by Rachel Caine
The square concrete courtyard between the Architecture Building and the Math Sciences Building was packed with students crossing between classes. Now that Claire knew what to look for, she couldn’t help but notice how many of them had bracelets—leather, metal, even braided cloth—with symbols on them.
And how many students didn’t.
The ones who wore the symbols were the shiny, confident ones. Sorority girls. Frat guys. Athletes. Popular kids. The loners, the sideliners, the dull and average and strange…they were the ones who weren’t Protected.
They were the cattle.
Shane was scanning the crowd. Claire kept walking quickly toward the Math Building; she knew for a fact that Monica wouldn’t be caught dead—or killing anybody—in a place that geeky. The only problem was that the third building on the Quad was the Business Administration Building, and that was, of course, where Monica liked to spend her time hanging out, looking for rich boys.
Almost there…
She was actually on the steps leading up to the Math Building when she heard Shane stop behind her. He was staring off into the Quad, and as Claire turned, she saw Monica, surrounded by a clique of admirers, staring right back at him. The two of them might as well have been alone. It was the kind of look that people in love exchanged, or people who were about to kill each other.
“Son of a bitch,” Shane breathed. He sounded shaken.
“Come on,” Claire said, and grabbed his elbow. She was afraid he wouldn’t let her pull him on, but he did, as if his mind was somewhere else. When he finally glanced at her, his eyes were dark and hard.
“Not here,” she said. “She won’t come in.”
“Why not?”
“It would embarrass her.”
He nodded slowly, as if that made sense to him, and followed her to class.
Claire had a hard time keeping her mind on the droning lecture, which was familiar anyway, and she’d read far ahead of where the professor was teaching…but mostly, she kept thinking about Shane, sitting motionless next to her, hands on the desk, staring blankly into space. He wasn’t even listening to his iPod. She could sense the tenseness in his body, like he was just waiting for the chance to hit something.
I knew this was a bad idea.
It was an hour-and-a-half lecture with a fifteen-minute break in the middle; when Shane got up and walked out, she hastily followed him. He went up to the glass doors and looked out over the Quad.
“She’s gone,” he said, without looking at Claire. “Quit worrying about me. I’m okay.”
“She—Eve said she burned your house.” No reply. “And—your sister—?”
“I couldn’t get her out,” Shane said. “She was twelve, and I couldn’t get her out of the house. That was my job. Watch out for her.”
He still didn’t look at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. After a while, he walked away, into the boys’ bathroom; she dashed into the girls’, waiting impatiently for the line to clear, and came back out to find him nowhere in sight.
Oh, crap.
But when she went back to the lecture hall he was sitting right where he’d been, this time with his iPod earbuds in place.
She didn’t say anything. Neither did he.
It was the longest lecture, and the least enjoyable, that Claire could remember.
Physics was in the same building; if Monica was waiting out in the wilting sun on the Quad, she’d be getting a really good tan. Shane sat like a statue, if a statue wore headphones and radiated angry coiled tension that made hair stand up on a person’s arms. She felt like she was sitting next to an unexploded bomb, and given all of the physics she’d had, she understood exactly what that meant. Talk about potential energy….
Physics crawled slowly by. Shane broke out water and Twinkies, and shared. Chemistry was in the next building, but Claire made sure that they went out the side entrance, not through the Quad. No sign of Monica. She suffered through another hour and a half of chemistry and tension. Shane gradually unwound to the point that her nerves didn’t jangle like sleigh bells every time he moved, and ended up playing on his PSP through most of the class. Killing zombies, she hoped. That seemed to put him in a good mood.
In fact, he was positively cheerful during chem lab, interested in the experiment and asking so many questions that the teaching assistant, who’d never had to come to Claire’s table before, wandered over and stared at Shane as if trying to figure out what he was doing there.
“Hey, man,” Shane said, and stuck out his hand. “Shane Collins. I’m—what’s the word I’m looking for? Auditing. Auditing the class. With my friend here. Claire.”
