by Rachel Caine
The last one was from her mother. Claire caught her breath, tears pricking in her eyes at the sound of Mom’s voice. Her mother sounded calm, at least—mostly, anyway.
Claire, sweetie, I know I shouldn’t be worrying but I am. Honey, call us. I’ve been hearing some terrible things about what’s happening out there. Some of the people with us here are talking about fights and looting. If I don’t hear from you soon—well, I don’t know what we’ll do, but your father’s going crazy. So please, call us. We love you, honey. Bye.
Claire got her breathing back under control, mainly by sternly telling herself that she needed to sound together and completely in control to keep her parents from charging out there into the craziness. She had it more or less managed by the time the phone rang on the other end, and when her mother picked it up, she was able to say, “Hi, Mom,” without making it sound like she was about to burst into tears. “I got your message. Is everything okay there?”
“Here? Claire, don’t you be worrying about us! We’re just fine! Oh, honey, are you okay? Really?”
“Honestly, yes, I’m okay. Everything’s—” She couldn’t say that everything was okay, because of course it wasn’t. It was, at best, kind of temporarily stable. “It’s quiet here. Shane’s here, and Eve.” Claire remembered that Mom had liked Monica Morrell, and rolled her eyes. Anything to calm her fears. “That girl from the dorm, Monica, she’s here, too.”
“Oh, yes, Monica. I liked her.” It really did seem to help, which was not exactly an endorsement of Mom’s character-judging ability. “Her brother came by here to check on us about an hour ago. He’s a nice boy.”
Claire couldn’t quite imagine referring to Richard Morrell as a boy, but she let it go. “He’s kind of in charge of the town right now,” she said. “You have the radio, right? The one we dropped off earlier?”
“Yes. We’ve been doing everything they say, of course. But honey, I’d really like it if you could come here. We want to have you home, with us.”
“I know. I know, Mom. But I think I’d better stay here. It’s important. I’ll try to come by tomorrow, okay?”
They talked a little more, about nothing much, just chatter to make life seem kind of normal for a change. Mom was holding it together, but only barely; Claire could hear the manic quaver in her voice, could almost see the bright tears in her eyes. She was going on about how they’d had to move most of the boxes into the basement to make room for all the company—company?—and how she was afraid that Claire’s stuff would get damp, and then she talked about all the toys in the boxes and how much Claire had enjoyed them when she was younger.
Normal Mom stuff.
Claire didn’t interrupt, except to make soothing noises and acknowledgments when Mom paused. It helped, hearing Mom’s voice, and she knew it was helping her to talk. But finally, when her mother ran down like a spring-wound clock, Claire agreed to all the parental requirements to be careful and watch out and wear warm clothes.
Good-bye seemed very final, and once Claire hung up, she sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the screen of her cell phone.
On impulse, she tried to call Amelie. It rang and rang. No voice mail.
In the living room, Shane was organizing some kind of sentry duty. A lot of people had already crashed out in piles of pillows, blankets, sometimes just on a spare rug. Claire edged around the prone bodies and motioned to Shane that she was going upstairs. He nodded and kept talking to the two guys he was with, but his gaze followed her all the way.
Eve was in her bedroom, and there was a note on the door that said DO NOT KNOCK OR I WILL KILL YOU. THIS MEANS YOU, SHANE. Claire considered knocking, but she was too tired to run away.
Her bedroom was dark. When she’d left in the morning, Eve’s kind-of-friend Miranda had been sleeping here, but she was gone, and the bed was neatly made again. Claire sat down on the edge, staring out the windows, and then pulled out clean underwear and her last pair of blue jeans from the closet, plus a tight black shirt Eve had lent her last week.
The shower felt like heaven. There was even enough hot water for a change. Claire dried off, fussed with her hair a bit, and got dressed. When she came out, she listened at the stairs, but didn’t hear Shane talking anymore. Either he was being quiet, or he’d gone to bed. She paused next to his door, wishing she had the guts to knock, but she went on to her own room instead.
