Many Bloody Returns

by Charlaine Harris

  “Jesus, Trent, you’re the laugh of the party.”

  “That’s life of the party, honey bunches. Oh, wait, you’re right. Not in Morganville, it isn’t.” God, Trent was hyper, which was weird for a guy consuming as many brews as he had. Maybe he was just naturally that way. Maybe his Ritalin had worn off. Anyway, it was bugging me.

  “Boo-ha-ha. Is that funny at all in other vans in town?” Jane asked. “Because it’s not so funny in here, ass pirate.”

  “You should know, princess; you’ve been on your back in every van in town,” Trent shot back.

  “Hey, bitch!” Jane tossed an empty bottle at him; Trent caught it and threw it in the plastic bin in the corner. Which, I had to admit, meant that despite the jittering, Trent could hold his liquor, because he led the field in ounces consumed by a wide margin. “Seriously, Eve—what are you going to do?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. Or, actually, I had, but in that what if kind of way that was really just bullshit bravado…but now it was down to do-or-don’t, or it would be when the sun came up in the morning. I was going to have to choose, and that choice would rule the rest of my life.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten quite so trashed, given the circumstances.

  “Well, I’m not signing with Brandon,” I said slowly. “Maybe I’ll shop around for another patron.”

  “You really think anybody else is going to stand up and volunteer if Brandon’s got you marked?” Guy asked. “Girl, you got yourself a death wish.”

  “Yeah, like that’s news,” Jane said. “Look how she dresses!”

  Nothing wrong with how I was dressed. A skull T-shirt, a spiked belt low on my hips, bike shorts, fishnets, black and red Mary Janes. Oh, maybe she was talking about my makeup. I’d done the Full-On Goth today—white face powder, big black rings around my eyes, blue lips. It was sort of a joke.

  And also, sort of not.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said a small, quiet voice that somehow cut right through the music.

  I’d almost forgotten about Miranda—the kid was sitting in the corner of the van, her knees drawn up, staring off into the distance.

  “It speaks,” Trent said, and laughed maniacally. “I was starting to think you’d just brought the kid along to protect your virtue, Jane.” He gave her a comical flutter of his long, lush eyelashes.

  Miranda was still talking, or at least her lips were moving, but her words were lost in a particularly loud guitar crunch. “What?” I yelled, and leaned closer. “What do you mean?”

  Miranda’s pale blue gaze moved and fixed on me, and I wished it hadn’t. There was something really strange about the girl, all right, even if her rep as the town Cassandra was exaggerated. She’d supposedly known about the fire last year that burned the Collins family out; people even said she predicted that Alyssa Collins would die in the fire. Jane said Miranda made it all up after the fact, but who knew? The girl had a double helping of weird, with creepy little sprinkles on top.

  “It doesn’t matter what you decide to do,” she said louder. “Really. It doesn’t.”

  “Yeah?” Trent asked, and leaned over to snag another beer from the Coleman cooler in the center of the van floor. He twisted off the cap and turned it over in his black-polished fingers. “Why’s that, o Madame Doom? Is one of us going to die tonight?” They all made hilariously drunken ooooooooo sounds, and Trent upended the bottle and chugged.

  “Yes,” Miranda whispered. Nobody else heard her but me.

  And then her eyes rolled up in her skull, and she collapsed flat out on the filthy shag carpet on the floor of the van.

  “Jesus,” Guy blurted, and crawled over to her. He checked her pulse and breathed a sigh of relief. “I think she’s alive.”

  Jane hadn’t moved at all. She looked more annoyed than concerned. “It’s okay,” she said. “She had some kind of vision. It happens. She’ll come out of it.”

  Trent said, “Damn, I was starting to get worried it was the beer.”

  “She didn’t have any, moron.”

  “See? Serious beer deficiency. No wonder she’s out.”

  “Shouldn’t we do something?” Guy asked anxiously. He was cradling Miranda in his arms, and she was as limp as a rag doll, her head lolling against his head. Her eyes were closed now, moving frantically behind the lids like she was trying to look all directions at once, in the dark. “Like, take her to the hospital?”

