by Rachel Caine
It was the most sensible thing Claire had ever heard her say—and the most painful, too. She put her arm around Miranda. Close up, she expected Mir to smell bad, but she didn’t; she smelled like lemon shampoo and soap. With a little clothing upgrade and better makeup and hair, she’d be pretty.
Oh, God, she thought, amused. Eve’s rubbed off on me. Because the old Claire, the one she’d been before the Glass House, would have never even thought about Miranda’s appearance.
“Explain to me why you came to find me,” she said. “Was it just that you saw the knife fight?”
“Yes,” Miranda said. And then, immediately, “No. There’s something else.”
“What?”
Miranda looked up at her with those odd, unsettling, luminous eyes. “It’s about Shane. I think he’s in trouble. There’s something wrong in his head. I can almost see it.”
Claire’s phone beeped for attention—a text. She checked it. It was, shockingly, from Myrnin; she didn’t think he even knew how to text. Evidently, he’d found his cell phone again.
It said, Where are you, stupid girl? Run faster!
Claire sighed. “Dammit! Can you tell me about it while we walk?”
Miranda didn’t, of course, have many details. Psychic impressions were the most useless things ever, as far as Claire could tell…it was always feelings and impressions and vague warnings, and half the time it seemed like Miranda made things worse by trying to prevent something bad. Like today. The whole thing with Gina wouldn’t have happened if Miranda hadn’t come along trying to stop it. Well, probably.
Miranda’s cold-blooded violent streak worried Claire almost as much as Gina’s psycho tendencies. She thought about revenge in dangerously graphic terms.
“Let’s try this again,” she said as they walked down the mostly deserted street that led to the cul-de-sac where Myrnin’s lab entrance was located. “So what you see is that Shane’s in trouble because he gets in a fight.”
Miranda nodded, so vigorously her tangled hair bounced. “A bad one,” she said. “And gets hurt. I can’t tell how much, but he gets hurt a lot, I think.”
“Is it day or night?”
Miranda thought about it, frowning. She kicked an empty plastic bottle and flinched when a dog barked in one of the yards they were passing. The houses on this street were run-down, with bars on the windows. Only the Day house at the end of the street—a mirror for the house where Claire lived, the one owned by Michael Glass—looked nicely kept up, and even it needed a new coat of paint. “I can’t tell,” she finally said. “It happens inside. In a room. People are watching. There are bars.”
“Like, with drinks?”
“No, like a cage.”
That was sickly likely, because Shane seemed to end up behind those kinds of bars way too often. “How many people?”
She shrugged. “It’s dark; I can’t tell. Maybe a lot? No—more. More than a lot. From a long ways off. There but not there.”
That was definitely vague and not at all helpful. The fighting—well, that was something that honestly wasn’t all that unusual. Shane was a born fighter. But the getting badly hurt—that was unsettling, all right.
“Is there any way to tell when it’s going to happen?”
Miranda shook her head. “It’s pretty clear, so maybe a few days? A week? But I don’t know. Sometimes it’s tricky. And sometimes it goes away, too. Things aren’t always obvious.”
“Okay, well, thanks. I’ll try to look out for him.” That wasn’t much, because Claire knew she couldn’t spend all her time watching out for him. Warning him would help, but knowing Shane, it wouldn’t solve the problem, either. If he felt like he needed to be in the fight, he’d be in it—whether he got hurt or not.
“You should get home,” Claire said. “I have to go to work. Mir?”
Miranda stopped, looking at her. She was getting taller, Claire realized; still growing. She was taller than Claire was now, and would probably be Eve’s height or better before she was done.
“Tomorrow, meet me at the house,” Claire said. “If Myrnin doesn’t need me, we’ll go shopping. Okay?”
Miranda smiled at her—a sweet, delighted, heartfelt expression that lit up her whole face. No, her whole body. It was like nobody had ever offered before. “Okay!” she said. “I’ve never been shopping.”
Claire blinked. “Never?”
