by Rachel Caine
Dad had looked at her like she was a disappointment.
She’d never, ever been a disappointment before, and it totally pissed her off, because she didn’t deserve it, not one bit.
Michael and Shane stood in the doorway, watching her parents hurry to their SUV in the dark. Shane, she saw, had a big hand-carved cross, and he was ready to charge to the rescue, even though he was mad as hell. He didn’t need to, though. Mom and Dad got in their truck and drove away, into the hushed Morganville night, and Michael closed and locked the door and turned to look at Claire.
“Sorry,” he said. “That could have been better.”
“You think?” she shot back. Her eyes were swollen and hot, and she felt like she might vibrate apart; she was so mad. “I’m not leaving! No way!”
“Claire.” Michael reached out and put his hands on her shoulders. “Until you’re eighteen, you really don’t have the right to say that, okay? I know, you’re almost seventeen, you’re smarter than ninety percent of the people in the world—”
“One hundred percent smarter than anybody else in this house,” Shane said.
“—but that doesn’t matter. It will, but it doesn’t right now. You need to do what they say. If you decide to fight them, it’s going to get ugly, and Claire, we can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. You understand?” He searched her eyes, and she had to nod. “Sorry. Believe me, it isn’t the way I wanted it to happen, but at least you’ll be out of Morganville. You’ll be safe.”
He hugged her. She felt her breath leave for a second, and then he was gone, walking away.
She looked at Shane.
“Well, I’m not hugging you,” he said. He was standing close to her, so close she had to crane her neck way up to meet his eyes. And for a long few seconds, they didn’t say anything; he just…watched her. In the living room, she heard Eve talking to Michael, but here in the hallway it was very quiet. She could hear the fast pounding of her heart, and wondered if he could hear it, too.
“Claire—,” he finally said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m sixteen. Heard it already.”
He put his arms around her. Not the way Michael had, exactly—she didn’t know why it was different, but it was. This wasn’t a hug; it was—it felt—close.
He wasn’t holding himself back, that was it. And she relaxed against him with a breathless sigh, cheek against his chest, almost purring with relief. He rested his chin on the top of her head. She felt so small next to him, but that was all right. It didn’t make her feel weak.
“I’m going to miss you,” he whispered, and she leaned back to look up at him again.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” She thought—really thought—that he was going to kiss her, but just then, she heard Eve call, “Shane!” and he flinched and pulled back, and the old Shane, the cocky Shane, was back. “You made things exciting around here.”
He loped off down the hall, and she felt a pure burst of fury.
Boys. Why were they always such dumbasses?
The night did its usual tricks—creepy creaking sounds upstairs, wind hissing at the windows, branches tapping. Claire couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get used to the idea that this room, this lovely room, was hers for only two more nights, and then she’d be carted off, humiliated and defeated, back home. No way would her parents let her go anywhere now. She’d have to wait out the next year and a half, which meant that her admission paperwork would have to be redone, and she’d have to start all over….
At least it didn’t matter now if she blew off classes, she thought, and punched her pillow into a more comfortable shape. Several times.
If she’d been asleep—even a little asleep—she’d have missed the knock on the door, as light as it was, but she was wired and full of restless energy, and she slipped out of bed and went to unlock it and swing it open.
It was Shane. He stood there, clearly wanting to come in, not daring to come in, as uncertain as she’d ever seen him. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and sweatpants, feet bare, and she felt a white-hot wave of—something—sweep over her. This had to be what he slept in. Or…maybe less than that.
Okay, she really needed to stop thinking about that.
She became aware, a hot second later, that she was standing there in a thin oversized T-shirt—one of Michael’s old ones—with bare legs from midthigh down. Half-naked wouldn’t be overstating it.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Shane said. “Did I wake you up?”
“No. I couldn’t sleep.” She was acutely aware of the bed behind her, covers all twisted. “Um, do you want to, um…come in?”
“Better not,” he said softly. “Claire, I—” He shook his head, brown hair swinging loose around his face. “I shouldn’t even be here.”
But he wasn’t leaving, either.
“Well,” she said, “I’m sitting down. If you want to stand there, fine.”
She went to the bed and sat, careful how she did it. Legs together, prim and proper. Her toes barely brushed the carpet. She felt alive and tingling all over.
She looked down at her hands, at the ragged fingernails, and picked at them nervously.
Shane took two steps into the room. “For the next two days, I don’t want you leaving the house,” he said. Which was not what she was expecting him to say. Not at all. “Your dad already thinks we’re getting you drunk and staging orgies in the hallway. Last thing I want is to send you home with fang marks in your neck. Or in a coffin.” His voice dropped lower. “I couldn’t stand that. I really couldn’t. You know that, right?”
She didn’t look up. He came a step closer, and his bare feet and sweatpants came into her vision. “Claire. You’ve got to promise me.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m not some little kid. And I’m not your sister.”
He laughed, low in his throat. “Oh, yeah. That, I know. But I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”
His hand cupped her chin in warmth, and tilted her face up.
The whole world hushed, one perfect second of stillness. Claire didn’t even think her heart beat.
