by Rachel Caine
It felt chilly. Claire found herself shivering, but she didn’t want to move away from Shane’s embrace; he solved that by taking the afghan from the back of the couch and wrapping it around them both. “Well,” he finally said, “I guess the issue of moving is off the table, at least for right now.”
“Guess so,” Claire said. Tears threatened again, but she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand in an angry swipe. Enough. She knew she wasn’t really crying for Miranda at the moment; she was just feeling sorry for herself, for losing another brick in the wall of her zone of safety, for more change when she just wanted everything to stay the same. “But the issue’s not going away. And we can’t let our friends just…leave, Shane. It’s not right. It’s not safe.”
“It’s Morganville,” he said, and kissed her gently. “Safety isn’t something we get guaranteed.”
“They do.” She really meant, He does, because Michael was the one with the exemption to human rules, but surely that extended to Eve now that she was his wife. Wife—what a weird word; it still didn’t sound quite real to Claire’s mental ears. Eve was a wife. And Shane had raised the even weirder possibility that someday Eve might be a mother. Maybe that shouldn’t have been quite so strange to her, but she hadn’t had any other friends who’d gotten married; it was still a foreign concept when applied to an actual person, and she didn’t altogether understand why Michael and Eve, who’d been so easy with sharing a house when they were all single-but-committed, would be so weird about it now that there’d been an actual church ceremony.
“Well, you might have a point. The Glass family’s had special consideration for a long time,” Shane agreed. “Probably because as a rule they weren’t douche bags. But Eve’s family…” He hesitated, as though wondering whether this was something he should share. Then he must have decided it was, because he said, “Eve’s family had a bad rep, going back generations.”
“For…?”
“Some people suck up and stomp down, if you know what I mean. Eve’s family was like that: sucking up to the vamps at every opportunity, stomping on the heads of everybody they thought beneath them. Bullies. Kind of like the Morrells, only on a much smaller scale. That didn’t get them respect from the vamps, or the humans; they didn’t have money to buy people off, or the power to make them afraid. So I wouldn’t say Eve was born with the immunity idol or anything. Not like Michael was, when he was human. Everybody liked the Glass family.”
Claire had known Eve’s dad was bad, and her mom was pretty much wallpaper, but the knowledge that it had gone on for generations was revolting. Generation after generation, pandering to the vampires for favors, and giving up their children when the vampires got interested—as Brandon, the Rossers’ Protector, had ordered Eve to be given to him. Eve hadn’t played along, which was part of why she’d ended up in the Glass House with Michael in the beginning. She’d been so willing to rebel that she’d risked death to do it.
“So, you’re saying that Eve could be hit from both sides if she leaves this house.”
“I’m saying I think it’s pretty much certain. She’s got nobody but Michael to look after her, and he can’t be there all the time. She wouldn’t want him to be. It just…makes me worry.” Shane smiled a little and gave her a sideways glance. “Don’t get jealous. You’re still my number one girl.”
“I’m not worried,” she said. She really wasn’t. “I’m scared, too. And what happens when Michael and Eve aren’t there for us? Because we’re in the same boat, right? I have some respect from the vamps, but your family…”
“Yeah, the Collins family went out of its way to make itself unwelcome around here. And vampires don’t forget. Ever.” He sighed and snuggled her closer against him. “You know, we really should get some sleep. It’s almost three in the morning, and you’ve got class today, right?”
She did. Her heart wasn’t in it, but she couldn’t afford to blow off any more lectures; the old days of professorial indulgences were over. Her newly minted grade B was enough to prove that. “Just a little longer,” she said. “Please?”
“Can’t say no to that.”
And they fell asleep, spooned together on the couch and wrapped in the afghan, until a crashing noise—shockingly loud—brought Claire awake with a flailing spasm.
She couldn’t get her breath to ask, but Shane vaulted over her, landed cat-footed on the wood floor, and ran to the hallway. He was gone only a second before he came back at a dead run. “Fire!” he yelled, and slammed through the kitchen’s swinging door as Claire fumbled on her shoes. He came back in seconds, toting the big red extinguisher. “Get Michael and Eve up, and get out of the house through the back door!”
“What happened?”
He didn’t answer her; he was already gone, pelting back down the hall. As she flew up the stairs, she heard him opening the front door, and she smelled acrid smoke.
Michael, dressed and ready, already had the bedroom door open, and Eve was belting a red silk kimono around her body. She took one look at Claire’s face and slipped her feet into untied Doc Martens. “Let’s go,” she said, and led the way down the steps. Michael split off from them at the bottom, heading for the front; he grabbed up a heavy rug, yanking it like a magician right out from under the couch, and ran to join Shane in fighting the fire.
Claire and Eve went out the back. “What happened?” Eve asked as she flipped the locks open. “We heard something, but—”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “Whatever it was, it was loud.”
She started to plunge outside, but Eve held her back, craned her head out the door, and took a careful survey of the dark yard before saying, “Okay, go.”
It was a mistake. A bad one.
Because they didn’t look up.