  The Morganville hospital was neutral ground—no vampires could hunt there. So it was the safest place for anybody who was, well, not working at full power. But Jane just shook her head.

  “I told you, this happens all the time. She’ll be okay in a couple of minutes. It’s like an epileptic seizure or something.” Jane looked at me curiously. “What did she say to you?”

  I couldn’t figure out how to tell her, so I just drank my beer and said nothing.

  Probably a mistake.

  Jane was right, it took a couple of minutes, but Miranda’s eyes fluttered open, blank and unfocused, and she struggled to sit up in Guy’s arms. He held on for a second, then let go. She scrambled away and sat in the far corner of the van, next to the empty bottles, with her hands over her head. Jane sighed, handed me her beer, and crawled over to whisper with her sister and stroke her hair.

  “Well,” Trent said. “Guess the emergency’s over. Beer?”

  “No,” I said, and drained my last bottle. I was feeling loose and sparkly, and I was going to be seriously sorry in the morning—oh, it was morning. Like, nearly 2 a.m. Great. “I need to get home, Trent.”

  “But the night’s barely late–middle age!”

  “Trent. Man, I have to go.”

  “Party pooper. Okay, fine.” Trent shot me a resentful look and jerked his head to Guy. “Help me drive, okay?”

  “You’re driving?” Guy looked alarmed. Trent had downed lots of beer. Lots. He didn’t seem to be feeling it, and it wasn’t like we had far to go, but…yeah. Still, I didn’t feel capable, and Guy looked even more bleary. Jane…well, she hadn’t been far behind Trent in the Drunk-Ass Sweepstakes either. And letting a fourteen-year-old epileptic have the wheel wasn’t a better solution.

  “Not like we can walk,” I said reluctantly. “Look, drive slow, okay? Slow and careful.”

  Trent shot me a crisp OK sign and saluted. He didn’t look drunk. I swallowed hard and crawled back to sit with Jane and Miranda. “We’re going home,” I said. “Guess you guys get dropped off first, right? Then me?”

  Miranda nodded. “Sit here,” she said. “Right here.” She patted the carpet next to her.

  I rolled my eyes. “Comfy here, thanks.”

  “No! Sit here!”

  I looked at Jane and frowned. “Are you sure she’s okay?” And made a little not-so-subtle loopy-loop at my temple.

  “Yeah, she’s fine,” Jane sighed. “She’s been getting these visions again. Most of the time they’re bullshit, though. I think she just does it for the attention.”

  Jane was looking put out, and I guess she had reason. If Miranda was this much fun at parties, I could only imagine what a barrel of laughs she was at home.

  Miranda was getting more and more upset. Jane gave her a ferocious frown and said, “Oh, God. Just do it, Eve. I don’t want her having another fit or something.”

  I crawled across Miranda and wedged myself uncomfortably into the corner where she indicated. Yeah, this was great. At least it was going to be a short drive.

  It was what was waiting at the end of it that I was afraid of. Brandon. Decisions. The beginning of my adult life.

  Trent started the van and pulled a tight U-turn out of the high school parking lot. There were no side windows, but out of the back windows I saw the big, hulking ’30s-era building with its Greek columns fading away like a ghost into the night. Morganville wasn’t big on streetlights, although there were a crapload of surveillance cameras. The cops knew where we’d been. They knew everything in Morganville, and half of them were vampires.

 
God, I wanted to apply for the paperwork to get the hell out, but it was a waste of time. I needed an acceptance letter to an out-of-state university or waivers from the mayor’s office. I wasn’t likely to get either one with my grades and ’tude. No, I had to face facts: I was a lifer, stuck in Morganville, watching the world go by.

  At least, until somebody cut me out of the herd and I became a snack pack.

  Trent was driving faster than we’d agreed. Not only that, the van was veering a little to the side of the road. “Yo, T!” I yelled. “Eyes front, man!”

  He turned to look back at me, and his pupils were huge and dark, and he giggled, and I had time to think, Oh shit, he’s not drunk; he’s high, and then he hit the gas.

  Miranda’s hand closed over my arm. I looked at her, and she was crying. “I don’t want them to die,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Mir, would you stop?” Jane said, and smacked her hand away. “Drama princess.”

