“There’s more than one black truck in this town.”
“You don’t know Viktor.” Lucas shook his head. “But that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want to lead. I’m not like him. I don’t even want to be like him.”
“Is anyone else in line?”
“Fenris Jr. But that’ll be a few years. The pack can’t function without a leader for that long.”
“Winter’s not dead yet.”
“Yet,” Lucas repeated dourly. “Helen has access to all the group accounts—she got them when Fenris Sr. died. But any time without a leader is too long for creatures accustomed to having one. Long enough for people to get ideas. If he doesn’t heal, then I’ll have to take over on the next full moon night.” He inhaled deeply. “I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“Don’t worry. I’m good at keeping secrets.” Like the fact that I had Winter’s blood in my pocket right now.
Lucas stared at me with his light brown eyes. They were rimmed in a darker brown, almost red. I felt guilt flush my face. “Thank you.”
* * *
The rest of the night was uneventful. Gina and I gave report to the same crew that’d had him yesterday, and went to the locker rooms together. I wanted to ask her privately about why she’d taken an extra shift, but by the time I’d slipped the test strip into my going-home scrubs’ pocket and double-washed my hands, she’d already gone.
As I exited the Winter family was arriving. Helen, whom I assumed was the matriarch now, was dressed all in black with Fenris Jr. in tow.
“This place—” She drew up short and worry furrowed her brow. “It smells like Viktor. Was he here? Did he come here last night?”
I looked to Lucas, who stood exhaustedly behind her, for guidance.
“He was, but I sent him away,” Lucas answered. “I knew it was what you would have wanted.”
“Good.” She turned toward me and reached for me like she knew me, her in her Sunday best and me in scrubs. I was startled into hugging her back. She ran her cheek against my own, breathing in my hair as she held tight. “Don’t let that awful man see my father. Don’t let him come down here. Ever.”
Just what I wanted, to be the local were-guest bouncer. “You’re going to see the social worker—you should tell him that,” I told her.
She smiled up at me weakly. “Okay. I will.” And then she clung to me again, as though she needed my support. “Thank you so much for all you do.”
“You’re … welcome?” I said, and looked to Lucas for help. He reached for Helen and gently pulled her away from me.
“You’ll keep him alive for us, won’t you?” she asked me from Lucas’s arms.
I didn’t want to make any promises I couldn’t keep. Plus, I wasn’t even in charge of his care. But trapped there, with Junior looking hopefully on—my unwise mouth began to form the word Okay. Only our social worker’s arrival saved me from myself. He waved the Winter family toward a meeting room down the hall. Jorgen was the last to go in. He paused and sniffed at me.
“Wash your hands, girl. You’re not even fit to smell like him,” he said as he passed. I grabbed my purse tighter and left, gritting the truth behind my teeth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The story of Nurse Edie and the Very Long Shift was almost through, thank goodness. I wove through the visitors in the lobby, sleeping on the couches set up like pews. In inclement weather, homeless people sometimes set up shop there, claiming they were waiting for friends. It would be hard to differentiate between them and the family members who really were waiting. This morning was no different.
On my way out I saw Luz sound asleep at the end of a couch, arms crossed, leaning against a column. I wanted to go over to wake her and ask how Javier was—but she’d been out here for eight hours, she wouldn’t know. I was off shift, I needed to stay that way. I needed to get home.
I drove home that morning in the dark. Dren wasn’t lurking in the lobby, underneath the awning, near my car, under my car, inside my car—I even checked in the trunk. I’d watched too many horror movies to not look.
By the time I got home you could tell that it was daytime, and I figured I was safe. Twelve hours is a long time to be at work, even if you’re not on your feet every minute of it. I unlocked my front door, already dreaming of the shower I was about to take.
Grandfather started ranting. I stopped in my entryway.
“What’s going on?” My keys were still in my hand—I slid the longest one between my fingers, so I could punch at someone with it if I had to. There was a groan in response, from inside my house.
