by Rachel Caine
“No, that makes you male and straight,” I said. Was it wrong I felt relieved? “I just need to change my— Oh, damn. My suitcase! It’s still out there—”
Michael got up and walked down the polished wooden hallway. The house felt warm, but strange—old and, despite the big open rooms, kind of claustrophobic. Like it was . . . watching.
I loved it.
The living room was normal stuff—couch, chairs, bookcases, throw rugs. A guitar case lying open on a small dining table, the guitar lying abandoned on the couch as if he’d put it down to see what the trouble was out in the yard. I’d heard Michael play before, though not recently. People had said he’d given it up . . . but I guessed he hadn’t.
Michael pulled the blinds and looked out. “It’s on the lawn,” he said. “They’re going through it.”
“What?” I pushed him out of the way and tried to see for myself, but it was all just a black blur. “They’re going through my stuff? Bastards!” Because I had some lingerie in there that I seriously wanted to keep private. Well, maybe share with one other person. But privately. I yanked the cord on the blinds and moved them up, then unlocked the window and threw up the sash. I leaned out and yelled, “Hey, assholes, you touch my underwear and—”
Michael yanked me back by my belt and slammed the window shut about one second before Brandon’s face appeared there. “Let’s not taunt the angry vampires,” he said. “I have to live here.”
Deep breaths, Eve. Right. Suitcase not as important as jugular. I sat down in one of the chairs, trying to get hold of myself and not even sure who that was anymore. Myself, I mean. So much had changed in five hours, right? I was an adult now. I was on my own in a town where being alone was a death sentence. I’d made a very bad enemy, and I’d done it deliberately. I’d been disowned by my own family, not that they’d been much of a family in the first place.
“Need a roommate?” I asked, and tried for a mocking smile. Michael hesitated in the act of reaching for his guitar, then settled in on the couch with the instrument cradled in his lap like a favorite pet. He picked out random notes, pure and cool, and bent his head. “Sorry. Bad joke.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “Actually—I might consider it. You and me, we always got along in school. I mean, we didn’t know each other that well, but—” Nobody had known Michael really well, except his buddy Shane Collins, but Shane had bugged out of Morganville with his parents after his sister’s death. Everybody had wanted to know Michael, but he was private. Shy, maybe. “It’s a big house. Four bedrooms, two baths. Hard to manage it by myself.”
Was he offering? Really? I swallowed and leaned forward. My shirt was coming loose again, but I left it that way. I needed every advantage I could get. “I swear, I’m good for rent. I’ll get a job somewhere, at one of the neutral places. And I clean stuff. I’m a demon with cleaning.”
“Cook?” He looked hopeful, but I had to shake my head. “Damn. I’m not so great at it.”
“You’d have to be better than me. I can screw up the recipe for water.”
He smiled. He had one of those smiles—you know the ones, the kind that unleash lethal force on girls in the vicinity. I couldn’t remember him smiling in high school. He was probably aware that it might cause girls to faint, or unbutton clothes, or something.
“We’ll think about it until tomorrow night,” he said. “Pick any room but the first one—that’s mine. Sheets are in the closet. Towels are in the bathroom.”
“My suitcase—”
“After dawn.” He was looking down again, picking out a sweet, quiet melody from the strings. “I’ve got someplace I have to go before then, but you’ll be safe enough just going out to get it and coming right back inside. I don’t think Brandon’s pissed enough to hang around in the sun.”
Hopefully. Some vampires could, and we all knew it, but Brandon seemed more of a night person. “But—you’ll come back, right?”
“I’ll be back by dark,” he promised. “We’ll talk about the rent then. But for now, you should—” He looked up. His gaze reached the level of my chest, fixed, and then lowered again. The smile this time was directed at the guitar. “Put on a new shirt or something.”
“Well, I would, but all my shirts are in my suitcase, getting molested by Brandon and his funboys.” I flipped a finger at the window, in case they were watching.