“Oh,” said the TA, whose name Claire had never learned. “Right. Okay, then. Just—follow along.”
Shane gave him a thumbs-up and a goofy grin. “Hey,” he said in an undertone, leaning close to Claire. “Any of this stuff blow up?”
“What? Um…yeah, if you do it wrong, I guess.”
“I’m thinking about practical applications. Bombs. Things like that.”
“Shane!” He really was distracting. And he smelled good. Guy good, which was different from girl good—darker, spicier, a smell that made her go all fluttery inside. Oh, come on, it’s Shane! she told herself. That didn’t help, especially when he shot her that crooked smile and a look that probably would kill most girls at ten feet. He’s a slacker. And he’s—not that smart. Maybe he was, though. Just in different places than she was. It was a new idea to her, but she kind of liked it.
She slapped his hand when he reached for the reagents, and concentrated on the details of the experiment.
She was concentrating so hard, in fact, and Shane had gotten so engrossed in watching what she was doing, that neither of them heard footsteps behind them. The first Claire knew about it was a searing, burning sensation down the right side of her back. She dropped the beaker she was holding and screamed—couldn’t help it, because God, that hurt—and Shane whirled around and grabbed somebody by the collar who was backing away.
Gina, the Monickette. She snarled and slapped at him, but he didn’t let go; Claire, gasping in pain and trying to twist to see what was happening on her back, could see that it was taking everything Shane had not to deck his prisoner then and there. The TA came rushing over and other students started realizing there was something wrong, or at least more interesting than lab work; Claire slipped off the stool at the table and tried to look at what was happening to her back, because it hurt. She smelled something terrible.
“Oh my God!” the TA blurted. He grabbed the bottled water out of Shane’s backpack, opened it, and dumped the contents over Claire’s back, then dashed to a cupboard on the side and came back with a box of baking soda. She heard it sizzle when it hit her back, and nearly passed out. “Here. Sit. Sit down. You, call an ambulance. Go!” As Claire sank down breathlessly again on another, lower stool, the TA grabbed a pair of scissors and cut her shirt up the back, and folded it aside. He cut her bra strap, too, and she just barely had the presence of mind to grab hold before the whole thing slid down her arms. God, it hurts, it hurts…. She tried not to cry. The burn was easing up a little as the baking soda did its work. Acid has a low pH; baking soda has a high one…. Well, at least she’d retained some grasp of chemistry, even now.
She looked up and saw that Shane still had hold of Gina. He’d twisted her arm behind her back and made her let go of the beaker; what remained of the acid she’d splashed on Claire was still in the glass, looking as innocent as water.
“It was an accident!” she yelped, and stood on her tiptoes as Shane twisted harder. “I tripped! I’m sorry! Look, I didn’t mean it….”
“We’re not working with H2SO4 today,” the TA said grimly. “You’ve got no reason to be walking around with it. Claire? Claire, how bad is the pain?”
“I—it’s okay. I’m okay,” she said, though truthfully she had no idea if she was or not. She felt lightheaded, sick, and cold. Shock, probably. And embarrassment, because God,
she was half naked in front of the entire chem lab, and…Shane…“Can I put something on?”
“No, you can’t let anything touch that. The burn’s through several layers of skin. It’ll need treatment, and antibiotics. You just sit still.” The TA turned to Shane and Gina, and leveled a finger at her. “You, you’re talking to the campus police. I will not tolerate this kind of attack in my classroom. I don’t care who your friends are!”
So he knew her. Or at least he knew enough. Shane was whispering something in Gina’s ear, something too low for Claire to hear, but it couldn’t be good, by the expression on the girl’s face.
“Sir?” Claire asked faintly. “Sir, can I have a makeup on the lab work and—”
And she passed out before she finished saying, and I’m sorry for the mess.