  But I was looking at Miranda, and she was staring at me, and she slowly nodded her head.

  “Here it comes,” she said, and transferred the stare to her sister. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

  And then something bad happened, and the world ended.

  I walked away from the smoking wreckage. Staggered, actually, coughing and carrying the limp body of Miranda; she was alive, bleeding from the head but still alive.

  My brain wouldn’t bring up anything about Trent, Jane, or Guy. Nothing. It just…refused.

  I walked until I heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and dropped to my knees, with Miranda in my lap.

  The first cop on the scene was Richard Morrell, the son of the mayor. I’d always thought that even though his family was poisonous, he was kind of a nice guy. He’d been kind to me when I’d had to testify against my brother, after Jason…did what he did. Richard proved it again now by easing Miranda out of my arms and to the ground, cushioning her head gently to keep it from bumping against the pavement. His warm hand pressed on my shoulder. “Eve. Eve. Anybody else in there?”

  I nodded slowly. “Jane. Trent. Guy.” Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d imagined all of that. Maybe they were about to crawl out of that twisted mass of metal and laugh and high five….

  Too much imagination. I imagined dead, bloody bodies crawling out of the wreck and swayed. Nearly collapsed. Richard steadied me. “Easy,” he said. “Easy, kid. Stay with me.”

  I did. Somehow, I stayed conscious even when the ambulance drivers wheeled the gurneys past me. Miranda was taken first, of course, and rushed off to the hospital with flashers and sirens.

  They didn’t bother hurrying for the others. They just loaded the black zippered bags into one ambulance, and it drove away. They wanted me to go with them, but I told them no, I was fine, because no way was I getting in there with the bodies of my friends. I couldn’t.

  The fire department hosed down the wreck, and it smelled like burned metal and reeking plastic, alcohol, blood….

  I was still kneeling there on the pavement, pretty much forgotten, when Richard finally came back, did a double take, and looked grim. “Nobody came to get you? From your family?”

  “You called them?”

  “Yeah, I called,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

  I wiped my face. The white makeup was almost gone, and my skin was wet; I hadn’t even known I was crying.

  Not a mark on me.

  Sit here, Miranda had told me. Right here. Like she’d known. Like she’d picked me over her own sister.

  I couldn’t stop shaking. Officer Morrell found a blanket in his patrol car and threw it around my shoulders, and then he bundled me in the back and drove me the five miles home. All the lights were on at my parents’ house, but it didn’t look welcoming. I checked the time on my cell phone. Three a.m.

  “Hey,” Richard said. “This is the big day, right? I’m sorry about your friends, but you need to focus now. Make the right choices, Eve. You understand?”

  He was trying to be kind, as much as he knew how to be; must have been hard, considering the asshole genes he’d been given. I tried to think what his sister Monica would have said in the same situation. What a bunch of trashed-out losers. They shouldn’t be in our cemetery. We’ve got a perfectly good landfill.

  I knew Monica too well, but that wasn’t Richard’s fault. I nodded to him numbly, gave back the blanket, and walked up the ten steps from the curb to my parents’ front door.

  It opened before I reached for the knob, and I was facing Brandon, the family’s vampire Protector.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Eve,” he said, and stepped back. “Come in.”

  I swallowed whatever smart-ass remark I might normally have given him and looked back over my shoulder. Richard Morrell was looking through the window of the police cruiser at me, and he gave a friendly wave and drove off. Like I was in good hands.

  You know every stereotype of the romantic, brooding vampire? Well, that’s Brandon. Dark, broody, bedroom eyes, wears a lot of black leather. Liked to think he was badass, and what the hell did I know? Maybe he was. He was badass enough to scare kids, anyway, with those sweet eyes and those cruel hands. Psycho bastard.

  I hated his guts, and he knew it.

  “Honey?” Mom. She was hovering behind Brandon, looking timid and nervous. “Better come inside. You know you shouldn’t be out there in the dark.”

  Dad was nowhere to be seen. I bit my tongue and crossed the threshold, and when Brandon closed the door behind me, it was like the cell slamming shut.