“Get something out of my closet,” he said. I thought he was playing something from Coldplay’s catalog now, something soft and contemplative. “Sorry about staring. I know you’ve had a tough night.”
There was something so damn sweet about that, it made me want to cry. Again. I swallowed the impulse. “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
This time, when he looked up, his gaze actually made it to my face. And stayed there. “I’m guessing bad.”
“Real bad.”
“You’d tell me if I was a friend, right? And not just some guy whose door you randomly knocked on in the middle of the night?”
I thought about Jane, poor sweet Jane, my best and only real friend. Trent and Guy, who probably had been destined for nothing but still had been, for tonight at least, my friends. “I’m not so good for my friends,” I said. “Maybe we ought to just call you a really nice stranger.” I took a deep breath. “I lost three friends tonight, and it was my fault.”
He kept looking at me. Really looking. It was a little bit hot, and a little bit disconcerting. “Then would you talk to a really nice stranger about it? For”—he checked his watch—“forty minutes? I need to leave before sunrise, but I want you to be okay before I do.”
It took only thirty minutes to tell him about the Life and Times of Me, actually. Michael didn’t say very much, and I felt so tired afterward that I hardly knew it when he got up and went into the kitchen. I must have dozed off a little, because when I woke up, he was kneeling next to my chair, and he had a chocolate brownie on a plate. With a semi-melted pink candle sputtering away on top.
“It’s a leftover,” he warned me. “Two weeks at least. So I don’t know how good it is. But happy birthday, anyway. I promise you, things will get better.”
They just had.
AMELIE’S STORY
A brief vignette, and one that I wrote mainly to understand Amelie and Oliver’s relationship. This was written very early on, between Glass Houses and The Dead Girls’ Dance. It was also before I’d thought about Bishop, or even much about Myrnin, although I already had the broad strokes of his character in mind. This little scene was written to help me understand how these very long-lived, somewhat disinterested characters would see these teenagers who’d defied them . . . and it also gives us a bit more about Shane’s father, since I was beginning to write that book and had a feeling for what was coming.
The characters changed over time, developed more depth and richness and personality, but I think the outlines are there in this story, and the sense of their long view of things.
This was originally posted as part of the Captain Obvious “hidden content” on the Morganville Web site.
Outside, nightfall had truly come, and it was a glorious darkness.
Amelie stood, one hand holding back the heavy velvet of the draperies, and watched the streetlights of her town blink on one after another. A faint circle of safety for the humans to cling to, an important illusion without which they could not long survive. She had learned a great deal about living with humans, over the past few hundred years.
More than about living with her own kind, she supposed.
“Yes?” She had heard the tiny whisper of movement behind her, and knew one of her servants had appeared in the doorway. They never spoke unless spoken to. A benefit to having servants so long-lived: one could reasonably expect them to understand manners. Not like the children of today, sparking as bright as fireflies, and gone as quickly. No manners. No sense of place and time.
&n
bsp; “Oliver,” the servant said. It was Vallery; she knew all their voices, of course. “He’s at the gates. He requests a conversation.”
Did he? How interesting. She’d thought he’d slink off into the dark and lick his wounds for a year or two, until he was ready to play games with her again. He’d come very near to succeeding this time, thanks to her own carelessness. She could ill afford another occurrence.
“Show him in,” she said. It was not the safest course, but she found herself growing tired of the safe road. There were so rarely any surprises, or strangers to meet.
Like the surprise of the children living in her house on Lot Street. The angelic blond boy, with his passion and bitterness, woven into the fabric of the house and trapped there. Or the strange girl, with her odd makeup and odder clothing. Or the other boy, the strong one, quick and intelligent and wishing not to seem so.
And the youngest, oh, the youngest girl, with her diamond-sharp mind. Fierce and small and courageous, although she would not know the depths of her abilities for years yet.
