by Rachel Caine
Which, Claire could tell, it wouldn’t. Rain was coming, the kind of torrential desert rain that would drown the streets and create flash floods out in the arroyos outside of town, and would be completely gone tomorrow. There were already flashes of hidden lightning inside the clouds.
Luckily, they weren’t far from Stinky Doug’s dorm. It housed both male and female students, which was lucky, because it meant the three of them were even less noticeable, and there weren’t any sign-ins required. Once they’d made it to the stairwell, Michael took off the hat, stuffed it in his jacket, and ran up the steps with so much ease that Claire, puffing a little in his wake, wondered if maybe this vampire thing might not be okay after all. Eight flights of stairs wasn’t her thing.
At the top, she and Eve caught their breath and joined up with Michael as he stepped out to check the hallway. He motioned for them to follow, so it must have been clear. Claire was surprised to see that this dorm hall was pretty much like her old one, the one she’d first lived in when she’d moved to Morganville—dingy, battered, smelling like old beer and desperation. Doors were closed all along the hall, except for a couple at the end that blasted music she didn’t recognize at top volume in some kind of stereo war.
Stinky Doug’s room was the third on the left. Michael paused in front of it, leaned forward and listened, then nodded. He jiggled the knob. Locked.
That was why it was good to have a vampire along, because a simple twist of his wrist, and that lock problem? Solved. Michael pushed open the door and disappeared inside, and Eve and Claire followed, shutting the door behind them.
And Claire choked, because Stinky Doug’s personal aroma was nothing compared to the state of his dorm room. Her eyes watered. She couldn’t stand to take a full breath, because she was deeply afraid she was going to vomit. Not that it would make the stench any worse.
“Eww,” Eve said, pitifully, holding her nose shut. “Oh, my God! What died?”
Michael turned on the lights. For a couple of seconds, they stared in silence, and then Eve said, in a very small, muffled voice, “It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.”
Because Doug was lying on the bed, eyes open and staring, and he was definitely, completely dead. Not for long, Claire guessed, because blood still dripped from the wound in his neck.
It wasn’t a vampire bite. There was a huge pool of blood soaked into the mattress beneath Doug, staining his T-shirt crimson.
Michael had gone very, very pale—marble white, in fact. He leaned over the body, maybe checking for signs of life, and shook his head. As Claire and Eve stood rooted to the spot in shock, he ransacked Doug’s backpack, then patted down the dead man’s pockets, pulling out keys, a cell phone, breath mints (it made Claire suddenly sad that he carried those when he was so generally unpleasant to the senses), a wallet, some change.
No vials of blood.
“We have to go,” Michael said. “Now. Right now.”
“Was it—Was it the vamps?” Eve asked. “Can you tell?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But—”
“The ones I know wouldn’t be that bloody,” Michael said. “We have to go.”
They were heading for the stairs, and Claire was still feeling a strange, distant sense of disconnection, when the reality of what she’d seen actually hit her, like color and sound and smell all snapping into focus at the same instant.
Doug was dead. He’d been murdered.
She stopped, put her back against the hallway wall, and slid down to a crouch. She couldn’t breathe. Her whole body was shaking. She’d seen a lot of unpleasant things since moving to Morganville, but this…this was worse. This seemed so…cold.
And the worst part of it was, Michael thought that the monsters hadn’t done it. Not the side of town she usually thought of as monsters, anyway.
Eve was bending over her, pulling on her arm. Having lost the Goth makeup, she looked stark right now, washed pale. “Come on, Claire, we need to get the hell out of here. Too many questions.”
“But we can’t…just leave him—”
“We won’t,” Michael said, and took her other arm. He pulled her to her feet and held her there until her knees stopped shaking. “But we’re not staying. Eve’s right.”
Claire clung to the handrail on the way down. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the way Doug’s face had seemed so slack and empty, the way his eyes stared, all pupils. The way the blood had soaked his bed beneath him.
She stopped on the third-floor landing and put her head down, breathing fast. Eve and Michael were already halfway down to the next level, but they turned and came back. They were talking, but she couldn’t hear them.
It took forever to get moving again and, once they were out in the dorm lobby, to try to act normal. She held on to Michael’s arm, mostly for support. Outside, he put his hat on again and led her to the shade of a tree, where she collapsed in a pathetic heap on the dying grass. Overhead, the dry leaves rattled and hissed. A few broke loose in the freshening breeze.
Michael crouched down beside her, and Eve knelt on the other side. “Claire?” he asked. His eyes were very blue, very clear, and very worried. “Claire, talk to me. You okay?”
“No,” she said. Her voice sounded small and fragile and very far away. “He’s dead. Someone killed him.”
Eve and Michael exchanged worried looks. Michael shook his head. “I’ll get hold of Richard and Hannah,” he said. “This needs to be handled quietly. They need to know what happened before it gets out of hand.”
And right on cue, the thundering music from the top floor of the dorm cut out, and from an open window came the sound of a girl’s scream, long and loud, with razor-edged horror in it. That was the scream Claire hadn’t voiced, the one that still bubbled inside her. Somehow, hearing someone else do it helped ease the pressure. She didn’t feel quite as faint and sick.
