by Rachel Caine
So not myself.
Naomi, who had taken more interest in me than the others, had warned me this would happen, that I’d start to feel distance between me and the humanity I’d once had; she’d warned me that living as I did, trying to still be what I’d been, would start to hurt me, and hurt the people I cared about.
And she’d been right. I’d proven that, hadn’t I? I’d lost control. I’d bitten Eve.
I’d almost killed her.
The shirt they’d given me to wear, to replace the one soaked with foul water and wet with Eve’s blood … the shirt itched. It felt wrong. I ripped it off over my head and threw it on the floor as I paced. When I looked down, my skin was too white, the veins too blue. I looked like living marble, and I felt as cold as that, too.
And inside, I was shaking. My whole world was shaking. It wasn’t just the draug, though we all were afraid of them …. I was afraid of me, of what I was, what I was capable of doing to the people I supposedly loved.
Love. Did I even really know what that meant now? Had I ever really known? What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking, risking her life every time I was around her? I’d thought I had it all under control, handled, fixed, and then … then all my illusions of being in charge of the monster broke.
I paced, and tried not to think about how good that had felt. I hadn’t realized how on guard, how tense, how desperately tight my control had been until I’d been forced to let go.
Something went very still inside me, and I paused in my rambling, because Eve was coming.
I heard her walking toward me in the hall, despite the thick carpets; I could smell Eve’s skin, the individual and soft perfume of her.
The door opened and closed behind me. Now I could smell the peach-scented shampoo she’d used, and the soap, and the salty hot blood beneath all of that.
I didn’t turn around.
“Where’s your shirt?” she asked me.
“It itches,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not cold.” But I was. Room temperature, except when her skin warmed me up. Cold as the dead. “I’m going to go look for something else.”
I turned then, but Eve was blocking my path to the door. My heart didn’t beat anymore—not often, anyway—but it still felt like a stab straight into it when I looked at her directly. She was standing there, fearless, chin up, with a white bandage on her neck and a scarf trying to disguise the damage I’d done. That was Eve, all over—hurt, and hiding it. The Goth look had always been armor against her terror of the vampires. The retro polka-dot dress, the shoes, all of it was just another form of armor now. Some kind of shield to hold between the real girl and the world.
And me.
“That’s it?” she asked me. “Your shirt itches, and you’re going to get another one? That’s what you’re going with in this conversation, here.”
I couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, I sat down on a camp bed and sleeping bag—not mine; mine was a shredded pile of fluff. I fiddled with the shirt in my hands, and pulled it over my head again. It wasn’t the clothing that was the problem, anyway. It was me that itched all over, remembering … remembering what it had felt like to utterly surrender myself to hunger. I hadn’t stopped myself. I wouldn’t have stopped myself. Drinking her blood had been … bliss. Heaven. As close as I would ever come to it, now.
I’d thought I understood what being a vampire was all about, until that moment of sheer, red pleasure when I’d grabbed Eve and mindlessly fed. It felt like the floor had broken open under me and all my assumptions, and now I was in free fall, grabbing for a life that was moving away from me at light speed.
If it hadn’t been for Claire somehow—using the strength of desperation, I guessed—pulling me off just long enough for some sanity to return, I’d have killed the woman I loved.
The woman standing in front of me right now, waiting for my answer.
“I can’t do this,” I said. The words felt dull gray in my mouth, like a mouthful of lead, and they landed just as heavily on her. I wasn’t watching her face—I couldn’t—but I had a vivid mental picture of the suffering in her eyes. And the anger. “Let it alone, Eve.”
“You mean, let you alone,” she said, and crouched down, perfectly balanced on those ridiculous prim retro heels, to stare me in the face. Her eyes were big and dark and, yes, they were haunted and full of pain, pain I had caused, was causing her now. “Michael, it wasn’t your fault, but you hurt me, and we have to talk about this before it gets … inside us. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I did. And it was already inside us. Inside me, anyway, eating away like acid, burning and sizzling and toxic. “Talk about it,” I repeated. “You want to talk about it.”
