Bitter Blood tmv-13

by Rachel Caine

  “Maybe I will leave! And what are you going to do then? Because I don’t think Myrnin really likes any of your new ideas, and you can’t control him, can you? But anyway, they’re not really your ideas.” Claire transferred her stare to Oliver. “Are they?”

  Oliver went from standing still as a statue—if statues could smirk—to rushing at her full speed, a blur she instinctively flinched away from.

  Michael got in the way, and shoved Oliver violently off course, into a side table, destroying a probably priceless antique vase. Oliver rolled to his feet, hardly slowed at all by the fall, and came at him.

  “Enough,” Amelie said, and Oliver just…froze. So did Michael. Claire felt a crushing sense of pressure in the room and realized that Amelie had just made them stop. It must have hurt, because even Oliver’s face contorted in pain for a second. “I’ve had quite enough peasant-style brawling in my presence. Michael, your loyalty is misguided, and I’ve had enough of your thinking that your personal choices outweigh your duty to me. You owe me your life. If a choice is to be made, be very careful how you make it. A vampire alone is vulnerable to many things.”

  “I know,” Michael said. “You can quit trying to threaten me. I’m not giving up the people I love, no matter what you do. And in the words of my best friend, bite me. Come on, Claire. We’re not getting any favors from her.”

  She reached out to him, but in the next instant, his blue eyes went wide and desperately blank, and he went straight to his knees—driven there by the force of Amelie’s fury. It felt like a storm, lashing over Claire as an afterthought, and she found herself on her knees next to him, reaching for his hand and holding it with shaking strength. He was trying not to crush hers, but it still hurt.

  Amelie rose from behind her desk, took an elegant silver-coated letter opener from her desk, and walked to look down on Michael. As she turned the knife in her hand, thin wisps of smoke escaped; she wasn’t invulnerable to the silver, just stronger than most.

  “Don’t test me,” she whispered. “I have survived my father. Survived the draug. I will survive you. Learn your place, or die where you kneel, right now.”

  Michael somehow managed to laugh and turn his face up toward her. For the first time, Claire thought, he really looked like one of them.

  Like a vampire.

  “I know who I am, and I’m not one of you,” he said. “Screw you.”

  She drove the letter opener down, and Claire had time to gasp in horror; she had a terrible, vivid flashback to the time she’d seen someone else stab Michael—in the earliest days of their friendship. He’d survived that. Not this. Not with silver. No, I can’t tell Eve this. No, please…

  Amelie drove the silver knife into the floor, to the hilt, an inch from Michael’s knee. She rose gracefully, turned her back, and walked away, dismissing them both with a flip of her hand.

  Oliver, after a long look at her that Claire couldn’t read, said, “Count yourself lucky. Both of you, get out. Now.”

  Claire stumbled to her feet, still holding Michael’s hand, and managed to get him up. He leaned heavily on her. He looked dazed, but his eyes were as crimson as the blood dripping from his nose and ears. He was, Claire thought, ready to go for Oliver’s throat, so it was lucky he was too weak to try it. “Come on,” she whispered to him. “Michael! Come on! You’re supposed to be the calm one, remember?”

  He closed his eyes, which was about all she sensed she was going to get from him in terms of agreement, so she half carried him to the door.

  Which remained closed.

  Behind her, Oliver said, “If you come here, you come as supplicants. Anything else, and next time, the knife won’t miss.”

  Claire was smart enough to keep her Screw you to herself.

  THREE

  CLAIRE

  Getting out of Founder’s Square wasn’t quite as bad as getting in, but with Michael staggering and only really able to stand halfway through, Claire was worried that Henrik, or someone else with similar feelings, would step out to finish the job Amelie and Oliver had started. He was hurt…maybe not in terms of the obvious wounds, but she was convinced that the blood that still stained his face near his nose and ears was a sign of some kind of internal hemorrhage. She had no idea what to do for him, but vampires could heal from most things without help.