“I think that ship’s sailed, Michael,” Eve said, staring toward the dorm. Without the makeup, she looked so young—and so determined. “Better make the call quick. This is going to get crazy fast.”
Michael nodded, stood up, and used his cell phone. It wasn’t a long conversation, but then he dialed another number, and that was a lot longer. Oliver, Claire figured, from the general tone and Michael’s body language. Only Oliver could make him that tense.
He came back as he was ending the call, and looked down at her. “You going to be okay?” he asked.
“You mean now or generally?”
That made him smile a little. “Now.”
“I can deal,” Claire said. “Generally, that’s going to be a little bit tougher. I wasn’t born in Morganville. Still getting used to all the…”
“Mayhem,” Eve said, for once not laughing or making a joke. “Blood. Death. Yeah, sadly, it is something you get used to. But still, this one caught me off guard, too. I’ll call Shane, okay?”
“No, no, don’t. He’ll take off from work, and I’m all right. I’ll be fine.” She was lying through her teeth. She felt cold and shaky and she wished—oh, God, more than anything—that Shane were here right now. Or her parents. She’d never missed her mom and dad more than she did right at this moment, which was dumb, because what were they going to do?
Hug her. Make her feel safe again, just for a little while. Because that was what parents did, or at least what they were supposed to do. Eve hadn’t had that privilege, because her home life had been crap, and neither had Shane, who’d had the worst dad in the world. But Claire’s family had been great, and she hadn’t even known how much she missed it until…well, now.
While they waited for the sirens to arrive, Claire pulled out her phone and dialed her dad’s cell phone number. He answered on the third ring.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. He sounded better than he had before, almost normal. Strong. Considering that he’d left Morganville in an ambulance and had almost died—not from the vampires, but from his own bad heart—it was so good to hear him be more
like himself. The connection crackled and hissed. “Sorry for the noise. I’m out walking. It’s getting windy.”
“Here, too. Looks like it might rain.”
“We had some rain earlier this morning. Cooled things down quite a bit. How are you, Claire?”
“Good,” Claire said, and swallowed. “I…just wanted to see how you were doing, Dad.”
“Doing great. They’ve got me walking a lot, trying to build up the old cardiovascular health again. I have to say, I’m glad I finally got that surgery. I didn’t realize how bad I’d been feeling until I felt better.” He paused, and, with that Dad radar she’d always both loved and dreaded, said, “You didn’t just call to say hello, honey. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The concern in his voice turned her all trembly again, and made her want to cry, but she couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t. “It’s pretty much the same here; you know how it is. How’s Mom?”
“She’s joined some kind of scrapbooking club. I never knew you could spend so much time and money on sticking photos in albums, but that’s your mom. Once she gets excited about something…”
“I know, she’s a madwoman,” Claire finished, and smiled a little. She could just see her mother coming home with bags and bags of stuff to hot-glue into memories. “How’s the new house?”
“Embarrassingly large. With a yard, too. I may have to learn how to garden.”
“Grow me something. Irises. I like irises.”
“Purple ones, right?”
“Yeah, purple’s good.”
“Honey, are you sure you’re all right? You sound odd.”
“Just…allergies,” she said, and wiped her leaking eyes. “You take care, Daddy. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, doubtfully. “Call tomorrow. Your mother will hate me if she doesn’t get her turn.”
“I will. Bye.”
Eve had turned away, watching the dorm, but she’d been paying attention. As Claire finished her call, she said, “Feel better?”
“Yeah,” Claire said. She did. Still shaky, but steadier inside, where it counted.
“I wish I could do that,” Eve said. “Call my mom. But no. Whiny, self-absorbed bitching from her probably wouldn’t have the same effect, although it definitely would make me forget about Doug for a second.”
Michael held out his hand, and Eve took it, and their eyes met for a second before Eve looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “Life sucks, we die, or not. Mom is the least of my problems, right?”
“Right at the moment? Yeah,” Michael said. “And now I want to call my parents.”
Claire thought he might be joking, but with Michael, you never could tell. His parents were cool; she’d met them once, but they didn’t live in Morganville anymore, and they weren’t even nearby. Like Claire’s parents, they’d been given permission to move because of medical problems. Michael didn’t say much about them, but then, Michael was the quiet type.
In any case, he didn’t have time to do anything, because a police car, siren blasting and lights flaring, pulled up in front of the dorm in the parking lot, where a crowd of students was gathering. Almost all the students promptly pulled their cell phones out and began busily clicking pictures and taking videos of the police presence. Next stop: the Internet. “Worst invention ever,” Claire muttered. Myrnin was already talking about how to disable the features on all cell phones inside of Morganville. At times such as this, she kind of saw his point.
Hannah Moses was second to arrive on the scene, looking crisp and starched in her police uniform; she’d tucked her corn-rowed hair up under her cap, and apart from the gold bar on the lapel of her blue shirt, she looked exactly like the other police, who got busy cordoning off the scene. Two other men got out of a plain gray car that pulled up behind hers. Claire recognized the men with a little start, because she hadn’t seen them in a while.
