Last Breath tmv-11

by Rachel Caine

  “Sure,” Claire said. It was a long list, and she silently mourned the loss of her day off. “Ah—Eve—?”

  “Yeah?” Eve ran her hand through her shag-cut hair, fluffing it out into the appropriate puff ball thickness. “Hey, do you think this is too much for meeting with Father Joe?”

  Claire blinked as she tried to put the image of Eve’s combat boots and stiff net skirt into the same space with Father Joe. She gave up and said, “Probably.”

  “Awesome. I was going for over-the-top. That way, no matter what I wear to the party, it’ll be a relief.”

  Eve had a logic all her own, and usually it was awesomely amusing, but right now, Claire was focused on something else. Shane wasn’t going to like it, and truthfully she didn’t much enjoy it, either, but she felt like she had to speak up. That was what friends did, right? Speak up even when it was hard.

  “I need to tell you something,” Claire said. There must have been something serious in her voice, because Eve stopped fiddling with the controller and put it aside. She turned, putting one knee up on the couch, and faced Claire directly. Now that she had Eve’s undivided attention, though, Claire felt suddenly tongue-tied, and there was a suspicious absence of Shane as backup . . . and no sound from the kitchen. He was probably lurking on the other side of the door, listening.

  Chicken.

  Eve saved her from the unbearable tension by saying, in a very level voice, “Oliver talked to you, didn’t he?”

  Claire pulled in a deep, relieved breath. “You know.”

  “Oh, he’s been dropping hints like atomic bombs for about a month now,” Eve said. “Everything short of ordering Michael to call it off.” Her dark eyes studied Claire’s face, all too knowing. “He told you to tell us to call it off.” Claire just nodded. Eve’s lips slowly spread into a wicked smile. “See, I always wanted to turn this town upside down, and we are so doing that. I can just hear him now. Back in my day, humans knew their place. What’s next, marrying cattle? Dogs and cats, living together.”

  Her impersonation of Oliver’s accent and impatience was so dead-on that Claire burst out laughing, a little guiltily. She heard the kitchen door swing open behind her, and when she glanced back, she saw Shane standing there, arms folded, leaning against the wall as he watched the two of them. “So,” he said. “Vamp Central Command doesn’t want you guys getting hitched. What are you going to do?”

  “Piss them off,” Eve said. “You with me?”

  Shane’s smile was every bit as dark and wicked as Eve’s. “You know it.”

  “See, I knew I could count on you for quality mayhem, my man.” Eve settled her focus back on Claire again. “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “I know you’re friends with them,” Eve said. “Lots more than me or Shane. This is going to put you in the middle. I don’t like that, but it’s going to happen.”

  “Oliver already tried to put me in the middle, but as far as I’m concerned, who you marry is none of his damn business,” Claire said. “I just wanted to make sure you knew what was happening.”

  “And what about Amelie?”

  “It’s none of her business, either. This can’t be the first time a human and a vampire got married.”

  “It isn’t.”

  They all jumped—Eve included—because Michael was standing at the top of the stairs, looking over the railing at them, looking casual and rumpled and fresh out of bed. His shirt was still half-unbuttoned.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.” He kept fastening his shirt on the way down, which was—from a purely objective point of view, Claire thought virtuously—kind of a pity. “It isn’t the first time a vampire and a human have gotten married in Morganville, and that’s the problem.” He was a tall boy—and, oddly for a vampire, he was almost exactly as old as he looked, which was frozen somewhere around eighteen. It was a weird thought, but Shane looked just a little bit older now than when Claire had first met him, and Michael didn’t. And never would.

  He settled into his usual chair, the one where his guitar was lying in its case next to it. He was like Eve; he had to have something to do with his hands, and in his case, his default was the guitar. He went for it immediately, and began picking out soft chords and notes, tuning the strings as he went.

  “Well?” Shane said, and sat on the arm of the sofa beside Claire. “You can’t leave it like that, man.”

