Bitter Blood tmv-13

by Rachel Caine

  He cut off abruptly because Claire made him shut up, by the simple expedient of putting the point of a thin-bladed silver knife against his back, just over where it needed to go to reach his heart. “Let go,” she said. “I picked up the trash, just like you said. We’re even.”

  They weren’t, and she knew it without him even bothering to say it, but Oliver silently released Shane’s hand. Claire stepped away, knife still drawn and ready, as Shane pushed Oliver back with a violent shove and picked up the stapler from where it had fallen on the pavement.

  “You owe us for a poster,” Shane said. “They cost me five bucks apiece. I’ll expect a free drink in exchange.”

  “So will I,” Oliver said, “from the vein, the next time I catch either of you in less…visible circumstances.” He showed teeth, and walked back into the coffee shop.

  “I guess that means Monica can’t count on his vote, either,” Shane said. It sounded like a joke, but he was trembling, and clenching the stapler way too hard. He knew, as Claire did, that they’d just passed over some kind of line. Maybe permanently.

  “Why?” she asked him, a little plaintively. “Why did you do that?”

  “Nobody talks to you that way,” he said. “Not even him.”

  He draped his arm around her shoulders, picked up the other signs, and they continued on to the next stop.

  At the next stop Claire and Shane made to put up Monica’s poster, they found someone else there before them stapling notices: a serious-looking older woman and a younger man, probably her son. He was about Shane’s height, but thin as a whip. He nodded to Claire as if he knew her (and she didn’t think they’d ever met), then fixed his gaze on Shane. “Hey, man,” he said, and offered his hand. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. How are you?”

  “Good, good. You remember my mom, Flora Ramos, right?”

  “Mrs. Ramos, sure, I remember the burritos you used to make for Enrique in grade school,” Shane said. “He used to trade them to me if I gave up my M&Ms. I always made the deal; that’s how good they were.”

  “You gave away my burritos, ’Rique?” Mrs. Ramos said, and raised her eyebrows at her son. He spread his hands and shrugged.

  “You gave ’em to me every day,” he said. “So yeah.”

  “They were delicious,” Shane said. “Hey, he made a profit. He used to cut them in half and trade each separately.”

  “Enrique.”

  “I was an entrepreneur, Mama.” Enrique gave her a devastating grin. “What, you want my M&Ms now?” In answer, she handed him a small letter-sized sheet of paper, and he held it against the telephone pole as she stapled it in place.

  The flyer said, captain obvious for mayor, and it had a big question mark underneath the caption where a picture ought to go. The slogan said, vote human. That was all.

  “What the hell?” Shane asked, and pointed at the blank picture. “Mrs. Ramos, Captain Obvious left town. You can’t ask people to vote for somebody who isn’t even here.”

  “Maybe an empty seat is better than one filled by another useless bootlicker,” she said, and as friendly as she seemed, her eyes were chilly and dark all of a sudden. “I’ve seen these Morrell posters. How can you of all people support such a thing, Shane? I know what that evil bruja did to you and your family!”

  “It’s not…” Shane took a step back, frowning. “It’s not what it looks like. Look, Monica’s a whole lot of things, but a bootlicker? Not so I’ve ever noticed. She’s more likely to be wearing the boots, and kicking with them. Weak, she’s not. And we need somebody on that council who will stand up to the vampires for us.”

  Anger flared in Mrs. Ramos’s lined face. “She is part of the cancer that eats at this town. She and her whole disgusting family! I thank God that her father and brother are gone—”

  “Wait a second,” Shane interrupted, and it was his serious voice now, the one that meant he wasn’t going to let it go. “Richard Morrell was okay. He tried. Don’t—”

  “He was a corrupt man from a corrupt family.” Her voice had gone hard now, as unyielding as the flinty distance in her eyes. “Enough. I’ve finished talking with you.”

  Claire tried a different approach. Emotion clearly wasn’t getting them anywhere. “But—they won’t let you write in someone who doesn’t even exist!”