She nodded.
“You want to talk about how I grabbed you and threw you down and took something very personal from you while you screamed and tried to fight me off,” I said. “How someone else had to stop me, because I was acting like an animal.”
She wasn’t a fool, my Eve; she knew what I was saying, and she paled almost to the same color she would have had in her Goth makeup. “Michael, you didn’t rape me.”
“That’s exactly what I did,” I said. “You know what Shane calls it? Fang rape.”
“Shane’s got no idea what he’s talking about.” The words lacked some force, though, and Eve sounded more than a little shaken. “You just—you weren’t in control, Michael.”
“So that’s a valid excuse now for me, when it isn’t for any other guy out there who hurts someone?” I wanted to touch her, but I honestly didn’t dare. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, and finally she just closed it. Her eyes filmed over with tears, but she blinked them away. “It’s not an excuse and you know it. It can’t be, if we’re supposed to be together.”
“You were hurt. You weren’t in your right mind. That matters, Michael.”
I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder—vampire speed, not trying to slow it down. We both felt the wrench as she tried to pull away, before she got control of her instinctive reaction.
It proved my point, and she knew it.
“Eve, you flinch when I touch you,” I said. “You pull back. You remember what it was like to have me hurting you, holding you down, not knowing if I was ever going to stop or if I was going to kill you when I was done. Of course it matters. It matters to us both.”
“I—” The words died in her mouth before she could speak them and she just stared at me. Because of course I was right. I’d seen it, and she knew that.
“Doesn’t matter whether it was my fault or not, whether I was in my right mind or just a sick bastard who got off on it,” I said. “I’m a vampire, Eve. And this is what we do. We take people’s blood. Sometimes they offer it up, and that’s nice, that’s really convenient, but sometimes we just take what we want. The fact that it’s instinct doesn’t excuse it. It all comes out the same in the end: with you getting hurt, maybe killed, even though I love you. Just like they tried to tell us from the beginning. We’re a tragedy waiting to happen.”
“No!” She lunged forward and tried to put her arms around my neck, but I’m a vampire; grabbing me isn’t that easy when I don’t want to be grabbed. I moved back just enough and before she could register the fact that I’d done it, I was holding her forearms in my hands. Tightly. She flinched and I felt it shiver all the way through her body, but she didn’t try to pull away. “Michael, no, don’t do this. I just need time, that’s all. It just happened last night. Give me a little space to deal with it and I’ll be …”
“Fine?” I let my eyes go slowly red. I let my fangs come down. “Really. You’re going to be fine with me, like this.”
Now she did pull back. Hard. And I didn’t let her go. Her strength was nothing compared to mine, not here, where I had leverage. “You’re trying to scare me, and it’s not going to work!”
I let go of one of her arms and used a fingernail to cut the scarf away from her neck. The spots of blood on the pale square of bandag
e made something in me growl, deep inside, and even though I loathed that beast I also knew I couldn’t keep it caged up forever. That was why Morganville had hunting licenses, and allowed vampires to hunt on a carefully regulated basis. The beast was why Amelie allowed some measure of violence in Morganville—because without it, we turned toxic. As I’d turned toxic on Eve.
“Stop,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound so strong now. “Damn it, you jackass, stop it!”
“Isn’t that what you told me last night?” I asked her, and I shook her, hard. “Isn’t it? Did I stop, Eve? Did I?”
She twisted free and slapped me across the face. It didn’t hurt, but the explosion of sudden warmth on my skin from hers made me blink. I let go of her other arm. She rocked back and then, all of a sudden, something stabbed me. Not in the heart, but off to the side, and the sensation of it sliding in was cold and horrible and yet also burning.
Silver.
I looked down. There was a small silver knife buried in my right side to the hilt. The skin was starting to smolder and burn around it.