Leaving the door wide open behind me, I took another step in. “Hello?”
Another groan. I made it to my living room and looked at my couch. It was currently occupied. Gideon waved a fingerless hand at me. My eyes slid up to his face, empty of eyes, ears, and lips, and I wanted to throw up, only I was too fucking tired.
“You have got to be kidding me. Hang on.” Without taking my eyes off him, I found my phone in my purse and dialed Sike. She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello, Edie!” She sounded pleased to hear from me, which meant she was in on this.
“Why is there a Cenobite sitting on my couch?”
“What’s a Cenobite?”
“Rent Hellraiser.” I walked backward without taking my eyes off him and closed my apartment door behind me. “Was this really the fucking plan?”
“You didn’t think they were coming home with me, did you?”
“They?” I sputtered, and looked down my short hall.
“In your closet.”
I went back to my bedroom. There was a lightproof sheet over my bedroom’s small window again. I’d kept it after the last time I needed it, for help hiding vampires. Being a night-shift nurse and all, lightproof curtains were a wonderful luxury. My bed was empty, but my shoes were cast out across my floor again. This didn’t bode well. I slid my closet open and peeked inside. “Goddammit, Sike. I hate you.” There was a woman inside my closet, on the floor. She wasn’t breathing, but I knew she wasn’t dead.
“Likewise, of course,” Sike said.
I squatted down, the phone still pressed to my ear. I put fingers to the prone woman’s wrist and felt no pulse, just flesh, soft and cool. “Who is this?”
“Veronica Lambridge. Gideon’s girlfriend, and former laboratory technician.”
She didn’t look like a Veronica—she had mousy brown hair, close-cropped, like a ten-year-old boy’s, and a smattering of freckles that made her look even younger. Her face was peaceful now, but who knew how she’d feel when she woke up.
“Anna changed her, after Gideon’s attack, for her own protection. But Anna’s not allowed to make new vampires yet, so we had to hide her.”
I slid the closet door closed again. “My house is safest why?”
“No other vampires have access to it. You haven’t been making more friends on the side, have you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well then, there you go. You’re the Ambassador of the Sun, they need a little baby-sitting, and your place is safer than ours till we figure out who did that to Gideon.”
I was silent on the line. “Anna trusts you. I don’t know why, but she trusts you,” Sike went on, her voice bitter, mocking—jealous. “You might be the only one she trusts.”
I pushed Veronica a little farther into my closet and slid the door closed. “How long will she be out?”
“Three days is the normal. We’ll pick her up between now and then.”
“Maybe you could call first?”
Sike laughed at me. “We’ll come by at night.” And then she hung up.
I stood in my bedroom, looking at my closed closet door. I was so tired. I was so scared. I was so tired of being scared.
But in my mind, I put all of my nurse armor on. I was going to do what needed doing. Again.
* * *
I went back out to living room, where Gideon sat, pantsless on my couch in a ho
spital gown.
“We’re going to have to make the best of things, okay?” He was mute, of course. “Look, you were here beforehand, right? Did you give yourself a tour?”
He shook his head.
“Well, the bathroom is down the hall. But.” I could not just have him sitting on my couch with no pants. I gave a slightly manic laugh at the thought, then breathed in deeply and went back to my bedroom.
Gideon was way taller than me. My old scrubs would be highwaters on him, but at least he’d be able to shimmy in and out of them, even without entire fingers. I silently blessed my new washable couch cover, which was keeping his boy parts from direct contact with my couch.
I brought the scrub pants out into my living room. “Okay, stand up. Right leg up. Left leg up.” I hitched the pants onto him and drew them up. After I tied the drawstring in a loose bow, I put my hand to his elbow and directed him down my short hallway.
“So there’s a bathroom over here, to your right.” My toilet was against the back wall, but I didn’t trust him to hit it in his state. I pulled him inside the small room. “There’s a shower here”—I knocked on the glass door so he could hear it—“and I’ll leave the door open. You can just pee in there. And if you have to do worse, just let me know. It won’t be the first time I’ve wiped someone’s ass, so don’t be shy, okay?”