Shane was inside, sitting on her bed. He looked up when she opened the door, and his lips parted, but he was silent for a long few seconds.
“I should go,” he finally said, but he didn’t get up.
Claire settled in next to him. It was all perfectly correct, the two of them sitting fully dressed like this, but somehow she felt like they were on the edge of a cliff, both in danger of falling off.
It was exciting, and terrifying, and all kinds of wrong.
“So what happened to you today?” she asked. “In the Bloodmobile, I mean?”
“Nothing really. We drove to the edge of town and parked outside the border, where we’d be able to see anybody coming. A couple of vamps showed, trying to make a withdrawal, but we sent them packing. Bishop never made an appearance. Once we lost contact with the vampires, we figured we’d cruise around and see what was going on. We nearly got boxed in by a bunch of drunk idiots in pickup trucks, and then the vampires in the Bloodmobile went nuts—that call thing going off, I guess. I dropped them at the grain elevator—that was the biggest, darkest place I could find, and it casts a lot of shadows. I handed off the driving to Cesar Mercado. He’s supposed to drive it all the way to Midland tonight, provided the barriers are down. Best we can do.”
“What about the book? Did you leave it on board?”
In answer, Shane reached into his waistband and pulled out the small leather-bound volume. Amelie had added a lock on it, like a diary lock. Claire tried pressing the small, metal catch. It didn’t open, of course.
“You think you should be fooling with that thing?” Shane asked.
“Probably not.” She tried prying a couple of pages apart to peek at the script. All she could tell was that it was handwritten, and the paper looked relatively old. Oddly, when she sniffed it, the paper smelled like chemicals.
“What are you doing?” Shane looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be repulsed or fascinated.
“I think somebody restored the paper,” she said. “Like they do with really expensive old books and stuff. Comics, sometimes. They put chemicals on the paper to slow down the aging process, make the paper whiter again.”
“Fascinating,” Shane lied. “Gimme.” He plucked the book from her hands and put it aside, on the other side of the bed. When she grabbed for it, he got in her way; they tangled, and somehow, he was lying prone on the bed and she was stretched awkwardly on top of him. His hands steadied her when she started to slide off.
“Oh,” she murmured. “We shouldn’t—”
“Definitely not.”
“Then you should—”
“Yeah, I should.”
But he didn’t move, and neither did she. They just looked at each other, and then, very slowly, she lowered her lips to his.
It was a warm, sweet, wonderful kiss, and it seemed to go on forever. It also felt like it didn’t last nearly long enough. Shane’s hands skimmed up her sides, up her back, and cupped her damp hair as he kissed her more deeply. There were promises in that kiss.
“Okay, red flag,” he said. He hadn’t let her go, but there was about a half an inch of air between their lips. Claire’s whole body felt alive and tingling, pulse pounding in her wrists and temples, warmth pooling like light in the center of her body.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I swear. Trust me.”
“Hey, isn’t that my line?”
“Not now.”
Kissing Shane was the reward for surviving a long, hard, terrifying day. Being enfolded in his warmth felt like going to heaven on moonbeams. She kicked off her shoes, and, still fully dressed, crawled und
er the blankets. Shane hesitated.
“Trust me,” she said again. “And you can keep your clothes on if you don’t.”
They’d done this before, but somehow it hadn’t felt so . . . intimate. Claire pressed against him, back to front under the covers, and his arms went around her. Instant heat.
She swallowed and tried to remember all those good intentions she’d had as she felt Shane’s breath whisper on the back of her neck, and then his lips brushed her skin. “So wrong,” he murmured. “You’re killing me, you know.”
“Am not.”
“On this, you’ll have to trust me.” His sigh made her shiver all the way to her bones. “I can’t believe you brought Monica back here.”