The vampire dropped down behind them, cutting them off from the house, and Claire didn’t even notice his appearance until she heard Eve give a little surprised gasp. That was all she had time for, because in the next instant he was already right behind them, with his hands closed around Claire’s shoulders…
But only to shove her violently out of the way.
She fell and rolled, fetching up with a painful slam against the bark of the old live oak tree that Myrnin had climbed to get into her bedroom. It wasn’t Myrnin who’d dropped in this time. This was Pennyfeather, a pallid, long-faced friend of Oliver’s who reminded her of a skeleton held together with string and a covering of flesh. He wasn’t interested in Claire. Not at all.
He had hold of Eve, fingernails shredding the red silk of her robe. She screamed and tried to break free, but he was too strong; Claire could see the gouges in Eve’s arms that his claws left as she struggled to get free.
“If you want to be one of us,” Pennyfeather said with a dreadful grin, “one of us really should oblige you. Your husband seems incapable of doing his duty.”
That sounded awful, and as the implication sank in, Claire gasped and tried to get up. She didn’t have anything to fight him—no stakes, no knives, not even a blunt object—but she couldn’t just let him…do whatever he was going to do. As she scrambled up, her hand fell on a tree branch—broken, with curled-up, dried leaves along its length.
It was sheared off in a sharp, angular point toward the thicker end. The break looked fresh, and it took Claire a moment to realize that it was this branch that had broken under Myrnin’s feet as he launched himself through her window the night before.
She grabbed it and launched herself into a run at Pennyfeather, yelling at the top of her lungs. It was a war cry, coming from someplace deep and primal inside, and she should have been afraid, she should have felt awkward or tentative or stupid, but she just felt filled with red, red fury, and determination.
She’d already lost Miranda tonight. She wasn’t losing Eve, too.
Eve saw her coming, and her dark eyes widened. Pennyfeather was too intent on pulling Eve’s head to the side and prepping his fangs for the bite to notice, and Claire had an instant of clarity to realize
that if she kept going, heading straight for them, she was likely to skewer Eve along with the vampire.
So Claire changed course, ran past them, whipped around, and lunged, full extension, just like Eve had taught her to do when they’d been messing around with fencing foils. She put her whole body into it, the straight line of her back continuing the same angle as her stiffened left leg, and her right arm extended up, out, and she slammed her weapon into Pennyfeather’s back, neatly to the left of center.
The branch was too thick to make it completely through the ribs, but it shocked him, and he gave a shriek that made the hair stand up on Claire’s arms. He let go of Eve, and she toppled forward in a heap of tattered red silk, crouched, and spun to face him with a look on her face so murderous that Claire was momentarily shocked. Pennyfeather didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to claw the wood out of his back, but even when he grabbed hold, the springy wood bent, and he only managed to scrape it partly free before it snapped out of his hand.
“Get the bag,” Eve snapped to Claire, and she nodded and dashed back into the kitchen. In seconds, she had hold of one of the black canvas totes they kept ready, but by the time she’d made it back outside, Pennyfeather had yanked the branch free, ripped it to pieces, and was stalking toward Eve with a low, furious growl and one piece still held as a club in his clawed hand.
There was no time to get to Eve. Claire did the next best thing; she spun around and flung the bag. It arced through the air and hit the grass at Eve’s feet, spilling out a confusion of objects, but Eve didn’t hesitate over choices. She grabbed a small bottle, popped the plastic cap, and threw the contents in Pennyfeather’s face.
Silver nitrate.
His growl turned to a howl, rising in volume and pitch until it hurt Claire’s ears, and he sheared off from making his run at Eve to claw at his face. The liquid silver clung like napalm, and burned about as fiercely. Claire grabbed the bag, stuffed items inside as fast as possible, and grabbed Eve’s wrist. “Come on!” she yelled, and they ran around the side of the house, feet sliding on the loose white gravel.
Michael and Shane were at the front, and between the last blast of the fire extinguisher and smothering flaps of the rug, they’d put out a fire that had blackened a ten-foot section of the exterior of the house. Broken glass lay around the base of it, and as they got closer, Claire smelled the sharp, almost-sweet stench of gasoline.
There was something pinned to their front door, too, fluttering pale in the night breeze.
Michael dropped the rug and flashed at vampire-speed to catch Eve in his arms. He must have smelled the blood from her cuts, Claire thought; she could see the faint, iridescent shine of his eyes. “What happened?” he asked, and touched the claw slashes on her kimono. “Who did this?”
“Pennyfeather,” Claire said. Now that the adrenaline rush was passing, she felt weirdly shaky, and she was beginning to realize how many things she’d done that could have gone badly wrong for her. For Eve, too. “It was Pennyfeather. He was—he was going to bite her.”
Michael made a hissing noise, like a very angry and dangerous snake, and blurred out of sight toward the backyard. Shane’s gaze followed him, but he didn’t go along; he reached instead for the bag that Claire held and sorted through the contents. He handed Eve a knife, gave Claire another of the bottles of silver, and for himself, a baseball bat—a regular bat, except that the last six inches of the business end were coated with silver plate. “Been dying to try this out,” he said, and gave them both a tight, wild smile. “Batter up.” He swung it experimentally, nodded, and rested it on his right shoulder. “You good, Eve?”