9
When she woke up, she was on her side, and she felt warm all over. Sleepy. There was someone sitting next to her, a boy, and she blinked twice and realized that it was Shane. Shane was in her bedroom. No, wait, this wasn’t her bedroom; it was somewhere else….
“Emergency room,” he said. She must have looked confused. “Damn, Claire. Warn a guy before you do a face-plant on the floor next time. I could have looked all heroic and caught you or something.”
She smiled. Her voice came out sounding lazy and slow. “You caught Gina.” That was funny, so she said it again. “You caught Geeeeeeeeeena.”
“Yeah, ha-ha, you’re high as a kite, you know? And they called your parents.”
It took her a little while to realize what he’d just said. “Parents?” she repeated, and tried to lift her head. “Oh. Ow. Not good.”
“Not so much. Mom and Dad were pretty freaked to hear you became a lab accident. The campus cops forgot to mention the part where Gina deliberately threw acid on your back. They seem to think it was just one of those funky accidents.”
“Was it?” she asked. “Accident?”
“No way. She meant to hurt you.”
Claire plucked at the ugly blue hospital gown she was wearing. “Killed my shirt.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Shane looked pale and tense. “I’ve been trying to call Michael. I don’t know where he is. I don’t want to leave you alone here, but—”
“He’s okay,” she said softly, and closed her eyes. “I’m okay, too.”
She thought she felt his hand on her hair, a second of light, sweet pressure. “Yeah,” Shane said. “You’re okay. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
She nodded sleepily, and then everything faded into a lemon yellow haze, like she was lying in the sunlight.
Ouch.
Waking up was not fun. No hazy druggy lemon sunlight; this was more like a blowtorch burning on her back right on the shoulder blade. Claire whimpered and burrowed into her pillow, trying to get away from the pain, but it followed close behind.
The drugs had worn off.
She blinked and whimpered and slowly sat up; a passing nurse stopped and came in to check her over. “Congratulations,” she said. “You’re doing well. That burn is going to hurt for a while, but if you take the antibiotics and keep the wound clean, you’ll be fine. You’re lucky somebody was there to wash it off and neutralize the reaction. I’ve seen battery acid burns down to the bone.”
Claire nodded, not sure she could actually speak without throwing up. Her whole side felt hot and bruised.
“Do you want to get down?”
She nodded again. The nurse helped her down, and gave her what was left of her clothes when she asked. The bra, cut through, was a total loss. The shirt—not much left of that, either. The nurse came up with a loose black T-shirt from lost and found and got her presentable, and the doctor came around to give her a quick once-over. From the brisk way they dispensed with her, a little sulfuric acid burn was barely worth working up a sweat about, at least in Morganville.
“How bad is it?” she asked Shane as he wheeled her through the halls to the exit. “I mean, is it, like, really gross?”
“Unbelievably gross,” he said. “Horror movie gruesome.”
“Oh God.”
He relented. “It’s not so bad. It’s about the size of a quarter. Your teacher guy did a good job chopping up your clothes and getting it away from your skin. I know it hurt like hell, but it could have been a lot worse.”
There had been a lot more in the beaker in Gina’s hand. “Do you—do you think she was going to—?”
“Pour it all on you? Hell yeah. She just didn’t have time.”
Wow. That was…unpleasant. She felt hot and cold and a little sick, and it had nothing to do with shock this time. “I guess that was Monica’s payback.”
“Some of it, anyway. She’ll be really pissed now that it didn’t go over the way she thought it would.”
The idea of Monica being really pissed wasn’t the best way to end the day—and it was the end of the day, she realized as Shane rolled her up to the automatic glass double doors.
It was dark.
“Oh,” she said, and covered her mouth. “Oh no.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve got transpo covered, at least. Ready?”
She nodded, and Shane suddenly accelerated her chair into a flat-out run. Claire yelped and grabbed for the handles, feeling utterly out of control as the chair bounced its way down the ramp and skidded to a halt just inches from the shiny black side of Eve’s car. Eve threw open the passenger door, and Claire tried to get up on her own, but Shane grabbed her around the waist and lifted her straight into the seat. It took seconds, and then he was kicking the wheelchair back toward the ramp, where it bumped into the railing and sat there, looking lost.
