by Rachel Caine
“Michael,” Oliver said. “Let that fool go.” Michael seemed just as surprised as Morley—or as Claire felt—but he let go of the other vampire and backed off. Morley lunged to his feet, then paused as he took in the sight of Oliver and all his backup. “Your followers—if one can dignify a starving pack of dogs by such a name—have been persuaded to leave. You’re alone, Morley.”
“Checkmate,” Amelie said softly. “Strategy, not tactics. I trust you see the point.”
Morley did. He hesitated a moment, then darted between the cover of tombstones and shadows, and then he was just . . . gone.
Crisis over.
“Well,” Eve said. “That was disappointing. Usually in the movies there’s kickboxing.”
Oliver turned his head slightly, looking at Amelie in a fast, comprehensive glance that fixed on the blood on her hands. His mouth tightened in what looked like disgust. “Are you finished here?” he asked.
“I believe so,” Amelie said.
“Then may I offer you an escort home?”
Her smile turned cynical. “Are you worried for me, my friend? How kind.”
“Not at all. I am so gratified that I could be of use to defend your honor.”
“Michael defended me,” Amelie said. “You showed up.”
Claire thought, Snap, again. She could see Eve thinking the same thing. Neither of them was quite brave enough to say it, though.
Oliver shrugged. “Strategy, and tactics. I do know the difference. And I have won battles, unlike Morley.”
“Which is why I rely on you, Oliver, for your counsel. I trust I can continue to count on you for that.”
Their gazes locked, and Claire shivered a little. Morley was bluff; Oliver wasn’t. He was the kind of guy who’d do what he said, if he thought he could get away with it. He also wanted Morganville. Maybe not quite enough to kill Amelie to get it, but the line was pretty thin.
In fact, Claire could see the line right now, in the faint and fading scars on Amelie’s wrists.
“Michael and his friends were kind enough to offer me an escort to the blood bank,” Amelie said. “I will go with them. Perhaps you can summon my car to meet me there.”
Oliver’s smile was sharp as a paper cut. “As ever, I exist to serve.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
Michael fell in next to Amelie, and the five of them moved down the rambling path toward where they’d left the car. When Claire looked back, there was no sign of Oliver and his people, or of Morley. There was just the silent cemetery, and the gleaming mausoleum at the top of the hill.
“Anybody else think that was weird?” Shane asked as they got into the car. Eve sent him an exasperated glance; the three of them were, of course, in the backseat. Amelie had the front, with Michael.
“Ya think? In general, or in particular?”
“Weird that we got through the entire thing, and I didn’t have to hit anybody.”
There was a moment of silence. Michael said, as he started the car, “You’re right, Shane. That is strange.”
When Michael parked at the blood bank, Amelie’s security detail was already in place, with the limousine parked at the curb. Claire half expected to see those little devices the Secret Service wore curved around their pale ears, but she supposed the vampires didn’t really need technology to hear one another. They did wear snappy black suits and sunglasses, though, and the second Michael’s car came to a stop, one of them was opening the passenger-side door and offering Amelie a hand. She took it without a bit of awkwardness, graceful as water, and looked back before the door closed to say, “I thank you. All of you.”
That was it. From Amelie, though, that was kind of a lot.
“Shotgun,” Eve and Shane said at the same time, and promptly launched into rock-paper-scissors to settle things. Shane won, then got an odd look on his face.
“You take it,” he said to Eve, who was still holding her scissors position, which had lost to his rock.
“Seriously?” Her eyes widened. “You’re giving up shotgun? I mean, you did win.”
“I know,” he said. “I’d rather stay back here.”
Meaning, with Claire. Eve didn’t waste any time; she bailed and slipped into the front passenger seat, wiggling in satisfaction. Michael smiled at her, and she took his hand.
Shane put his arm around Claire, and she rested her head on his chest. Warm, finally. Warm, safe, and loved. “Man, dinner must be cold,” he said. “Sorry. I know how much you like tacos.”
“Cold tacos are good, too.”
“Sick.” He meant that in a good way. “So, after the tacos, you want to watch a movie or something?”
Claire made a vague sound of agreement, closed her eyes, and without any conscious decision to do it, fell asleep in his arms. She remembered waking up, vaguely, to Shane saying, “Better take her home,” and then another very fuzzy memory of his lips pressed against hers. . . .
Then, nothing.
Morning dawned, and she woke up in her twin bed, at her parents’ house. The first few seconds she felt nothing but a vague sense of disappointment that she’d wasted the opportunity to stay with Shane, but then all that was wiped out by the incredible heat she felt on her face. It was as if she’d fallen asleep under a sunlamp, except the room was pleasantly dim.
Claire slid out of bed, stumbled over the pile of clothes on the floor—she didn’t remember taking them off, but she was wearing a mom-approved cotton nightgown, which meant Shane hadn’t taken them off—and made her way into the bathroom.
The blinding lights came on, and they were cruel. Claire whimpered as she stared at the red blotch of her face, with white patches that must have been forming blisters underneath the first layers of skin. She pressed on her face, tentatively; it hurt—a lot. “Really going to kill you, Myrnin,” she said. “And laugh, too.”
