by Rachel Caine
“Well, that’s a problem,” Shane said, “seeing how our transpo out there is not exactly lightproof anymore, even if we didn’t mind sitting on half-burned seats.” Not even the trunk, anymore, thanks to the sledgehammer’s work. “Plus, we’ve got t-minus two hours to sunrise. Not happening, anyway.”
Michael said, “Oliver, it’s time to tell us why we came here in the first place. And what happened to you.”
“It’s none of your business,” Oliver said.
“Excuse me, but since you dragged us into it with you, I’d say it is our business now.”
“Did my business destroy your car? No, that was your own idiocy. I say again, you don’t need to know, and I don’t need to tell you. Leave it.” He sounded almost himself, but subdued, and he sat down on the edge of the bed as if standing tired him—not like Oliver.
“Are you okay?” Claire asked. He looked up and met her eyes, and for a second she saw something terrible in him: fear—overwhelming, tired, ancient fear. It shocked her. She hadn’t thought Oliver could really be afraid of anything, ever.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m all right. Wounds heal. What won’t is what will happen if we remain trapped here. We can’t wait for rescue from Morganville. We must get on our way before the next nightfall.”
“Or?” Claire asked.
“Or worse will happen. To all of us.” He looked... haunted. And very tired. “I need to rest. Find a car.”
“Ah—we’re not exactly rolling in cash.”
Without a word, Oliver took out a wallet from his pants, grimaced at the scratches and tears in the leather, and opened it to reveal a bunch of crisp green bills.
Hundreds.
He handed over the entire stack. “I have more,” he said. “Take that. It should be enough to buy something serviceable. Make sure it’s got sufficient trunk space.”
After a second’s hesitation, Eve’s fingers closed around the money. “Oliver? Seriously, are you okay?”
“I will be,” he said. “Michael, do you suppose there is another room in this motel I can occupy until we are ready to leave?”
“I’ll get one,” Michael said. He slipped out the door and was gone in seconds, heading for the office. Oliver closed his eyes and leaned back against the headboard. He looked so utterly miserable that Claire, without thinking, reached out and, just being kind, put her hand on his arm.
“Claire,” Oliver said softly, without opening his eyes, “did I give you permission to touch me?”
She removed her hand—quickly.
“Just—leave me alone. I’m not myself at the moment.”
Actually, he was pretty much like he always was, as far as Claire could tell, but she let it go.
Eve was fanning out the money, counting it. Her eyes were getting wider the higher she went. “Jeez,” she whispered. “I could buy a genuine pimped-out land yacht with this. Wow. I had no idea running a coffee shop was this good a job.”
“It’s not,” Shane said. “He probably has piles of gold sitting under his couch cushions. He’s had a long time to get rich, Eve.”
“And time enough to lose everything, once or twice,” Oliver said. “If you want to be technical. I have been rich. I am currently ... not as poor as I once was. But not as wealthy, either. The curse of human wars and politics. It’s difficult to keep what you have, especially if you are always an outsider.”
Claire had never really thought about how vampires got the money they had; she supposed it wouldn’t have been easy, really. She remembered all the TV news shows she’d seen, with people running for their lives from war zones, carrying whatever they could.
Oliver would have been one of those people, once upon a time. Amelie, too. And Myrnin. Probably more than once. But they’d come through it.
They were survivors.
“What happened out there?” Claire asked, not really expecting him to answer.
He didn’t disappoint her.
6
Once Oliver had his own room—room three, of course—at the motel, Claire, Eve, and Shane set out lightproofing the rooms Michael and Oliver would be staying in during the day. That wasn’t so hard; the blackout curtains in the windows were pretty good, and a little duct tape around the edges made sure the room stayed dim—that and a DO NOT DISTURB sign on each knob.
“Dead bolt and chain,” Shane told Michael as the three of them left the room. Dawn was starting to pink up on the eastern horizon. “I’ll call when we’re at the door again, on your cell. Don’t open for anybody else.”
“Did you tell that to Oliver?”
“Do I look stupid? Let him figure out his own crap, man.”
