Moonshifted es-2

by Cassie Alexander

  “I’m the baby of my family too. When I turned eighteen, my mother flung open the doors and kicked me out of the nest.”

  Gina sighed. “It’s different for me. I was working and going to vet school when my mother got early-onset Alzheimer’s. One of my brothers died in the war. The other moved away. My sister has four kids—taking care of Mom and Dad just fell to me. One day I was living at home to save money, the next I was stuck there because my dad couldn’t convince my mom to take a shower otherwise.”

  “God. That’s tough, Gina.”

  “Tell me about it.” She shook her head. “That’s what I traded. The Shadows keep her from getting any worse, and they get me, on Y4.” I winced, but she was looking out the window. She went on. “I’ve never actually gotten to be a real vet. What I would give someday to just take care of a yippy dog. Even just a hamster. Turn here.” She pointed in front of me. “If I’d stayed bitten, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my job. Y4 fires you if you fraternize too much—the Consortium won’t allow it. It might make you too biased, I guess.”

  “Nah—probably because then everyone would do it, and there’d be no one left to work on the full moon,” I teased.

  She gave me a halfhearted smile. “Really, if I lost my job, where would my mom and dad be? Part of me is afraid the Shadows will keep her alive forever, just to keep me trapped.”

  “That’s a reasonable fear.”

  “I know. Anyhow. It is what it is now. I’ll get out someday, just not today. Or tomorrow. Or four days from now.”

  I turned into a neighborhood where all the homes were packed together tightly, and she directed me into her driveway. “You going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. I’ll catch the bus into work tonight. I’ll be fine.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant, but I nodded. “Call me if you need anything else, Gina.”

  “I will.” She gave me a tight smile. Her hand was on the door handle, but she didn’t move to open the door. I could see her steeling herself to face her parents, haunted by the memories of what could have been, fighting the depression that came with realizing you made the wrong choice, even if you’re not entirely sure which one it was.

  “He doesn’t deserve you, Gina. You know that, right?”

  “I know. Doesn’t make it hurt any less.” She reached over and hugged me before jumping out of my car. I watched her till her front door opened, then waved as I pulled out of her driveway.

  I wished I could have helped her out more, but I had problems of my own to get home to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Honey, I’m home!” I announced as I walked into my house. There was a groan from the vicinity of my bathroom, and an accusatory meow from Minnie.

  I walked around the bar and into my kitchen. I put an extra bagel into my fridge, noticing an empty space on my small kitchen counter where my toaster oven had been. Huh. Over by the couch, the mister bottle was empty. Hopefully some of that had gotten into Gideon’s mouth. I paused and listened for more noise. Gideon would be dead if Veronica had woken up—and God help Sike if she didn’t take Gideon with her when they took Veronica. I walked down my hall and pressed my ear to the bathroom door. There was silence beyond.

  “Hey, I really want to take a shower.” Speaking of which, he probably needed one too. Goddammit, if I had to shower people on my off days, I should at least be getting paid minimum wage.

  Another groan. Gideon always sounded like an end-stage liver failure patient, with too many toxins in his brain to think straight. Like a seal having sex on a beach. “One for yes, two for no,” I said. “Are you okay in there?”

  Silence.

  Fuck.

  “I’m coming in.” I opened up the door—it stopped when it hit my electric scale. Which was on the floor and, for some reason, dismembered. “Gideon?”

  Gideon stood in front of the mirror, his naked back to me, blocking his own reflection. I shoved the scale away with my toe and stepped inside. “You okay?” I asked, then gasped. The floor around my sink was spattered with blood, and Gideon’s image in the mirror was not the same.

  “What happened to you?”

  With the mirror I could see his face—his eyelids still dangled over empty sockets, and his teeth were still exposed—but in his chest there was a piece of plastic, embedded in his flesh. There were raised welts where it had inserted itself—or where he had inserted it himself. Oh, my, God. There were other fragments elsewhere, like a jigsaw puzzle scattered on his chest. I felt a small part of my brain just shut off at the horror.