He made a cross between a grunt and a groan. I decided to take it as a yes.
“Are you hungry?”
He nodded. Without lips, there was only so much he would be able to keep inside his mouth. Lips were one of those things that people didn’t appreciate till they were gone—although most times that was due to a stroke, and not internecine vampire warfare. Thank God they’d let him keep his teeth. I inhaled and exhaled, drawing on additional strength and sanity hidden deep inside.
“I’ll make some eggs.”
* * *
I was tired as hell, but Gideon’s day had been worse than mine. I scrambled the eggs up, cubing some leftover Christmas turkey to toss inside. He’d need all the protein he could get to heal.
I surrounded him with dish towels, and sat beside him to fork pieces of turkey and egg into his mouth. He gnashed at them, having a hard time moving them around without a tongue, without lips to hold them in. His gums weren’t meant to be exposed like this. I knew his mouth would dry out. And then his teeth would go. I wondered if Anna knew what she’d gotten herself into. I knew I hadn’t, really. And Gideon—damn.
In between Gideon’s bites of food, I researched—if research online about werewolves can actually be called such—causes of werewolf-itis. It seemed only appropriate since I had been carrying Winter’s blood in my pocket.
The Internet was its usual helpful-unhelpful self. Twenty standard ideas and fifty thousand nonstandard ones, complete with comments below the articles from twelve-year-old kids who swore they were going to go out to a national park and slaughter a wolf to try out that pelt-wearing thing this weekend. That’d wind up really well for anyone who tried to do it in the Deepest Snow pack’s park.
The standard ideas were pretty standard, though, at least. Accidents of birth—being born on a full-moon night, the seventh son of a seventh son thing, or with a caul. Then there were accidents of locale, being bitten by a werewolf personally, or just plain bad luck—putting on that old furry thing you found abandoned in the forest, witches’ curses, and drinking water from a werewolf’s paw print, which sounded ludicrously dumb.
Part of me being super Pollyanna with Gideon and nosy on the Internet was the fact that a baby vampire was asleep in my closet. I didn’t want to go in there to sleep and hang out with her. I mean, daytime was safest for me and all—but what would she wake up as? And who? And how mad? I didn’t know anything about her.
Had she wanted to become a vampire? Had she been a daytimer too? Or just someone whom Anna had thought it’d be a good idea to save? There was saving, and then there was this, me spooning eggs into the mouth of a man who had no lips.
Gideon would eventually need something to drink, too. Maybe I could feed him ice chips. Or in the shower, with his face turned up into the faucet like a bird.
I took a few deep breaths. “Are you okay for now, Gideon?”
He nodded. Perhaps if he’d been able to talk, he’d have told me how ironic that question was. Okay was a very relative term.
“I’ll buy you some other food soon. But I gotta sleep. It’s been a long day,” I said, knowing I spoke for both of us. I put a station on my laptop’s Internet radio, and I set Grandfather beside him. “Keep him company, okay?” I doubted Gideon spoke German, but hey. “I’ve got a cat too. Be nice to her, or else. I’ll be asleep in the back. Don’t be afraid to go to the bathroom. We’ll work out a system, I swear.”
I got him some blankets and left him there on my couch. I didn’t want to go back into my room, but with him on the couch, I had little choice.
I crawled into bed, and Minnie hopped up on my bed to eye me once I’d gotten settled. “I know,” I told her. “This is all incredibly bad.” True to her Siamese ways, she meowed in agreement. Then she snuggled under the blankets with me, and despite both of us knowing it was a bad idea, we went to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The closet doors were still closed when I woke up. I lay in bed for a moment and contemplated my next move. Luckily for me, my underwear lived in my dresser, and I could just wear some things that weren’t that dirty on the floor. I didn’t want to open my closet up. I mean, what if I went in there for a shirt, and somehow the lightproof fabric fell off my window, and she dusted from the daylight, leaving a dust stain right there in my closet. How would I get my deposit back then?
