by Rachel Caine
“Hey, sleepyhead,” he said. “It’s three in the morning. Eve thought vampires stole you, but that’s only because you didn’t make your bed this morning. I think I’m a bad influence.”
Her lips parted, and his finger paused there, tracing her mouth slowly. She didn’t speak. His smile got wider.
“Miss me?”
“No,” she said. “I wanted some peace and quiet. I didn’t even know you were gone.”
He clapped his hands over his chest like she’d shot him, and fell on the floor. Claire rolled off the couch on top of him, but he refused to open his eyes until she kissed him, long and thoroughly. She licked her lips as she pulled away. “Mmmm, barbecue.”
“Hungry?”
“Eve brought UC sandwiches.”
Shane made a face. “Yeah, glad I missed that. But I wasn’t exactly talking about midnight snacks.”
“Boys. Is that all you think about?”
“Midnight snacks?”
“Is that what the cool kids are calling it these days?”
He laughed, and she felt the rumble of it through her skin. Shane didn’t laugh often, except when they were together; she loved the light in his brown eyes, and the wicked way his smile curled up on the ends. “Like I would know,” he said. “I never was one of the cool kids.”
“Bullshit.”
“Such language, Miss Danvers. Oh, wait, shit—I’m a bad influence.”
She settled her head down again, ear against his chest, listening to the rush of his breathing. “Tell me what you were like in school.”
“Why?”
“Because I missed it.”
“You didn’t miss much,” he said. “Me and Mikey hung out a lot. He was Mr. Popular, you know, but really shy. Girls, girls, girls, but he was pretty choosy. At least, up until our junior year.”
“What happened in your junior year?” she asked before she thought.
Shane’s fingers kept stroking through her hair as he said, “House burned, my sister Alyssa died, my family went on the run. So I don’t know how Mikey was the last two years of school. We caught up some when I came back, but it wasn’t the same. Something happened to him. Sure as hell something happened to me. You know.” He shrugged, even with her weight on him, but then, she wasn’t much of a burden, and he was a strong guy. “There’s not a lot to say about me. I was a pretty boring dumb-ass.”
“Were you in sports?”
He laughed. “Football, for a while. I liked hockey better. More chances to hit people. But I’m not really a team player, so I ended up in the penalty box about twice as much as everybody else. Not as much fun.” He was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “I guess you know Monica was after me for a while.”
That surprised her. “Monica Morrell? You mean, after you, in the sense of—”
“I mean she slipped me really dirty notes and tried to rip my clothes off in a broom closet once. Which I guess to her was love. Not so much for me.” His face got hard for a moment, and then relaxed. “I blew her off, and she got pissed. You know the rest.”
Shane believed—and Claire had no reason to doubt it—that Monica had set the fire that had burned his home and killed his sister and destroyed his family’s life. That wound was never going to heal; he was always going to hate Monica with an intense passion that was two seconds from violence. Not that Monica didn’t egg him on, most of the time; she seemed to enjoy Shane’s rage.
Claire couldn’t think of much to say, so she kissed him again, and it felt sweet, warm, a little distracted on his part. She shouldn’t have brought it up, she thought. He didn’t like to think about those days at all. “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” His smile came back again, and she thought he was back in the here and now, with her, instead of in the bad old days. “Glad you weren’t here for all that, actually. I wasn’t really all that good to know then. Plus, if you want to know the truth, I was kind of a jerk in junior high.”
“All boys are jerks in junior high. And mostly in high school. And then they grow up to be jerks.” She kissed him again. “But not you, Mr. McStabby.”
“Oh, man, Eve’s not letting that go, is she?”
“Not remotely.” She felt herself smiling, too. Shane always brought out some crazy streak in her she didn’t think she had—that was probably what worried her parents so much about the two of them. But Claire liked it. When she was with Shane, she could feel—feel the blood pounding in her veins, feel every nerve awake and alive and hungry to be touched. Everything was brighter, clearer, cleaner. A little crazy was a good thing. “Want to make out?”
“Maybe I should take a shower. I smell like sweat and barbecue.”
“You smell great,” she said. “I love the way you smell.”
“You’re getting sappy, you know that? And maybe a little creepy.”
“Oh, shut up, you like it.”
He did, she could tell, especially when they were under the blanket, curled together on the couch, and Amelie’s refuge was their own, their private, sweet, warm heaven where nothing could intrude.
Well, except for Claire’s cell phone alarm, which was set for seven a.m.
That sucked.
Morning was hard, partly because neither one of them had slept much, and partly because Claire just didn’t want to ever leave the room, but she finally managed to kiss her way free and get down the stairs to the closed door.
It didn’t open. “Shane!” she yelled. “I have to go!”
His evil laugh drifted down to her, movie-campy, but he pushed the button and let her out. She beat Eve to the shower, of course; Eve was not voluntarily an early riser, and it was her day off, so Claire could take her time in the hot water, and get herself pulled together without knocks rushing her along. When she opened the bathroom door and stepped out, she found Shane sitting on the floor next to it, blocking the hallway with his legs. He had on his rumpled jeans, but he’d left off the shirt.
So not fair. She loved looking at his chest, and he knew it.