  Michael glanced at him, a flash of big blue eyes, and then set his gaze at a safe middle distance. His music face, Claire thought, the one that he put up like a shield. One place he wasn’t looking was at Eve. At all. And that just wasn’t right.

  “It was before my time,” he said. “Back in the sixties, I guess, a vamp named Pavel hooked up with a girl named Jenny, and it got serious. They got married.”

  Silence, except for the steady, relentless whisper of his fingers on the strings of the guitar. Eve was staring at him intensely, and finally said, “You haven’t told me this.”

  That broke through his shell for a second, and he glanced over at her, an apologetic and gentle look. “Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to think how to do it, because it’s not a happy ending.”

  “Didn’t think it was,” she said. Eve sounded very steady, very adult. “But every story’s tragic somewhere along the way. You just have to know where to stop telling the story to make it a happy ending.”

  “Well, this one doesn’t have any happy middles, either,” Michael said. “They were married for about a month, and Pavel killed her. He didn’t mean to do it; he just . . . couldn’t cope.”

  “Why?” Claire asked. Michael raised his eyebrows, just a twitch, and got a very odd look on his face, as if he was trying to think how to phrase his reply.

  Finally, he said, “He wasn’t used to being around humans on a daily basis. In particular, not around girls.”

  “And she pissed him off?” Shane asked.

  “Not exactly—you really don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah,” Shane said, frowning. “I kinda do.”

  Michael now looked truly uncomfortable. “There are times when it’s hard to be around girls when you’re a vampire. Look, don’t make me draw you a picture, okay?”

  “I don’t—” Eve’s face went blank, and she looked over at Claire. “Oh. Oh.”

  Claire shrugged, mystified for just another second, and then she got it, too.

  Once a month. And vampires could smell blood.

  She imagined her expression looked pretty much like Eve’s.

  Shane slowly sat down on the couch next to Claire. “That is . . . epically disgusting,” Shane said, “and I don’t think I will ever, ever get that out of my brain again, man. Thanks.”

  “Told you you didn’t want to know,” Michael said. “Anyway, Pavel didn’t expect it, and he lost control and killed her. Then her family came after him and killed him. The vamps arrested her father and brother and executed them; some said they weren’t even the ones who did it. It started the whole human underground resistance, and a bunch of them attacked the vampire districts and tried to burn them down. People and vampires got hurt; some got killed. Morganville was chaos for a while. It was bad.”

  They all let that sit in silence for a few seconds, and then Eve said, “And now, what? Amelie’s afraid our story’s going to end the same way? With her cleaning up the mess?”

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Michael said. He’d lowered his head while he was talking, focusing on his guitar, but now he looked up and directly at her, blue eyes clear and honest. “But we both know the risks, Eve.”

  “Honey, it’s not the same thing at all. If you were going to snap, you’d have already done it—you’ve been living in a house with three heartbeats and two girls for how long now? You’re not going to make a mistake, because you’ve already proved you know how to handle—this.” She waved at them, the whole situation, everything. “You said it yourself: Pavel hardly ever came in contact with a pulse. He got overwhel
med—too much too soon. You’re already used to it.”

  “What if I’m not?” he asked softly. “You really think about what might happen?”

  She pulled in a deep breath. “All the time, Michael. I’m the one who’s risking my life, after all.”

  Shane cleared his throat. “If you guys want to have some kind of serious convo, let me clear the hell out.”

  “No, you stay,” Eve commanded. “Everybody stays. Everybody needs to hear this; right, Michael? If Amelie wants to come down from the mountain and tell you stop the wedding, what are you going to do about it?”

  He looked—well, there was no other word for it than miserable. He looked down again, strummed a few chords, actually hit a wrong note. She saw him flinch, and he deliberately waited a few long seconds before he said, “I’d do what’s right.”

  “That’s not an answer.” Eve’s voice shook a little this time, and her fists clenched where they rested on her skull-patterned tights. “Michael, are you going to marry me even if Amelie tells you not to do it?”

