The Morganville Vampires

by Rachel Caine

  ‘‘No, but my room faces the alley.’’ Something moved in the yard, and she felt a lurch of pure adrenaline. ‘‘I think—I think he’s in the yard now. Coming to the house. To the back.’’

  ‘‘Go wake up Michael and Shane. Make sure Eve’s okay. Go now, Claire.’’

  She wasn’t dressed, but she supposed it didn’t really matter; the oversized T-shirt she was wearing came to her knees, anyway. She unlocked her door and swung it open, and yelled in shock.

  Tried to, anyway. She couldn’t quite get the sound out, because Oliver’s hand clapped over her mouth, spun her around, and dragged her backward over the threshold. She screamed, but it was barely a buzz in her throat. Her bare heels scraped on the wood as she tried to get her feet under her, but he had her helpless and off balance. She dropped the phone.

  She could hear Lowe’s voice distantly whispering her name, but it was blotted out by Oliver’s soft voice in her ear as he bent close and said, ‘‘I only want to talk. Don’t make me hurt you, girl. You know I will if you force me.’’

  She went still, breathing hard. Had he been out there in the yard? How had he gotten up here so fast? Didn’t the protections on the house keep him out?

  No. They only work against uninvited humans now, because Michael’s—Michael’s a vampire. Oliver had some way in and out. Easy access. God.

  ‘‘Good girl. Stay quiet,’’ Oliver whispered. He looked up and down the hall, moved the painting next to the doorway, and pressed the hidden switch. The secret doorway across from Eve’s room opened with a soft sigh, and he dragged her inside, then shut it. No knob on the inside. The release switch was up a flight of stairs, and he’d never let her get there if she tried to run. When he let her go, Claire stayed where she was.

  He let his voice return to normal levels. Not afraid of being overheard, not here. ‘‘I thought it was time we had a talk. You signed an agreement with Amelie. That hurts me, Claire. I thought we had a special friendship, and after all, I did offer first.’’ Oliver smiled at her, that cold and oddly kind smile that had suckered her in the first few times she’d met him. ‘‘You turned me down. So why, I wonder, did you decide that Amelie would be a better choice?’’

  He might know about Myrnin, but not what Myrnin did. Amelie had been pretty specific: he could never know that.

  ‘‘She smells better,’’ Claire said. ‘‘And she made me cookies.’’ Somehow, after the day she’d had, Oliver just didn’t seem all that terrifying anymore.

  Until he bared his fangs, and his eyes went a strange, wide black. ‘‘No games,’’ he said. ‘‘The room’s soundproofed. Amelie used to play with her victims here, you know. It’s a killing jar, and you’re inside. So perhaps you should be more polite, if you intend to see morning.’’

  Claire held up her left wrist. The golden bracelet glinted in the light. ‘‘Bite it, Oliver. You can’t touch me. You can’t touch anybody in this house. I don’t know how you got in, but—’’

  He grabbed her right wrist and ripped away the bandage covering the cut Jason had made. It broke open, and a red trickle ran from it down the interior of her arm.

  Oliver licked it off.

  ‘‘Okay, that’s just gross,’’ Claire said faintly. ‘‘Let go. Let go!’’

  ‘‘You belong to Amelie,’’ he said, and let her go. ‘‘I can taste it. Smell it on you. You’re right, I can’t touch you, not anymore. But the others, you’re wrong about them. While they’re in the house they’re safe, but not out there, not in my town. Not for long.’’

  ‘‘I made a deal!’’

  ‘‘Did you? Did you see in writing that your friends would be protected from all attacks? Because I very much doubt that, little Claire. We’ve been writing agreements for thousands of years, and you’re only sixteen years old. You have no idea what kind of deal you’ve made.’’ Oliver actually sounded a little sorry for her, and that was scary. He folded his arms and leaned against the door. He was in his usual good-guy disguise tonight: a tie-dyed T-shirt, battered cargo pants, his graying, curling hair pulled back in a ponytail. He’d probably just closed up Common Grounds, she figured. He smelled like coffee. She wondered what Oliver wore on his days off, if he wasn’t trying to intimidate. Pajamas? Fuzzy slippers? One thing she’d figured out about the vampires in Morganville, they were never exactly what they seemed to be, even the bad ones.