“This was my favorite robe,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, but it was from rage as much as from fear, Claire thought. “Dammit. It was vintage!”
Shane was still watching the side of the house, around which Michael had disappeared. He was clearly wondering if he ought to go back him up. Claire put a hand on his arm and drew his focus, just for a second. “Eve got Pennyfeather with a face full of this,” she said, and held up her bottle. “He’s got a handicap, and Michael’s really pissed off.”
That eased some of the tension in Shane’s back and shoulders, at least. “I don’t want to leave you two alone out here,” he said. “The fire’s out. Get back inside and lock the doors. Go.”
“What about you guys?”
“If you hear us crying for our mommies, you can come rescue us, but hey, Eve’s kinda half naked and bleeding out here.”
Shane had a great point, and as Claire looked over at her, she saw that Eve was gripping the knife in a white-knuckled hand and shivering badly. It was cold out, and the shock was setting in.
Claire took her arm and steered her up the steps. Shane watched them until they reached the door, and then nodded to her and dashed away into the dark, bat held at the ready. She pushed open the door and hustled Eve inside, then paused and looked at what was pinned to the wood.
She supposed it was Pennyfeather’s writing, because it was hard to read, spiky, and had a nasty brownish color to the ink that might well have been blood.
It said, Done by Order of the Founder, and it was pinned deeply into the wood by a giant knife, like a bowie knife on steroids.
Claire worked it back and forth until she could pull it out of the door’s surface, folded the piece of paper, and locked up with trembling fingers.
Eve was standing there watching her, an unreadable expression on her face. She was still shaking. “It’s a death sentence, isn’t it?” she said. “Don’t lie, Claire. You’re not good at it.”
Claire didn’t even try. She held up the knife. “On the plus side,” she said, “they left us another weapon. And it’s sharp.”
Truthfully, that was cold comfort indeed. And in the end, after Michael and Shane came back in without Pennyfeather, who’d managed to run for his life despite taking a pretty good battering from both of them, nobody much felt like celebrating.
Or sleeping.
Morning brought light and warmth, but not much in the way of reassurance; the cops came and took statements, looked over the damage to the house, and photographed the slashes on Eve’s arms (which, upon inspection at the hospital, fortunately turned out not to be as deep as they’d looked).
The police declined to include the destruction of her vintage robe as a separate charge of vandalism. They also played dumb about who Pennyfeather was, or even that vampires existed at all, even though both men were plainly wearing Protection bracelets in full view. Typical. Once upon a time, Claire could have called on some Morganville police detectives who had reputations for impartiality…but they were all gone now. Richard Morrell had been police chief before he’d been mayor, and he’d been fair about it; Hannah had been great in the same role, but now Richard was dead, and Hannah was helpless to act.
Done by Order of the Founder. That said…everything, really. It meant that whatever tenuous claim the four of them had to safety in Morganville was officially cancelled.
Claire stayed with Eve as long as she could, but classes were calling, and so was her in-jeopardy grade point average; she grabbed her book bag, kissed Shane quickly, and dashed off at a jog to Texas Prairie University. Nothing was going to happen during the day, at least from the vamp quarter. Morning was well advanced over the horizon, and she had to skip her normal stop for coffee and flat-out race the last few hundred yards to make it into the science building, up the stairs, and down the long, featureless hall to her small-group advanced study class. Today was thermodynamics, a subject she normally loved, but she wasn’t in the mood for theory today.
It was more of an applied sciences day—such as the amount of fuel required to burn down a house. Claire slipped into her classroom seat, earning a dirty look from Professor Carlyle, who didn’t pause in his opening remarks.
Pennyfeather had been the one who’d attacked them, but that didn’t mean he’d been acting alone; he could have thrown the Molotov cocktails at the front of the house and then jumped up o
n the roof to wait for them to exit the back, but somehow, Claire thought there was more to it. Someone in the front, and Pennyfeather waiting for Eve, specifically. And while it was a little bit of a relief not to be the main target, it was unsettling. Eve wasn’t helpless, but somehow she was more vulnerable. Maybe it was just that Claire wanted desperately for Michael and Eve to somehow work out, and for the town to stop hating them, and…
“Danvers?”
She looked up from consideration of her closed textbook; she didn’t even remember getting it out of her bag. She’d lost track of time, she guessed, and now Professor Carlyle—a severe older man with a close-cropped brush of gray hair and eyes the color of steel—was staring at her with a displeased expression, clearly waiting for something.
“Sorry?” she said blankly.
“Please provide the equation for the subject on the board.”
She focused behind him. On the chalkboard, he’d written Harmonic Oscillator Partition Function.
“On the board?”
“Unless you’d like to perform it in interpretive dance.”
There was a stir of laughter and smirking from the ten other students, most of whom were master’s candidates; they were at least five years older than she was, every one of them, and she wasn’t popular.
Even here, nobody liked a smart-ass.
Claire reluctantly rose from her desk, went to the chalkboard, and wrote zHO = 1/(1-e-a/T).
“Where?” he asked, without a trace of satisfaction.
Claire dutifully wrote down where a=hv/k.