by Rachel Caine
“I’m going to the hospital with her,” Claire said. “Watch your back—I mean it.”
“I will.”
He hung up, and she had an insane wish to call him back, to hear his voice saying her name, telling her it would all somehow, impossibly, work out, that he loved her and she didn’t have to be afraid of the humans of Morganville, too, instead of just the vampires. But Shane would never say that last thing.
Because he’d known better, and always had.
Eve had disappeared into an emergency room treatment area, and Claire wasn’t allowed to follow; she ended up sitting on the edge of a hard plastic chair in the waiting room, rubbing her hands together. They felt sticky, even though she’d washed them twice. When she closed her eyes, she kept seeing the avid delight on the faces of the kids—people Eve knew—as they kicked her when she was down.
She’d faced down Monica and her friends, but that had been a cold, calculated kind of violence. This was…This was sickeningly different. It was a blind, unreasoning hate that just wanted blood, and she didn’t understand why. It left her feeling horrified and shaky.
The first she knew of Michael’s arrival was Shane putting his hand on her shoulder and crouching down in front of her. When she looked up, she realized that Michael had just walked straight past her, past the nurse who’d tried to stop him, and stiff-armed open the emergency room patients only beyond this point door.
Shane didn’t say anything, and Claire couldn’t find the words. She just collapsed against him, and let the tears boil out of her. It wasn’t all grief; part of it was a sharp-edged ball of fury and frustration that kept bouncing around in her chest. First Myrnin had disappeared, and then Pennyfeather had come at them, and Jason, and Angel, and now this. It was as if everything they’d known was going wrong, all at the same time. Morganville’s bricks and mortar were back together, but its people were coming apart.
Shane made boyfriend noises to her, things like Hush and It’s okay, and it did soothe that deep, scared part of her that had felt so alone. She gulped back her sobs and got enough self-control that she asked, “Was everything all right with Michael?”
“Nah, not really,” Shane said. “While we were leaving, some guy taunted Michael about Eve getting what she deserved. We might have trashed the place a little bit. Oliver’s going to be pissed. That was a bonus, though. I had to keep Michael from ripping the idiot’s head off. He had some kind of Human Pride thing going on, and you know I don’t exactly disagree with that, but…” He shrugged. “At least I got to hit somebody. I needed that.”
She dug in her backpack and found a sad little crumpled-up ball of tissues, blew her nose, and wiped the worst of her tears away. “Shane, I couldn’t stop them. They were just—all over her. I tried, but—”
“Knowing you, you did more than try,” he said. “I heard a rumor that Captain Obvious had put out the word we were no longer off-limits, but I didn’t take it too seriously; hell, he just got started up again, I didn’t think he had real juice yet.” He sat beside her and took her hand in his. “Eve’s tough. She’s okay.”
“She wasn’t,” Claire said, and felt tears threaten again. “She couldn’t even try to fight them. They just—”
He hushed her and tipped her head against his shoulder, and they sat together, in silence, until Michael came back. He was moving more slowly now, but his face was tense and marble-pale, and he wasn’t bothering to try to keep the vampire grace out of the way he walked, like a prowling animal. His eyes looked purple at a distance, from the flickering red in them.
He stopped in front of them, and Claire started to ask about Eve, but something in him kept her quiet and very still.
“I need you,” he said to Shane. Shane slowly rose to his feet. “You know who it was?”
Shane glanced at Claire, then nodded.
“Then let’s go.”
“Bro—,” Shane said, and for him, his voice sounded almost tentative. “Man, you’ve got to tell us something. We love her, too.”
“She has a concussion and a broken rib,” Michael said. “I can’t be here. I need to go, right now.”
Shane gazed at him for a long few seconds before he said, “I’m not letting you kill anybody, man.”
“I have the privilege to hunt. If you want to stop me from using it, you’d better come along.”
Shane cast a quick look of apology at Claire, and she nodded; there was no doubt that Michael was in a mood to get more violent than she’d ever seen him, and having Shane as wingman might actually save lives. “Stay here,” he said to her, and gave her a fast, warm kiss. “Do not leave without me.”