  ‘‘Fine,’’ she said, and backed away from him until her heels hit the first step. She sat down. ‘‘You tell me what I’ve done.’’

  ‘‘You’ve upset the balance of power in the town, and that’s a terrible thing, little Claire. You see, Amelie intended to be queen of this little kingdom. She thought I was safely dead when she did so. When I came here a year ago, many people decided that they’d rather listen to me than to her. Not all, of course, and not even a majority. But she’s won no real friends during her long existence, and it isn’t only the humans who are trapped here, you know. It’s the vampires as well.’’

  This was a new idea to her. ‘‘What are you talking about?’’

  ‘‘We can’t leave,’’ he said. ‘‘Not without her permission. As I said, she fancies herself the cold White Queen, and most are content to let her. Not all. I was working to come to some . . . arrangements with her, to let a number of us leave Morganville and set up a community outside of her influence. Things had been static here for fifty years, you see, since she made the last vampire. Now Amelie feels the need to protect her position. She’s blocked me. She won’t allow me to make a move without her permission.’’ He lowered his chin and stared at her, and it chilled her deep inside. ‘‘I don’t like to be controlled. I tend to get . . . unhappy.’’

  ‘‘Why are you talking to me? What can I do?’’

  ‘‘You, stupid little child, are her pet. When you want something, she indulges you. I want to know why.’’

  Amelie hadn’t exactly indulged her the last time they’d talked, although the cell phone sitting abandoned in her room might argue otherwise. ‘‘I don’t know!’’

  ‘‘She thinks you have something she needs, or she’d hardly bother. She’s seen whole cities die without shedding a tear or lifting a finger. It’s not altruism.’’

  Myrnin. It’s about Myrnin. If I weren’t learning from him . . . She couldn’t say that, didn’t even dare to really think it through. Oliver was unnerving, and sometimes he seemed downright psychic. ‘‘Maybe she’s lonely.’’

  He laughed, a harsh bark of sound with no amusement in it. ‘‘She certainly deserves to be.’’ He took a step forward. ‘‘Tell me why she needs you, Claire. Tell me what she’s hiding, and I’ll make a deal, a perfectly straightforward one: I’ll give your friends my direct Protection. No one will hurt them.’’

  She didn’t say anything this time; she just looked back at him. She didn’t dare not look at him; even when she was watching him she had the eerie feeling that somehow he was creeping up behind her, ready to do something awful to her when she least expected it.

  Oliver made a sound of deep frustration. ‘‘You stupid, stupid girl.’’ He shoved past her, going up the stairs so lightly the wood hardly even creaked. After a second, the hidden, knobless door sighed open. Claire got up, steadied herself for a second, and then stepped out into the hallway. Nobody else had heard a thing, apparently. It was quiet as the grave.

  Oliver’s hands closed around her shoulders, and he moved her out of his way by simply picking her up and putting her down, as if she weighed nothing. He didn’t let go once he’d done it; he stepped up behind her, bent down, and whispered, ‘‘Not a sound, Claire. If you wake your friends and they come against me, I’ll destroy you all. Understand?’’

  She nodded.

  She felt the cold pressure of his hands go away, but not his presence, and she was surprised when she looked back and saw that he was gone.

  As if he’d never been there at all.

  She pressed the button behind the painting, and the hidden door sealed itself. Then
she picked up her phone from the floor of her bedroom. The call had ended; Travis Lowe was probably on his way over, burning sirens all the way.

  She sat down to wait for the panic to start.

  There just had to be something out there in the alley, given the response. It wasn’t only a couple of cops, some yellow tape, and a write-up in Captain Obvious’s underground newspaper; it looked, from Claire’s window, like a full-blown CSI-style investigation, with people in white jumpsuits collecting evidence and everything. There was a big blocky van with heavily tinted windows that she guessed housed vampire detectives or forensics people or something, with the emblem of the Morganville police on the side, and she guessed the majority of people roaming around in Michael’s backyard this morning were, in fact, the undead.

  Crime-solving undead. That was new.

  She wasn’t sure what she was feeling anymore. Light-headed, disconnected, looped. Last night had felt like a dream, and it had passed in a blur from the time she and Shane had come upstairs until she’d heard the rattle of trash cans in the alley.

