by Rachel Caine
“Yeah? Well I can’t,” Eve said. She glared at Monica, who glared right back. “Claire, you have to stop picking up strays. You don’t know where they’ve been.”
“You’re one to talk about diseases,” Monica shot back, “seeing as how you’re one big, walking social one.”
“That’s not pot, kettle—that’s more like cauldron, kettle. Witch.”
“Whore!”
“You want to go play with your new friends back there?” Shane snapped. “The really pale ones with the taste for plasma? Because believe me, I’ll drop your skanky butt right in their nest if you don’t shut up, Monica.”
“You don’t scare me, Collins!”
Hannah rolled her eyes and racked her shotgun. “How about me?”
That ended the entire argument.
Myrnin, leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, watched the proceedings with great interest. “Your friends,” he said to Claire. “They’re quite . . . colorful. So full of energy.”
“Hands off my friends.” Not that that statement exactly included Monica, but whatever.
“Oh, absolutely. I would never.” Hand to his heart, Myrnin managed to look angelic, which was a bit of a trick considering his Lord-Byron-on-a-bender outfit. “I’ve just been away from normal human society for so long. Tell me, is it usually this . . . spirited?”
“Not usually,” she sighed. “Monica’s special.” Yeah, in the short-bus sense, because Monica was a head case. Not that Claire had time or inclination to explain all the dynamics of the Monica-Shane-Eve relationship to Myrnin right now. “When you said that someone was calling the vampires together for some kind of fight—was that Bishop?”
“Bishop?” Myrnin looked startled. “No, of course not. It’s Amelie. Amelie is sending the call. She’s consolidating her forces, putting up lines of defense. Things are rapidly moving toward a confrontation, I believe.”
That was exactly what Claire was afraid he was going to say. “Do you know who answered?”
“Anyone in Morganville with a blood tie to her,” he said. “Except me, of course. But that would include almost every vampire in town, save those who were sworn through Oliver. Even then, Oliver’s tie would bind them in some sense, because he swore fealty to her when he came to live here. They might feel the pull less strongly, but they would still feel it.”
“Then how is Bishop getting an army? Isn’t everybody in town, you know, Amelie’s?”
“He bit those he wished to keep on his side.” Myrnin shrugged. “Claimed them from her, in a sense. Some of them went willingly, some not, but all owe him allegiance now. All those he was able to turn, which is a considerable number, I believe.” He looked sharply at her. “The call continued in the daytime. Michael?”
“Michael’s fine. They put him in a cell.”
“And Sam?”
Claire shook her head in response. Next to Michael, his grandfather Sam was the youngest vampire in town, and Claire hadn’t seen him at all, not since he’d left the Glass House, well before any of the other vamps. He’d gone off on some mission for Amelie; she trusted him more than most of the others, even those she’d known for hundreds of years. That was, Claire thought, because Amelie knew how Sam felt about her. It was the storybook kind of love, the kind that ignored things like practicality and danger, and never changed or died.
She found herself looking at Shane. He turned his head and smiled back.
The storybook kind of love.
She was probably too young to have that, but this felt so strong, so real. . . .
And Shane wouldn’t even man up and tell her he loved her.
She took a deep breath and forced her mind off that. “What do we do now?” Claire asked. “Myrnin?”
He was silent for a long moment, then moved to one of the painted-over first-floor windows and pulled it open. The sun was setting again. It would be down completely soon.
“You should get home,” he said. “The humans are in charge for now, at least, but there are factions out there. There will be power struggles tonight, and not just between the two vampire sides.”
Shane glanced at Monica—whose bruises were living proof that trouble was already under way—and then back at Myrnin. “What are you going to do?”
“Stay here,” Myrnin said. “With my friends.”
“Friends? Who, the—uh—failed experiments?”
“Exactly so.” Myrnin shrugged. “They look upon me as a kind of father figure. Besides, their blood is as good as anyone else’s, in a pinch.”