  “Gideon … what did you do?”

  Things that were not veins ran inside his chest; I could see them looping, curled, creating new circulatory paths. I reached out to turn him around, and he put up his hands to stop me—the ends of his fingers were spiked with pieces of metal, tines from something. My brain slowly parsed them—they were from the grill from my toaster oven.

  “What. Happened.”

  A red light turned on near the apex of his shoulder. Like a webcam. Say, from my laptop. And I knew who’d been behind all of this.

  “Grandfather.”

  Gideon didn’t answer me. He couldn’t while missing a tongue. But German muttered out from Gideon’s chest, where the CD player rode under Gideon’s skin like a pacemaker, the edges ragged and raw.

  “How the hell did this happen?”

  I’d only been gone for a night. One night. And Grandfather had taken all the electronics in my house and shoved them under Gideon’s skin, like he was a fucking piñata. I wanted to throw up, but Gideon was blocking my path to the toilet, and I didn’t want to step in his blood.

  “What? How?” I sputtered. I let go of Gideon, and addressed the vicinity of his chest. “Did you even give him a choice?”

  “Wir sind beide zufrieden.”

  “Did he actually give you a choice?” I asked Gideon, my voice rising.

  “Unsere Wahl war offensichtlich.” The man—the human beneath whatever the hell Grandfather had done—nodded. But maybe Grandfather was controlling him. Who knew. Who would ever know again.

  I made to reach for the sink, and stopped myself before I put my hand into a smear of blood.

  Gideon’s hands weren’t completely articulated, but he’d managed to get the hot water on. “That toaster oven was a graduation gift,” I said.

  Grandfather continued talking.

  “I could try to translate what you’re saying, but you ate my laptop.” My brain was trying to get a wrap around what had happened. I could feel it revving up, and then spinning out of control. It was one thing keeping Grandfather around, thinking he was some moody German ghost—and another to have him blacksmith himself into a cyborg.

  “I need a shower.” I took some deep breaths. “This will all make more sense after a shower.” Surely it couldn’t get worse. I stepped aside, so Gideon could get past me.

  He didn’t move.

  “A shower, by myself. Out. Now,” I clarified.

  Gideon held up his right forefinger, which had been replaced by the temperature-dialing rheostat from my toaster oven. And then he turned toward my bathroom mirror and sketched out something upon the fogging glass.

  “Out!” I yelled.

  He turned and squeezed by me, leaving the sink’s water still on.

  Written in the fog, before more fog could replace it, I saw two words: RADIO SHACK.

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, a shower didn’t help. I couldn’t really wash my troubles right out of my hair, when What the hell had happened to Gideon was continually at the forefront of my mind.

  Gideon had been horrifying before, but my brain could grasp the ways he was damaged—I’d seen other people injured similarly at work. Now he was changed in ways I couldn’t comprehend. I almost stepped out onto bloody tiles. Then I grabbed an extra towel and threw it down to step on instead. I didn’t have the strength to clean anything else just now. Bleach would have to wait.

  I walked into my bedro
om. It would be day for a few more hours. I wanted to feel safe, but it was getting hard in between all the crazy. There was too much going on, and nothing I could do about it. Maybe once Anna’s ceremony was done, and Gideon and Veronica were out of my house, it would all start making sense. Then I’d only have to worry about stalkery vampires and stalkery weres. It would mean that my problems had been halved.

  I picked up the box Anna had given me. At least Grandfather hadn’t assimilated Asher’s silver bracelet. I put the bracelet on, feeling a bit like Wonder Woman, pulled the sheets back on my bed, and tucked myself inside.

  * * *

  I didn’t set my alarm clock, and it felt late when I woke up. I blinked and reached for my phone. It was five P.M. I was still safe, inside my house. As safe as could be expected anyway. I remembered today’s To Do list: dinner with Jake, ask a were-leader for help.