  Someone was ringing the doorbell downstairs. She didn’t move away from the window—couldn’t seem to convince herself to move at all, in fact. It was probably the cops. Travis Lowe had, as she’d thought, already come racing to the rescue, but on finding her unfanged and still alive, he’d called in the full-on police assault. So those were probably the detectives, Gretchen and Hans, or maybe Richard Morrell coming to take her statement.

  Claire looked down at herself. I should probably get dressed. Her wrist was a mess, smeared with slow-leaking blood, and she pressed her T-shirt against it before she could think about what she was doing. Great, now she wasn’t only undressed, she was undressed in bloody nightclothes.

  It took ten minutes to shower, change, and bandage up her arm, and then she padded down the stairs in bare feet to face the music.

  Her housemates were all standing in the living room, and they all looked at her with identical expressions, blank enough that she came to a stop on the steps. ‘‘What?’’ Claire asked. ‘‘What’d I do now?’’

  Michael stepped aside so Claire could see who was sitting cross-legged in the chair, flipping through a bubble-gum pink edition of Teen People.

  Monica Morrell.

  She was dressed in a tight-fitting pink top with diamonds that spelled out BITCH/PRINCESS, and white short-shorts that even Daisy Duke would have thrown out as too trashy. Her tan was deep and dark, and she was lazily dangling a pink flip-flop with a yellow flower on top from her perfectly manicured toes.

  ‘‘Hey, Claire!’’ she said, and stood up. ‘‘I thought we could grab some breakfast.’’

  ‘‘I—what?’’

  ‘‘Break . . . fast,’’ Monica said, drawing out the word. ‘‘Most important meal of the day? Do you even have parents?’’

  Claire felt ridiculously off balance. ‘‘I don’t understand. Why are you here?’’

  Shane leaned against the wall, glaring at Monica. He had a serious bed-head thing going on, and Claire wanted to run her hands through his thick, soft hair and return it to its usual shaggy mess. ‘‘What a good question. The second best one being, who let her inside? And we’re going to have to throw out that chair. The smell’s never coming out.’’

  ‘‘I let her in,’’ Michael said quietly, and that got him a stare from Shane. ‘‘Lay off the daggers. It was better to let her in than have her pitch a fit on the porch with all the cops around. We’ve already got enough trouble.’’

  ‘‘What’s this we, paleface? I mean that in the vampire sense, not—’’

  ‘‘Shut up, man.’’

  Claire rubbed her forehead, feeling her headache blooming back to hot, throbbing life. She ignored Michael and Shane with an effort and focused on Monica, who had a malicious smile curving her lips. ‘‘You’re enjoying this,’’ Claire said. Monica shrugged.

  ‘‘Of course. They’re jackasses to me most of the time; it’s nice to see them take it out on each other for a change. Not that I care.’’ Monica arched one perfectly groomed eyebrow. ‘‘So? I know you like coffee. I’ve seen you drinking it.’’

  Eve stepped in between them, and for a second Claire thought her friend honestly looked . . . dangerous. ‘‘You’re not taking Claire anywhere. And you’re sure not taking her anywhere near that son of a bitch,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Which son of a bitch would that be, exactly? Because hey, she lives here. It’s not like she’s choosy about who she hangs out with.’’

  Eve bunched up a fist, and for a second Claire thought she was going to haul off and slug Monica right in her perfect, pouty mouth. But Eve checked herself. Barely.

  ‘‘You so need to leave our house,’’ Eve said. ‘‘Now. Before something bad happens that I won’t really regret.’’

  Monica gave her a look. ‘‘I’m sorry, were you talking? Because I think I dropped off. Claire? I’m not here to banter with the mentally challenged. I’m just trying to be friendly. If you don’t want to go, just say so.’’

  Claire felt ridiculously like laughing, it was so weird. Why was this happening to her?

  ‘‘What do you really want?’’ she asked, and Monica’s lovely, crazy eyes widened. Just a little.

  ‘‘I want to talk to you without the Losers Club hanging over my shoulder. I figured we could have breakfast, but if you’re allergic to caffeine and pastry . . .’’

  ‘‘Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of my friends,’’ Claire said. That brought both of Monica’s eyebrows up.

  ‘‘Oooookay. Your funeral,’’ she said, and glanced at Shane. ‘‘So where was your boyfriend last night after midnight?’’

