by Rachel Caine
He’d been avoiding the camera, but now he made eye contact with it, and she felt like he was staring right into her. And that smile … it broke her heart.
‘Love you,’ he said, and logged off, as if he was afraid to be caught at it.
It made her eyes fill up with tears, and she sat for a few more minutes, starting it over, replaying it, watching his lips say the words.
We can be lonely together.
She was reaching for her phone when Elizabeth – without knocking – threw open her bedroom door with such force it knocked over one of her empty suitcases. ‘Hey!’ she said brightly. The dark mood she’d been in was already gone, and looking at her brilliant smile, Claire wondered if she’d imagined some of it. ‘Ready for some delicious home-made dinner?’ Liz asked. ‘Because I’m totally starved.’ She put her hands on her hips and looked around the room, then looked around again. ‘Um … did you unpack?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wow. I really need to show you how to decorate, don’t I?’
Not if this paint colour is any clue, Claire thought, but she kept it to herself. She’d quietly get a can of something neutral and redo things to the way she wanted them – no confrontation, no drama, no fuss. ‘So, what’s for dinner?’
‘How about mac and cheese with some chicken? It’s leftover KFC, but it’s still good, I swear.’
It did sound good. Claire hadn’t even realised she was hungry until her stomach started growling, and she slid out of the chair behind her computer and stuck her phone in her pocket on the way out the door.
Dinner wouldn’t take that long.
… Except, it did. Elizabeth was hell to cook with; she wanted everything done just right. Claire stuck the macaroni in boiling water, and Liz got upset and took it off the burner because she wanted to check the temperature of the water first. Claire asked why, and that brought on an insane volume of information about cooking pasta at just the right temperatures, and the physics and chemistry of food, and honestly, even as much of a physics junkie as Claire was, she couldn’t really apply it to box pasta with reconstituted cheese substance that sold for a buck a box. She just backed off and let Liz conduct all her temperature observations, mix the sauce, and generally obsess about getting the chicken chunks just the right size to go into the pasta once it was done. All this took about an hour, which was about half an hour more than Claire wanted to spend on mac and cheese, even if Liz added something she said were Chinese herbs and white truffle oil. In the end, it tasted pretty much like she expected, but by then Claire was willing to eat the box, too.
Claire took the cleaning up role, which seemed to suit Liz, and when that was done, she headed for the stairs.
‘Wait,’ Liz said. ‘So – you’re leaving? Just like that?’
‘What do you mean, just like that?’
‘It’s our first night here! Don’t you think we ought to, you know, celebrate? I have a movie we can watch, or we can just catch up and talk—’ Liz was practically begging her. ‘Please? I know it’s been a really long time and maybe – maybe you’re just really feeling lost, and I want you to like it here. So let me help.’
I just want to go upstairs, call Shane, and spend all night talking. But if she said that out loud, it would sound like she was some girl who couldn’t exist without a boy, and wasn’t that what all this coming-to-MIT had been intended to prove? Pretty ridiculous to fail the first test, on the first day she was apart from him.
‘Sure,’ Claire said, and tried to force some cheer into her voice. She felt horrible, but it wasn’t Liz’s fault. Her former best friend was trying to fill the void, and the least Claire could do was let her.
Besides … she could call Shane later.
Elizabeth was, as it turned out, a movie fanatic, and six hours later, Claire finally begged off from the video assault and climbed the stairs, feeling more like a zombie than a survivor of the living-dead attack. Watching gory horror movies on the first night in a creaky old house, with a flaky roommate, was not nearly as much fun as it had been in the Glass House, surrounded by people she loved and trusted. That house had always seemed – and been, on some level – alive, and protective of them.
This one felt cold, alien, and utterly indifferent to her life or death, which made imagining the creaks and bangs to be serial killers intent on murder all too easy.
Claire made it up the steep climb, turned on the lights, and climbed in bed with her phone. She thought about shutting the lights off again, but in her sleep-deprived, overstimulated state, every shadow looked like a monster, and she thought she could see things moving at the corners of her eyes.