“Don’t let him do anything stupid,” she whispered. “And don’t you do anything stupid, either.”
“Hey,” he said with a cocky grin, “look who you’re talking to!”
He left before she could tell him—as if he didn’t know—that she loved him, so much, and Michael never even glanced back at her. Maybe he blamed her, she thought miserably. Maybe he figured she should have been able to stop it, to save Eve.
Maybe she ought to have been able to, after all.
She sat in silence, miserable and aching with guilt and grief, for hours. It was long enough that she got thirsty and bought a Coke, downed it, had to find the restroom, went through all the ancient magazines piled on the table, and actually napped a little.
It was almost eight o’clock when the doctor finally appeared from the treatment area. He looked around, frowned, and then came to her. “You’re here for Eve Rosser?”
“Yes.” She shot to her feet and almost stumbled; her legs had gone a little numb from sitting for so long. “Yes!”
“Where’s her immediate family?”
“He’s”—she tried to think of something more clever than blurting out Getting his revenge, and shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other—“gone to tell her mom.”
That seemed to do the trick, because the doctor looked more satisfied with that. “Well, when he comes back, tell him she’s in recovery. We’ve got her stabilized, but we’ll have to keep her for a couple of days and make sure there’s no brain trauma. She’s lucky. The surgery went well.”
“Surgery?” Claire covered her mouth with her hand. “She had surgery? For what?”
He stared at her in silence for a moment, then said, “Just tell him she’s stable. I don’t anticipate more than one night here for her, unless there are complications we can’t foresee right now. But the internal bleeding is under control.”
He walked off before she could ask him if she could see Eve. He got all the way to the door, then turned back to see her settling miserably back into the plastic chair. “Oh,” he said. “If you want to see her, she’ll be waking up soon. I warn you, she’ll be in some pain.”
Claire climbed to her feet again and followed him to the recovery room.
He wasn’t kidding about the pain, and Claire was in tears trying to soothe Eve as she moaned and tossed and whimpered, but they finally gave her some kind of a shot that quieted her a little. Claire followed as they wheeled her into a room and hooked her up to machines, and this time, when Claire dozed off in a chair, it was a little more comfortable, and she pulled up to Eve’s bedside.
When she woke up, Morganville had gone still and dark, bathed here and there in the soft glow of porch lights and streetlamps. Car headlights crisscrossed the grid of streets. There were, as always, more out at night. Vampire vehicles.
She was still staring out at it when she heard a rustle of sheets, and Eve said, in a shockingly small voice, “Michael?”
Claire went to her side as Eve woke up. She had bruises on her face—red right now, but starting to turn purple at the edges. Both eyes were puffy. “Hey,” she said in as soothing a voice as she could manage. She took Eve’s hand, carefully, and held it. “Hey, you scared the hell out of me, sweetie.”
“Claire?” Eve blinked and tried to open her lids wider, then winced from the effort. “Crap. What car hit me?”<
br />
“You don’t remember?”
“Did someone run into us? Is my hearse—” Her voice faded off, and she was quiet for a moment, then said, “Oh. Right. They jumped me, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” Claire said. “But you’re okay. You’re in the hospital. The doctor says you’re going to be fine.”
“Son of a—” Eve tried to lift her hand, but it had tubes coming out of it; she looked at it, then lowered it slowly back down. “Where’s Michael?”
“Ah—”
“Please don’t tell me he went after them.”
“I won’t,” Claire said. “Look, you just need to rest, okay? Get your strength back after surgery.”
“Surgery? For what?” Eve tried to sit up, but she groaned deeply and sank back down in the pillows. “Oh God, that hurts. What the hell…?”
The nurse came in just then, saw Eve was awake, and came to lift the bed up to help her sit. “You can sit up for a while,” the nurse said, “but if you start feeling sick, use this.” She pressed a bowl into Eve’s hands. “The anesthesia could make you vomit.”