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said. “Amelie can influence other vampires, if she wants to. She has the power to make me do what she wants.”

  “Michael!”

  “I’m telling you the truth!” He shouted it, and almost threw the guitar back in its case, standing up with sudden energy. His pale face was lightly flushed, and his body language rippled with tension. Claire unconsciously pressed herself back into the cushions, and felt Shane shift his weight next to her. She put a hand on his knee, and he relaxed. A little. “Dammit, Eve, I am trying. Don’t you understand? It’s not like I can just do what I want, twenty-four /seven! I’m—”

  “Owned,” Eve finished for him, and stood up to face him. Her fists were still clenched. “Amelie’s pet. And she can make you roll over—is that it? You won’t stand up to her, even for me?”

  “Eve—”

  “No. No, I get it.” She was gulping in deep breaths now, and her eyes glittered, but she wasn’t crying. Not yet. “Do you even want to marry me, really?”

  “God,” Michael whispered. He stepped forward and put his arms around her, a sudden, almost desperate move, and she was like a statue in his arms, stiff with surprise. “God, Eve, yes. I want to make you happy. I want that so much.”

  She went limp against him, holding on, and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Then fight for us,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “If I fight Amelie, I’ll lose.”

  “Then go down fighting, you jerk!”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I will.” He rested his chin there where he’d kissed, and Claire realized that he was looking at Shane. She glanced up and saw Shane looking back. Whatever communication was going on there, she didn’t have the playbook to read it. Shane’s face was blank, his body language tense.

  After a second, he got up and walked out of the room into the kitchen. Claire stuffed the rest of her hot dog in her mouth and followed him.

  Shane kept walking, right to the back door, opened it, and went outside. Claire chewed fast, swallowed, and lunged out after him before the screen door flapped shut. She hopped down the concrete steps and caught up with Shane just as he sat down under the shade of the scraggly tree next to the leaning wooden garage.

  “What was that look?”

  Shane pulled out a pack of breath mints and took two, then passed them over. She took one. “You know what it was.”

  “Really don’t.”

  “If you don’t know, you don’t want to know, trust me.”

  “It could not possibly be as bad as the Pavel story.”

  He sighed. “It’s just that I’m not going to stand there while he lies to her. I’m trying to be all nonviolent and shit. And I want to punch him, and he knows it, and out here is better right now until I get myself together.”

  Wow. That was a lot of communication going on in a ten-second look. So much for guys not talking; they just did it way, way differently. “Wait. . . . He was lying?”

  “I’m not saying he doesn’t love her. He does. But—” Shane was silent for a moment. “But there’s something else, too.” He shrugged. “Look, it’s between them, okay? We have to let them work it out.”

  “No, it’s not between them—she’s my best friend! I can’t let her walk into this if he’s not really serious!”

  “She knows,” Shane said. “Girls know, deep down.”

  She did, Claire realized. Eve had been focused on all the stuff, the party plans, the invitations, all that, instead of facing her own fears. She already knew something was wrong, and she didn’t know how to fix it. “Well—she can’t go through with it. She just can’t.”

  “Hang on—half an hour ago you were saying how the vamps couldn’t tear apart true love.”

  “If it is. But what if it’s not, Shane? What if they’re making some awful, awful mistake and they’re both afraid to admit it?”

  He put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him, turning her face to bury it in the heavy fabric of his blue jean jacket. It was chilly out here, even in the sun, and she was grateful for the warmth of his body. The feel of his fingers stroking through her hair made some tense, anxious part of her slowly relax inside. “You can’t fix everything,” he told her. “Sometimes you’ve just got to let it fix itself, or wreck itself.”

  “Was it Gloriana?” she asked. Her voice was muffled, but she knew he could hear and understand. “Do you think she got to Michael?”