“We have got to get a second bathroom in this monster,” he said, and kissed her on his way through the doorway. “You take way too long.”
“Do not!” she said, outraged, but the wood had already closed between them. “I take half the time Eve does!”
“Still too long!” he called from inside. “Girls.”
She banged on the door, then winced and hoped it wasn’t loud enough to wake Eve or Michael, and went down the hall to her room. Shane had been right: she had never made the bed yesterday, but she did it today, putting the pillows right and everything. Then she pulled out old, ratty clothes and her worst high-tops.
There was no sense in wearing good clothes to Myrnin’s lab. They were just going to get splashed with icky stuff, or stuff that burned holes, or stuff that never came out, no matter how creative you got with laundry add-ins. Claire gulped a bowl of cereal in the kitchen, standing over the sink, and started to wash the bowl—but it was Shane’s kitchen day, and with a grin, she put the dirties down unscrubbed.
Served him right for trying to make her late.
She dumped most of the contents of her backpack, except for the things that were relevant to her project with Myrnin, then added in the slim history book and took off.
It was a beautiful morning. She’d missed sunrise, but it was still a little cool, and the sky was a beautiful clear blue with only a few scrubby clouds on the horizon. At this hour, the sun seemed friendly, not like the scorching monster it would become by noon. Claire skipped down the steps and out the gate, and set off for Common Grounds first. No Oliver, and this time both the baristas were new employees. Her name was spelled wrong again.
Coffees in hand, she headed for Myrnin’s lab.
Morganville was busy at this hour, with practically everybody who wasn’t a vampire taking advantage of the sunshine and the safety it afforded. Kids walked in groups, even so; most adults didn’t go alone, either, but go they did. Claire met several people
she knew as she walked along.
It felt like home. That was actually a little sad.
A police car pulled up next to her on the street, idling and crawling along, and Claire saw Hannah Moses wave at her. The police chief of Morganville rolled down her window. “You need a ride, Claire?”
Hannah was . . . impressive. She just had this completely competent air about her, and there was a scar on her face that should have looked disfiguring, but on her, it made her seem even more intimidating—until she smiled. Then she looked beautiful. Today, she was wearing her cornrowed hair back in a loose knot, elegant and kind of formal. For Hannah, anyway.
“No, thanks,” Claire called back. “I appreciate it, but it’s a really nice day. I should walk. And you’re probably busy.”
“Busy is vampires fighting over the snack supply,” Hannah said. “This isn’t it, trust me. Okay, then, have a nice day. If you see Myrnin, tell him I said I want my slow cooker back.”
“Your—You let him borrow something you put food in?”
Hannah’s smile disappeared. “Why?”
“Um, never mind. I’ll make sure it gets disinfected before you get it back. But don’t lend anything to him again unless you can put it in some kind of sterilizer.”
That made even Hannah look nervous. “Thanks. Tell crazy boy I said hey.”
“I will,” Claire promised. “Hey, if you don’t mind me asking—when did he borrow it from you?”
“He just showed up at my door one night about a week ago, said, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Can I borrow your Crock-Pot?’ Which I understand is pretty typical Myrnin.”
“Very,” Claire agreed. “Well, I should go; the coffee’s getting cold—”
“Be safe,” Hannah said, and accelerated away. Claire increased her pace, too, walking faster as she passed through a couple of neighborhoods and arrived in the street with the Day House—a mirror of Michael Glass’s, because they were both Founder Houses, the original houses built by Amelie and Myrnin. The Founder Houses not only looked the same; they had the same kind of energy to them, Claire had found. In some it was stronger than others, but they all had that slightly unsettling sensation of . . . intelligence. It was strongest in the Glass House, almost a personality of its own.
The Day House was at the end of the cul-de-sac. Hannah’s relatives lived there, or at least Gramma Day still did; Claire didn’t know where Lisa Day had gone, except that she’d chosen wrong during Morganville’s civil uprisings of a few months back, gotten jailed, and been released after a couple of weeks. She’d never come back to the Day House; that was certain. Claire knew Hannah was still looking for her cousin. There were only a few possibilities—Lisa had managed to escape Morganville, or she’d gone into hiding, or she’d never made it out of jail alive. For Gramma Day’s sake, Claire hoped Lisa had escaped. She wasn’t the friendliest person, but the old lady loved her.
Claire wasn’t planning to stop at the Day House, although Gramma Day, an ancient little old woman sitting outside in a big rocking chair, called to her and asked whether she wanted any breakfast rolls. Claire smiled at her and shook her head—Gramma didn’t always hear too well—and got a friendly wave in return as she turned right, down the narrow fenced alley between the Day House and the anonymous tract home on its other side. It was too small for a car, this alley, and it got narrower as it went, like a funnel. Or a throat. It was suspiciously clean, too—not a lot of trash blown in, and even the tumbleweeds had stayed away.
And here she was, walking right into the trap-door spider’s lair.