“Wow. Cheery,” Eve said. “Wait—what kind of surgery did I have?”
The nurse hesitated, glanced at Claire, and said, “Are you sure you want me to tell you with your visitor present?”
“Claire? Sure. She’s like—like a sister.” Eve paled a little as she shifted. “It hurts.”
“Well, it will,” the nurse said, without much sympathy. “They had to remove your appendix. It was bleeding.”
“It what?”
“You were kicked in the stomach,” the nurse said. “Your appendix was badly damaged. They had to remove it. So it’s best if you stay still for a while and let yourself heal. The police are coming to interview you about what happened.”
“Good.”
The nurse smiled. There was something a little ominous about it, a little disturbing. “I’d advise you to refuse to give a statement. Might be healthier for you, all things considered. The people who hurt you might have friends. And you don’t have very many.”
Claire blinked. “What did you just say?” The nurse turned away. “Hey!”
Eve put a hand on her arm as Claire tried to get up. “I understand,” she said.
The nurse nodded, checked the readings on a couple of machines, and said, “Don’t keep her awake long. I’ll tell the police to come back later. Give you some time to think about what you’re going to say to them. You’re a smart girl. You know what’s best.”
The message, Claire thought, was chilling and clear: don’t tell the cops the names of the people who attacked you. Or else. And an “or else” from a medical professional was pretty nasty. If Eve wasn’t safe here…
Captain Obvious had always been a little bit of a joke, in most Morganville resident circles, but Claire was starting to think that this new, more aggressive Cap was something else entirely. He was inspiring people. And leading them into frightening extremes.
Like the vampires, with their identification cards and hunting licenses.
If both sides kept escalating, nobody could stand in the middle for long without having a price on his head—and it sounded as though that had already happened. Eve was the first, but any one of them could be next.
The nurse left. Eve watched her go, then closed her eyes and sighed. “Figured that would happen,” she said. “Humans first, and all that crap. They’ve gotten stronger. And now Captain Obvious is back. It’s a bad time to be us, Claire. I have to tell Michael to back off….”
Eve tried to sit up, but the effort left her pale and exhausted. “He never should have gone after them. That’s what they want; don’t you get it? They came after me to get to him. I’m not important. He is. He’s Amelie’s blood—kind of like her son. If they can hurt him, kill him—Claire, go find him. Please. I’ll be okay here. Just go. The worst thing they’re going to do to me is give me crap Jell-O.”
Claire hesitated a long moment, then leaned over and hugged Eve, giving her a gentle and awkward kind of embrace that made her aware of just how fragile the girl was—how fragile they all were.
“Love you,” she said.
“Yeah, whatever, you, too,” Eve said, but she smiled a little. “Go. Give him a call. He’ll listen to you—or at least Shane will.”
And for the love of her, Claire tried, but the phone kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing, straight to voice mail.
And the day slipped away as they anxiously waited.
SIXTEEN
MICHAEL
The anger that had hold of me made me ache all over, especially in my eyeteeth; I’d rarely experienced the urge to bite somebody in pure rage, but damn, I wanted to sink my fangs deep in someone now. Roy Farmer, that little son of a bitch, to start, and then the rest of his murderous little crew.
Eve had looked so broken, lying in that bed. So unlike the bundle of strength and energy I loved. I really hadn’t known, deep down, how much she meant to me until I’d seen her like that, and known, really and deeply known, that I could lose her.
Nobody hurt my girl and got away with it.
Shane was angry, too, but—and this was a reversal of our usual roles as friends—he was the cautious one, the one telling me to play it smart and not let anger drive the bus. He was right, of course, but right didn’t matter so much just now. I wanted blood, and I wanted to taste it and feel the fear spicing it like pepper. I wanted them to know how she’d felt, helpless and terrified and alone.
And yeah, it probably wasn’t fair, but I was angry at Claire for leaving her, even for a moment. I knew she’d done the right thing, drawing off the mob, but that had left Eve lying bleeding on a sidewalk. Alone. And I couldn’t get that image out of my head. She could have died alone.
