by Rachel Caine
Her mouth wasn’t dry anymore; it was mummified. She tried to swallow, but got nothing but a dry click at the back of her throat. She hastily picked up her tea and sipped it, tasting nothing but glad of the moisture.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Don’t,” he cut her off, and his voice wasn’t so kind this time. “Why else would you be here today, when you know Brandon is likely to show up any time after dark? You want to make a deal with him to save Shane. That much is obvious.”
Well, it wasn’t why she was here, but still, she tried to look guilty about that, too. Just in case. It must have worked, because Oliver sat back in his chair, looking more relaxed.
“You’re clever,” he said. “So is Shane. But don’t let it go to your heads. Let me help.”
She nodded, not trusting her voice not to quiver or break or—worse—betray how relieved she was.
“That’s settled, then,” Oliver said. “Let me talk to Brandon and a few others, and see what I can do to make this problem go away.”
“Thanks,” she said faintly. Oliver got up and left, looking like any skinny ex-hippie who hadn’t quite let go of the good old days. Inoffensive. Ineffective, maybe.
She couldn’t rely on adults. Not for this. Not in Morganville.
She opened up the laptop, maximized the browser window, and went back to work.
Like always, time slipped away; when she looked up next, it was night outside the windows, and the crowd in the coffee shop had switched over from studious to chatty. Eve was busy at the bar, talking and smiling and generally being about as cheerful as a Goth chick could be.
She went quiet, though, when Brandon slouched in from the back room and took his accustomed seat at the table in the darkest corner. Oliver brought him some kind of drink—God, she hoped it wasn’t blood or anything!—and sat down to have some intense and quiet conversation. Claire tried to look like she wasn’t there. She and Eve exchanged a few glances between customers at the bar.
Putting together the book, Claire had learned during the long research marathon, was work for experts, not sixteen-year-old (nearly seventeen) wannabes. She could put something together, but—to her vast disappointment—anybody with an eye for rare books could spot a fake pretty easily, unless it was expertly done. She suspected that her leatherworking and bookbinding skills needed work.
All of which brought her back to square one, Shane Gets Bitten. Not acceptable.
A line in one of the dozens of windows she’d opened caught her eye. Nearly anything can be created for the movies, including reproductions of ancient books, because the reproduction only has to fool one of the senses: vision….
She didn’t have time—or cash—to get some Hollywood prop house to make a book for her, but it gave her an idea.
A really good idea.
Or a really bad one, if it didn’t work.
Nearly anything can be created for the movies.
She didn’t need the book. She just needed a picture.
By the time midnight rolled around—and Common Grounds ushered the last caffeine addict out into the night—Claire was reasonably sure she could pull it off, and she was too tired to care if she couldn’t. She packed up the laptop and leaned her head on her hand, watching while Eve cleaned up cups and glasses, loaded the dishwasher, chatted with Oliver, and deliberately ignored the dark shadow sitting in the corner.
Brandon hadn’t taken off after his walking snacks. Instead, he kept sitting there, nursing a fresh cup of whatever it was he was drinking, smiling that cruel, weird little smile at Eve, then Claire, then Eve.
Oliver, drying ceramic cups, had been watching the watcher. “Brandon,” he said, and tossed the towel across his shoulder as he began slotting cups into their pull racks. “Closing time.”
“You didn’t even call last round, old man,” Brandon said, and turned that smile on Oliver.
Where it died, fast. After a moment of silence, Brandon stood up to stalk away.
“Wait,” Oliver said, very quietly. “Cup.”
Brandon looked at him in utter disbelief, then picked up the cup—disposable paper—and dumped it in the trash can. First time he’d bused his own table in a few dozen years, Claire guessed. If ever. She hid a nervous grin, because he didn’t seem like the kind of guy—much less vamp—who’d appreciate her sense of humor.
“Anything else?” Brandon asked acidly. Not as if he actually cared.
“Actually, yes. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like the ladies to leave first.”