Better to leave them on.
She dialled Shane’s number and snuggled down in the pillows, warm and safe, finally, beneath the covers even if the mattress felt weirdly hard, and the sheets smelt of unfamiliar detergent.
His cell rang, and rang, and rang, and finally it went to voicemail.
That was like an ice dagger to the heart; she felt numbed and destroyed, all at once. He didn’t answer. She’d called, she’d watched the video, and he wasn’t there, wasn’t answering. She was too tired to think rationally, so the next thing in her mind was that he’d gotten angry, turned his phone off, maybe even blocked her calls. What if he’d gone out? When she’d moved to Morganville, Shane had been dating other girls, though not seriously … maybe he’d already called one of them, gone out to the movies, or …
… Or worse. Maybe he was already forgetting her, laughing at some other girl’s jokes. Someone older and prettier.
Stop it, she told herself angrily, and shut off the phone. Just stop it.
Claire shut off the ringer, tucked the phone under her pillow, and tried very, very hard not to cry.
She’d never felt so abandoned, or so lonely, in her life.
CHAPTER THREE
SHANE
It hadn’t taken me long to pack most of my crap up. Truthfully, I didn’t have that much; I wasn’t a fashion victim like Eve – hell, even Michael had more clothes than I did – or a collector of stuff. A few well-aged tees, some jeans that had seen the worst of acids and bloodstains and buckshot, and not in that fancy-ass designer way. More the ‘I survived that’ way.
I decided to ditch the stereo – it was a third-hand ancient thing anyway, and cheap – and that was the biggest thing I owned, besides weapons.
It was the weapons that were going to be tricky. A shotgun weighs a decent amount. Throw in multiple other deadly sharp things, some stakes, a couple of crossbows, and you’ve got a problem … particularly if you’re planning on having no fixed address for a while. In other words, I had to pick what I could easily carry in the battered camping backpack my dad had once used for the same purpose. Turned out that minus the clothes, my phone, some basic stuff for not smelling gross, the pack weighed about fifty pounds when I finally got it on to test it.
Doable. Soldiers pack that much plus body armour, and I wasn’t exactly humping it through the mountains of Afghanistan.
As I shucked the backpack and leant it against the wall, I sensed someone watching me … and I was right. Michael. ‘Can’t talk you out of this,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question.
‘Nope.’
‘You’re sure this is the right thing to do.’
‘Yep. You and the missus need some alone time. Last thing you need is me hanging around here like the new house ghost, haunting Claire’s room. Besides, man, I don’t do emo.’
‘I never said you had to go.’
‘Never had to,’ I said, and checked my phone again. No calls. Every time I checked and I didn’t see Claire’s name, I felt the dark, jagged ball of anxiety inside get a little bigger, choke me a little more. ‘You giving me a ride to the border or what?’
‘Shane—’
I gave him a long look, and he shut up. ‘We’ve been through a lot, Michael, but I’m not going to collapse into your manly arms and cry about it, okay? I already said I don’t blame you. I don’t. It’s no
t your fault she left us … it’s mine. I should have trusted her more. I should have believed in you more. I got some things to make up for, not just to her but to you. And it’s probably better I do that away, so you and Eve can get to feel actually married without me lurking around in the background.’ That still hurt, the idea I was holding them back; I knew that was part of why Claire had decided to go, too. But he and Eve did need alone time. It was just truth, hard as it was.
‘I’ll give you a ride,’ Michael said. He walked over to my backpack and picked it up like I’d loaded it up with feathers. ‘You got weapons in here?’
‘A few.’
‘You know that it’ll get your ass arrested out there, right?’
‘Only if I’ve got really bad luck, or I decide to hold up a liquor store with ’em.’
‘You are a cocky bastard, did I ever tell you that, bro?’
I flashed him a grin. ‘Did you really think you needed to?’
He backslapped me as he passed me. ‘Come on, criminal. Eve will kill me if I don’t let her say goodbye.’