  Still, he probably was going to need blood, and she didn’t want to be the only source standing nearby if a sudden craving came down hard. She’d seen that happen, and the aftermath. It might not ruin their friendship, unless he actually killed her, but it would make things very awkward around the dinner table.

  “Can you drive?” she asked him anxiously as they arrived at the garage level. She kept a hand on his arm, though he was moving under his own power now; he hadn’t said much at all, but now he nodded. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been screaming. “Not yet. Will be.”

  “You probably need a drink.” She said it the matter-of-fact way she’d heard Eve phrase it, and he seemed relieved that he didn’t have to bring it up. “I don’t mind waiting in the car if you want to stop at the blood bank. Michael…I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would go so…” Wrong. Violent. Crazy. But Shane somehow had intuited that, or he wouldn’t have insisted on someone else going with her. Someone strong enough to fight off Oliver and Amelie…or who’d be willing to try.

  If I’d had the machine finished, I could have used it. Canceled out her power. Maybe it would have worked. Maybe it would have even canceled out Oliver’s influence on Amelie, made her go back to the old Founder, the one Claire sorely missed.

  And maybe it would have only made things worse.

  It humbled her to think how much danger Michael had put himself in, for her. And it showed just how much danger there was for all of them. Hannah had been right after all. There wasn’t any point in trying.

  In the car, finally, Claire felt safe enough to broach the subject she’d been frantically turning over in her mind during the long walk. “What’s happened to Amelie? She wasn’t like this. Could the draug have, I don’t know, infected her? Done something to her?”

  “Maybe,” Michael said. He coughed, and it was a wet sound. Claire cringed. “Maybe it’s got something to do with Oliver; he has the ability to influence people. She always kept him at a distance before. Now it’s as though they’re channeling Sid and Nancy.”

  “Who?”

  Michael groaned. “It’s sad how much you don’t know about music, Claire. Sid Vicious? The Sex Pistols?”

  “Oh, him.”

  “You have no idea who I’m talking about, do you?”

  She smiled a little. “Not the least little bit.”

  “Remind me to play you some songs later. But anyway, if Myrnin said things were spinning out of control, he’s not wrong. Amelie doesn’t use that power she just pulled out on me, not unless things are really critical. Never just for her own personal amusement.” He shuddered, and finally said, in a quiet voice, “She could have killed me, Claire. At least the part of me that isn’t pure vampire. She could have made me into—I don’t know, her meat puppet or something. She’s got power like nobody else.”

  Claire swallowed, suddenly and sharply uneasy again. “But she didn’t do it.”

  “This time,” he said. “What if she decides that’s the only way to make me obey the way she wants? I don’t want to live like that, if she crushes everything in me that’s me. Promise me, you and Shane, you’ll…take care of it. If it happens.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Promise.”

  “God, Michael!”

  He was silent for a second, then said, “I’ll ask Shane.” Because they both knew Shane would understand that request, probably far too well.

  And that he’d say yes.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Claire said. “No way in hell, Michael. We won’t let it happen.”

  He didn’t tell her that it probably wouldn’t be a thing she
could control, but she already knew it anyway. She just felt better, and more in control, for saying it.

  The drive to the blood bank was quiet, and Claire faced toward the blacked-out passenger window. In the aftermath of all the adrenaline, she felt numb, and exhausted, and—weirdly enough—really hungry. Michael went inside the back of the blood bank, through the vamps-only entrance, and came back with a small handheld cooler, which he handed her. She put it on the floor between her feet. “Blood supply’s running low,” he said. “They’ll be sending out the Bloodmobile to collect tomorrow. Is Shane paid up?”

  “Is he ever?” Claire rolled her eyes. “I’ll get him in voluntarily in the morning. I’ll donate, too.” Claire, by Amelie’s decree, had historically been free of the responsibility of giving blood, which was the tax humans paid in Morganville from age eighteen up; she’d been underage before, but even now that she was legal, she didn’t have to contribute. She still did, mainly because the hospitals, not the vampires, were the ones that ran short in an emergency.