  I went toward my bathroom to brush my teeth, then remembered the huge bloodstain on the floor, and my apartment’s other, non-feline, non-vampire occupant.

  “Hey, Gideon—” I said, walking into my living room. He stood with his back to me, against the far wall. His shoulders were slumped—it looked like he was urinating, only I didn’t smell pee and there was no corresponding sound. “Grandfather?” I tried instead.

  Him having his back to me, with no hint he’d heard either name, was creepy. I walked over, feeling like that chick in a horror movie who always does what she shouldn’t, no matter how many times you throw popcorn or yell at the screen. As I sidled around him, I saw he was plugged into the wall simultaneously via an outlet and a phone jack.

  “I’m still not okay with this,” I said. The cords looked umbilical—I tried not to follow them too far into the shadows my bathrobe created on his chest. Wait—my bathrobe. “Gideon,” I said, my voice low. Was nothing sacred? He’d taken the shoulder and torn it, so that my laptop’s webcam could peek through. I took a step nearer. “Do you even need food now? Water?” I asked, and got no response. “Okay. Fine. I’ll just be in the bathroom, cleaning up your mess.” I resisted the urge to poke him, to see if he would move or what he would do, and went under my kitchen sink to get bleach.

  I’d need a new jug of bleach soon and some additional cheap towels. Hopefully that trip could wait until after the holidays. I wondered exactly how Grandfather-Gideon was communing with the outside world just now, and to what effect—I imagined him lodging serious complaints on assorted message boards and snorted. Honestly, it seemed like the sort of thing I ought to tell—or warn—someone about, but I wasn’t entirely sure who, and since so far the only detriment was that he was probably using electricity like I was harboring a grow-light, it could wait.

  I scrubbed until no one would know that my bathroom had been a crime scene unless they possessed a forensic degree. Empowered by cleanliness, high on bleach fumes, I got ready to go out to dinner with Jake.

  I pulled on my scrubs and all the silver that I currently owned. Between my belt, bracelet, and badge—which might warn me a second or two before any attack—I’d give myself even odds on surviving for five seconds once I was outside my door. Five whole seconds, although not necessarily painless ones. Hooray for me. I estimated where I’d parked was about ten seconds away, and technically being in my car wasn’t any safer than being outside it, really. If a certain crazed unknown someone in a black truck decided to run me over, my little Chevy Cavalier wouldn’t stand a chance.

  While I was standing there waiting, measuring assorted odds, Gideon came up behind me, looming.

  “I’ve got to get to my car. Are you willing to spot me?” I wasn’t sure what Gideon could do precisely—but once upon a time, I’d seen Grandfather laser out from the inside of a pissed-off dragon. Gideon nodded, then pointed at the doorknob with his chin.

  It took me a second to catch his drift. “Ah. Opposable thumbs must be high on your To Do list.”

  Gideon nodded.

  “Once I leave, don’t open the door up for anyone but me, okay?”

  Gideon nodded again, and with one last look at my badge, I opened the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The only thing I had to be afraid of on my way to my car was ice. The weather wasn’t letting up—instead of snowing enough to run the city into the ground, it kept warming just enough to put a slick sheet of ice over everything as it refroze. I hopped inside and my engine took quickly. With a moment of forethought, I took my ibuprofen out of my purse and tossed it into my glove box—I’d hate to find out Jake had swiped it two weeks from now, when I was on my period.

  Jake was waiting for me on the curb outside the Armory. When he saw my car, he put his thumb out like a hitchhiker, and I flashed my high beams at him.

  “Hey, Sissy!” he said as he got in.

  “To what do I owe the honor?” I said, pulling away from the curb.

  “The usual. Your good taste in siblings, the fact that we share a mom.” He grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “How’s it going?”

  “Eh. I’m tired.”

  “You work night shift. You’re always tired.”

  “True.”

  “But I have a surprise for you.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Dinner’s on me tonight.”

