.” (Alexander 159)
Anna and
Luz made a deal that Luz could have her freedom if she didn’t out vampires or
create followers, meaning she couldn’t drink human blood or share her vampire
blood with anyone. With her newfound freedom, Luz punished the gang that tried
to kill Javier and took their place, cleaning up the neighborhood and making it
a nicer place for everyone. She developed (non-vampire) followers in the neighborhood
women who would protect her life because of the good she was doing. Three
Crosses are a rival gang trying to encroach on her territory. Luz has been living off the blood that Dr. Tovar has been drawing from his patients. Luz’s new
girlfriend, Adriana (Catrina’s sister), allegedly has been kidnapped by Three Crosses
gang members to force Luz’s hand with their territory dispute.
Edie knows the
real identity of the leader of Reina de la Noche before greeting her. Conversely,
she learns of the real identity of the leader of Three Crosses after meeting
him: Pastor Maldonado.
He had close-cropped black hair, and held himself like he was used to being listened to. He had on a black button-down shirt, black jeans, and black cowboy boots. A gold chain hung outside his shirt, with a large pendant whose shape I couldn’t make out. (Alexander 100)
He’s your typical
mob boss type, shaking down local businesses for protection money under the guise
of “tithing” the church he’s building to honor Santa Muerte. Dr. Tovar’s clinic
is vandalized supposedly by Three Crosses, and Pastor Maldonado shows up to
offer his condolences. There seems to be a hidden agenda beyond the tithe:
“You have yet to tithe to us. The seventeenth approaches. We can’t finish our new church without the support of every member of the community. How will she know we love her, if our new church isn’t grand?”
“You and I both know this has nothing to do with that.” (Alexander 101)
In addition
to rebuilding the clinic and worrying about her mother, Edie has been repeatedly
visited by Jorgen. He’s the werewolf that Dren turned into a Hound at the end
of the previous novel. Since Dren vowed to pay Edie back for taking his hand,
Edie is resistant to opening the door despite Jorgen’s nightly knocks for fear
that Dren isn’t far behind. What she finds, though, is that Dren has been taken
prisoner by members of Three Crosses along with Adriana.
They’re being held in Maldonado’s future
church to Santa Muerte, a torture chamber made of the bones they’ve extracted
from Dren that he regrows daily. Ti, Edie’s zombie ex-boyfriend, has been put under
a spell compelling him to torture Dren every night. Adriana is being starved to
death, and she has been tattooed head-to-toe outlining her bones. It’s explained
that Adriana is being primed as a sacrifice to Santa Muerte because Maldonado wants
to control her.
“No way—Maldonado’s a shapeshifter?”
“Yeah. Who also happens to be my dad.” (Alexander 206)
Dr. Tovar reveals that he’s Asher,
Edie’s shapeshifter sometimes-lover, who is attempting to escape the deadly
fate of shapeshifters. He fears losing control of who he is at his core, so he’s
come to the clinic to live out his days as Hector until the inevitable happens.
Maldonado appears in the neighborhood to persuade Asher to join him on Asher’s birthday
(the seventeenth) when he plans to sacrifice Adriana to Santa Muerte and ask
for the cure. (The sheer number of bones that Edie sees, though, leads me to believe
that Maldonado had tried this sacrificial thing before and failed repeatedly,
so there’s no guarantee this time would work.) Then Edie arrives at the clinic and
unbeknownst to her reminds Asher daily of his real self.
“I spent my whole life doing what shapeshifters were supposed to do. I saved money up, I contributed to the safe house—the sanatoriums—we send our kind to when they lose their minds. I thought I was ready to go, at peace with my fate. And then Maldonado appeared, telling me to do things like my dad used to do—and then I saw you and—I don’t know what happened to me.” He took a deep inhale. “It’s not too late for me to just give in to Hector. I could just sink into him, and let him win.”
“And that Hector won’t remember me, will he,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“He wouldn’t know anything about my past. Just his. He might remember this conversation—but he’d write it off like a bad dream. I’ve seen it happen before.” He snorted and looked up at me, the emotion on his face raw. “My own mother doesn’t even remember me. She thinks she’s a housewife upstate.” (Alexander 208)
Luz decides
to charge the place where Adriana was being held only to discover that she’s
been moved. Edie tells Ti, who only came back to town to see a witch who had promised
to give him the rest of his soul back so he could finally die and go to heaven,
that the witch (Maldonado) was using him as a torture device without him knowing
about it. He vows to help Edie rescue Adriana to make up for his sins. In the
meantime, Edie takes him to Olympio’s grandfather, the curandero, to see if he
can undo the spell that turns Ti into a brainless zombie at night. There are a
handful of awesome, magical scenes in Don Pedrito’s house where, using only an
egg and chanting, he removes black magic from Edie and Ti. These must be my
favorite scenes from this book.
In the end,
the crew of Edie, Olympio, Luz, Ti, and Asher/Dr. Tovar take on Maldonado before
he can sacrifice Adriana to Santa Muerte, who turns out to the elderly woman
Edie rescued from the underground tunnels beneath the clinic (and a few more
times after that). She kills Maldonado and grants wishes to everyone else. Olympio
is dying, and Edie uses her wish to ensure he lives, surprising even herself
when she doesn’t wish for her mother’s life to be saved. Olympio wishes to be
the greatest curandero in existence—what a teenage wish. Luz wishes for her
freedom from Anna. Asher wishes to be saved. Ti wishes for his soul; he dies
from his wounds caused in the fight with Maldonado. Anna shows up and tries to
control Santa Muerte. She discovers that Luz no longer has ties to her.
This novel was lacking in the romance department, which is fine since it’s not strictly a paranormal romance. What did happen was a flash of romance at the very end when Asher shows his vulnerable side by taking Edie to the place where he was born. Thanks to Santa Muerte, he’s able to keep a static form and changes into Dr. Tovar when he wants to. Mark my words, he’s going to be a major part of the next book.
Works Cited
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