  “Captain Obvious does exist,” Flora said. “He always has, always will. Until he stands up again, I’ll stand for him.”

  “You,” Claire said. “You’re the new Captain Obvious?”

  Enrique had gone quiet now, and when he wasn’t smiling and being friendly, he looked a little bit dangerous. “Why? You got a problem with that? My mom’s not good enough for you?”

  “No, I just—” Claire didn’t know how to finish that.

  Shane did. “Dude, she’s your mom. She used to throw bake sales. She made cookies. How can she be Captain Obvious?”

  “How can any mother not want to be against the evil that lives here?” Flora said. “I raised kids in this town. Enrique, Hector, Donna, and Leticia. You tell me, Shane. You tell me what happened to three of my kids.”

  He just looked at her mutely for a long few seconds, and then away. “That wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was an accident.”

  “So they said.”

  Claire cleared her throat; she felt—as always—as though someone had failed to fill her in, and here she was standing in the middle of a scene clearly full of tension, and she didn’t understand any of it. “Uh, sorry, but…what happened?”

  Mrs. Ramos didn’t reply, and Shane didn’t seem to want to, now that he’d tripped over the land mine. So Enrique finally sighed and dived in.

  “My sister Donna was driving,” he said. “She was seventeen, just got her license. She was taking my brother Hector to work—he was nineteen—and my sister Letty to school. It was the middle of winter, a little icy like it gets sometimes. Black ice, the kind you can’t see. She hadn’t ever driven on it before. They hit a pole.” He didn’t finish the story, but Claire guessed how it would end: in funerals. That was confirmed by a sideways glance at Shane. He had that quiet, closed-in look he got when people talked about their lost friends and relatives; he’d had so much of it himself, losing his sister, then his mom, and finally his dad. He always seemed to guard against emotion, even when it came from other people.

  “That wasn’t all of it,” Flora Ramos said, with a suppressed anger that made the hair shiver at the nape of Claire’s neck. “My children were out there lying hurt and alone, and they took their lives. I know they did.”

  “Mama, it was an accident. They bled out; you know what the doctors said.”

  “The doctors, the doctors, like they don’t work for the monsters just as we all do? No, Enrique. It was the vampiros. It wasn’t an accident. You should know that!” She sounded weary and furious at the same time; whenever it had happened, it was still fresh in her mind. “I have one child left they haven’t taken from me. And they won’t. Not while I have breath left in my body.”

  “You could leave town,” Shane said quietly. “You had a chance.”

  “And our house? Our life? No. My husband is buried here, and my children. This is our home. The monsters must leave it before we do.” She raised her chin, and Claire saw that despite the wrinkles, the gray hair, she was determined, and dangerous. “Don’t play these games, Shane; politics here means our lives. I will not let you make it a joke.”

  Shane stared at her for a long moment. He felt sorry for her; Claire could see it. He knew how it felt, to blame the vamps for the loss of people he loved. But above all, Shane was practical. “You can’t win,” he said. “Don’t do this. We’ve got a plan. Trust us.”

  “You two?” Flora laughed. “Your girlfriend, she’s a vampire’s pet—the Founder’s pet. And you, you are too much in love to see it, and too much of a child. She’s with them, not you.” She dismissed them both with a flip of her hand. “Enough. Enrique. Vámanos.”

  He sent Shane an apo
logetic look and lifted his hands in a what-can-you-do? kind of gesture. “She’s my mother,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Shane nodded back. “But you should talk her out of this. Seriously. It’s dangerous.”

  “I know, man. I know.”

  Enrique hurried to catch up. His mother was already half a block away.

  Claire stood with Shane, staring at the poster promoting Captain Obvious, and Shane finally took Monica’s bigger, brighter poster and firmly stapled it right over the top.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I guarantee this isn’t over.”

  SEVEN

  CLAIRE

  It wasn’t over, not by a long shot, but at least they were left alone to put up the rest of the posters; that didn’t mean people weren’t glaring at them, or saying mean things, but nobody actively tried to hurt them. Claire did wonder if Mrs. Ramos would be tearing down posters behind them—and if she’d approve of Oliver doing the same thing. Maybe they’d meet in the middle. That would be an interesting thing to witness.