I snorted, rolled upright, and hunted down some clothes.
Gideon was still in the living room, sitting on my couch. The Internet radio had paused out long ago. I glanced at my oven’s clock—it was four. I’d only been asleep for six hours. Not enough to feel rested after the night I’d had. But it was still daylight out. Safer than nighttime, for sure.
“Okay. I’m gonna go get us some food.” I took my laptop back from Gideon and woke it up to check my bank account. My paycheck had autodeposited the evening before—somehow I never believed it was going to until I’d seen that it had. I breathed a little easier. I could make it for another two weeks just fine—rent wasn’t due till the fifteenth. But I couldn’t feed Gideon eggs forever. He’d get scurvy. “Do you like Chinese?” There was a take-out joint nearby I could hit. And it was all cut up into small bites already. He shrugged.
“Is that a no on Chinese?”
He shrugged again.
“We’re going to have to get better on nodding or shaking our heads if we want this thing to work. Wait—egg rolls?” A nod. “Mushroom chicken.” A large shake no. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Lemon chicken?” Another nod.
We played twenty questions till I had our menu figured out, and discovered that Gideon did not like mushrooms, kung pao, or hot-and-sour soup. Which was just as well because he wouldn’t be able to drink it. Which gave me a thought.
I found the old mister I’d used with Minnie back in the day, to dissuade her from clawing up my couch, back when my couch had been worth attempting to save. I cleaned out the spigot, filled the bottle, and returned.
“Open up your mouth. I’m gonna mist you like a houseplant.”
I think more water went on him than in his mouth. But he could almost hold it, and spray himself with it, if he smashed both his hands together, Hulk-style. It would keep him busy for a while. That would be the biggest damage he’d face, as time went on. Not being able to interact with the outside world could make him go insane. I’d seen it before, with long-term patients. They were mostly druggies before they got hurt, so they hadn’t had much of a support structure to fall back on afterward. And Gideon didn’t really either—just Anna, his now-a-vampire girlfriend, and me. I could barely manage owning a cat. Caring for an entire other human being long-term was out of the quest
ion.
I looked around my small living room, made smaller by the addition of Gideon. I spotted the boxes that were left here for me to deal with after Christmas morning. There was that ugly belt in one of them, the one Peter’d given me, which I had no chance in hell of ever wearing. I could return that, and maybe at least break even on the Chinese food.
“Okay, Gideon, I’m taking off now,” I said while picking up the boxes to take out to the trash and/or return. Gideon nod-grunted from his spot on my couch.
* * *
Winter’s test strip was still in my purse. I should have put it in a plastic bag, because ew, biohazards, but the blood was dry now, and I doubted my purse was going to become a were-purse come the full moon. I didn’t want to touch it anyhow—I wouldn’t until it came time to hand it over to Dren.
Daylight, such as it was, filtered through the clouds above. The constant gray of living in Port Cavell—at least during winter, and not in summer when all it was was too warm—wore on me. Each winter day, numbingly cold, wet, miserable, just like the last. No wonder vampires liked it here so much. I parked my car in a mostly vacant lot. Now that Christmas was over, all the weather-bleached decorations looked like grim little flags, flapping surrender in the wind.
I hit the Chinese food place first. I stood in line, ordered my takeout, and my phone rang. Jake. Normally I wouldn’t pick up and be that person who talked in public, but with him I’d been trained to feel I was one phone call away from an emergency at all times.
“Hey, Sissy.”
“Hey yourself.” I stepped back and looked sheepish as I handed the Asian woman my credit card. “What are you up to tonight?”
“About five eleven,” he said, and I snorted.
The lady at the counter handed my card back, and I tipped her well, since I knew I was being rude. “What’s going on?” I slid the food off the counter and made my way to the door.
“Just wondering if I could take you out for dinner tomorrow.”
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