Interesting, all of them, and that was a rarity in Amelie’s long, long eternity. She had been kind to them, out of no better reason than that. She could afford to be kind, so long as it risked her nothing in return.
Oliver deliberately made noise as he approached her study, a gesture of politeness she appreciated. Amelie turned from the window and sat down in the velvet-covered chair beside it, arranging her skirts with effortless grace and folding her hands in her lap. Oliver looked less harassed than he had; he’d taken time to bathe, change, compose himself. He’d tied his gray curling hair back in the old style, a subtle sign to her that he was willing to accommodate her preferences, and he was perfectly correct in his manners as he bowed to her and waited for her to gesture him to take a seat.
“I am grateful to you for the opportunity to speak,” Oliver said as he settled himself in the chair. Vallery appeared in the doorway with a tray and two silver cups; she gave him a slight nod, and he delivered them refreshment. Oliver drank without taking his eyes from her. She sipped. “I thought we had an agreement, Amelie. Regarding the book.”
“We did,” she said, and sipped again. Fresh, warm, red blood. Life itself, salty and thick in her mouth. She had long learned how to feast neatly on it. “I agreed not to interfere with your . . . searches. But I never agreed to forgo the opportunity to retrieve it myself, if the chance presented. As it did.”
“I was cheated.”
“Yes,” she agreed softly, and smiled. “But not by me, Oliver. Not by me. And if you should consider taking your petty revenge on the children, please remember that they are in my house, under my sign of Protection. Don’t make this cause for complaint.”
He nodded stiffly, eyes sparking anger. He put his cup back on Vallery’s tray. It rang empty. “What do you know of the boy?”
“Which boy?”
“Not Glass. The other one. Shane Collins.”
She raised one hand in a tiny, weary gesture. “What is there to know? He is barely a child.”
“His mother was resistant to conditioning.”
Amelie searched her memory. Ah, yes. Collins. There had been an incident, unfortunate as such things were, and she had dispatched operatives to see to the end of it when the elder Collins had taken his wife and son and left Morganville. “She should be dead by now,” she said.
“She is. But her husband isn’t.” Oliver smiled slowly, and she did not care for the triumph in his expression. Not at all. “I have a report that he returned to town only an hour ago, and went straight to the house where his son is staying. Your house, Amelie. You are now sheltering a potential killer.” She said nothing, did nothing. After a long moment, Oliver sighed. “You cannot pretend that this is not a problem.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But we shall see what develops. After all, this town is a sanctuary.”
“And the children?” he asked. “Are you extending your Protection to them even if they come after vampires?”
Amelie sipped the last of her blood, and smiled. “I might,” she said.
“Then you want a war.”
“No, Oliver, I want the right to make my own decisions in my own town.” She stood, and Oliver stood, too, as if drawn on the same string. “You may go.”
She went back to the window, dismissing him from her thoughts. If he was inclined to dispute his dismissal, he thought better—possibly because Vallery was not the only servant she had within a whisper’s call—and he withdrew from the field without surrender.
Amelie folded her hands on the warm wood of the window ledge and stared at the faint glow of moonrise on the horizon.
“Oh, children.” She sighed. “Whatever shall I do with you?”
She was not in the habit of risking her life or position. Especially not for mere humans, whose lives blinked on and off as quickly as the streetlights below.
If Oliver was right, she would have little choice.
WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME
Another free-on-the-Web story under the Captain Obvious hidden content, I wrote this story to give a little shading and understanding to Richard Morrell, Monica’s (exasperated) older brother. We first met him in Glass Houses, and I took a liking to him immediately—it’s not easy being the son of the most corrupt human in Morganville while also being the brother of the most outrageous, selfish bully. Add to that a real desire to do some good in the world and help protect his fellow Morganville residents, and you’ve got a man who has a hard day ahead of him.
But one thing’s for certain: Richard does love his sister. He knows her flaws, but that doesn’t mean he won’t go to the wall for her—and even compromise his ethics from time to time.
