“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 hospital 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.