I understood how Shane felt when he drove his fist through a wall. Some things, only violence could erase.
“Roy lives over on College Street,” Shane said, “but he won’t be there. He lives with his parents. He’s a punk, but not so much of one that he’d run home to his mommy.”
“Where, then?” We were in Eve’s hearse, and Shane was driving; I was sitting in the blacked-out back area. Shane had verbally kicked my ass about risking sunburn when I’d wanted to walk; he’d made me stop off and grab a long coat and hat and gloves, too, just in case. “You know the guy, right?”
“Kinda,” he said. “Roy’s one of those vampire-hunter-wannabe types, came to me a couple of times for pointers on things, and showed me things he was working on as weapons. He hero-worshipped my dad, which tells you a little bit about how screwed-up he is. I never thought he’d do this, though. Not coming out for Eve, or any of us. Didn’t think he’d have the guts.”
“It doesn’t take guts to kick a girl half to death,” I said. Shane said nothing to that, just gave me an uneasy look in the rearview and tightened his grip on the wheel. “Where would he be?”
“Probably at the ’Stro,” Shane said. “He has a sick hand-built Cadillac he likes to show off there. He’s probably getting back-slaps from his buddies about how awesome he is.”
The Astro was an abandoned old drive-in on the outskirts of Morganville, just barely within its borders; it had a graying movie screen that tilted more toward the desert floor every year, and the pavement had cracked and broken in the sun, letting sage and Joshua bushes push up through the gaps. The concession stand had fallen down a couple of years back, and somebody had touched off a bonfire there for high school graduation.
It went without saying that the place was a favorite of the underage drinking and drugging crew.
Shane drove out there. It was close to twilight now, and sunset had stacked itself in bands of color on the horizon; the leaning timbers of the Astro’s screen loomed as the tallest thing around in the flatland, and Shane circled the peeling tin fence until he came to the entrance. The cops made periodic efforts to chain it shut, but that lasted only as long as it took for someone to cut the lock off—and most of those who hung out here had toolboxes
built in the beds of their trucks.
Sure enough, the entrance stood gaping, one leaf of it creaking in the fierce, constant wind. Sand rattled the windshield as Shane made the turn, and he slowed down. “Got to watch out for bottles,” he said. “The place is land-mined with them.”
He was right. My eyes were better in the dark, and I could see the drifts of dark brown bottles, some intact, most broken into shards. The fence line was peppered with shotgun blasts, and I got the feeling that a lot of the empties had been used for target practice. Standard drunken-country-teen behavior; I couldn’t say I hadn’t done some of that myself, before I’d been forced to adapt to something different.
I didn’t miss it, though.
Shane’s headlights cut harsh across dusty green sage, the spiked limbs of mesquite pushing up out of the broken pavement, and, in the far corner of the lot, a gleam of metal. Cars, about six of them. Most were pickups, the vehicle of choice out here in Nowhere, Texas, but one was a sharply gleaming Caddy, painted electric blue, with shimmering chrome rims. Shane was right. It was a sick car.
A bunch of kids—about twenty of them—were sitting on the hoods of the vehicles, passing bottles, cigs, pills, whatever else they had to share.
They watched the slow approach of the hearse with the wary attention of people who might have to run for it at any moment. The only reason they hadn’t scurried already was that it wasn’t a standard vampire sedan, or a cop car.
Roy Farmer was sitting on the hood of his Caddy with his arm around a plump blond girl. They were both wearing cowboy hats and boots. She must have been cold in her tank top and torn jeans shorts, but from the looks of her, she was too drunk to care. Roy watched as the hearse pulled to a stop, and he took a long pull out of the brown bottle in his hand.
“Mike,” Shane said as I reached for the door. “Seriously, man, slow your roll. He wouldn’t just be sitting there like this if he didn’t have something up his sleeve. He has to know you’d be coming for him. Let me check it first.”