The shower was horrible; hot water turned nuclear when it hit the burns, and she got through it mainly by gritting her teeth and chanting a variety of gruesome and creative ways she could kill her boss. Afterward she felt a little better, but she thought she looked worse. Not a great exchange, really.
She ran into her mother in the hallway, as Mom climbed the last few steps with a neatly folded stack of sheets and towels in her arms. “Oh, you’re up, sweetie,” Mom said, and flashed her a distracted smile. “Want me to change your—oh lord, what happened to your face?”
Mom fumbled the laundry, and Claire caught the toppling stack. “It’s not that bad,” she lied. “I, ah, fell asleep. In the sun.”
“Honey, that’s dangerous! Skin cancer!”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry. It was an accident. These go in the linen closet?”
“Oh—wait, let me take those. I have a system.” The threat to take her mother’s neatly folded laundry and mess it up had the desired effect; Mom left the subject of Claire’s sunburn and focused on the task at hand. “Breakfast is ready downstairs, honey. Oh, dear, your face—can I get you some lotion?”
“No, I’ve got it already. Thanks.” Claire went back to her room, finished dressing, and opened up her backpack. Truthfully, the backpack itself had seen better days; the nylon was ripped and frayed in places, there were stains that Claire was queasily sure were blood over part of the back, and the straps were starting to work their way loose, too. Probably that was because of the amount she crammed into it. She wiggled the books until she was able to pull out her Advanced Particle Physics and the sadly lame Fundamentals of Matrix Computations, which was just about the worst text ever on the subject. Behind that was the giant, backbreaking book of English lit, and all her color-coded notebooks. Behind that was the other stuff. Alchemy and the Hermetic Arts, which wasn’t so much a textbook as an analysis of why the whole field was crap. Myrnin hadn’t recommended it; Claire had ordered it off the Internet from a Web site run by a guy who was creepily paranoid. Of course, if he knew what she knew, he’d probably run screaming, so maybe paranoia was the right attitude.
At the bac
k, in a special Velcro pocket, were her special supplies—the vampire-related ones: a couple of heavy, silver-plated stakes that she hoped never to have to use; a couple of injectable pens that she and Myrnin had rigged up with the serum Dr. Mills had developed, just in case there were still a few vampires around who hadn’t gotten the shot and might be—to put it kindly—unstable. And she wasn’t sure Morley from the cemetery didn’t qualify, but she was glad she hadn’t gotten close enough to use the pen, either.
Folded and shoved all the way to the back was the piece of paper Myrnin had given her with a sequence scribbled on it in symbols. As she did daily, Claire memorized it. She’d test herself later, drawing out the symbols and comparing them against the original. Myrnin had said the reset sequence was only to be used in emergencies, but she had the feeling that if it really got to that point, the last thing she’d have time for would be to try to figure out his sloppy drawing.
She repacked her bag, making sure she could easily slide the books in and out this time, and hefted it experimentally. The strap creaked, and she heard another thread snap. Really need a new one. She wondered where Eve picked up her cute patent leather ones, embossed either with the pink kitty or cute skulls; probably not in town, Claire guessed. Morganville wasn’t exactly Fashion Central.
Breakfast was a family thing in the Danvers house, and Claire actually kind of looked forward to it. She didn’t often make it back for lunch or dinner, but every morning she sat with her mom and dad. Mom asked her about classes; Dad asked her about her job. Claire didn’t know how other families in Morganville worked, but hers seemed pretty . . . normal. At least in the abstract. The specifics were bound to be freaky.
Breakfast over (and, as always, delicious), Claire headed out for school. Morganville was a small-enough town that walking was easy, if you liked that sort of thing, and Claire did—usually. Today, with her gross-looking face throbbing with the heat of the sun, she wished she’d taken up her dad’s offer of buying her a car, even if it had come with the attached strings of also seeing a lot less of her boyfriend. She hadn’t told Shane that he meant more to her than having a car. That seemed like commitment any guy would find scary.
Claire stopped in at the first open store—Pablo’s Market, near the university district—and found a black cloth cap with a brim that shaded her face. That helped, and it made her feel a bit less obviously disfigured . . . until she heard a horn honk behind her, and looked over her shoulder to see a red convertible gliding up next to her on the street.
Claire turned face-forward and kept walking. Faster.
“What is it?” she heard a voice ask from the backseat of the car. Gina or Jennifer; Claire could never tell their voices apart. “It looks kind of human.”
“I don’t know. Zombie? We’ve had zombies here, right?” Gina (or Jennifer)’s vocal twin said. “Could be a zombie. Hey, how do you kill a zombie?”
“Cut its head off,” a third voice said. There was no doubt about whom that voice belonged to, no doubt at all: Monica. It was cool, confident, and commanding. “Let’s find the brain-freak and ask her—she’d know. Hey, zombie chick. Have you seen Claire Danvers, Girl Brain?”
Claire flipped her off and kept walking. Monica—black-haired again, no doubt looking shiny and pretty—was just a vague shadow in her peripheral vision, and Claire wanted to keep it that way.