‘Oh man, that means she’s gonna cry. Again.’
‘Like a river,’ he assured me. ‘Good thing you wore a black shirt. That mascara never comes out.’
I stopped him at the top of the stairs, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Then he set the backpack down, and hugged me hard. No need for words or speeches or anything like that; he just offered me a fist to bump, I bumped, we were good.
And then we went downstairs to where Eve was pacing the floor, chewing on a neon-coloured thumbnail. Sometime in the past couple of years girls had started painting their nails weird, so the neon thumb didn’t match the other four fingers, which were standard Goth black. She’d tied her colour-streaked hair back in a ponytail so tight that I wondered how it didn’t give her a migraine, and she looked pale even though she’d gone light on the rice powder today. In fact, she didn’t look particularly Gothed out any more – dramatic eye shadow and liner, but not a lot else.
Although she was wearing her combat gear – tight black shirt, cargo pants, heavy boots. Everything but bandoliers.
‘So you’re going after all,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly surprised about it, and I recognised the dangerously flat tone of her voice. ‘I’m not sure if you’re crazy or just in love.’
‘Not much difference right now, Eve. I take a couple of weeks, head up to Boston, stay close in case she needs me … and if she doesn’t, if all’s well and she doesn’t want to see me, I come home.’ I was trying really hard to avoid feeling like a stalker, because something inside me was hard-core bent on seeing her, even at a distance. I wanted her to have her freedom – she wanted it, and needed it. But I also just couldn’t shake the idea that letting trouble-magnet Claire go off across the country without backup was … a very bad idea. ‘I just need to make sure she’s okay.’
‘Me too,’ Eve said. She bit her lip, and somehow held back the tears I knew were lurking just under the surface. ‘At least you didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night without a word.’
‘She was trying to make it easier,’ I said. ‘It isn’t that she doesn’t love us. You know that.’
‘I know. Didn’t make it any better to wake up and find her gone, did it?’ She nailed me with a dark look, and I had to agree. The feeling came back to me: shock, abandonment, my stomach dropping toward the centre of the earth. Before I could deal with that, Eve hugged me, and I hugged her back. She felt as familiar and warm to me as the sister I’d lost so long ago now, and all of a sudden it dawned on me that for any number of reasons, I might not make it back to Morganville once I’d left. Accidents happened. They could happen anywhere. ‘You watch your back, Shane. I mean it.’ Her voice was muffled against my shoulder, and it sounded unsteady. ‘You come back to us or I swear, I’ll find you, dig up your stinky corpse and kick its ass until it freaking disintegrates.’
I patted her on the back and kissed her cheek. She smelt like flowers, but not the sweet and innocent kind … more like the night-blooming ones. ‘You watch Michael’s back and don’t worry about mine, tough girl. And damn sure watch your own.’
She sniffled a little, but the tears didn’t quite break free, and she compensated by giving me a hard shot to the shoulder as she stepped back. ‘Don’t I always? What are you going to do when you get there? If you get there, I mean, because knowing you, you’ll end up in a bar fight before you’re out of Texas.’
‘Not fair. I never go into bars.’ I wouldn’t be allowed in one at my age, anyway. ‘My fights are always in the parking lots. Get it right.’
‘Idiot.’
‘That’s the best you’ve got, Gothika? Because I expect quality insults from you, and that’s not really measuring up.’
‘Look, Steroid Brain—’
‘Okay, that’s better, but work on it.’
‘You are such a tool! I love you, you know, right?’
‘Right,’ I said softly. ‘Scary girl.’
She blew me a kiss and turned away so I wouldn’t see her cry. I glanced at Mikey, who was waiting near the door with my bag.
One last look around at the Glass House, my house … at the couch where I’d played countless hours of video games, at the kitchen where we’d yelled at each other over whose turn it was to do dishes and trash duty, at the carpet we always said we’d steam clean one of these days. At the scars on the walls from battles that had almost cost us our lives.