“Oh, come on. You wouldn’t have left her out there, all alone. I know you better than that, Shane. Even as bad as she is—”
“The satanic incarnation of evil?”
“Maybe so, but I can’t see you letting them get her and . . . hurt her.” Claire turned around to face him, a squirming motion that made them wrestle for the covers. “What’s going to happen? Do you know?”
“What am I, Miranda the teen screwed-up psychic? No, I don’t know. All I know is that when we get up tomorrow, either the vampires will be back, or they won’t. And then we’ll have to make a choice about how we’re going to go forward.”
“Maybe we don’t go forward. Maybe we wait.”
“One thing I do know, Claire: you can’t stay in the same place, not even for a day. You keep on moving. Maybe it’s the right direction, maybe not, but you still move. Every second things change, like it or not.”
She studied his face intently. “Is your dad here? Now?”
He grimaced. “Truthfully? No idea. I wouldn’t be surprised. He’d know that it was time to move in and take command, if he could. And Manetti’s a running buddy from way back. This kind of feels like Dad’s behind it.”
“But if he does take over, what happens to Michael? To Myrnin? To any other vampire out there?”
“Do you really need me to tell you?”
Claire shook her head. “He’ll tell people they have to kill all the vampires, and then, he’ll come after the Morrells, and anybody else he thinks is responsible for what happened to your family. Right?”
“Probably,” Shane sighed.
“And you’re going to let all that happen.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say you weren’t, either. Don’t tell me it’s complicated, because it isn’t. Either you stand up for something, or you lie down for it. You said that to me one time, and you were right.” Claire burrowed closer into his arms. “Shane, you were right then. Be right now.”
He touched her face. His fingers traced down her cheek, across her lips, and his eyes—she’d never seen that look in his eyes. In anyone’s, really.
“In this whole screwed-up town, you’re the only thing that’s always been right to me,” he whispered. “I love you, Claire.” She saw something that might have been just a flash of panic go across his expression, but then he steadied again. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I do. I love you.”
He said something else, but the world had narrowed around her. Shane’s lips kept moving, but all she heard were the same words echoing over and over inside her head like the tolling of a giant brass bell: I love you.
He sounded like it had taken him completely by surprise—not in a bad way, but more as if he hadn’t really understood what he was feeling until that instant.
She blinked. It was as if she’d never really seen him before, and he was beautiful. More beautiful than any man she’d ever seen in her entire life, ever.
Whatever he was saying, she stopped it by kissing him. A lot. And for a very long time. When he finally backed up, he didn’t go far, and this look in his eyes, this intense and overwhelming need—that was new, too.
And she liked it.
“I love you,” he said, and kissed her so hard he took her breath away. There was more to it than before—more passion, more urgency, more . . . everything. It was as if she were caught in a tide, carried away, and she thought that if she never touched the shore again, it would be good to drown like this, just swim forever in all this richness.
Red flag, some part of her screamed, come on, red flag. What are you doing?
She wished it would just shut up.
“I love you, too,” she whispered to him. Her voice was shaking, and so were her hands where they rested on his chest. Under the soft T-shirt, his muscles were tensed, and she could feel every deep breath he took. “I’d do anything for you.”
She meant it to be an invitation, but that was the thing that shocked sense back into him. He blinked. “Anything,” he repeated, and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Yeah. I’m getting that. Bad idea, Claire. Very, very bad.”
“Today?” She laughed a little wildly. “Everything’s crazy today. Why can’t we be? Just once?”
“Because I made promises,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, and she felt a groan shake his whole body. “To your parents, to myself, to Michael. To you, Claire. I can’t break my word. It’s pretty much all I’ve got these days.”
“But . . . what if—”
“Don’t,” he whispered in her ear. “Please don’t. This is tough enough already.”
He kissed her again, long and sweetly, and somehow, it tasted like tears this time. Like some kind of good-bye.
“I really do love you,” he said, and smoothed away the damp streaks on her cheeks. “But I can’t do this. Not now.”