“No. My parents used to buy me things before they died. And now people sometimes bring me things, but I’ve never gone myself. Is it fun? It looks fun.”
“It’s fun,” Claire said. She had a sudden impulse to hug the girl, so she did. Miranda felt all bones and awkward angles, but she hugged back enthusiastically. “You go straight home and stay there. Monica may back off, but Gina’s kind of nuts. I think she’s after me, though.”
“She is,” Miranda said, in that distant, weird kind of voice Claire dreaded. “She’ll be coming. Soon.” She blinked and smiled. “See you tomorrow!”
She practically skipped away. Claire watched her go, shook her head, and headed into the monster’s lair.
The monster himself was standing in the middle of the lab, pacing and shaking his cell phone as if he was trying to get it to work by sheer force. He’d changed clothes again—this time, to a Victorian long-tailed coat in black, a purple vest, no shirt, and black pants. He’d ditched the bunny slippers this time, in favor of real shoes. When she came jogging down the steps, he looked so relieved she almost backed up a step or two.
“There you are!” he cried, and held his phone out to her. “This thing doesn’t work.”
“It does. I got your text.”
“But I’ve been sending it over and over, and then it just stopped working.”
It had stopped working because, evidently, he’d been pushing buttons so hard he’d broken them. Claire shook her head, took the phone, and tossed it in the garbage can in the corner. “I’ll get you another one,” she said. “Well? I’m here. What’s the crisis?”
He stopped and stared at her. “Bishop is on the loose, and you’re asking me what the crisis might be? Really?”
“I…thought the vampires would be taking care of that.”
“Indeed. Oliver’s got half the vampires in Morganville making inquiries of the other half.”
“Only half?”
“The half we can trust interrogating the half we can’t,” Myrnin said. “A sad truth, but there are more than a few who preferred Bishop’s open tyranny to Amelie’s more reasonable approach. There are always a few, Claire, who like being told what to do instead of being required to think. And those are the ones you should fear. That goes equally for humans, I’m afraid. Critical thinking has become a sadly rare skill these days.”
She nodded, because she already knew that. “So what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to speak with Frank. We need him to be on the alert for any sign of Bishop. He has control of the monitoring systems, and he should be able to provide us solid leads.”
“Wait, you want me to do it? Why didn’t you?”
Myrnin drew himself up to his full height, hands clasped behind his back. “I have things to do,” he said. “And…Frank and I may have had a little disagreement. He isn’t speaking to me anymore.”
“He—Wait, can he do that?”
“Damn straight I can.” Frank’s gravelly voice came from her cell phone speaker, muffled by her pocket, but still clearly audible. “I can do what I want, and I don’t want to hear anything from that jackass anymore.”
“Frank—” Claire sighed. “Fine. I hate this, you know. I hate that you’re all fangs-out at each other when one of you doesn’t even have any fangs anymore. But we don’t have time for your girl fight, okay? Will you please look for Bishop, so he doesn’t get us all killed horribly?”
“Well,” Frank said, “you’ve got a point about that.”
Claire turned to Myrnin. “Anybody else you want monitored?”
“Well, there’s Gloriana,” Myr
nin said. “I would definitely look out for Gloriana, since she’s the newest in town, and, well, you’ve met her, haven’t you?”
Claire frowned. Gloriana…oh. She’d met her once, briefly, at a party about a month ago. Gloriana—or Glory, for cutesy-short—was beautiful, in an antique kind of way; she had waves of long blond hair and bright blue eyes and a smile that made men melt like ice cream in the sun. Vampire, of course. Charming. But she’d taken a special interest in Michael, and that hadn’t sat very well with Eve at all. “Glory’s a Bishop girl?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Myrnin said, “but Gloriana has a history of betting with the winners, and she was Bishop’s pet for a short time, about three hundred years ago, I believe. She may still have some fond memories of him, as difficult as that is to understand. Old loyalties die hard among our kind. So do old enemies, and she never was Amelie’s friend, though they’re polite enough in public.”
“Is she your friend?” Claire hesitated, then said, “Or, you know, friend?”