Even in the shadows, Claire saw the gleam of sharp teeth when Brandon silently opened his mouth—flashing his fangs. Showing off. Oliver didn’t seem impressed.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he repeated. Brandon shrugged and leaned against the wall, arms folded. He was wearing a black leather jacket that drank in light, a black knit shirt, dark jeans. Dressed to kill, Claire thought, and wished she hadn’t.
“I’ll wait,” he said. “But they don’t need to worry about me, old man. The boy made a deal. I’ll stick to it.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Oliver said. “Eve, Claire, get home safe. Go.”
Eve slammed the door on the dishwasher and turned it on; she grabbed her purse from behind the counter and ducked out to take Claire’s hand and pull her toward the door. She flipped the front sign from OPEN to CLOSED and unlocked the door to let Claire out. She locked it back behind them with a set of keys, then hustled Claire quickly to the car, which sat in the warm glow of the streetlight. The street looked deserted; wind whipped trash and dust into clattering ghosts, and the blinking red stoplights danced and swayed along. Eve unlocked the car in record time, and both of them slammed down the locks once they were inside. Eve started up the Caddy and motored away from the curb; only then did she sigh a little in relief.
And then she gasped, because another car turned the corner and whipped past them in a black blur, stopping at the curb where they’d been parked. “What the hell?” Eve blurted, and slowed down. Claire turned to look back.
“It’s a limo,” she said. She didn’t even think Morganville had a limo, but then she thought about funeral homes and funerals, and got chills. For all she knew, maybe Morganville had more limos than any city in Texas….
This one wasn’t part of a procession, though. It was big and black and gleamed like the finish on a cockroach, and as the Caddy inched along, Claire saw a uniformed driver get out and walk around to the back.
“Who is it?” Eve asked. “Can you see?”
The driver handed out a woman. Small—not much taller than Claire herself, she guessed. Pale, with hair that glowed white or blond in the streetlights. They were too far for Claire to get a really good look, but she thought the woman looked…sad. Sad, and cold.
“She’s not very tall—white hair? And kind of elegant?”
Eve shrugged. “Nobody I’ve met, but most of the vamps don’t mingle with the little people. Kind of like the Hiltons don’t shop at Wal-Mart.”
Claire snorted. As Eve turned the corner, she saw the woman standing in front of the door of Common Grounds, and saw Oliver opening it for her. No sign of Brandon. She wondered if Oliver had already sent him out, or if he was making the vamp give them a head start. “How does Oliver do this?” she asked. “I mean, why don’t they just…?”
“Kill him? I wish I knew. He’s got balls of platinum, for one thing,” Eve said. Passing streetlights strobed across her face. “You saw how he did Brandon back there? Dissing him? Unbelievable. Anybody else would be dead by dawn. Oliver…just gets away with it.”
Which made Claire even more curious about the why. Or at least the how. If Oliver could get away with it, maybe other people could, too. Then again, maybe other people had already tried, and ended up as organ donors.
Claire turned back face forward, lost in thought, as Eve sped through the silent, watching streets for home. A police car prowled a side street, but somehow in Morganville she thought they weren’t looking so much for cr
iminals as potential victims.
At first, she thought she was so tired she was imagining things—that happened when you didn’t sleep; you saw ghosts in mirrors and spooky faces at the window—but then she saw something moving fast through the glow of a streetlight. Something pale.
“They’re following,” Eve said grimly. “Damn.”
“Brandon?” Claire tried to scan the sides of the street, but Eve pressed the gas and went faster.
“Not Brandon. Then again, he doesn’t have to get his fangs dirty personally—”
Fifty feet ahead, someone stepped in front of the car.
Claire and Eve screamed, and Eve stamped on the brakes. Claire pitched forward against the seat belt, which snapped tight and grabbed so hard she just knew she was going to pass out from pain as the acid burn on her back rubbed against the seat. But the pain flashed away, buried by fear, because the car was fishtailing to a stop on the dark street, and there was a vampire standing there, resting its hands on the hood.
Grinning with way, way too many teeth.