Eve was breathing hard now, and there were tears rolling down her face, but she looked tough all the same. Unyielding.
“I can stop you,” she said. “I can always stop you if I have to, Michael, damn you. I could have put that in your heart because you weren’t ready for it, because you’ll always be vulnerable to me even if you don’t want to be. So we’re even. Because I’ll always be that way to you, too. That’s called trust. It’s called love.” She grabbed the knife and pulled it swiftly out, and I choked and collapsed sideways on the sleeping bag. God, it hurt. Badly. I shuddered and writhed as the silver’s influence continued to punish me, but it wasn’t a fatal wound—not even close. She’d picked her spot, and the duration of the blow, very well. And in a weird way, I loved the pain. I needed it.
I deserved it.
“You hear me, Michael? Don’t even try to think you’re the only badass in this room. I will not let you do that to me again, ever, so you can stop obsessing about how damn powerful you are and how weak I am. I am not weak. Screw you for even thinking it. Get over yourself, your vampire angst, and your power trip.”
She pushed up to her feet, staring at me for a moment, then walked away with the silver knife glinting in her hand.
I pulled in just enough breath to gasp, in genuine surprise, “Is it crazy right now to say I love you?”
She didn’t even pause. “Given that I just stabbed you? Seems a little weird, yeah.”
“I do,” I said, and put my head down again. “God, Eve. I do so much it’s killing me. I just don’t want it to kill you, too.”
I watched her walk away, slow and steady steps, a woman totally in control of herself and what she was feeling.
I just didn’t know what that was, but I was afraid … afraid that it wasn’t love anymore.
I collapsed on my back and closed my eyes, and tried to heal.
CHAPTER THREE
CLAIRE
The unfamiliar weight of the shotgun made Claire feel awkward. She’d fired guns, but she’d never carried them around, not like they were a normal, everyday kind of thing. Like a book bag, for instance. She deeply missed her book bag. It had symbolized everything important in her life, and suddenly being a poster child for the National Rifle Association … didn’t.
Around her waist she had added a belt Shane had dug up in the back of the armory—it held small sealed bottles on hooks that she could pull free easily. Silver nitrate. Very dangerous to vampires, and draug. She was now about as loaded down with advantages as she could be.
And she felt incredibly clumsy and awkward, but that fell away as the big, scary vampire guards manning the main entry door of the Elders’ Council building slid it open and she, Shane, and Naomi stepped outside.
It was midafternoon, but it was gray and raining. That had felt wrong enough when all this had started, with overcast skies and rain, because it almost never rained in Morganville, and when it did it was a violent burst that cleared the same afternoon. This had gone on for days … and it had brought the draug with it. Until they were gone, Claire thought, Morganville would never see the sun again.
Naomi glowed in the wan light like some kind of angel—the wrong kind, but still beautiful. She nodded to Claire and Shane and surveyed the world that they could see from the steps.
It looked … quiet. So terribly quiet. Stretching out in front of the Elders’ Council building—a big, Romanesque temple of a place, with stairs like Niagara Falls of marble—was the green of Founder’s Square, with its trees and ponds and footpaths and antique lighting that had come on to fight the gloom. Genuine gas lighting, the kind that hissed very softly, like snakes in the garden. In the center of the green was a wide, clear space with a raised platform. That was where they held town meetings, and where—not so very long ago—there had been a cage to hold humans who dared to attempt to kill vampires. Sometimes they were punished just by being caged. Sometimes, if the vampire actually died, the punishment was a whole lot worse.
But the cage was gone now. That was one thing Claire could be proud of, at least …. She’d gotten Amelie to get rid of it. Managed to secure some basic rights for the human population, but those were not exactly popular, or consistently honored.