He raised his eyebrows and air quoted. “Friend?”
“You know what I mean. Oliver practically admitted he’d had a fling with her once.”
“I don’t have flings.” Again with the air quotes. “And, no, Gloriana is not my friend. Nor my enemy, particularly; I rarely had anything to do with her at all. She’s agreed to abide by the laws of Morganville, but if a situation arises where she might sidestep them…well. I would not like to stand between her and her desires. She can be quite cold-blooded.”
Claire felt a stab of dread. “Uh, she could be after Shane, then?”
“Shane?” Myrnin rolled his eyes. “Why in the world would you leap to such a conclusion? Definitely not. She doesn’t do humans. She finds them commonplace. And, strangely enough, not everyone is as fascinated by your beau as you are.”
“Well, then, would she be after you?”
That made him stop for a second, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “No,” he finally said. “No, I don’t believe she would be at all interested. I’m not…suitable. By which I mean, sane. She can’t show me off in public, which is very important to her; she likes to be seen with her conquests. Also, I’m not sure that she could affect me in any significant way. My patterns of thought are quite…different, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Frank, are you getting this?”
“Bishop, check. It’s not like I’m going to forget that the bastard who ripped out my throat and made me the walking dead is out there. Gloriana, yeah, I know her. Gloriana’s on my radar. She just left the gym about ten minutes ago, and she’s arriving at Common Grounds right now.”
Myrnin nodded. “She does like it there. Claire, perhaps you should make friends. You’re quite a friendly person.”
“Be your spy, you mean.”
“Inelegantly put, but accurate. I have things to do. Frank, please stay in touch with Claire via her communicator.”
“Cell phone,” she said. “Star Trek had communicators.”
He flapped a hand. “I hardly see the difference.”
“I’m still not listening to him,” Frank said. “But, yeah. I’ll stay in touch, kid. You got some kind of headphones? Bluetooth?”
“Earbuds,” she said. “Why?”
“So I don’t broadcast all over the place when I talk to you, kid. I thought you were smart.”
“It’s been a bad day,” she said. “I almost got stabbed.”
Myrnin stopped pacing, looked at her for a moment as if trying to see any possible wounds, and then said, “Almost doesn’t count, now, does it? Hurry onward. And, Claire?”
“Yes?”
“Do be careful and watch out for Bishop; he was dangerous before, but I don’t know what he is now, except much less stable. Also, I don’t trust Gloriana. I don’t know why on earth she’s here in Morganville. Or why she’s decided to come here now. As I said, she and Amelie never got along, despite their exquisitely polite manners toward each other. So I do believe we have to assume that there can’t be a coincidence between Gloriana’s arrival and Bishop’s escape.” He hesitated, then added, “Do be careful. I can’t replace you as easily as all that.”
That was Myrnin’s idea of a compliment. Nice.
SHANE
Claire went to school, and I had a day off, and I felt kind of…lost. I shouldn’t have gone back to the gym, but I did. Don’t know why, except that I was out and it seemed like the right thing to do. The jackass who manned the front desk gave me the same “you are a bug and I will crush you” look as before, but then he looked down at a list and nodded to me. “Go on in,” he said. “You’re taken care of.”
“Taken care of how, exactly?”
“Paid for,” he said. “No charge to use the gym.”
Well, crap. Tough to justify walking out on that, so I went in the door and breathed in the scent of sweat, effort, old leather, metal, desperation. Gyms smelled like home to me, especially after my mom and Alyssa died; life with Dad had been boiled down to gyms, bars, cheap motel soap, and blood.
It smelled like…home? If that isn’t too sick.
I tried the sauna, which was superhot and damp, and changed into an old pair of sweatpants. Bare feet, because I fear no athlete’s foot fungus, and besides, I was planning on kicking the crap out of a heavy bag, anyway.
I didn’t get the chance. I walked out, towel around my neck, hair damp and sticking to my face, and there, sitting on the railing on the second floor like a very beautiful bird on a wire was the girl I’d dreamed about.
The vampire I’d dreamed about.