“So much more than I wanted to know,” Shane said, and nodded to Hannah. “Let’s go.”
“Got your back, Shane.”
“Watch Claire’s and Eve’s. I’ll take the lead.”
“What about me?” Monica whined.
“Do you really want to know?” Shane gave her a glare that should have scorched her hair off. “Be grateful I’m not leaving you as an after-dinner mint on his pillow.”
Myrnin leaned close to Claire’s ear and said, “I think I like your young man.” When she reacted in pure confusion, he held up his hands, smiling. “Not in that way, my dear. He just seems quite trustworthy.”
She swallowed and put all that aside. “Are you going to be okay here? Really?”
“Really?” He locked gazes with her. “For now, yes. But we have work to do, Claire. Much work, and very little time. I can’t hide for long. You do realize that stress accelerates the disease, and this is a great deal of stress for us all. More will fall ill, become confused. It’s vital we begin work on the serum as quickly as possible.”
“I’ll try to get you back to the lab tomorrow.”
They left him standing in a fading shaft of sunlight, next to a giant rusting crane that lifted its head three stories into the dark, with pale birds flitting and diving overhead.
And wounded, angry failed experiments lurking in the shadows, maybe waiting to attack their vampire creator.
Claire felt sorry for them, if they did.
The mobs were gone, but they’d given Eve’s car a good battering while they were at it. She choked when she saw the dents and cracked glass, but at least it was still on all four tires, and the damage was cosmetic. The engine started right up.
“Poor baby,” Eve said, and patted the big steering wheel affectionately as she settled into the driver’s seat. “We’ll get you all fixed up. Right, Hannah?”
“And here I was wondering what I was going to do tomorrow,” Hannah said, taking—of course—the shotgun seat. “Guess now I know. I’ll be hammering dents out of the Queen Mary and putting in new safety glass.”
In the backseat, Claire was the human equivalent of Switzerland between the warring nations of Shane and Monica, who sat next to the windows. It was tense, but nobody spoke.
The sun was going down in a blaze of glory in the west, which normally would have made Morganville a vampire-friendly place. Not so much tonight, as became evident when Eve left the dilapidated warehouse district and cruised closer to Vamptown.
There were people out on the streets, at sunset.
And they were angry, too.
“Shouty,” Eve said, as they passed a big group clustered around a guy standing on a wooden box, yelling at the crowd. He had a pile of wooden stakes, and people were picking them up. “Okay, this is looking less than great.”
“You think?” Monica slumped down in her seat, trying not to be noticed. “They tried to kill me! And I’m not even a vampire!”
“Yeah, but you’re you, so there’s that explained.” Eve slowed down. “Traffic.”
Traffic? In Morganville? Claire leaned forward and saw that there were about six cars in the street ahead. The first one was turned sideways, blocking the second—a big van, which was trying to back up but was handicapped by the third car.
The trapped passenger van was vampire-dark. The two cars blocking it in were old, battered sedans, the kind humans drove.
“That’s Lex Perry’s car,
the one turned sideways,” Hannah said. “I think that’s the Nunally brothers in the third one. They’re drinking buddies with Sal Manetti.”
“Sal, as in, the guy out there rabble-rousing?”
“You got it.”
And now people were closing in around the van, pushing against it, rocking it on its tires.
Nobody in their car spoke a word.
The van rocked harder. The tires spun, trying to pull away, but it tipped and slammed over on its side, helpless. With a roar, the crowd climbed on top of it and started battering the windows.
“We should do something,” Claire finally said.
“Yeah?” Hannah’s voice was very soft. “What, exactly?”
“Call the police?” Only the police were already here. There were two cars of them, and they couldn’t stop what was happening. In fact, they didn’t even look inclined to try.
“Let’s go,” Shane said quietly. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
Eve silently put the car in reverse and burned rubber backing up.
Claire broke out of her trance. “What are you doing? We can’t just leave—”
“Take a good look,” Eve said grimly. “If anybody out there sees Princess Morrell in this car, we’ve all had it. We’re all collaborators if we’re protecting her, and you’re wearing the Founder bracelet. We can’t risk it.”