  Shane had pointedly not been excluded from the tax rolls. Probably because of how much trouble he’d historically been in, in Morganville.

  Michael sighed. “Do you mind if I…?”

  Claire opened the cooler and took out one of the blood bags. It was slightly warm, and heavy, and she tried to pretend it was a bag of colored water, one of those prop things they used in television shows.

  But she still looked away when he bit into it.

  It took only about a minute for him to drain it dry, and he looked around for a place to put the empty, then let her take it and return it to the cooler. “Sorry,” he said. His apology sounded genuine. “I know that’s probably not what you needed to see right now.”

  “All eating is gross,” Claire said, “but we all have to do it. Anyway, I’m starving. Is Chico’s still open?”

  “You know if I get you Chico’s, I have to get it for the house, right?”

  “I’ll pitch in.”

  Chico’s Tacos was a relative newcomer to town, opened by a Morganville resident who’d taken a liking to something he’d tasted out of town in El Paso: delicious rolled tacos, soaked and floating in hot sauce, then topped with shredded cheese. Messy, yeah. Unhealthy, probably. But in taco terms, it was crack. Extra orders were mandatory.

  Michael handled drive-through duties, forking over cash and receiving all of the goodies to hand off to Claire. It was still new for them to count five housemates; Miranda was only half-time, in that during the day she was insubstantial, but at night she was very much flesh and blood, able to walk around, talk, do chores, eat dinner…. It made very little sense to Claire, but the Glass House (like all the remaining Founder Houses original to the town) was capable of doing things that her science couldn’t explain, no matter how far out of shape she stretched the boundaries.

  When Michael had been killed within its walls, drained by Oliver, the house had preserved him—saved him, literally, like a file, only as a ghost. The Glass home was more powerful at night than during the day, so at night it could create a real flesh-and-blood form he could use to have half a life…but when dawn came, it melted away. It wasn’t real, exactly, though Michael had said he could feel, eat, drink, do everything as if it were real, between dusk and dawn.

  But to make that half-life truly permanent, he’d had to make a deal with Amelie and become fully vampire.

  Miranda seemed to have inherited the same pluses and minuses. And she had no wish to become a vampire. In life, Miranda had been a lost little girl, cursed with a psychic gift that was as much creepy as it was informative; she’d been shunned all her life by most of the town, and even Eve—her best friend, maybe—hadn’t been able to handle her some of the time.

  Ghost-Miranda was blooming into a happy young lady, now that she no longer had the psychic powers and was able to have real friends. So Miranda got tacos, too.

  “What are we going to tell Shane about what happened? Or Eve?” Claire asked as the familiar crunch of the car’s wheels on gravel signaled they’d arrived home.

  Michael parked, killed the engine, and spent a moment in thought before he said, “We’re going to tell them everything. Anything else wouldn’t be fair. And it could put them in a lot of danger if they think Amelie’s still somehow got our backs.”

  It would upset Eve, and it would anger Shane, but he was right; keeping them in the dark was a sure path to disaster. You could protect people from harm, but not from knowing.

  “Well,” Claire said, “at least we have tacos. Everything goes better with tacos.”

  And the tacos did help. Even Shane, who met them at the door and glared at the cooler in Michael’s hand, brightened up at the sight of the grease-stained paper bags Claire held. “You really know the way to a man’s heart,” he said, and grabbed them out of her hands.

  “Between the ribs and angle up?” she said, and gave him a sweet, fast kiss when he looked shocked. “Hey, it’s your joke. Don’t blame me if I remember it.”

  “And you look like such a nice girl.”

  “Fine, if you’re not into it, I’ll just take those tacos back….”

  It devolved into keep-away with taco bags, which Shane of course would have won by virtue of sheer size and agility, except that Miranda sneaked up behind him and stole a couple by surprise, which sent him yelling in pursuit as she dashed off through the kitchen and into the living room. And then Eve was into it, and Claire had to fight to hang on to the two bags she had left.