His lips were warm and soft and sweet, and the sensation just blinded her, made her feel awkward and scared. I’ve never…nobody ever…I’m not doing it right…. She hated herself, hated that she didn’t know how to kiss him back, knew he was measuring her against all those other girls, those better girls he’d kissed.
It stopped. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like a bird fluttering in her chest. She was flushed and hot and warm, so warm….
Shane pressed his forehead to hers and sighed. His breath warmed her face, and this time she kissed him, letting her instincts guide her, letting him pull her to her feet. Their hands were clasped, fingers laced, and parts of her—parts she’d only ever warmed up alone—were going full blast.
This time, when they came up for air, he pulled completely back. His face was flushed; his eyes were bright. Claire’s lips felt swollen, warm, utterly deliciously damp. Oh, she thought. I guess I should have done the tongue thing. Putting theory into practice was hard when her brain kept wanting to short out entirely.
“Okay,” Shane said. “That—that shouldn’t have happened.”
“Probably not,” she admitted. “But I’m leaving in two days. It’d be stupid if I never even kissed you.”
She wasn’t absolutely sure who kissed whom this time. Maybe it was gravity tilting, stars exploding. It felt like it. His hands were free this time, and they cupped her face, stroked her hair, her neck, down to her shoulders….
She gasped into his open mouth, and he moaned. Moaned. She had no idea a sensation could go through her like that, traveling through her skin and nerves like lightning.
His hands stopped right there, at her waist.
When their tongues touched, gentle and tentative and wet, it made her knees weak. Made her whole spine rattle like dry bones. Shane put his right arm around her waist, holding her close, and cupped the back of her head wit
h his left.
Okay, this was kissing. Serious kissing. Not just a kiss before moving out, not a good-bye, this was Hello, sexy, and wow, she’d never even suspected that it could feel this way.
When he let go, she fell back to sit on the bed, utterly weak, and she thought that if he followed her, she’d fall back and…
Shane took two giant-sized steps backward, then turned and walked out into the hall. Facing away from her. In a kind of dreamlike trance she watched the strong, broad muscles of his back moving under his shirt as he took deep breaths.
“Okay,” he said finally, and turned around. But staying well out in the hall. “Okay, that really shouldn’t have happened. And we’re not going to talk about that, right? Ever?”
“Right,” she said. She felt like there was light dripping from her fingertips. Spilling out of her toes. She felt full of light, in fact, warm buttery sunlight. “Never happened.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, and closed his eyes. “Claire—”
“I know.”
“Lock the door,” he said.
She got up and swung it mostly closed. One last look at him through the gap, and then she clicked it shut and flipped the dead bolt.
She heard a thump against it. Shane was slumped on the other side; she just knew it.
“I am so dead,” he muttered.
She went back to bed and lay there, full of light, until morning.
14
No sign of Shane on Monday morning, but she got up way early—just after Michael would have evaporated into mist, in fact. She showered and grabbed a Pop-Tart from the cabinet for breakfast, washed the dishes that had been dumped in the sink from last night’s disaster of Parental Dinner—hadn’t that been Michael’s job?—and emptied out her backpack to stuff in the metal canister (to return to the chem lab, which made it borrowing, not stealing) and the Bible with its concealed secret.
And then she thought, It won’t do any good if they just steal it from me, and took it out again and put it on the shelves, wedged in between an old volume 10 of the World Encyclopedia and some novel she’d never heard of. Then she stepped out, locked the door, and began walking toward the school.
The chem lab was busy when she arrived between classes, and she had no trouble slipping into the supply room to put the canister back in place, after carefully wiping her fingerprints from everything she could think of. That moral duty done, she hustled to the admissions office to put in her paperwork to withdraw from school. Nobody seemed surprised. She supposed that there were a lot of withdrawals. Or disappearances.
It was noon when she walked down to Common Grounds. Eve was just arriving, yawning and bleary-eyed; she looked surprised to see Claire as she handed over the cup of tea. “I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house,” she said. “Michael and Shane said—”
“I need to talk to Oliver,” Claire said.
“He’s in the back.” Eve pointed. “In the office. Claire? Is there anything wrong?”
“No,” she said. “I think something’s about to be right for a change.”
The door marked OFFICE was closed. She knocked, heard Oliver’s warm voice telling her to enter, and came in. He was sitting behind a small desk in a very small room, windowless, with a computer running in front of him. He smiled at her and stood up to shake her hand. “Claire,” he said. “Good to see you’re safe. I heard there had been some…unpleasantness.”
Oliver was wearing a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and blue jeans with faded patches on the knees—not so much style as wear, she figured. He looked tired and concerned, and she thought suddenly that there was something about him a lot like Michael. Except that he was here in the daytime, of course, and at night, so he couldn’t be a ghost. Could he?
“Brandon is very unhappy,” he said. “I’m afraid that there’s going to be retaliation. Brandon likes striking from an angle, not straight on, so you’d better watch out for your friends, as well. That would include Eve, of course. I’ve asked her to be extra careful.”
She nodded, heart in her throat. “Um…what if I have something to trade?”