She tore her gaze away from Founder’s Square and its bad memories, and looked over Morganville itself. Not a huge place. From this vantage point she could see the gates of Texas Prairie University, her school. It blazed with lights, still, like a beacon; when she squinted, she thought she could see that the gates were all closed. “They shouldn’t still be here,” she said to Naomi. “The students.”
“They aren’t,” Naomi said. “They’ve been evacuated, every one of them. Amelie could ill afford to explain a disaster of this magnitude; they are hard-pressed to cover the normal attrition rates.”
Attrition. That was what vampires called it. Claire called it murder. “What did she tell them?”
“Nothing. The dean made an address and said that deep cuts in the state budget required them to cut the semester short. All students have been granted excellent marks and will receive free admission to all courses at the beginning of next term. Then they announced an emergency evacuation based upon a chemical spill to drive off the faculty and the workers.”
“That’s going to bring a lot of attention to this place,” Shane said, scanning the horizon. “Last thing Morganville wants.”
Naomi shrugged. “It is the best we can manage now. Not that it will matter, when this is done; the university will never reopen, and of course we will leave this town. We must. Amelie will see the sense of it soon, or Oliver will. Morganville is dead to us.”
She said it as if it was vampire religion or something—that running was the only option. And Claire guessed that given the long and terrible experience the vamps had with the draug, maybe that wasn’t so unreasonable. But Amelie had decided to fight. Oliver would fight, too; he’d made it clear that he’d rather do that.
What scared Claire was that he might now be the only one, other than Myrnin, who really felt that way. The vampires weren’t heartless, exactly, but they were extremely focused. If they stood a better chance of survival by sacrificing the humans who were supposedly under their Protection, well, they’d send flowers to the funerals and feel a little bit sad. You can’t trust them, Claire reminded herself. Not when it comes to something like the draug, something that can kill them. They’ll always put themselves first.
But how did that really match with how Myrnin acted? Or Amelie, or even Oliver, for that matter? Vampires were different, just like people were different. Some ran. Some didn’t. Some fought. And some, a very few, actually cared.
“I can see our house,” Shane said, and pointed. There it was, barely visible in the gloom—a white house no larger than a toy from this distance, distinguished from its neighbors by the Victorian shape. No lights burning there. No one to need them now. And there weren’t many lamps burning out there an
yway. A few candles or fireplaces flickered in windows, but the steady glow of electric power was out now, except here in the very heart of the city. Most people had left town already, when the vampires were distracted; Claire suspected Myrnin had lifted the barriers to allow them to do it undetected. The ones who remained were, like Shane, fighters. People who just didn’t go when they got pushed. “I told you that the outside needed paint. Truth is, this whole town needs a damn makeover.”
He was right. Morganville, soggy and dripping in the rain, did look horrible. The fierce desert sun wasn’t much kinder to it, but at least it had looked … clean. Not like this, so utterly washed of life, muddy and disheartened.
“First on my list,” Claire said, “after we try not to die. Paint the house.”
“It’s good to have goals,” he said, and held out his hand. “Watch your step.”
Naomi gave them a curious look, but jogged down the stairs, moving as lightly as a cat, and with the alien, fluid grace of one, too. Claire and Shane followed more carefully, since the rain had left the marble slippery. “How can we tell if the draug are here?” Shane called to Naomi as his boot splashed into a puddle on the first landing. She was also wearing boots, big ones that laced up to her knees.
“I expect you will know when you feel their bite,” she said. “In small, isolated puddles they are not so dangerous, but the rain keeps coming. Avoid any running streams and large bodies of still water. We’re lucky the ground soaks up so much, so fast. An advantage of the desert.”
“That’s why she built here,” Claire said. The rain was already soaking through the warm hoodie she’d thrown on over the T-shirt. She was, she thought, going to spend a lot of the day feeling cold and damp. Naomi had worn a full raincoat, with hood, though Claire felt it was less protection against the cold than against the idea of the draug drizzling down on her bare skin. “Very little rain, and people leave you alone way out here. She could control things.”