  ‘‘Who? Shane?’’ What time had she left his room, anyway? Late. But . . . not after midnight.

  ‘‘None of your damn business where I was,’’ Shane said to Monica. ‘‘Eve told you to get out. The next step is I throw your skanky ass and see if you bounce when you hit the porch. I don’t care whose pet you are; you don’t come here and—’’

  ‘‘Shane,’’ Monica interrupted with elaborate calm, ‘‘shut the hell up. I saw you, idiot.’’

  Claire waited for Shane to give her a biting comeback, but he just sat there. Waiting. His eyes had gone very dark.

  ‘‘They don’t know, do they?’’ Monica continued, and tapped her rolled-up copy of Teen People against her hip. ‘‘Wow. Shocker. Bad boy keeps secrets. That never happens.’’

  ‘‘Shut up, Monica.’’

  ‘‘Or you’ll what? Kill me?’’ She smiled. ‘‘There wouldn’t even be DNA left when they got done with you, Shane. And the rest of you, too. And your families.’’

  ‘‘What’s she talking about?’’ Eve asked. ‘‘Shane?’’

  ‘‘Nothing.’’

  ‘‘Nothing,’’ Monica mocked. ‘‘Deny everything. That’s a brilliant plan. Then again, it’s what I’d expect from someone like you.’’

  Michael was frowning at Shane now, and Claire couldn’t resist, either. Shane’s dark eyes darted to each of them in turn, Claire last.

  ‘‘The cops aren’t going to find any bodies out there in the alley. And they’re not going to find one anywhere else in your house,’’ Monica said, ‘‘because Shane moved a body last night, out the back door.’’

  Shane still wasn’t saying anything. Claire covered her mouth with her hand. ‘‘No,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re lying.’’

  Monica folded her arms. ‘‘Why exactly would I do that? Why would I admit to hanging around watching your house unless I had to? Embarrassing! Look, if I’m lying, all it takes is for him to deny it. Ask him. Go on.’’ She was staring right at Shane.

  Shane’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything. For a frozen second or two, nobody moved, and then Michael said, ‘‘Christ, Shane, what the hell?’’

  ‘‘Shut up!’’ Shane snapped. ‘‘I had to! I thought I heard something down in the basement last night, when I was getting some water in the kitchen. S
o I went to check it out. And—’’ He stopped, and Claire saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, hard. ‘‘She was dead down there. At the bottom of the stairs, as if somebody had just . . . thrown her. For a second I thought it was’’—he glanced at Eve, then away—‘‘I thought it was you. I thought you’d tripped and fallen down the stairs or something. But when I got down there, it wasn’t you. And she was dead, not just knocked out.’’

  Eve sank down on the arm of the sofa, looking as stunned as Claire felt. ‘‘Who? Who was it?’’

  ‘‘I didn’t recognize her. Some college girl, I guess.

  She didn’t look local and she wasn’t wearing a bracelet.’’ Shane took in an audible deep breath. ‘‘Look, we’ve been in enough trouble as it is. I had to get rid of her. So I wrapped her up in one of the blankets out of the boxes down there and carried her out. I put her in the trunk of your car—’’

  ‘‘You what?’’ Michael snapped.

  ‘‘And I drove her to the church. I left her there, inside. I didn’t want to just—dump her. I thought’’— Shane shook his head—‘‘I thought it was the right thing to do.’’

  Monica sighed. She was checking out her fingernails with exaggerated boredom. ‘‘Yeah, yeah, touching. The point is, when I saw you, you were hauling a dead chick into the trunk of his car. And I just can’t wait to tell my brother. You know my brother, right? The cop?’’

  Unbelievable. ‘‘What do you want?’’ Claire practically yelled it at her.

  ‘‘I told you. Breakfast.’’ Monica gave her a sunny movie-star smile. ‘‘Please. If you say yes, I just could forget all about what I saw. Especially since I was, you know, out after curfew, and I don’t want to get asked about why. Think of it as mutually assured destruction.’’

  It sounded like a deal, but it wasn’t, not really. Monica had all the cards, and they had none. None at all.

  ‘‘There’s no body in the alley,’’ Claire said. ‘‘The police aren’t going to find anything. You’re sure?’’