  By the time they’d stapled the last cardboard to a pole, in front of Morganville High (“Go Vipers!”), Claire was thoroughly worn out. This, she thought, had to be the worst day off ever…. They hadn’t even stopped for much of a lunch, though they’d wolfed down some cookies between stops and had a couple of Cokes. Morganville wasn’t a very big town, but they’d been down almost every street of it, and that was just about enough for one day in her opinion. She was going to voice it, but she didn’t have to, because Shane gave her a look that told her he was just as tired, and said, “Can we skip the lab and go home?”

  “Home,” she said, and slipped her arm through his. The only weight now was the stapler dragging down her backpack (and the anti-vamp knife and extra stakes that she rarely left behind) but it still felt like a ton. Shane took it from her and slipped it on one shoulder, and she envied those muscles—and admired them, too. They felt so warm and firm beneath her fingers, and it made her a bit light-headed, never mind the exhaustion. “What do you think Monica’s doing right now?”

  “Bullying someone to make her a crappy Web site and some buttons?”

  Claire groaned, because he was almost certainly right. “We created a monster.”

  “Well, no. But we’re enabling one.”

  By common unspoken consent, they avoided the street Common Grounds was on, which put them on a different, less traveled avenue; it was one that held some bad memories, Claire realized, and wished they’d risked Oliver’s wrath one more time.

  This was the street where Shane’s house had once stood. There was nothing in the spot now except a bare, weed-choked lot, a cracked foundation, and the crumbling remains of what would have once been a fireplace. Even the mailbox, which had been leaning before, had given up the ghost and fallen to pieces of random, rusted metal.

  “We don’t—maybe we should—” She couldn’t think how to say it, or even if she should, but Shane just kept walking, eyes fixed on the pavement ahead.

  “It’s okay,” he said. She might have even believed him, a little, except for the slight hunch to his shoulders, and the way he’d lowered his head to let his shaggy hair veil his expression. “It’s just an empty lot.”

  It wasn’t. It was full—full of grief and anger, anguish and terror. She could almost feel it like needles on her skin, an irresistible urge to slow down, to stop, to look. She wondered if Shane felt it, too. Maybe he did. He wasn’t walking quite as quickly as they approached the silent empty spot, which was choked with trash, scattered fire-blackened bricks, and the snarled balls of tumbleweeds.

  It was the spot where Shane’s family home had once stood, before it had burned down, taking his sister away with it.

  Just as they took their first steps in front of it, Shane stopped. Just…stopped, not moving at all, head still down, hands in his pockets. He slowly looked up, right into Claire’s startled eyes, and said, “Did you hear that?”

  She shook her head, confused. All she heard was the normal, constant background noise of daily life—TV sets whispering from distant houses, radios in passing cars, the rattle of blown tumbleweeds against chain-link fences.

  And then she heard something that sounded like a very soft, but clear, whisper. She couldn’t have said what it meant, couldn’t make out the word, but it didn’t sound like distant conversation, or TV dialogue, or anything like that. It sounded very…specific. And very close.

  “Maybe…a cat?” she guessed. It could have been a cat. But she didn’t see anything as she glanced over the ruins of Shane’s childhood. The only things still recognizable about it having been a home was the foundation—cracked in places, but still there where it wasn’t hidden by weeds—and the jumbled outline of what must have once been a brick fireplace.

  Shane didn’t look toward the lot at all. He kept looking at her, and she saw his eyes widen just as she, too, heard what he was hearing.

  A voice. A clear girl’s voice, very, very soft, saying, Shane.

  His face drained completely of color, and Claire thought for a second he was going to hit the pavement, but he managed to hold on, somehow, and turned toward the lot to say, “Lyss?” He took a tentative step toward it, but stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. “Alyssa?”

  Shane.

