Bitter Blood tmv-13

by Rachel Caine

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’m just going to look. Relax. You’re safe now.” He pointed to Shane. “Stay with them.”

  “You suck!” Shane called after him as Michael went back to the door. Underneath, though, he was taking it seriously. Miranda wasn’t the most reliable source of information, but Shane never underestimated a warning. “If it’s Jason out there, no problem. If it’s somebody worse, I don’t know if Michael can hold his own.”

  “Then we’ll handle it if it gets by him,” Claire said, and surprisingly, she meant it. Between the four of them, nothing was going to overwhelm them. Not like it used to.

  She thought that right up until the freaking ghost-army arrived.

  The first indication she had that something was very, very wrong was Michael’s outcry; he wasn’t that kind of boy, generally, much less that kind of vampire. It was surprise, and definite worry—the kind of cry you made when you found a spider on a doorknob, or a snake in the toilet. A that-shouldn’t-happen kind of sound.

  Claire exchanged a look with Shane, and Miranda said, wearily, “I’m sorry I brought them here, but it was the only place I could think of that might keep them out. Maybe…maybe the house won’t let them in.”

  But it turned out that the house did.

  The first ghost to drift past—no, through—Michael was an old man, no one Claire recognized. He was just barely a visible shape, more a trick of the eyes than an actual presence; she saw him better in her peripheral vision than straight on. He walked down their hallway in a zombielike state, staring straight ahead. Shane backed up, but then stood his ground and tried to wave the phantom off. It ignored him and flowed around him like smoke over glass, and Shane shuddered and moved away, fast. “Okay, that was—unpleasant.”

  And there were more. Lots more. Some were just shadows, ominous and strange; some were almost-visible people. Claire only caught a glimpse of them because Michael let only a couple of them inside before he stepped back and slammed and locked the door…and that, surprisingly, worked. No more came inside.

  But the ones already in were bad enough. One was an almost-visible man, but Claire couldn’t make out his face as he moved toward them, until suddenly a trick of the light and shadows came together and showed her it was Richard Morrell, Monica’s dead brother. She gasped and grabbed Eve’s arm, and Eve nodded as she bit her lip. Richard slowed and looked at them, and Claire saw his mouth open and close, but he couldn’t seem to speak. After a few seconds, he flowed on, heading for…

  For Miranda, who was retreating from the oncoming old man, and Richard following behind. She looked miserably terrified. “Make them stop,” she said, and looked at Michael. “Michael, make them stop!”

  “I don’t know how!” he said. It was ominous and eerie how the old man had zeroed in on Miranda, as if the little girl were the last cupcake left in the world and he had a sweet tooth. “What do they want?”

  “Me!” She looked more real now, and she’d taken on a faint blush of color in her face and clothes. Miranda, in fact, looked way more real than any of the other ghosts. “They want me!”

  “Shane…?” Claire looked for him, but he wasn’t beside her. That was surprising, but then she saw him, and she knew, with a sickening sense of horror, why.

  He was standing motionless a few feet away, facing a ghost—a small ghost in the shape of a girl barely into her teens, with her hair in two long braids.

  Claire knew immediately who it was he was staring at, even before she heard the small, pallid voice whisper, “Shane.”

  “Lyss,” he said. There was a world of emotion in that name—pain, guilt, longing, love, horror. “Oh, my God, Lyss.”

  She reached out for him, and Shane raised his hand.

  “No!” Miranda yelled. “No, don’t touch her! You can’t touch her. Don’t you know anything?” She scrambled around the barrier of the sofa, playing keep-away with the shambling old man who was still chasing her. Richard was stalking her, too, now, but at a distance, as if he were irresistibly drawn toward her but didn’t want to be. It was more of a slow circling. Like a shark, Claire thought, and shuddered.

  She took Miranda at her very urgent word, and launched herself at Shane, slapping his hand away as he tried to touch his dead sister. He let out a harsh sound of surprise, and she saw his hand clench into a fist, but it relaxed almost immediately, and he pulled in a deep breath.

  “Don’t,” Claire said. “Please don’t.”