  I flipped the right-hand turn signal on in my car.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m driving toward the nearest Burger King.”

  He snorted. “Go straight two lights, before making a left.”

  I did what he said, and there were directions after that. We wound up in a diner at an area just this side of decent. I’d been here before, long ago, when Mom would drop Jake and me off at a forgotten arcade with a fistful of quarters to kill an afternoon. The arcade was gone now, but the diner remained.

  “Well, this is a blast from the past,” I said, pulling into a small parking lot nearby.

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  “Thanks. I think I do.” He held the door for me as we went inside.

  As I passed, I could see he was wearing nice clothes—he looked pulled together. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around this version of Jake: clean, polite, kind. The waitress took us to a booth.

  “Just like old times. Want a chocolate milk shake?” Jake asked as the waitress waited for our drink order.

  “Maybe a hot chocolate, instead. And a burger, please.”

  “Me too. A double.”

  The waitress took our order and went away.

  “So,” I said, looking at Jake.

  “Soooo?”

  “Really, Jake. What is up.” I took my hat off and set it down. It was nice and warm in here at least. Plus, there were no eyeless cyborgs.

  “Does there always have to be something up?”

  “With you, yes.”

  “I just wish you could trust me again.”

  “How many times have you stolen things from me, Jake?”

  “I don’t want to hash over the past.”

  “How convenient.”

  “Do we have to have the same conversation every single time we hang out?”

  I squinted at him. “Unless we’re not talking that day.”

  He crossed his arms, and childishly stuck out his tongue. I couldn’t help but laugh. The waitress came by with our hot chocolates, and we busied ourselves stirring in marshmallows.

  “I can’t blame you,” Jake began, and I expected one of the reversals that had followed the last few times he’d said those words. I can’t blame you for whatever problems you have, like not trusting me, he’d say, without ever owning up to his own flaws. But instead he continued, “I can’t blame you for being mad at me. But I want you to know, I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

  The irony that it was the dead of winter, and we wouldn’t see any new foliage till late spring didn’t avoid me. “How so?”

  “For starters, I’m buying us dinner tonight. And then next month, I’ll be paying for my half of the cell phone bill.”

  I pursed my lips. If
we were normal, these things would have pleased me; they’d be signs my erstwhile brother was getting back up on his feet. But if Jake had taught me one thing, it was that everything always came with a hitch. “How are you affording it?”

  Jake shrugged nonchalantly.

  “No. Seriously, Jake. I need to know.”

  “I’ve been working very hard lately is all.”

  “About that, Jake.” I couldn’t very well tell my brother to quit hanging out with other homeless people—just white guys with dreadlocks who probably sold drugs. “What is it that you do?”

  “This and that.”

  “Selling drugs,” I guessed, getting ready to scoot out of the booth. Was this the right time to make a scene? Was there ever a right time? Of all the things I would have thought that Jake could do to push me away, this was the last, biggest, final, straw.

  “No. Energy supplements.”

  “Is that what they’re calling meth these days?”

  He inhaled and exhaled. “I knew you would make this difficult, Edie.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re doing well. But if you’re taking money for running drugs, and then trying to buy me dinner with it, I just can’t stand for that.”

  “It’s not drugs,” he protested. I stood up, and he stood up too. Other patrons were looking at us now.

  “Why can’t you just have faith in me?”

  “Are you really asking me that?” My voice rose as I asked him. He held out his hands, palms up, pleading.

  “Edie. I love you. I just need you to believe in me. One more time.”

  I stood there, looking down at him, torn between running away and running toward him. I breathed heavy, deep, then sat back down.

  “Energy supplements,” I repeated, trying to talk myself into it.

  He nodded. “They’re really popular. I’ll cover the phone bill next month. The whole bill. Not just my half. I owe you.”

  “Okay,” I said to him, and to myself. “Okay.”

  * * *

  Our dinner came out. Jake opened up his burger and reached into his pocket, under my watchful stare, pulled out a palmful of glass vials.