And she knew, fatalistically, that it was never going to happen.
In fact, Monica didn’t like being flipped off. She accelerated the sports car, whipped it around the corner, and came to a hard stop to block Claire’s progress across the street. Monica and Gina snapped at each other, probably arguing about the specifics of how to kick Claire’s ass without breaking a nail or scuffing a shoe.
Claire gave it up and crossed the street.
Monica threw the car into reverse, and blocked her there, too.
They played the game two more times, back and forth, before Claire finally just stopped and stood there, staring at Monica.
Who laughed. “Oh my God, it is the brain-freak. You know freak is only an expression, right? You didn’t actually have to become a circus attraction just for me.”
“It’s the new thing. High-speed tanning. I’m on the way to an awesome summer glow; you should try it,” Claire said. Jennifer actually laughed. She looked immediately guilty. “I’m going to be late for class.”
“Good. That’ll move the bell curve back toward the middle.”
“Only if you actually attended to drag it down.”
“Ooooh, zing,” Monica said. “I’m crushed, because brains are my only asset. No, wait—that would be you, right?”
Claire sighed. “What do you want?” Because it was kind of obvious they wanted something—and probably something other than just the daily harassment. Monica had worked at cutting her off, after all, and Monica just didn’t do work.
“I need a tutor,” Monica said. “I don’t get this economics bullshit. There are fractions and stuff.”
Economics, in Claire’s opinion, was voodoo science, but she shrugged. Math was math. “Okay. Tomorrow. Fifty bucks, and before we get into it, I won’t take a test for you, steal the answers, or come up with some high-tech way for you to cheat.”
Monica raised her perfect eyebrows. “You do know me.”
“Yes or no.”
“Fine.”
“Common Grounds, three o’clock. You buy the mocha.”
“Greedy little bitch,” Monica said. Business deal concluded, she flipped Claire off with a perfectly manicured finger, smiled, and said, “You look like shit. Love the hat—where’d you get it, Cousin Cletus on the short bus?”
Their laughter lingered, along with the exhaust, as the three girls sped off on their usual mission of chaos and destruction.
Claire took a deep breath, pulled the hat down lower over her face, and went across the street to enter the gates of Texas Prairie University.
Claire loved classes. Oh, not the actual lectures, really—professors were, as a rule, not that exciting in person. But the knowledge. That was right there for the taking, as much as you could grab and hold on to—more than you ever wanted, in some classes.
Like English Lit, which she still didn’t know why she had to take, and which was her last class of the day. It wasn’t as if the Brontë sisters were going to make a difference in her daily life, right? Not like math, which was underneath everything from cooking to construction to going to the moon. No, science was definitely cooler.
At least until today, when her attention was temporarily pulled in by the class assignment.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
It was the strangest thing to read those words of Oscar Wilde at the beginning of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and think of Myrnin saying them, because it was eerily like the kind of explanation he’d give. It gave Claire a strange little lurch, wondering if Myrnin had ever met Oscar Wilde, who had been quite a partyer, apparently. She’d never really considered the lives of vampires much, but now reality set in, and it was strange.
For Myrnin—and Oliver, and Amelie, and most of the vampires she’d ever met—history wasn’t just stuff written in a book, or sometimes captured in an old, stiff photo. For them, history happened day after day after day. Oscar Wilde had just happened a whole lot of days ago.
She bet Myrnin had met him. Probably borrowed his hat or something.
That thought distracted her so much, she didn’t hear her phone ring at first; she’d set it to ultrasonic, so the professor rambled on down on the stage of the stadium-seating room without noticing a thing. Those around her did, though, a
nd she smiled an apology, switched it to silent, and checked the name on the tiny screen. It was Eve. Claire texted her back—IC for in class. It was their standard code. Eve texted CG ASAP OMG. Meaning, get to Common Grounds as soon as she could.
911?
No.
Shane?
No.
Tell!
No!
Claire smiled and folded up the phone, and refocused on the professor, who hadn’t noticed a thing. The last ten minutes of class seemed to crawl by, but she did try to pay close attention. If she was going to seriously ask Myrnin about Oscar Wilde, it might help to actually know something about the dude. Something other than he was snarky, and more or less gay.
After class, Claire jogged through the campus quad, across the grass, and out to the gates. It was still midaft ernoon, so there was loads of time left before sunset. That was a good thing, because it was kind of nice to be out in the fresh air before it got, as Eve liked to title it, THTL—too hot to live, which lasted from about June through October. It didn’t take long to make the trip to Common Grounds. Claire kept her head down, mostly using the cap shading her face to keep passersby from staring at her in horror.
She got to Common Grounds, and for the first time it occurred to her that the place might very well be totally packed, and she might really get stared at, for real. Wonderful. Well, nothing she could do about that.
Claire took a deep breath, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. The interior was dim after the brilliant sunlight, and she blinked away glare and looked around the room. It was crowded, all right—maybe forty people clustered around small café tables, drinking their mochas and lattes and espresso shots. Students, at this hour. The mix of caffeine enthusiasts changed after dark.