Before she could stop him, he slid out of bed, put on his shoes, and walked quickly to the door. She sat up, holding the covers close as if she were naked underneath, instead of fully clothed, and he hesitated there, one hand gripping the doorknob.
“Please stay,” she said. “Shane—”
He shook his head. “If I stay, things are going to happen. You know it, and I know it, and we just can’t do this. I know things are falling apart, but—” He hitched in a deep, painful breath. “No.”
The sound of the door softly closing behind him went through her like a knife.
Claire rolled over, wretchedly hugging the pillow that smelled of his hair, sharing the warm place in the bed where his body had been, and thought about crying herself to sleep.
And then she thought of the dawning wonder in his eyes when he’d said, I love you.
No. It was no time to be crying.
When she did finally sleep, she felt safe.
10
The next day, there was no sign of the vampires, none at all. Claire checked the portal networks, but as far as she could tell, they were down. With nothing concrete to do, she helped around the house—cleaning, straightening, running errands. Richard Morrell came around to check on them. He looked a little better for having slept, which didn’t mean he looked good, exactly.
When Eve wandered down, she looked almost as bad. She hadn’t bothered with her Goth makeup, and her black hair was down in a lank, uncombed mess. She poured Richard some coffee from the ever-brewing pot, handed it over, and said, “How’s Michael?”
Richard blew on the hot surface in the cup without looking at her. “He’s at City Hall. We moved all the vampires we still had into the jail, for safekeeping.”
Eve’s face crumpled in anguish. Shane put a hand on her shoulder, and she pulled in a damp breath and got control of herself.
“Right,” she said. “That’s probably for the best, you’re right.” She sipped from her own battered coffee mug. “What’s it like out there?” Out there meant beyond Lot Street, which remained eerily quiet.
“Not so good,” Richard said. His voice sounded hoarse and dull, as if he’d yelled all the edges off it. “About half the stores are shut down, and some of those are burned or looted. We don’t have enough police and volunteers to be everywhere. Some of the store owners armed up and are guarding their own places—I don’t like it, but it
’s probably the best option until everybody settles down and sobers up. The problem isn’t everybody, but it’s a good portion of the town who’s been down and angry a long time. You heard they raided the Barfly?”
“Yeah, we heard,” Shane said.
“Well, that was just the beginning. Dolores Thompson’s place got broken into, and then they went to the warehouses and found the bonded liquor storage. Those who were inclined to deal with all this by getting drunk and mean have had a real holiday.”
“We saw the mobs,” Eve said, and glanced at Claire. “Um, about your sister—”
“Yeah, thanks for taking care of her. Trust my idiot sister to go running around in her red convertible during a riot. She’s damn lucky they didn’t kill her.”
They would have, Claire was certain of that. “I guess you’re taking her with you . . . ?”
Richard gave her a thin smile. “Not the greatest houseguest?”
Actually, Monica had been very quiet. Claire had found her curled up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, sound asleep. She’d looked pale and tired and bruised, and much younger than Claire had ever seen her. “She’s been okay.” She shrugged. “But I’ll bet she’d rather be with her family.”
“Her family’s under protective custody downtown. My dad nearly got dragged off by a bunch of yahoos yelling about taxes or something. My mom—” Richard shook his head, as if he wanted to drive the pictures right out of his mind. “Anyway. Unless she likes four walls and a locked door, I don’t think she’s going to be very happy. And you know Monica: if she’s not happy—”
“Nobody is,” Shane finished for him. “Well, I want her out of our house. Sorry, man, but we did our duty and all. Past this point, she’d have to be a friend to keep crashing here. Which, you know, she isn’t. Ever.”
“Then I’ll take her off your hands.” Richard set the cup down and stood. “Thanks for the coffee. Seems like that’s all that’s keeping me going right now.”
“Richard . . .” Eve rose, too. “Seriously, what’s it like out there? What’s going to happen?”