“Hey,” said Detective Travis Lowe, nodding to her. He’d lost weight, she thought, and he looked a little bit grayer than before. Detective Joe Hess hadn’t changed at all, except that his smile was more guarded as he nodded, too. “I heard you found yourself a genuine dead person.”
“Travis,” Hannah said, frowning at him. “Go easy on the kid.”
“Her? Listen, I know her. She’s tough. She can take it. Right, Claire?”
She nodded, because what else did you do when someone said something like that? But she didn’t feel tough. Not right at this moment. As if he sensed that, Detective Hess cut in front of his partner and came to talk to her. He had a soothing sort of manner, and the gentle tone of voice he used made her feel a little less…lost.
“Someone you knew, right?” Hess said. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I—” Claire suddenly realized that she had a decision to make: tell about the whole reason she and Eve and Michael had come over, or lie and pretend like it was just another of those wacky Morganville coincidences. She didn’t feel like lying, though. Not to Detective Hess. “It’s Doug—Doug Legrande. He was my lab partner in Professor Larkin’s class. He took something he shouldn’t have, and I came to ask him to give it back.”
Detective Hess was a hell of a lot sharper than most people in Morganville, and he gave her a sideways look as he said very casually, “Would that thing be something that some people in town wouldn’t want to get out?”
“Blood,” she said, keeping her voice in a whisper. “You know what kind of blood.”
“I do. So, tell me what happened when you got here.” And he slowly walked her through it, step by step, from the beginning. He’d also walked her off a little from her friends, and Claire saw that Detective Lowe was talking to Eve, while Michael had Hannah as a conversational partner. Double-checking facts, Claire guessed. The low-key way it was done made her feel a lot less nervous. By the time she was finished, Detective Lowe had finished up with Eve and was sitting on the back bumper of the gray car, making notes with a pad and pen as he talked to Chief Moses. Hannah had notes, too.
“Did we do anything wrong?” Claire finally asked, as Hess jotted down something, as well. “I mean, we tried to do the right thing. For Doug.”
“You probably would have been better off reporting it immediately,” Hess said. That was one thing she liked a lot about him: he was kind about it, but he told her the truth, no matter how difficult it was to hear it. “I can’t say this wouldn’t have still happened, because we can’t jump to the conclusion that his theft had anything to do with his murder, but you need to understand that if it did, Doug didn’t have to die. He might have been in jail, but he would have been safer. Understand?”
She did, and she felt miserable…but, oddly, also more centered. It was what she’d been thinking, anyway. Hearing him say it didn’t make her feel any worse; it made it real enough that she could move on, accept it as a mistake, and plan to never let it happen again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She wasn’t sure if Hess understood, but she thought he probably did.
“You’re learning,” he said. “Sometimes those lessons come harder than others. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Um, how have you been? I haven’t seen you since, you know…” She didn’t know how to put it. They all avoided talking about Mr. Bishop, definitely the coldest vampire she’d ever met; he’d been cruel, calculating, and way too powerful. The fact that they’d survived his attempt to take over Morganville had been amazing…but nobody wanted to risk going through that again.
“Yeah, since that,” Hess said. “We’ve been working. Travis took a vacation for six months, out of town. Other than that, the usual. This is the first outright murder we’ve had in a while, though.”
He didn’t sound either bothered or excited about it. Just businesslike. Claire didn’t know what to say to that, but it didn’t seem to matter. He walked her back over to the police cars and went to consult with Hannah and his partner.
“You take me the most interesting places,” Eve w
as saying to Michael when she rejoined them. “Murder scenes, interrogations…”
He hugged her silently. Overhead, thunder boomed and the first drops of rain began to fall.
A police officer brought them a collapsible umbrella from his squad car, and the three of them stood in its shelter as the rain poured down and the police started their investigation. By the time it let up, Hannah said they could leave.
Claire said good-bye to her friends, picked up her backpack from the coffee shop, and then went straight to Myrnin.
“It’s possible,” Myrnin was muttering to himself as he paced the floor of the lab. “Entirely possible. Likely, even.”
Claire, coming down the steps from the entrance, dumped her book bag at the usual strategic location—meaning it was equally accessible whether she needed to defend herself or make a quick exit. She was used to coming into the middle of Myrnin’s conversations with himself. “What’s possible?” she asked.
“Anything,” he said absently. “But that’s not what I was talking about. Oh, hello, Claire. You’re in good time. I need an extra pair of hands.”
“As long as I keep them attached,” she said, which earned her a startled stare.
“The things you say to me, you’d think I was some sort of monster. Oh, here, help me with this.” He gestured to one of the lab tables, which held some gleaming new device with brass fittings and—as always with Myrnin—pipes, wires, and some kind of strange-looking vacuum tubes. “I need it over there.” He pointed to an empty table across the room. And then he kept on pacing, his white lab coat (a recent discovery of his; he thought it made him look more official) flaring around him. It was somewhat spoiled by the flopping bunny slippers, their fangs showing with every step.
Oh. He wasn’t going to help her move it. Well, of course he wasn’t. Myrnin could have picked it up with one hand and carried it easily from one spot to another, but he was busy thinking. Carrying things was her job. Today, anyway.