Shane dived into the back. “Punch it!” he said. Eve did, as Claire struggled to find some kind of seat belt setting that wouldn’t reduce her to gasps and tears of pain. She settled for hunching forward, bracing herself on the massive dashboard, as Eve peeled out of the parking lot and raced down the dark street. The streetlights looked eerie and too far apart—was that deliberate? Did the vampires control even how far apart they built the lights? Or was she just freaked beyond belief?
“Is he there?” Shane asked, leaning over the seat back. Eve shot him a look.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s there. But don’t put me in the middle of it. I have to work there, you know.”
“I promise, I won’t tick off your boss.”
She didn’t believe him—that much was clear—but Eve turned right instead of left at the next light, and in about two minutes pulled up at the curb in front of Common Grounds, which was ablaze with light. Crowded, too. Claire frowned, but before she could even ask, Shane was out of the car and heading inside the coffee shop.
“What’s he doing?” she asked.
“Something stupid,” Eve said. “How’s the burn? Hurts, huh?”
Claire would have shrugged, but when she even thought about it the imagined pain made her flinch. “Not so bad,” she said bravely, and tried a smile. “Could have been a lot worse, I guess.”
“I guess,” Eve agreed. “Told you classes were dangerous. We need to get this under control. You can’t go back if this kind of thing happens.”
“I can’t quit!”
“Sure you can,” Eve said cheerfully. “People do it all the time. Just not people like you—oh, damn.”
Eve bit her black-painted lip, eyes wide and worried as she stared through the window at the brightly lit interior of the shop. And after a few seconds, Claire saw what she was worried about: the hippie manager, Oliver, was standing at the window watching them right back, and behind him, Shane was pulling up a chair to the far-corner table, where a dark shape was sitting.
“Tell me he’s not talking to Brandon,” Claire said.
“Um…okay. He’s not talking to Brandon.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yeah. He’s talking to Brandon. Look, let Shane do his thing, okay? He’s not as stupid as he looks, mostly.”
“But he’s not—Protected, right?”
&nb
sp; “That’s why he’s talking in Common Grounds. It’s sort of a truce spot. Vampires don’t hunt there, or they’re not supposed to, anyway. And it’s where all kinds of deals and treaties and stuff get made. So Shane’s safe enough in there.”
But she was still biting her lip and looking worried. “Unless?” Claire guessed.
“Unless Shane attacks first. Self-defense doesn’t count.”
Shane was being good, as far as Claire could see…. His hands were on the table, and although he was bent over saying something, he wasn’t slugging anybody. That was good, right? Although she had no idea what he could be saying to Brandon, anyway. Brandon wasn’t the one who had poured acid on her back.
Whatever Shane said, it didn’t seem to go down too hard; eventually, Shane just shoved his chair back and walked out, nodding to Oliver on the way out. Brandon slid out from behind the table, dark and sleek, to follow Shane to the doorway, close enough to reach out and grab him. But that was just a mind game, Claire realized as she started to yell a warning. Brandon wanted to freak him out, not hurt him.
Shane just looked over his shoulder, shrugged, and exited the coffee shop. When Brandon started to follow, Oliver reached across and put his arm in the way. By the time Brandon had snarled something at him, Shane was in the car, and Eve was already gunning it away from the curb.
“Do we need to be afraid now?” she asked. “Because I’d like a head start before the official terror alert goes up.”
“Nope. We’re clear,” Shane said. He sounded tired, and a little strange. “Claire’s got a free pass. Nobody’s going to come after her. Including Monica and her sock puppets.”
“But—what? Why?” Claire asked. Eve evidently didn’t have to ask. She just looked grim and angry.
“We did a trade,” Shane said. “Vampires are all about the one-up.”
“You’re such an idiot!” Eve hissed.