“Claire!” Eve yelled. “Don’t look at him! Don’t look!”
Too late. Claire had, and she felt something going soft in her head. The fear went away. So did all her good sense. She reached for the lock on the door, but Eve lunged across and grabbed her arm. “No!” she screamed, and held on as she slammed the car into reverse and burned rubber backward. She didn’t get far. Another vampire stepped out, blocking the street. This one was tall, ugly, and old. Same number of gleaming teeth. “Oh, God…”
Claire kept fumbling for the lock on the door. Eve muttered something that would have definitely gotten Claire grounded at home, hit the brakes again, and said, “Claire, honey, this is going to hurt,” and then she pushed Claire forward and slapped her on the burn. Hard.
Claire screeched loud enough to deafen dogs three counties away, nearly fainted, and quit trying to get out of the car. Even the two vampires outside the car—who were all of a sudden right there at the doors—flinched and stepped back.
Eve gunned the engine. Claire, half fainting from the red-hot throbbing agony in her back, heard noise like iron nails on a chalkboard, but then it stopped and they were moving, driving, flying through the night.
“Claire? Claire?” Eve was shaking her by the other shoulder, the one that didn’t feel like she’d taken another acid bath. “Oh, God, I’m sorry! It was just—he was going to get you to open the door, and I couldn’t—I’m sorry!”
Panic was still a hot wire through her nerves, but Claire managed a nod and a weak, sick smile. She understood. She’d always wondered how in the hell anybody could be stupid enough to open up a door to the scary bad thing in the movies, but now she knew. She absolutely knew.
Sometimes, you just didn’t have a choice.
Eve was gasping for breath and crying furiously in between. “I hate this,” she said, and slammed her hand into the hard plastic steering wheel, over and over. “I hate this town! I hate them!”
Claire got that. She was starting to really hate them, too.
11
Shane was in the doorway, ready for action, when Eve screeched the car to a stop; if he was still mad, at least he wasn’t letting it get in the way of a good fight. Eve frantically signaled for him to stay where he was, on safe ground, and checked the street on all sides.
“Do you see anything?” she asked Claire anxiously. Claire shook her head, still sick. “Damn. Damn! Okay…but you know the drill, right? Asses and elbows. Bail!”
Claire fumbled open the lock, bolted out of the car, and hit the sidewalk running. She heard Eve’s door slam and running footsteps. Déjà vu, she thought. Now all they needed was for Brandon to show up and act like a total asshole….
She nearly ran into Shane as she pelted across the threshold; he stepped out of the way in time, just far enough to let her pass, and grabbed Eve to pull her inside as he slammed the door and locked it.
“You have got to get a better job,” he said. Eve wiped at her ruined makeup with the back of one hand and threw him a filthy look.
“At least I have a job!”
“What, professional blood donor? Because that’s all you’re going to be if you—”
Claire turned, ran into a vampire, and screamed her lungs out.
Okay, so she wasn’t a vampire. That was established in about thirty more seconds by a combination of Shane doubling over with laughter, the vampire screaming in fright and cowering, and—last of all—Eve saying, in blank surprise, “Miranda! Honey, what the hell are you doing here?”
The vamp—she looked like a vamp, Claire amended, but now that her heart rate was going down below race-car speeds she saw that it was makeup and drama, not nature—slowly lowered her arms, peered at Claire uncertainly through thick black mascaraed eyelashes, and made a little O with her ruby red lips. “I had to come,” she said. She had a breathy, floaty voice, full of drama. “Oh, Eve! I had such a terrible vision! There was blood and death, and it was all about you!”
Eve didn’t seem impressed. She sighed, turned to Shane, and said, “You let her in? I thought you hated her!”
“Couldn’t leave her out there, could I? I mean, she’s got a pulse. Besides, she’s your friend.”
From the look Eve gave him, friend might have been stretching things.