Michael shook his head. “Be careful out there. I don’t like sending the three of you out by yourselves.”
“Linda’s riding shotgun with us,” Eve said. “Literally. With an actual, you know, shotgun.”
“Actually, Linda’s driving us. We said we’d buy her breakfast and haul some heavy stuff for her at the store. Kind of a good deal, plus I think everybody likes her. Nobody’s going to come after us while she’s with us.”
It might have been wishful thinking, but Michael seemed a little relieved by it, and he knocked fists with Shane as they closed the door. They heard the bolts click home.
“Well,” Eve said, “it’s the start of a beautiful day in which I have had no sleep, had my car burned, and can’t wear makeup, which is just so great.”
The no-makeup thing was Shane’s idea, and Claire had to admit, it was a good one. Eve was, by far, the most recognizable of their little group, but without the rice powder, thick black eyeliner, and funky-colored lipsticks, she looked like a different person. Claire had lent her a less-than-Gothy shirt, although Eve had insisted on purple. With that and plain blue jeans, Eve looked almost... normal. She’d even pulled her hair back in a single ponytail at the back.
Not a skull in sight, although her boots still looked a little intimidating.
“Think of it as operating in disguise,” Shane said. “In a hostile war zone.”
“Easy for you to say. All you had to do was throw on a camo T-shirt and find a ball cap. If we can find you some chewing tobacco, you’re gold.”
“I’m not in disguise,” Claire said.
Eve snorted. “Honey, you live in disguise. Which is lucky for us. Come on, maybe Linda’s still got some cookies left.”
“For breakfast?”
“I never said I was the Nutrition Nazi.”
Linda was up—yawning and tired, but awake—when they opened up the office door. She was sipping black coffee, and when Eve said good morning, Linda waved at the plate of cookies on the counter. Eve looked relieved. “Ah—could I have some coffee, too?”
“Right there on the pot. Pour yourself a big one. It’s already a long day.” Linda had put on another shirt—still checked, but different colors—but otherwise, she looked pretty much the same. “So, you kids get any sleep at all?”
“Not much,” Shane mumbled around a mouthful of cookie as Eve poured a chunky white mugful of coffee. He held out his hand in a silent demand for her to get him some, too. She rolled her eyes, put the pot back on the burner, and walked past him to the cookie tray. “Hence, Miss Attitude.”
“The attitude comes from someone not even wanting to fetch his own coffee.”
Shane shrugged and got his own, as Eve raided the cookie tray and Claire nibbled on part of one, too. She supposed she ought to feel more tired. She probably would, later, but right now, she felt—excited? Maybe nervous was a better term for it. “So,” she ventured, “where do you go to buy a car here?”
“In Durram?” Linda shook her head. “Couple of used places, that’s all. Any new cars, we go to the city for them. Not that there’s many new cars round here these days. Durram used to be an oil town, back in the boom days, pumped a lot of crude out of the ground, but when it folded, it hit the ground hard. People been leaving ever since. It never was huge, but what you see now ain’t more than half what it was f
ifty years ago, and even then a lot of those buildings are closed up.”
“Why do you stay?” Shane asked, and sipped his coffee. Linda shrugged.
“Where else I got to go? My husband’s buried here; came back dead from the war in Iraq, that first one. My family’s here, such as they are, including Ernie, my grandson. Ernie runs one of the car lots, which is why I figure we can find you what you want at a good deal this early in the morning.” She grinned. “If an old woman can’t make her own grandson get out of bed before dawn to do her a favor, there’s no point in living. Just let me finish my coffee and we’ll be on our way.”
She drank it fast, faster than Shane and Eve could gulp their own, and in about five minutes the four of them were piling into the bench seat of Linda’s pickup truck, with more rust than paint on the outside, and sagging seats on the inside. Claire sat on Shane’s lap, which wasn’t at all a bad thing from her perspective. From the way he held her in place, she didn’t think he objected, either. Linda started up the truck with a wheezing rattle of metal, and the engine roared as she tore out of the gravel parking lot and onto the narrow two-lane road heading toward Durram.