  “I was in an accident,” I said. Mom looked at me. We didn’t seem much alike, even when I wasn’t Gothed up…. She had fading brown hair and green eyes, and I took after Dad’s darker looks.

  “Oh, yes, Officer Morrell called,” she said. “But he said you weren’t hurt. And you know, we had a guest, we couldn’t just leave.” She smiled at Brandon. My skin tried to crawl off my bones at the sight of that sick, eager-to-please look on her face.

  “Three of my friends were killed,” I said. I don’t know why I bothered to say it; not like anyone here really cared. But just for once, I wanted to see my mother feel something for me.

  And once again, I was disappointed. “Oh, dear,” Mom said. “That must have been terrible.”

  Yeah, once more with feeling, Mom. I sometimes thought maybe this was some kind of play, and Mom was an actress, not a very good one. If that was true, she really phoned in her performance.

  “Any of mine?” Brandon asked casually. I gritted my teeth, because I wanted to scream and hit him, and that wouldn’t have done me any good at all.

  “N-no,” I managed to stammer over the fury. “Jane Blunt, Trent Garvey, and Guy—” What the hell was Guy’s last name? I wanted to cry now. Or keep on crying, because I wasn’t sure I’d ever stopped. “Guy Finelli.”

  Brandon smiled. “Sounds as if Charles had a bad night.” Charles being a rival vamp. I knew he was the Protector for Jane’s family. I hadn’t known he’d been responsible for one or both of the others. Charles was just the opposite of Brandon—a bookish little man, soft-spoken and mild until you pushed him. Not a bad choice, if I had to go shopping for Protectors, I supposed.

  God, I hated this. I wanted this over.

  “Let’s just do it,” I said, and walked down the hallway to the living room. Predictably, Dad was parked in his recliner with an open beer, probably working on his usual six-pack. He was a bloated vision of my future—two hundred and fifty pounds, sallow and grim and full of rage and resentment he couldn’t fling anywhere but around here, in the house. He managed the biggest local bar, which of course was owned by Brandon. All nice and tidy. Brandon owned the mortgage on the house. Brandon owned the notes on our cars.

  Brandon owned us.

  And now Brandon was smiling at me, all sleek and horrible with those hungry, hungry eyes, and he was taking a folded, thin sheaf of papers out of the pocket of his long black coat.

  “You only wear that thing b
ecause you saw it on Angel,” I said, and snatched the paperwork from him. I read the first few sentences. I, Eve Evangeline Walker Rosser, swear my life, my blood, and my service to my Protector, Brandon, now and for my lifetime, that my Protector may command me in all things.

  This was it. I was holding my future in my hands, right here.

  Brandon held out a pen. My father tore his attention away from the glowing escape of the television and took a sip of beer, watching me with angry intensity. My mother looked nervous, fluttering her hands as I stared without blinking at the black Montblanc the vampire was holding out.

  “Happy birthday, by the way,” Brandon said. “There’s a signing bonus. Ten thousand dollars.”

  “Guess I could bury my friends in style with that,” I said.

  “You don’t have to worry about that.” Brandon shrugged. “Their family contracts cover that sort of thing.”

  Mom sensed what I was thinking, I guess, because she blurted, “Eve, honey, let’s hurry. Brandon does have places to go.” She encouraged me with little vague motions of her hands, and her eyes were desperate.

  I took a deep breath, held the crisp paper in both hands, and ripped it in half. The sound was almost drowned out by my mother’s horrified gasp and the sound of the beer can crushing in my father’s hand.

  “You ungrateful little—” Dad said. “You disrespect your Protector like that? To his face?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much just like that.” I ripped the contract in quarters and threw it at him. The paper fluttered like huge confetti, one piece landing on his shoulder until Brandon calmly brushed it off. “Fuck off, Brandon. I’m not signing with you.”

  “No one else will take you,” he said. “And you’re mine, Eve. You’ve always been mine. Don’t forget it.”

  My dad got out of his recliner and grabbed my arm. “You’re signing that paper,” he said, and shook me like a terrier shaking a rat. “Don’t be stupid! Don’t you know what you’re doing? What you could cost your family if you do this?”