  Alyssa was still holding out her ghostly hand, but she wasn’t trying to come at Shane. She was just waiting. Maybe—whatever Miranda was afraid of, maybe it had to be his decision to touch her, and it wouldn’t count if Alyssa touched him first.

  Though what would happen if he did do it was an entirely different question, and Claire really didn’t want to know the answer. Not even as a scientist.

  “Lyss?” Shane asked. “Can you hear me?”

  She didn’t move or speak again. She just kept holding out that ghostly, smoking hand toward him. Shane stared at it, and Claire knew he wanted to try, wanted it with everything inside him.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, and took his hand in hers. “Please stay away from her.”

  Shane sucked in a deep breath. There were tears shimmering in his eyes, but he blinked them back and nodded. “Sorry, Alyssa,” he said. “I can’t.” His voice shook. His whole body shook. But he meant what he said, and Alyssa clearly understood, because she dropped her hand back to her side and drifted back a few feet, then turned and joined the old man in stalking Miranda.

  “Help me!” Miranda screamed. With ghosts on three sides, she was rapidly being cornered. It was only a matter of a minute or so until one of them had hold of her. “Do something!”

  “What?” Michael asked, and then his eyes widened, as if something had finally occurred to him. “Can I make them leave? As head of the house?”

  Normally Shane would have chimed in with something like Who says he’s head of this house? but Shane’s attention was riveted completely on his little sister’s ghost, and it was Eve who said, “Maybe. Try!”

  Michael closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, as if drawing strength from the house itself, or at least trying to communicate with it. Claire felt a flicker of energy around her, as if the connection were almost there, and then it died.

  “All of us!” she shouted, and waved Eve to the wall, too. She put her hands flat on the old wallpaper and concentrated. Come on, house. I know you’re there. I know you’re still alive; I can feel you…. Come out, come out, wherever you are….

  Shane didn’t join them. Claire didn’t think he could. He was almost as fixed on his sister as the ghosts who stalked Miranda were on her…but luckily, that didn’t seem to matter. Three of them together seemed to complete some kind of circuit, and Claire felt a surge of raw power whip through the room. “Hold on, Miranda!” she said, and the ghost-girl took hold of the arm of the sofa as a wave of force swept through the room in an almost-liquid ripple. It passed over Claire, leaving her skin tingling and raw, and when it hit the nearest ghost—Richard—he blew apart into mist. Alyssa was next, and then the old man, just seconds away from touching Miranda with his outstretched hand.

  Miranda wavered and went pale and smoky, but then she stabilized as the wave passed her by, into an almost-real transparent form. She slowly let go of the sofa and straightened to look around.

  “What did you do?” Shane said. He turned in a circle, frantically looking. “Where’s Lyss?”

  “Outside,” Miranda said. “She’s okay, Shane. She just isn’t welcome here anymore. The house put her out.”

  “This is insane,” he said, and sank down on the couch with his head in his hands. “Insane.”

  Eve sat beside him and put her hand lightly on his back. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Before Claire could go to him, too, there was a thundering volley of knocks on the door, loud as gunshots, and all of them jumped. “What the hell now?” Michael sai
d.

  “Whatever it is,” Eve said, “just leave it outside. Please.”

  “No,” Miranda said. She took a deep breath and pulled herself up to her full height—which wasn’t very much, but she looked suddenly very adult. “The house is looking out for us now, looking out for me. And it isn’t just ghosts out there, anyway. They can’t make noise like that.”

  The knocks came again at the door, and Michael took a few steps in that direction before turning to look at her again. She nodded.

  “Please,” she said. “It’s okay. Now that the house is paying attention, it’s not as bad. I think I might be able to…able to help them. It was just so overwhelming, out there alone. In here, I don’t feel as bad.”

  Michael didn’t seem convinced, but he didn’t seem to know what else to do, either. He flipped the locks on the door and swung it open during the third round of knocking, and outside there were dozens of ghosts, maybe hundreds, a mass of misty waving forms crowded together like zombies on the attack, and standing in the middle of them on the doorstep were Angel, Jenna, and Tyler.