Claire sank back in her seat as Eve shifted gears again and turned the wheel. They took a different street, this one unblocked so far.
“What’s happening?” Monica asked. “What’s happening to our town?”
“France,” Claire said, thinking about Gramma Day. “Welcome to the revolution.”
Eve drove through a maze of streets. Lights were flickering on in houses, and the few streetlamps were coming on as well. Cars—and there were a lot of them out now—turned on their headlights and honked, as if the local high school had just won a big football game.
As if it were one big, loud party.
“I want to go home,” Monica said. Her voice sounded muffled. “Please.”
Eve looked at her in the rearview mirror, and finally nodded.
But when they turned down the street where the Morrell family home was located, Eve slammed on the brakes and put the car into reverse, instantly.
The Morrell home looked like the site of another of Monica’s infamous, unsupervised parties . . . only this one really was unsupervised, and those uninvited guests, they weren’t just there for the free booze.
“What are they doing?” Monica asked, and let out a strangled yell as a couple of guys carried a big plasma television out the front door. “They’re stealing it! They’re stealing our stuff!”
Pretty much everything was being looted—mattresses, furniture, art. Claire even saw people upstairs tossing linens and clothing out the windows to people waiting on the ground.
And then, somebody ran up with a bottle full of liquid, stuffed with a burning rag, and threw it into the front window.
The flames flickered, caught, and gained strength.
“No!” Monica panted and clawed at the door handle, but Eve had locked it up. Claire grabbed Monica’s arms and held them down.
“Get us out of here!” she yelled.
“My parents could be in there!”
“No, they’re not. Richard told me they’re at City Hall.”
Monica kept fighting, even as Eve steered the car away from the burning house, and then suddenly just . . . stopped.
Claire heard her crying. She wanted to think, Good, you deserve it, but somehow she just couldn’t force herself to be that cold.
Shane, however, could. “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “At least your little sister isn’t inside.”
Monica caught her breath, then kept crying.
By the time they’d turned on Lot Street, Monica seemed to be pulling herself together, wiping her face with trembling hands and asking for a tissue, which Eve provided out of the glove box in the front.
“What do you think?” Eve asked Shane. Their street seemed quiet. Most of the houses had lights on, including the Glass House, and although there were some folks outside, talking, it didn’t look like mobs were forming. Not here, anyway.
“Looks good. Let’s get inside.”
They agreed that Monica needed to go in the middle, covered by Hannah. Eve went first, racing up the walk to the front door and using her keys to open it up.
They made it in without attracting too much attention or anybody pointing fingers at Monica—but then, Claire thought, Monica definitely didn’t look much like herself right now. More like a bad Monica impersonator. Maybe even one who was a guy.
Shane would laugh himself sick over that if she mentioned it. After seeing the puffy redness around Monica’s eyes, and the shattered expression, Claire kept it to herself.
As Shane slammed, locked, and dead bolted the front door, Claire felt the house come alive around them, almost tingling with warmth and welcome. She heard people in the living room exclaim at the same time, so it wasn’t just her; the house really had reacted, and reacted strongly, to three out of four of its residents coming home.
Claire stretched out against the wall and kissed it. “Glad to see you, too,” she whispered, and pressed her cheek against the smooth surface.
It almost felt like it hugged her back.
“Dude, it’s a house,” Shane said from behind her. “Hug somebody who cares.”
She did, throwing herself into his arms. It felt like he’d never let her go, not even for a second, and he lifted her completely off the ground and rested his head on her shoulder for a long, precious moment before setting her gently back on her feet.
“Better see who’s here,” he said, and kissed her very lightly. “Down payment for later, okay?”
Claire let go, but held his hand as they walked down the hallway and into the living room of the Glass House, which was filled with people.
Not vampires.
Just people.