I hadn’t lied to Claire, not actually. I’d honestly figured that it had been a dream, because it hadn’t seemed like me at all—what I’d been doing, saying, thinking. It’s like that in dreams, right? You don’t have to be yourself.
But there she was, just as curvy and fresh and gorgeous as she’d been last night, in the dream/not dream/maybe possibly dream.
And she was smiling down on me like we had a secret. I wanted to be angry, to feel that rush of adrenaline I almost always got in the presence of a vamp, but it seemed like whatever my brain thought, my body reacted to her like it did to a pretty girl.
A pretty girl smiling at me.
“Hey, Shane,” she said. She had a lovely voice, low and sweet, and it sounded like she was the only thing in the room when she spoke. “Nice to see you here. Did you think about my offer?”
Oh, man. It took me a minute to sort out what kind of offer she was talking about; that smile made a bunch of offers that had nothing to do with the gym. “The advanced sparring group,” I said. “Right?”
“Yes.” Her smile took on a mischievous, knowing curl. “Whatever else could you possibly be thinking of?”
Stop this. Stop it now. Some part of me was angry, trying to shake me out of it, but it was a very small part, and the rest of me felt…calm. Right. Like all this was inevitable—fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it.
But at the very least, I wasn’t going to go chasing after some vamp girl, no matter how pretty she was. I couldn’t do that to Claire, and deep down, there was always going to be a part of me that a vampire couldn’t touch. I hoped. So I said, staring straight into her clear blue eyes, “I’m just here for the fighting, lady.”
“Glory,” she said. “Gloriana. But you can call me Glory.”
Of course. I’d seen her before, and it came back to me clear as day this time; I’d seen her at her welcome-to-Morganville party, but not close up. She’d been trying to drag Michael off then, and she hadn’t been focused on me at all. I’d thought she was pretty, but not, you know, pretty.
Not until she’d turned that smile and those eyes on me. Then I understood how swept away Michael had felt. It was like being hit with a tsunami of hormones, and, man, did it feel good.
“You came for the fighting,” she said, and pushed off the railing. She dropped twenty feet and landed like a cat, barely flexing her knees to absorb the impact. Her gaze never left mine,
and her smile never faltered. “All right, then. You should get what you came for. Follow me.”
I expected her to take me to the mats in the center of the room; there were people working out there, doing throws, kicks, blocks, that kind of stuff. Your basic martial arts sort of activity.
But she took me another way, through an unmarked door at the back, down a plain hallway, and through another door marked private, into a room with an actual boxing ring on a platform. Two guys stripped down to form fitting shorts were whaling on each other, and they were doing serious damage. I stopped and watched, analyzing speed, force, agility, endurance.
“They’re good,” I said.
“They’d better be,” Glory said. “Do you think you can hold your own?”
“Yeah.” I said it without any particular sense of bragging; I just knew I could. These guys hadn’t grown up with my dad. “Bring it.”
“I need to match you up with a partner,” she said. “Vassily? Who do you think Shane should spar with?” While she asked, Gloriana reached into a big, black refrigerator on the wall and pulled out a sports-drink bottle, which she held out to me. I frowned at it, but she raised her eyebrows and gave me a charming little smile. With dimples. “Trust me. It’s good for you. Protein drink, special recipe. Free with your membership.”
I took it and very cautiously sipped. I know, stupid, right? Who takes something from a frickin’ vampire? But there was something so safe about her. It was like I couldn’t distrust her, even though I wouldn’t have ever taken any damn drink from another vampire, ever.
And it tasted good. Gritty, the way protein shakes do, but with a buzzing edge. Caffeine, maybe. It raced through me with a hot shiver. Made me feel amazing—alert, strong, pumped.
“Shane?” Vassily, the vamp who’d been teaching that first class, the one I’d put down, came over. He’d shed the gi and was wearing standard gym clothes, and he’d left his long, thick hair down to spill over his shoulders. “Ah yes. This one. Let’s have him spar with Jester. That should be an interesting matchup.”