  The ghost hunters.

  Who apparently couldn’t see any of the ghosts. Ironic.

  Angel Salvador stiff-armed a very surprised Michael Glass out of the doorway and rushed up the hallway, followed by Jenna Clark and Tyler, with his camcorder light glowing red. “Hey!” Michael said. “Hey, wait a minute. I didn’t say—”

  “Keep rolling, Tyler. We can cut that,” Jenna said. “I know she’s here; I can feel her. Angel, are you getting anything there?” She seemed almost frantic, and there were spots of color high on her cheeks. “Hello, little girl. Are you here? Anywhere?”

  “Hey!” Michael shut the door, though for the moment the house itself seemed to be barring the ghosts from drifting inside the opening, and darted around them—not quite vampire fast—and got in their way again. “Hold up. What the hell, man? This is our house!”

  “Congratulations,” Angel said. He continued staring at the handheld device he was clutching. “The readings are remarkably strong. I think we’ve found her. It looks like this is her home location.” He looked up at Shane, who was right in front of him, blocking the hallway, and said, “How long has your house been haunted?”

  Shane looked past him, to the camera, and then at Michael. Claire would have given odds that he’d punch him out, but instead, Shane turned beet red and burst into uncontrollable laughter.

  “Hey!” Eve said, and pushed him out of the way with an irritated glare. “You people, out! Out of our house, right now!” She tried to push Tyler, but he danced backward, clearly used to people going for that move.

  Angel cut her off. “Wait, wait, not yet. Let us at least document these readings—do you know the history of this house? Was there anything violent that happened here, perhaps a famous murder? Who were the previous owners? How long have you lived here?”

  The blizzard of questions was confusing, and all the time Angel was firing them off, he was moving relentlessly forward. It wasn’t so much that Eve backed off as she was swept out of his way by the force of his momentum, and the rest of them just followed along.

  Tyler focused on Eve, evidently liking her Goth look in connection with a haunted house, which Eve didn’t approve. “Hey, get your camera out of my face before I put it in yours!”

  “Easy, babe,” Michael said, and grabbed her by the shoulders to pull her back. “We’re fine. It’s okay.” He leaned over to Claire and whispered, “Find out what the hell Miranda wants us to do.” Then he turned the full glare of his smile on the camera. “So, do you want me to show you around, or…?”

  “We just need you to get out of the way,” Jenna said. “You kids are what, under twenty, all of you? You’ve got no idea how this kind of thing can turn bad. One careless session with a Ouija board, messing around with tarot cards, you’re inviting spirits to contact you. Once they’re here, you might not be able to get rid of them…even when they start hurting you. I know. It happened to me.”

  There was, Claire sensed, a backstory that the show’s viewers would probably all know. Jenna’s face was tight and sober, and there was a feverish believer’s light in her eyes. Claire had an eerie memory of the vindictive ghost of the house’s original owner, Hiram Glass, tearing at her with hatred, and wondered exactly what a younger Jenna might have gone through. She was right. Ghosts could be vicious.

  Miranda knew that better than anyone, apparently.

  Despite Michael’s winning personality and movie-star smile, it wasn’t working. Michael had a definite effect on girls, when he was really trying…and boy, was he trying. Claire could feel the tingle from five feet away, and it wasn’t even directed at her. He’d always had charm, but lately she’d realized that as a vampire, he was fully capable of wielding it like a weapon—a kinder one, but powerful in its own right.

  But Jenna seemed immune.

  Claire couldn’t see Miranda, and she had the sinking feeling that maybe she’d lost her nerve and run, but then she saw a ghostly face peeking out from behind the bookcases. Claire headed that way, trying not to look obvious about it. She leaned in next to her and muttered, “Michael needs to know what you’re doing.”

  “Waiting,” Miranda said.

  “For what?”

  Miranda was looking past her, Claire realized—looking at the window that faced west, toward twilight.

  Toward the sun slipping steadily below the horizon.

  “For sunset,” she said, and stepped out from behind the bookcase. Clearly a ghost. Clearly a walking dead girl.