One last look at home.
‘I’ll be back,’ I promised them, and myself, and then Michael and I walked out the doorway and into the cold, vast world beyond.
On the way down the steps I checked my phone, again. Nothing from Claire. It was late now. Maybe she hadn’t seen my video. Maybe she’d seen it, and hadn’t cared. Maybe she was angrier than I’d ever thought.
Maybe she was out having fun and had already forgotten all about me. That was the scariest thought of all. Sure, I might be charming by Morganville standards, but she wasn’t locked into the shallow end of the pool now, and there were plenty more to choose from. Genuinely smart college boys.
Thinking about that made me stupid. I knew better than to check my phone and forget my surroundings – we lived in Morganville, after all, and one thing you didn’t do was get distracted in public, at night.
And as Michael headed for the car with my backpack, and I fumbled with the phone and tried to see if I’d missed a call, it cost me, because a dark shape rushed at me from the darkness, and I was unprepared.
Not a vampire, as it turned out. I could have handled a vampire. This was a dog. A big, scary dog, something like a Rottweiler, maybe, and it wasn’t barking; it was intent on biting. I heard the growl coming at me, and next thing I knew jaws had clamped down on my arm, and my phone went flying. I dimly heard the crunch of metal and glass, but that was not the biggest problem I had at the moment. I’d put on my heavy coat, which was helping, but this dog had a seriously painful grip on me, and a lot of weight behind it; he shook his massive head, and I saw a shine of red in his eyes. Not natural.
I surprised him by not trying to pull away, but instead throwing myself into him and over, flipping him clumsily on his side. He let go of me with a surprised yelp, and I rolled up to my feet and spared one glance for my phone.
Destroyed.
No time to mourn; I was in serious shit, because this dog wasn’t just a dog; the hellhound glare of its eyes was proof enough of that. I’d never seen anything like it before, not even in Morganville; dogs were pretty predictable, but this one was coming after me like I was a steak and he’d been starved for months. All my weapons were in the pack, which was with Michael, and besides I really didn’t like the idea of killing a dog, even one that was trying to kill me.
It launched itself at me in a running leap, growling, showing way-too-sharp teeth, and I fell backward to the grass and put one foot up like a soccer player going for a goal. Good timing. My foot caught the dog underneath and changed t
he trajectory from down to my throat, to up and headed for a hard landing against Michael’s car.
Michael caught it as it bounced off. More accurately, he got it in a headlock and held it there as it snarled and fought and ineffectively clawed the air for purchase. I heaved in thick, fast breaths and got to my feet in a post-fight burst of adrenaline. The sleeve of my coat was shredded, and I could feel bruises deep into my arm, but at least I hadn’t lost any flesh out of it.
Lucky.
‘What the hell?’ I said, and Michael shook his head.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘It’s almost as if it’s been turned, but you can’t do that. Animals can’t become vampire. They don’t have enough – will, I guess.’
‘Tell that to the devil beast, then, because he damn sure looks like he’s been turned.’
‘Whatever he is, we can’t leave him running around out here,’ Michael said. ‘You mind waiting a bit until this is taken care of?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Not unless you want to share the seat with him, locked in the car.’
‘Yeah, I haven’t had my shots, better not. Throw me your phone,’ I said. ‘Mine’s trashed. I’ll call it in.’
‘Let me see your arm.’
‘I’m fine, man.’
‘Let me see.’
I took off the coat and rolled up the long sleeve of the thermal I was wearing beneath. Red bruises that were going to black-and-blue in a few hours … and some distinct dark, welling spots of blood. Funny. I hadn’t felt the punctures at all.
I wiped the blood off.
No wounds.
‘Shane?’ Michael sounded worried. Hell, he was right to be. I shook my head, and he pitched his phone to me. I fielded it neatly, dialled 911, and reported devil dog in a vampire headlock. They didn’t sound surprised. That’s my hometown for you. He repeated the question after I hung up, with a more urgent edge to it.