  In the end, it all somehow made it to the dining table. Eve broke out thick paper plates and forks and spoons, and Michael and Shane organized the drinks while Claire and Miranda put little taco boats at each of their place settings. It was all really warm and sweet and home, and Claire made sure as they were eating that Miranda got a couple of extra tacos that normally Shane would have grabbed as they passed. He pouted, but in a cute way.

  It was when they were finishing up that Shane said, faux-casually, “So I guess everything went okay today?”

  Miranda licked the last of the hot sauce out of the bottom of the paper boat and raised her eyebrows. “What happened today? I never get to know anything.” She was still physically a frail little thing, and Claire supposed that the girl’s delicate, breakable look would never change now; ghosts didn’t age, and no matter how many tacos she ate or Coca-Colas she guzzled, she’d never grow an inch or gain a pound. That was something a lot of girls dreamed of, Claire thought. Of course, those girls probably never thought about having to live their eternity trapped inside one house, living half a life, not even being able to shop or see a movie that wasn’t brought in, or go out to eat…or date.

  Miranda was never, ever going to date. That was probably the saddest thing of all. She probably hadn’t ever even been kissed. Not once. And what was worse, she was living in a house with two couples.

  Yeah. Living hell, Claire decided, and she elbowed Shane and gave Miranda the last taco. It seemed the least she could do.

  Then she realized that Michael hadn’t even started answering the question. Somehow, Claire had expected him to take the lead on it, but since he hadn’t, suddenly everyone was staring at her, waiting.

  Claire cleared her throat, took a drink of water, and said, “I guess I’ll just get it over with. Hannah can’t help about getting rid of the ID cards, or the hunting licenses. She’s being thrown out of office. Oliver’s a jerk. Amelie’s turned into a Vampire with a capital V, and she nearly killed Michael to prove how badass she is now. Does that cover it, Michael?”

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  That…didn’t go over as well as she’d hoped. For a second, nobody said a word, and then everyone was trying to talk at once. Michael tried to put some kind of polish on what she’d said, but there was no changing the truth of it. Eve was sharply demanding to know what was meant by nearly killed. Shane was cursing and saying that he’d known it would be like this.

  Even Miranda was timidly asking something that was lo
st in the general chaos.

  “One at a time,” Claire finally yelled, and that surprised them enough that they all fell silent. Surprisingly, it was Miranda who plunged ahead first.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked Michael, and there was an edge of anxiety in her voice that surprised Claire…and then, didn’t. After all, Miranda had never been kissed, and Michael couldn’t help being a girl magnet. Claire felt a little relieved, really, because at least the girl didn’t moon about Shane. Not that Shane would have noticed, or cared, but still.

  Eve, on the other hand, seemed to ignore Miranda altogether; her gaze focused wholly on Michael’s face. Her dark eyes were huge, and she’d gripped his left hand tightly with her right.

  “I’m okay,” he said, not to Miranda, but to Eve, and brought her hand to his lips to kiss it. “Claire might have been exaggerating a little.”

  “Not much,” Claire muttered, but she ate a bite of taco and didn’t object any louder.

  “She’s right, though,” Michael continued. “Definitely, there’s something wrong with Amelie and how she’s handling things. It’s not the Founder we’ve known; this is more the way Bishop acted. Maybe it’s something to do with her near miss with the draug.”

  “Or maybe it’s just that Oliver’s in her pocket all the time,” Shane said. “I’m saying pocket because there’s a deceased minor present, but by pocket I mean pants.”

  Claire smacked him under the table on the side of the leg, hard, but she didn’t disagree with the substance—just the presentation. “Oliver’s a bad boyfriend,” she agreed. “And she’s listening to him way too much. That’s why he’s getting rid of Hannah; he doesn’t want any disagreements on the Elders’ Council. He just wants some rubber-stamping human body sitting at the table, to keep people in line by pretending they still have a voice.”

  “Can we go back to the issue of Michael nearly being killed?” Eve said. “Because I’m really not okay with that. What happened?”