“Huh,” she said as they passed the town limits sign, barely readable from shotgun blasts. “Usually there’s a deputy out here in the mornings. Guess somebody overslept. Probably Tom. Tom likes those late nights at the bar, sometimes; he’s gonna catch hell for blowing it again.”
“You mean fired?”
“Fired? Not in Durram. You don’t get fired in Durram ; you get embarrassed.” Linda drove a couple of blocks, past some empty shops and one empty gas station, then took a right turn and then a left. “Here it is.”
The sign said HURLEY MOTORS, and it was about a million years old. Somebody had hit it with buckshot, too, once upon a time, but from the rust, it had been a while ago—maybe before Claire was born; maybe before her mother was born. There was a small, sad collection of old cars parked in front of a small cinder-block building, which looked like it might have been built by the same guy who’d built Linda’s motel.
Come to think of it, it probably had.
The cinder blocks were painted a pale blue with dark red trim on the roof and windows, but the whole thing had faded to a kind of pale gray over time. As Linda stopped the truck with a squeal of brakes, the front door of the shack opened, and a young man stepped out and waved.
“Oooh, cute,” Eve whispered to Claire. Claire nodded. He was older, maybe twenty or so, but he had a nice face. And a great smile, like his grandma.
“Oh, he is cute!” Shane said in a fake girly voice. “Gee, maybe we can ask him out!”
“Shut up, you weasel. Claire, hit him!”
“Pretend I did,” Claire said. “Look, he’s bleeding.”
Shane snorted. “Not. Okay, out of the truck before this gets silly.”
Linda, ignoring them, had already gotten out on the driver’s side and was walking toward her grandson. As they hugged, Claire scrambled down from Shane’s lap to the pavement. He hopped down beside her, and then Eve slithered out as well. “Wow,” she said, surveying the cars on the lot. “This is just—”
“Sad.”
“I was going more for horrifying, but yeah, that works, too. Okay, can we agree on nothing in a minivan, please?”
“Yep,” Shane said. “I’m down with it.”
They wandered around the lot. It didn’t take long before they’d looked at everything parked in front, and from Eve’s expression, Claire could tell there wasn’t a single thing she’d be caught dead driving—or, more accurately, caught with the dead, driving. “This sucks,” Eve said. “The only thing that has decent trunk space is pink.” And not just a little pink, either; it looked like a pink factory had thrown up all over it.
Linda’s grandson wandered over, trailed by her. He caught the last bit of Eve’s complaint, and shook his head. “You don’t want that thing, anyway,” he said. “Used to belong to Janie Hearst. She drove it fifteen thousand miles without an oil change. She thinks she’s the Paris Hilton of Durram. Hi, I’m Ernie Dawson. Heard you’re looking for a car. Sorry about what happened to yours. Those fools are a menace—have been since I was a kid. Glad nobody was hurt.”
“Yeah, well, we just want to get the heck out of town,” Eve said. “It was my car. It was a really nice old classic Caddy, you know? Black, with fins? I was hoping maybe somebody could tow it in, fix it up, and I could pick it up later on, maybe in a couple of weeks?”
Ernie nodded. He had greenish eyes, a color that stood out against his suntanned skin; his hair was brown, and wavy, and got in his face a lot. Claire liked him instinctively, but then she remembered the last cute stranger she’d liked. That hadn’t turned out so well. In fact, that had turned out very, very badly, with her blood getting drained out of her body.
So she didn’t smile back at Ernie-much.
“I think I can set that up,” he said. “Earle Weeks down at the repair shop can probably work some magic on it, but you’d have to leave him a pretty good deposit. He’ll have to order in parts.”
“Hey, if you can make me a good deal on a decent car that isn’t pink, I’m all good here.”
“Well, what you see is pretty much what you get, except—” He gazed at Eve for a few long seconds, then shook his head. “Nah, you won’t be interested in that.”
“In what?”
“Something that I keep out back. Nobody around here will buy it. I’ve been trying to make a trade with a company out of Dallas to get it off my hands. But since you said big classic Caddy—”
Eve jumped in place a little. “Sweet! Let’s see it!”