Miranda gave Shane a loopy smile. Great, Claire thought, annoyed and disgusted and still trying to contain the aftermath of a nuclear terror explosion. The girl was tall and most of her was thin, storklike legs revealed by a black leather miniskirt. She had lots of makeup, the standard dyed-black hair, shag cut around a long white face. Ragged Magic Marker crosses drawn on her wrists and around her neck.
Miranda suddenly swung around and looked up at the ceiling. She raised her hands to her mouth in dread, but, Claire noticed, didn’t smudge her lipstick. “This house,” she said. “Oh my. It’s so…strange. Don’t you feel it?”
“Mir, if you wanted to warn me about something, you could have called,” Eve said, and steered her into the living room. “Now we’ve got to figure out how to get you home. Honestly, don’t you have any sense? You know better than this!”
As Miranda sat down on the couch, Claire caught sight of something else on her neck…bruises. And in the center of the bruises, two raw, red holes. Eve saw it, too, and blinked, looked at Shane, and then at Claire. “Mir?” she asked gently, and turned the girl’s chin to one side. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Miranda said. “Everything. You’ve really got to try it. It’s everything I dreamed it would be, and for a second I could see, I could really see—”
Eve let go of her like she’d caught on fire. “You let somebody bite you?”
“Just Charles,” Miranda said. “He loves me. But Eve, you have to listen—this is serious! I tried to call, but I couldn’t get anyone, and I had this terrible dream—”
“Thought you said it was a vision,” Shane said. He’d followed Claire into the room and was standing near her, arms folded. She felt a little bit of the tight knot of anger and tension unravel at his closeness, even if he wasn’t looking at her. Yeah, Claire, way to go. He treats you like the furniture. Maybe you need some hooker lipstick and Kleenex in your bra, too.
“Don’t, Shane, she’s been through hell—” Eve evidently remembered, too late, that whatever Miranda had been through, it waited for Shane, too, unless they could somehow negate his deal with Brandon. “Um, right. Vision. What did you see, Mir?”
“Death.” Miranda said it with hushed relish, leaning forward and rocking gently back and forth. “Oh, he fought, he didn’t want it, didn’t want the gift, but…and there was blood. Lots of blood. And he died…right…here.” She put out a hand and pointed to a spot on the floor covered by a throw rug.
Claire realized, with a sinking sense of horror, that she was probably talking about Michael.
“Is it—is it Shane? Are you seeing Shane’s future?” Eve asked. She sounded spooked, but then, they’d had a
spooky night all around. And worrying about Shane made sense.
“She can’t see the future,” Shane said flatly. “She makes crap up. Right, Mir?”
Miranda didn’t answer. She craned her neck up and looked at the ceiling again. Claire realized, with a strange creepy sensation, that she was looking exactly at where the secret room would be. Did Miranda know? How?
“This house,” she said again. “This house is so strange. It doesn’t make sense, you know.”
There was a creak on the stairs, and Claire looked over to see Michael padding down to join them, barefoot as usual. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not the only one. Eve, what the hell is she doing here?”
“Don’t ask me! Shane let her in!”
“Hello, Michael,” Miranda said absently. She was still staring at the ceiling. “This one’s new.” She waved at Claire.
“Yeah. That’s Claire.” He hadn’t exactly come bounding to the rescue when Claire had screamed, and she wondered why. Maybe he’d been trying to stay away from Miranda; she understood why he’d want to. Talk about freaky weird…even Eve seemed not quite sure what to do with her.
She realized he hadn’t heard Miranda’s eerie description of his death. Maybe that was for the best.
“Claire,” Miranda whispered, and suddenly looked directly at her. She had pale blue eyes, really strange. They seemed to look right through her. “No, it’s not her, not her. Something else. Something strange in this house. Something not right. I need to read the cards.”
“The hell?” Shane asked. Miranda grabbed Eve’s hand and jumped up, and practically dragged her to the stairs. “Okay, now this is just too much. Eve?”
“Um…right, it’s okay!” Eve called back, as Miranda practically yanked her arm out of its socket. “She just wants to do some tarot or something. It’s okay! I’ll bring her back down! Just a sec!”