Oliver sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Trade for what? And to whom?”
“I—something important. I don’t want to be more specific than that.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be, if you want me to act as any kind of go-between for you. I can’t trade if I don’t know what I’m offering.”
She realized she was still holding her teacup, and put it down on the corner of the desk. “Um…I’d rather do it myself. But I don’t know who to go to. Whoever can order Brandon around, I guess. Or even higher than that.”
“There is a social order to the vampire community,” Oliver agreed. “Brandon’s hardly at the top. There are two factions, you know. Brandon is part of one—the darker side, I suppose you could say. It depends on your viewpoint. Certainly, from a human standpoint, neither faction is exactly lily-white.” He shrugged. “I can help you, if you’ll let me. Believe me, you don’t want to try to contact these people on your own. And I’m not sure they’d even allow you to do so.”
She bit her lip, thinking about what Michael had said about the deals in Morganville. She wasn’t good at it; she knew that. And she didn’t know the rules.
Oliver did, or he’d have been dead a long time ago. Besides, he was Eve’s boss, and she liked him. Plus, he’d been able to keep Brandon from biting her at least twice. That had to count for something.
“Okay,” she said. “I have the book.”
Oliver’s gray eyebrows came down into a straight line. “The book?”
“You know. The book.”
“Claire,” he said slowly, “I hope you understand what you’re saying. Because you can’t be wrong about this, and you absolutely can’t lie. Bluffing will get you, and all your friends, killed. No mercy. Others have tried, passing off fakes or pretending to have it, then running. They all died. All of them. Do you understand?”
She swallowed again, convulsively. Her mouth felt very dry. She tried to remember how it had felt last night, being warm and full of light, but the day was cold and hard and scary. And Shane wasn’t here. “Yes,” she whispered. “I understand. But I have it, and I don’t think it’s a fake. And I’m willing to trade for it.”
Oliver didn’t blink. She tried to look away, but there was something about him, something hard and demanding, and she felt a real surge of fear. “All right,” he said. “But you can’t do this by yourself. You’re too young, and you’re too fragile. I’ll undertake this for you, but I’ll need proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“I need to see the book. Take photographs of at least the cover and one inside page, to prove that it’s legitimate.”
“I thought vampires couldn’t read it.”
“They can’t, at least according to legend. It’s the symbol. Like the Protection symbols, it has properties that humans can’t really understand. In this case, it confuses the senses of vampires. Only humans can read the words inside—but a photograph removes the confusion, and vampires will be able to see the symbol for what it is. Wonderful thing, technology.” He glanced at the clock. “I have a meeting this afternoon that I can’t postpone. I’ll come to your house this evening, if that’s all right. I’d like a chance to speak with Shane and Eve, as well. And your other friend, the one I’ve never seen come in—Michael, correct? Michael Glass?”
She found herself nodding, a little alarmed and not even sure why she should be. It was okay, wasn’t it? Oliver was one of the good guys.
And she had no idea whom else she could turn to, not in Morganville. Brandon? Right. There was a good option.
“Tonight,” she echoed. “Okay.”
She stood up and walked out, feeling strangely cold. Eve looked up at her, frowned, and tried to come after her, but there were people crowding at the coffee bar, and Claire hurried to the door and escaped before Eve could corner her. She didn’t want to talk about it
. She was sickly certain she’d just made a terrible mistake, but she didn’t know what, or why, or how.
She was so caught up in it, lost in her own head and lulled by the hot safety of the sun, not to mention people on the streets, that she forgot not all the dangers came at night in Morganville. The first warning she had, in fact, was the low rumble of an engine, and then she was being knocked off-balance and stumbling against the sun-heated finish of a van door, which slid aside.
She was being pushed from one side, pulled from the other, and before she could do more than yelp, she was in the van, bodies were piling on top of her, and the van door slammed shut on the sun. She slid on the carpeted floor as the van accelerated off, and heard whoops and laughter.
Girls’ laughter.
Somebody was kneeling on her chest, making it hard to breathe; she tried to twist and throw her off, but it didn’t work. When she blinked away stars she saw that the person on top of her was Gina, looking freshly made-up and fashion perfect, except for the sick gleam in her eyes. Monica was kneeling next to her, smiling a tight, cruel little smile. Jennifer was driving. There were a couple of other girls in the van, too, ones she remembered from the basement confrontation at the dorm. Apparently, Monica was still recruiting, and these two had made the cut to Advanced Psycho School.
“Get off me!” Claire yelled, and tried to bat at Gina; Monica grabbed her hands and yanked them over her head, painfully hard. “Bitch, get off!”
Monica punched her in the stomach, driving out what little air she had, and Claire whooped for breath. Gina’s weight made it incredibly hard to breathe. Could you kill somebody like this? Smother a person like this? Maybe if the victim was small…like her…
The van was still going, taking her farther and farther away from safety.
“You,” Monica said, leaning over her, “really pissed me off, fish. I don’t forget things like that. Neither does my boyfriend.”
“Brandon?” Claire wheezed. “Jeez, at least get one with a pulse!”