“I’m just warning you, you won’t like it.”
“Is it pink?”
“No. Definitely not pink. But”—Ernie shrugged—“okay, sure. Follow me.”
“This ought to be good,” Shane said, and reached into his pocket for a cookie he’d hidden there. He broke it in half and offered it to Claire.
“Can’t wait,” she said, and wolfed it down, because Linda was world-class with the cookies. “I can’t believe I’m eating cookies for breakfast.”
“I can’t believe we’re stuck in Durram, Texas, with a burned-out car, two vamps, and the cookies are this good. ”
And... he had a point.
Eve had a look on her face as if she’d just found the Holy Grail, or whatever the Gothic equivalent of that might be. She stared, eyes gone wide and shiny, lips parted, and the glee in her face was oddly contagious. “It’s for sale?” she asked. She was trying to play it cool, Claire thought, although she was blowing it by a mile. “How much?”
Ernie wasn’t fooled even a little bit. He rubbed his lips with his thumb, staring at Eve, and then at the car. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I guess I could go to three thousand. ’Cause you’re a friend of Grandma’s.”
Linda said, “Don’t you go cheating this gal. I know for a fact you paid Matt down at the funeral parlor seven hundred dollars for the damn thing, and it’s been sitting for six months gathering dust. You ought to let her have it for a thousand, tops.”
“Gran!”
“Don’t Gran me. Be nice. Where else in this town are you going to sell a hearse?”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been working on making it more of a party bus.”
It was gigantic. It was gleaming black, with silver trim and silver curlicues on the same, and faded white curtains in the windows at the back. Grandma Linda was right—it was covered in desert dust, but underneath it looked sharp—really sharp.
“Party bus?” Eve said.
“Yeah, take a look.”
Ernie opened the back door, the part where the casket would have gone... and there was a floor in there, with lush black carpet, not metal runners or clamps as there would have usually been for coffins. He’d built in low-riding seats down both sides, two on each side, facing each other.
“I put in the cup holders,” he said. “I was going for the fold-down DVD screen, but I ran ou
t of money.”
Eve, as though in a trance, reached in her pocket and pulled out the cash. She counted out three thousand dollars and passed it over to Ernie.
“Don’t you want to drive it first?” he asked.
“Does it run?”
“Yeah, pretty well.”
“Does it have air-conditioning?”
“Of course. Front and back.”
“Keys.” She held out her hand. Ernie held up one finger, ran back to the shack, and returned with a set dangling from one finger. He handed them to her with a smile.
Eve opened the front door and started up the hearse. It caught with a cough, then settled into a nice, even purr.
Eve stroked the steering wheel, and then she hugged it—literally. “Mine,” she said. “Mine, mine, mine.”
“Okay, this is starting to seriously creep me out,” Shane said. “Can we move past the obsessive weird love and into the actually driving it part?”
“You guys go on and take it out for a spin,” Ernie said. “I’ll get the paperwork ready for you to sign. Be about fifteen minutes.”
“Shotgun!” Shane said, one second before Claire. He winked at her. “And you get the Dead Guy Seat.”
“Funny.”
“Wait until there are actual dead guys sitting back there.”
It wasn’t safe to say that, not in front of Ernie and Linda; after a second, Claire saw Shane realize that. He blinked and said, “Well, maybe not. But it would be funny.”
“Hilarious,” Claire agreed, and went around to the back. Getting in was a bit of a challenge, but once she was sitting down, it felt kind of like what she imagined a limo would be. She looked around for a seat belt and found one, then strapped herself in. No sense dying in a car crash in a hearse. That seemed a little too tragically ironic even for Eve. “Hey, there really are cup holders.”
“Fate,” Eve said with a sigh.
“I’m not sure fate had to burn up your car to get the point across,” Shane said, buckling his own seat belt.
“No, not that. The hearse. I’m going to name it Fate.”
Shane stared at Eve for a long, long few seconds, then slowly shook his head. “Have you considered medication, or—”