The door to the rickety shack at the end of the alley banged open before she could reach it, and the spider himself charged out, grabbed his coffee out of her hand, and dashed back inside at vampire speed before she could say a word. From the glimpse she had of him, he’d been wearing black cargo-style pants that were too big for him, flip-flops with daisies on top, and some kind of satin vest with no shirt, probably because he just forgot to put one on. Myrnin didn’t dress for vanity. Completely at random, really, as if he just reached into the closet blindfolded and put on whatever pieces he touched first.
Claire went at human speed into the shack and down the steps, and emerged into the big room that was Myrnin’s lab and sometimes his home. (She thought he had a separate one, but she rarely caught him absent from this one, and there was a room in the back with castoff clothes he rummaged through when the mood took him.) Myrnin was bent over a microscope, studying who-knew-what. He had all the lights on, which was nice, and the lab looked clean and cool today, all its steampunky elements gleaming. She wondered whether he had a mad-scientist cleaning service.
“Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” Claire said, and dumped her backpack on a chair. “How did you know which coffee was yours?”
“I didn’t.” He shrugged. “You haven’t been returning my phone calls. And you know how much I dislike making them in the first place. Telephones are so cold and impersonal.”
“I didn’t answer because I didn’t feel like rerunning the argument again. We’re not getting anywhere with it, are we?”
He looked up from the microscope, shoved old-fashioned square spectacles up on top of his long, curling black hair, and looked at her with a devastating smile. Myrnin was—for a vampire who looked about twice her age, but was thousands of years older than that—pretty hot. He could be sweet and affectionate one minute, cold and predatory the next, and that kept her from having any kind of crush on him, mostly. Truth was that he’d make a terrible, possibly fatal boyfriend.
She also really had no idea how he felt about her, deep down. He treated her like a particularly clever pet most of the time.
“I love arguing with you, Claire. You always surprise me. And occasionally, you even make sense.”
She could have said the same about him, but not in a flattering kind of way. Instead of trying to put that into words, she took her coffee over to the granite-topped lab table. He was using a modern microscope, digital, that she’d ordered for him special. He seemed happy with it, for now, though he’d probably go back to his old brass-and-glass monstrosity soon. Myrnin was just more comfortable with Victorian technology. “What are you doing?”
“Checking my blood,” he said. “I do it every week. You’ll be happy to know that there’s still no trace of the Bishop virus.”
The Bishop virus was what they’d named the cruel sickness that had attacked the vampires long before she’d arrived—a manufactured virus that Amelie’s father, Bishop, had released, because only he had the cure. Unfortunately for him, since he’d first used the cure on himself, his blood had been the cure for everybody else, and now the evil old vampire was locked down, under maximum security, somewhere in Morganville. Nobody knew where, except Amelie and the people guarding him.
Claire liked it that way. The last thing she wanted to think about was Bishop getting away and coming after all of them for revenge. She’d met some nasty vampires, but Bishop was, as far as she was concerned, the worst.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said. The Bishop virus had caused vampires to lose themselves, their memories, their self-control. It had happened slowly for most, which made it worse—like human Alzheimer’s, only a vampire stripped of all of those things was an unpredictable, dangerous beast. Unlike the others, Myrnin hadn’t recovered completely—or, more likely, he’d always been a little off the bubble from normal. “Can I see?”
“Oh, certainly,” Myrnin said, and stepped back to let her squint into the eyepiece of the microscope. There, in vivid color, was the busy life of Myrnin’s drop of blood—which wasn’t his own blood, really, so much as that of others. There was a lot of difference between vampire blood and human, and Claire was still fascinated by how it worked. “See? I’m in fine shape.”
“Congratulations.” She shut down the microscope—no sense in running up the lab’s probably horrible electric bill—and sipped her coffee while he drank his. “What are w
e doing today?”
“Oh, I thought we’d take a day off. Go to the park, stroll, watch a film . . .”
“Really.”
“You know me too well. Since you weren’t talking to me this week, I designed some new circuitry. I’d like to see what you think of it.” He darted over to another table, this one covered by a white sheet. For a horrible few seconds she thought there was a person under there . . . but then he whipped it off, and it was just piles of metal, glass, and plastic. It didn’t look like circuitry. Most things Myrnin built didn’t look right. They just worked.
Claire came over and tried to figure out where to start—probably there, at the open pipe that wound around and led to some kind of vacuum-tube arrangement, then into what looked like a circuit board scrounged from something more rational, then into bunches of wire, all the same color, that snaked out like spaghetti to other things buried under more coils of tubing.
She gave up. “What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“It could be anything from a lawn trimmer to a bomb, for all I know.”
“I would never build a lawn trimmer,” Myrnin said. “What did the lawn ever do to me? No, it’s an interface. For the computer.”
“An interface,” Claire repeated slowly. “Between what and what?”
He gave her a long look, one of those “don’t ask me questions you already know the answer to” looks, and she felt her stomach clench.
“I’m not going to let you do that,” she said. “No building brains into your machines. No. You can’t kill someone just to power your stupid computer, Myrnin; it’s wrong!”
“Well, I kill people for blood, you know. I thought this would be more like conservation—waste not, want not, and all that. If I’m killing them already.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “You don’t kill people for blood, not in Morganville. I know for a fact that since you got better, you haven’t—” Well, did she know that, actually? Was she sure? “I’m pretty sure you haven’t.”