  At the sound of the female vampire’s name, Shane’s muscles tightened, then deliberately loosened; it wasn’t quite a flinch, but it definitely was close. Gloriana had been a horrible, manipulative, deceptive (beautiful) witch of a vamp who’d wanted . . . well, human playthings. She had definitely gotten to Shane, who’d become her toy soldier; she’d seduced the part of him that loved to fight.

  She’d treated Michael differently. Still a toy, but a completely different kind.

  “Maybe she did get to him,” Shane acknowledged quietly. “Yeah, at least a little. She could do that, make you feel—anything she wanted. It’s tough to deal with it, but at least Glory’s gone in that not-coming-back way. Eve’s still here.”

  “Is that enough?”

  He didn’t answer her, and Claire thought, miserably, that there really was no answer—none that the two of them could get to, anyway. He was right.

  It was Eve and Michael’s engagement, and Eve and Michael’s problem.

  If they could admit they actually had one.

  The shadows got longer, and the wind got colder, and eventually not even Shane’s body heat could keep Claire from freezing, so they went back inside. It was quiet, but not silent; as Claire poured herself a glass of water and grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table, she heard the creak of footsteps overhead. It had to be Eve, because from the living room drifted the quiet, contemplative sound of Michael’s guitar. Talk about “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Claire thought. That was the saddest thing she’d ever heard.

  Shane gave her a quick, sweet kiss and went into the living room. She stayed where she was, eating her apple, listening to the quiet, low buzz of their voices over the music (Michael was still playing), and wondering if she ought to go upstairs and see if Eve wanted to spill it out. It was a friend’s duty, right? But Claire felt angry at Michael right now, righteously angry, and she wasn’t sure that wouldn’t boil over and complicate everything even more.

  She eased over to the kitchen door and cracked it open. Shane would be kicking Michael’s ass, at least verbally; she just knew it.

  But he wasn’t. They weren’t talking about Eve or the engagement party at all.

  Michael was saying, “. . . over it, man. If you want us to get back where we were, you have to let that crap go.”

  There was a short silence, and then Shane said, “I hurt Claire. Hell, man, I hurt you. I wanted to kill every damn vampire in the entire world, including you, single-handed.” He paused for a second, and then said
, very softly, “I was like my dad, only on steroids, and it felt right. I’m not sure that’s ever going away, Mike. That’s my problem. If deep down I’m an abusive, violent ass like my old man, how exactly do I pretend I don’t know that?”

  “You’re not him.” Michael kept playing, a slow and soothing tune, and his voice was quiet and deep. “Never were, never will be. You just hang on to that.” He paused a second, and Claire almost heard a smile in his voice. “You still want to kill me?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.” Shane, on the other hand, sounded completely serious. “I love you, man, but . . . it takes time for all that stuff to go away. I don’t want to feel it.”

  “I know, shithead.”

  “If you break Eve’s heart, I will kill you.”

  Michael stopped playing. “It’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s not. Stop screwing around and commit.”

  “Oh, so now you’re giving me relationship advice? You can’t commit to a cell phone contract, let alone—”

  “I’m committed,” Shane interrupted. “To her. You know I am.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “Yeah, I know that. And you know if you screw it up with Claire, I’ll rip your throat out and drink you like a juice box, so you’ve got some incentive.”

  Shane laughed. “You know what? I do that, you’ve got permission. And you know how I feel about that whole drinking-me stuff.”

  It was a nice moment—one of the best she’d heard between them for a while—and then it all fell apart because there was a knock at the back door, and Claire went to answer it, and standing on the steps was a vampire. Female, wearing a hooded black jacket and gloves, very chic but also very sun-blocking. Claire couldn’t really make her out beneath the giant dark glasses and the smothering garments, so she said, “Can I help you?”

  “It’s Claire, isn’t it? Hello. You probably don’t remember me,” the woman said. She smiled, a little tentatively. “My name is Naomi. I met you the day that you freed us from confinement in the cells below town.”