  It was very clear, and it did not sound like a real person’s voice—there was something eerie and cold and distant about it. Claire remembered the draug, the vampires’ enemies who lurked in water and lured with song; this held something of that quality to it—something just not right.

  She grabbed Shane’s sleeve as he started to step onto the lot’s dirt. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  He stared at the tumbled wreckage of his house, and said, “I have to. She’s here, Claire. It’s Alyssa.”

  His sister, Claire knew, had died in the fire that had wrecked this house—and he hadn’t been able to save her. It was the first, and maybe the biggest, trauma in a life that had since had way too many.

  She didn’t even try to argue that it was impossible for his sister to be here, talking to him. There were far crazier things in Morganville than that. Ghosts? Those were no more unusual than drunken frat boys on a Friday night.

  But she was scared. Very scared. Because there was a vast difference between ghosts who manifested themselves in the Founder Houses—like the Glass House, in which they lived—and one who could talk from thin air, powered by nothing at all. The first kind she could explain, theoretically at least. This?

  Not so much.

  “I have to do this,” Shane said again, and pulled free of her. He stepped into the weeds, into what had once been the carefully tended front lawn of a relatively stable family, and walked steadily forward. The broken remains of a sidewalk were hidden under those weeds, Claire realized; it was buckled and broken into raw chunks, but it was recognizable when she looked for it. Shane kept going forward, then stopped and said, “This used to be the front door.”

  Claire devoutly did not want to do it, but she couldn’t leave him alone, not here, not like this. So she stepped forward, and instantly felt a chill close in over her—something that didn’t want her here. The pins-and-needles feeling swept over her again, and she almost stopped and backed up…but she wasn’t going to let it stop her.

  Shane needed her.

  She slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it hard. His face was set, jawline tight, and whatever he was looking at, it was not the rubble in front of them. “She died upstairs,” Shane said. “Lyss? Can you hear me?”

  “I really don’t know if this is a good—” Claire caught her breath as the pins and needles poked again, deeply. Painfully. She could almost see the tiny little stab marks on her arms, the beads of blood, though she knew there was no physical damage at all.

  “Lyss?” Shane stepped forward, over the nonexistent threshold, into what would have been the house. “Alyssa—”

  He got an answer. Shane. It was a sigh, full of something Claire couldn’t rea
lly comprehend—maybe a sadness, maybe longing, maybe something darker. You came back.

  He sucked in a deep, shaking breath, and let go of Claire’s hand to reach forward, into empty air. “Oh God, Lyss, I thought—how can you still be—”

  Always here, the whisper said. So much sadness; Claire could hear it now. The resentment she felt was that of a baby sister hating that someone else had taken her brother from her; it might be dangerous, but it was understandable, and the sadness brought a lump into Claire’s throat. Can’t go. Help.

  “I can’t,” Shane whispered. “I can’t help you. I couldn’t then and I can’t now, Lyss…. I don’t know how, okay? I don’t know what you need!”

  Home.

  There were tears shining in his eyes now, and he was shaking. “I can’t,” he said again. “Home’s gone, Lyss. You have to—you have to move on. I have.”

  No.

  There was a wisp of movement at the edge of Claire’s vision, and then she felt a shove, a distinct shove, that made her take a step back toward the sidewalk. When she tried to move toward Shane again, the pins and needles came back, but it felt more like a pinch now, sudden and vicious. She hissed and grabbed her arm, and this time when she looked down, she saw she had a red mark, just as if someone had physically hurt her.

  Alyssa really didn’t care for the idea that her brother had found a girlfriend, and Claire found herself skipping backward, pushed and bullied back all the way to the sidewalk.

  Shane stayed where he was. “Please, can I—can I see you?”

  There was that faint hint of movement again, mists at the corners of her vision, and Claire thought that for a second she saw a ghostly shadow appear against the still-standing bricks of the fireplace…but it was gone in seconds, blown away.

  Please help me, Alyssa’s whisper said. Shane, help me.

  “I don’t know how!”

  Don’t leave me alone.

  Claire suddenly didn’t like where this was going. Maybe she’d seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she knew that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her.