  There was a sudden, vivid silence as Michael, Jenna, and Angel all stopped talking, and everyone focused right on Miranda. Claire could even hear the tiny mechanical whir of Tyler adjusting the focus on his camera.

  “Hello,” Miranda said. “My name is Miranda. I’m a ghost.”

  And then she vanished.

  “No!” Jenna screamed. “No, please, come back! I want to help you. We want to help. Don’t run!”

  And that was the exact moment the sun completely set outside, and Miranda fell out of the ceiling, going from mist to solid in midair, and thumping flat on her face on the floor in the middle of the rug.

  She said, in a muffled voice, “Ow.”

  No one said anything else for a moment. And then Jenna said, in a flat, odd voice, “Tyler? Please tell me you got that.”

  * * *

  For what felt like minutes, nobody seemed able to move. The three ghost hunters looked like wax statues, frozen in their poses, unable to process what they’d just seen. Tyler finally moved the camera away from his eyes and blinked, as if not sure exactly what had gone wrong with his eyes.

  “Well, that was awkward,” Shane finally said, and crouched down next to Miranda. “You okay, kid?”

  She wasn’t. She stayed facedown for a long moment, shuddering, and Claire remembered with a shock that when Michael had been trapped as a ghost, he’d reexperienced how he’d died, every day. That was particularly awful for Miranda, who’d been killed by the draug—not a pleasant way to go.

  Shane helped her sit up, and Miranda gave him a grateful, brave little smile. “Sorry,” she said, “but I needed to get their attention.”

  “Well, you’ve got it,” Jenna said, barking out a laugh. “We can’t leave. We have the biggest thing that’s ever been recorded in ghost hunting. Hell, not just ghost hunting. Science. This isn’t just huge, it’s—it’s world-breaking! It changes everything!”

  Angel clearly didn’t know what to say. He was staring down at Miranda with a curiously blank expression, as if he really didn’t know how to handle this at all. He was more of an actor than someone who really believed, Claire thought, and unlike Jenna, who saw it as vindication, he saw it as upheaval. When Miranda plunged out of the air, his world had definitely broken, and it looked as if he’d be a while trying to put it all back together again.

  Tyler hadn’t said a word. He was still recording, as if too frozen to stop, but Claire heard him mutter
ing under his breath, “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap, what the hell!”

  She’d felt the same way, the first time she’d seen Michael coalesce out of thin air. But by then, she’d already known about vampires. Her world had already been spun off its axis; the ghost team was having to make a whole lot of adjustments pretty damn quickly.

  Jenna leaned in toward Miranda as she climbed to her feet. “You’ve been speaking to me, haven’t you? Trying to help us?”

  “No, I—” Miranda looked tired, and very worried. “I wanted to warn you. You were getting them all upset. It was going to get you hurt.”

  “Who?”

  “All the ghosts.”

  “But that’s why we’re here, to talk to—”

  “Morganville isn’t like any other town,” Miranda said, cutting her off, and met her eyes with an intensity that made Jenna blink. “You came here looking for ghosts, and they heard you. And that’s dangerous. There’s—okay, I can’t explain so much of it, but there’s power here. Old power. And sometimes the dead can use it if you give them access. You opened up the tap, I guess. And now we need to shut it off before something worse happens.”

  “This is insane,” Angel said, and stood next to Jenna. “Clearly, this is the most sophisticated hoax I’ve ever seen, but…”

  “Shut up,” Jenna said. She was staring intently at Miranda, and suddenly she reached out and took the girl’s hand in hers. “You feel real. You look real.”

  “I am,” Miranda said. “Half the time. But it’s because I’m like you. I had power, and the house could use that to save me—not all the way, but this way. During the day, though, I’m mostly invisible. It was hard to make you see me just now, even inside the house. I’m getting better, though.”

  “You’re—you’re a real spirit.”

  “Yes,” she said, and shook Jenna’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Jenna burst out in a delighted laugh and kept shaking Miranda’s hand until the girl finally pulled free.

  “It’s a hoax,” Angel said again. “Jenna, you can’t believe any of this. It’s obviously…”