Some of them were familiar, at least by sight—people from town: the owner of the music store where Michael worked; a couple of nurses she’d seen at the hospital, who still wore brightly colored medical scrubs and comfortable shoes. The rest, Claire barely knew at all, but they had one thing in common—they were all scared.
An older, hard-looking woman grabbed Claire by the shoulders. “Thank God you’re home,” she said, and hugged her. Claire, rigid with surprise, cast Shane a what-the-hell look, and he shrugged helplessly. “This damn house won’t do anything for us. The lights keep going out, the doors won’t open, food goes bad in the fridge—it’s as if it doesn’t want us here!”
And it probably didn’t. The house could have ejected them at any time, but obviously it had been a bit uncertain about exactly what its residents might want, so it had just made life uncomfortable for the intruders instead.
Claire could now feel the air-conditioning switching on to cool the overheated air, hear doors swinging open upstairs, see lights coming on in darkened areas.
“Hey, Celia,” Shane said, as the woman let go of Claire at last. “So, what brings you here? I figured the Barfly would be doing good business tonight.”
“Well, it would be, except that some jerks came in and said that because I was wearing a bracelet I had to serve them for free, on account of being some kind of sympathizer. What kind of sympathizer, I said, and one of them tried to hit me.”
Shane lifted his eyebrows. Celia wasn’t a young woman. “What did you do?”
“Used the Regulator.” Celia lifted a baseball bat propped against the wall. It was old hardwood, lovingly polished. “Got myself a couple of home runs, too. But I decided maybe I wouldn’t stay for the extra innings, if you know what I mean. I figure they’re drinking me dry over there right now. Makes me want to rip my bracelet off, I’ll tell ya. Where are the damn vampires when you need them, after all that?”
“You didn’t take your bracelet off? Even when they gave you the chanc
e?” Shane seemed surprised. Celia gave him a glare.
“No, I didn’t. I ain’t breaking my word, not unless I have to. Right now, I don’t have to.”
“If you take it off now, you may never need to put it on again.”
Celia leveled a wrinkled finger at him. “Look, Collins, I know all about you and your dad. I don’t hold with any of that. Morganville’s an all-right place. You follow the rules and stay out of trouble—about like anyplace, I guess. You people wanted chaos. Well, this is what it looks like—people getting beaten, shops looted, houses burned. Sure, it’ll settle down sometime, but into what? Maybe no place I’d want to live.”
She turned away from him, shouldered her baseball bat, and marched away to talk with a group of adults her own age.
Shane caught Claire looking at him, and shrugged. “Yeah,” he sighed. “I know. She’s got a point. But how do we know it won’t be better if the vamps just—”
“Just what, Shane? Die? What about Michael, have you thought about him? Or Sam?” She stomped off.
“Where are you going?”
“To get a Coke!”
“Would you—”
“No!”
She twisted the cap off the Coke she’d retrieved from the fridge—which was stocked up again, although she knew it hadn’t been when they’d left. Another favor from the house, she guessed, although how it went shopping on its own she had no idea.
The cold syrupy goodness hit her like a brick wall, but instead of energizing her, it made her feel weak and a little sick. Claire sank down in a chair at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands, suddenly overwhelmed.
It was all falling apart.
Amelie was calling the vampires, probably going to fight Bishop to the death. Morganville was ripping itself in pieces. And there was nothing she could do.
Well, there was one thing.
She retrieved and opened four more bottles of Coke, and delivered them to Hannah, Eve, Shane, and—because it felt mean to leave her out at a time like this—Monica.
Monica stared at the sweating bottle as if she suspected Claire had put rat poison in it. “What’s this?”
“What does it look like? Take or don’t, I don’t really care.” Claire put it down on the table next to where Monica sat, and went to curl up on the couch next to Shane. She checked her cell phone. The network was back up again, at least for the moment, and she had a ton of voice mails. Most were from Shane, so she saved them to listen to later; two more were from Eve, which she deleted, since they were instructions on where to find her.