This is about to be a very bad day to be a criminal in Morganville.
Richard Morrell looked at the man sitting across from him—shaking, pale, covered in blood that the ambulance attendants had sworn wasn’t his own—and said, “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me your name.” He kept his tone neutral, because he wasn’t sure yet which approach to take. The guy looked too shaky to push really hard, and too paranoid to take well to friendliness.
Businesslike was apparently the right course, because the man blinked at him, ran a blood-smeared hand across his sweaty forehead, and said, “They’re dead. They’re dead, right? My friends?”
“Lets talk about you,” Richard said, very steadily. “What’s your name?”
“Brian. Brian Maitland.”
“Where are you from, Brian?” Richard smiled slightly. “I know you’re not from around here.”
“Dallas,” Maitland said. “We were, y’know, just passing through. We thought, Jeez, it looks like such an easy score, y’know? No big deal. We weren’t going to hurt anybody. We just wanted the money.”
“One thing at a time, Brian. What are your friends’ names?”
“Joe. Joe Grady. And Lavelle Harvey. Lavelle—Lavelle’s Joe’s girl. I swear, Officer, we were just passing through. We thought—we saw the bank open after dark, we thought—we figured—”
“You figured it would be an easy score,” Richard said. “You said. So what happened?”
“I, uh—” Maitland seemed to vapor-lock. Richard motioned over one of the two cops standing in the corner of the room—the human one—and asked for coffee in a low voice. He waited until the steaming Styrofoam cup was in Maitland’s big, bloody hands before prodding him again.
“You’re safe now,” Richard said, which really wasn’t the truth. “Tell me what happened at the bank.”
Maitland sipped at the coffee, then gulped convulsively, not seeming to care that it was hot enough to raise blisters. His eyes had that terrible distance to them, something Richard was way too familiar with.
“There was this girl,” he said. “Pretty little thing, cashing a check at the teller window. Joe took the guard, Lavelle covered the c
ouple of people in the lobby, and I grabbed the girl.”
“Describe her,” Richard said.
“I don’t know, pretty. Brunette. Had a mouth on her—I’ll tell ya that.” He shook his head slowly. “She kept telling me we were in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong damn town. Pissed me off. But she was right.”
He gulped more coffee, eyes darting nervously from Richard to the night visible in the barred window of the room. He hadn’t once looked at the cops standing behind him. Richard figured he was blocking it out, the knowledge that one of them might not be entirely human.
“This girl,” Richard said softly. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” Maitland said, and then corrected himself. “Okay, I hit her. Just to shut her up. And then Joe shot that guard, and somebody triggered the security alarms. These bars came down at the door. We couldn’t get out. Why the hell would they want to keep us inside the bank, with the customers? Ain’t the whole point to get us outside? Don’t you people know nothing about security?”
“You said Joe shot the guard. What happened then?”
“The guard—” Maitland’s voice went tight, and then silent. He shook his head. There were tears standing in his damp eyes. “It ain’t possible, man. I saw him go down. Joe put four bullets right in his chest, and he wasn’t wearing no vest. I saw the blood.” Maitland choked down his fear. “And then he got up. I never seen anybody do that. Sure, you see guys on drugs or something who just don’t really know they’ve been shot—they can go for a while before they fall down, but it ain’t like they’re normal, y’know? This was just some working guy. He shouldn’t just—get up like that.”
Maitland started to shiver again, and gulped more coffee. When he put the cup down, it was empty. Richard motioned for a refill, and waited. Maitland didn’t seem to need prodding now. He wanted to get it out.
“Joe, he emptied the gun, but the guard just kept coming. I was watching them, so I didn’t see what happened to Lavelle, but I heard her start yelling. And then she just—stopped. Joe—that guard, there was something wrong with him, man—I don’t know—it was like he was possessed or something, like, call-the-exorcist wrong. His eyes got all red, and he—he . . .” Maitland looked down. “You wouldn’t believe me.”