by Rachel Caine
This time, she understood the yell plenty. “I’m going to make you sorry!” Monica said. “You pervy skank! Brandon’s my Protector, too! Just wait till you turn eighteen, bitch—he’s going to make you pay!”
Well, crap, Eve thought as she stiff-armed the exit, adjusted the backpack on her arm, and started the walk home. I guess I should have thought of that.
She was never going to let Brandon get a fang into her. Never.
Not even if she had to tear up his contract and throw it in his face and run for her life.
She was imagining what that might be like when Michael Glass fell in beside her. He was carrying his guitar in a soft case strapped to his back, and had a distinct lack of books. Then again, he was a smart guy; he probably didn’t need to study nearly as hard as she did.
Her heart did that guilty flutter thing again when he joined her.
“Sorry about bugging out like that,” he said. “I’ve got a gig at Common Grounds. Want to drop in?”
“Sure,” she said, as casually as if it didn’t mean everything in the world to her. “Why not?”
She could worry about the future later.
THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
This was my very first Morganville short story, published in Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner’s fantastic collection Many Bloody Returns. Because when Charlaine Harris asks you whether you’d like to contribute a story to an anthology that has the theme of “vampires and birthdays,” you definitely say yes to that.
I realized that I had the perfect birthday to discuss: Eve’s eighteenth, on which she had to make the choice to either be a good little Morganville resident, sign her Protection agreement, and fit in . . . or be Eve. I think you already know the answer, but it’s fun getting there.
A little factoid—the Glass House address is a combination of the numbers of my first dorm apartment in college and a book by Stephen King: 716 Lot Street (as in ’Salem’s Lot).
Eighteenth birthdays in Morganville, Texas, are usually celebrated in one of two ways: one, getting totally wasted with your friends or, two, making a terrifying life-or-death decision about your continued survival.
Not that there can’t be some combination of the two.
My eighteenth birthday party was held in the back of a rust-colored Good Times van, circa way before I was born, and the select guest list included some of Morganville’s Least Wanted. Me, for instance—Eve Rosser. Number of people who’d signed my yearbook: five. Two of them had scrawled C YA LOSER. (Number of people I’d wanted to sign my yearbook? Zero. But that was just me.)
And then there was my best friend, Jane, and her kid sister, Miranda. Jane was okay—kind of dull, but seriously, with a name like Jane? Cursed from birth. She did like some cool things, other than me of course. Wicked eighties make-out music, for instance. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume, particularly from the Dark Elements line, although I personally preferred the Funereal Oils.
Miranda—a tagalong to Jane—was a kid. Well, Miranda was a weird kid, who’d convinced a lot of people she was some kind of psychic. I didn’t invite her to the party, mostly because I didn’t think she’d be loads of fun, and also she wasn’t likely to bring beer. Her BPAL preferences were unknown, because she didn’t live on Planet Earth.
Which left Guy and Trent, my two excellent beer-buying buddies. They were my buddies because Guy had a fake ID that he’d made in art class and Trent owned the party bus in which we were ensconced. Other than that, I didn’t know either one of them that well, but they were smart-ass, funny, and safe to get drunk with. Guy and Trent were the only gay couple I actually knew, gaydom being sort of frowned upon in the heartland of Texas that was Morganville.
We were all about the ironic family values.
The evening went pretty much the way such things are supposed to go: guys buy cheap-ass beer, distribute to underage females, drive to a deserted location to play loud headbanger music and generally act like idiots. The only thing missing was the make-out sessions, which was okay by me; most of the guys of Morganville were gag-worthy, anyway. There were one or two I would have gladly crawled over barbwire to date, but . . . that was another story.
Jane bought me a birthday present, which was kind of sweet, especially since it was a brand-new mix CD of songs about dead people. Jane knows what I like.
I was still a mystery to Guy and Trent, though. Granted, Morganville’s a small town, and all us loser outcast freaks had a nodding acquaintance, but . . . Goths didn’t much mix with other identity groups. The Goth population was even smaller than the few gays, given the town’s prominent undead demographic. They have no sense of humor.
Oh, I forgot to mention: vampires. Town’s run by them. Full of them. Humans live here on sufferance, heavy on the “suffer.”
See what I mean about the ironic family values?
I could tell that Guy had been trying to think of a way to ask me all night, but thanks to consuming over half a case of beer with his Significantly Wasted Other, he finally just blurted out the question of the day. “So, are you signing or what?” he asked. Yelled, actually, over whatever song was currently making my head hurt. “I mean, tomorrow?”
Was I signing? That was the Big Question, the one all of us faced at eighteen. I looked down at my wrist, because I was still wearing my leather bracelet. The symbol on it wasn’t anything people outside Morganville would recognize, but it identified the vampire who was the official Protector for my family. However, I was no longer in that select little club of people who had to kiss Brandon’s ass to continue to draw breath.
I also would no longer have any kind of deal or Protection from any vampire in Morganville.
What Guy was asking was whether I intended to pick myself a Protector of my very own. It was traditional to sign with your family’s hereditary patron, but no way in hell was I letting Brandon have power over me. So I could either shop around to see if any other vampire could, or would, take me, or go bare—live without a contract.
Which was attractive, but seriously risky. See, Morganville vampires don’t generally kill off their own humans, because that would make life difficult for everybody, but free-range, non-Protected humans? Nobody worries much what happens to them, because usually they’re alone, and they’re poor, and they disappear without a trace.
Just another job opening at the Chicken Shack fry machine.
They were all looking at me now. Jane, Miranda, Guy, and Trent, all waiting to hear what Eve Rosser, Professional Rebel, was going to do.
I didn’t disappoint them. I tipped back the beer, belched, and said, “Hell no, I’m not signing. Bareback all the way, baby! Let’s live fast and die young!”
Guy and I did drunken high fives. Trent rolled his eyes and clicked beer bottles with Jane. “They all say that,” he said. “And then there’s the test results, and the crying. . . .”
“Jesus, Trent, you’re the laugh of the party.”
“That’s life of the party, honeybunches. Oh, wait, you’re right. Not in Morganville, it isn’t.”
“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, as many vans as you’ve bounced around in,” Trent shot back.
“Hey!” 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 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 would rule the rest of my life.
Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten quite so trashed, given th
e 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 eyelashes. I coveted 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 eyes moved and fixed on me, and I wished they hadn’t. There was something really strange about the girl, all right, even if her rep as the town Cassandra was exaggerated. She’d known about the fire last year that had burned the Collins family out; she’d even known—supposedly—that Alyssa Collins would die in the fire. 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 fingers. I admired the black polish on his nails. “Why’s that, O Madame Doom? Is one of us going to die tonight?” They all made hilariously drunken oooooooooh sounds, and Trent upended the bottle.
“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, about three a.m. Great. “I need to get home, Trent.”
“But the night’s barely late-middle-age!”
“Sunrise in three hours. I don’t want to meet Brandon drunk off my ass.”
“Might improve—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 thirties-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 couldn’t wait to apply for my paperwork to get the hell out, but in order to do that, 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 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.
<
br /> “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 proved that 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. 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.”