“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 bedroom. 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.