by Rachel Caine
Everybody stared as she passed. Claire tried to pretend it was because of how fabulously cute she was, but that was a leap of faith she really couldn’t make, and now her sunburn was worse because she was blushing on top of it, and also, ow.
Eve was all the way toward the back, jammed into a corner and defending an empty chair across the table with sharp glares and careful deployment of harsh words. She looked relieved as Claire dropped into the seat, leaned her heavy backpack against the table leg, and sighed, “I really need coffee.”
Eve stared at her face for a few long seconds, then said, “And I can see why. Yo! Mocha!”
She snapped her fingers.
She snapped her fingers at Oliver, who was behind the counter pulling espresso shots. He looked up at her with blank contempt. “Yo,” he repeated with poisonous sarcasm. “I am not your waitress.”
“Really? Because we tip, if that helps. And you’d look really good in a frilly apron.”
Oliver slammed back the pass-through hinged section of the bar and came out to stand over their table, giving them the full benefit of his presence. And that, to put it mildly, was intimidating. “What do you want, Eve?”
“Well, I’d like the blue-plate special of you thrown out of Morganville, with a side order of dead, but I’ll settle for a mocha for my friend.” Eve tapped purple metallic fingernails against the china of her coffee cup, and didn’t look away from Oliver’s glare. “What you going to do, Oliver? Ban me for life from your crappy shop?”
“I’m considering it.” Some of the aggression faded out of him, replaced by curiosity. “Why are you challenging me, Eve?”
“Why shouldn’t I? We’re not exactly besties,” Eve said. “And besides, you’re a jerk.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t a nice sort of smile. “And how have I offended you recently?”
“You were totally going to screw us over last night, weren’t you?”
Oliver’s smile faded. “I came when Amelie called. As I always do.”
“Until you don’t, right? Sooner or later, she’s going to ring the little bell and faithful servant Ollie isn’t going to show up to save her ass. That’s the plan. Death by slacking, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.”
“And how is that any business of yours, in any case?” Oliver’s eyes were dark, very dark, and full of secrets that Claire wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“It’s not. I just don’t like you.” Eve tapped her talons again. “Mocha?”
He glanced at Claire’s blistered face and said, without too much sympathy, “That’s quite disfiguring.”
“I know.”
“A week should see it right.” Which was, weirdly, kind of comforting in its dismissal of her problems. “Very well, mocha.” But he didn’t leave. Eve widened her eyes and looked irritated.
“What?”
“It’s customary to pay for things you buy.”
“Oh, come on. . . .”
“Four fifty.”
Claire dug a five-dollar bill from the pocket of her jeans and handed it over. Oliver left.
“Why are you doing that?” she asked Eve, a little anxiously. Because hey, it was cool and everything, to get in Oliver’s face, but it was also not exactly safe.
“Because they cast him as Mitch, which means I have to pretend to actually like the dude. Ugh.”
“Oh, the play. Right. I, uh, looked it up. Looks interesting.” Claire said that kind of halfheartedly, because it didn’t, at least to her. It sounded like a lot of middle-aged people having melodrama.
“It is interesting,” Eve said, and brightened up immediately. “Blanche is sort of really the symbol of the way women oppress themselves; she just can’t live without a man. Come to think of it, based on that, I guess Oliver’s casting was genius.”
“So . . . you’re playing a woman who can’t live without a man?”
“It’s a stretch, but the director wanted to do this post-modern kind of take on it, so he went with Goth girls for Blanche and Stella.”
“Goth girls, plural,” Claire repeated. “I kind of thought you were the only one in town.”
“Not quite.”
“Eve? You 911ed me?”
“Oh—uh, yeah, I did. I wanted you to meet—oh, there she is! Kim!”
Claire looked around. A girl had just come in the door of the coffee shop, not quite as Goth as Eve, but quite a bit farther down the curve than anybody else in the room. She had long black hair, dyed jet-black, with bubble-gum pink stripes. Her makeup was mostly eyeliner. She wore less-outrageous stuff, but what she did wear seemed kind of grim—black cargo pants, plain black shirt,black leather wristband, which had (of course) a vampire symbol on it.
Kim had signed up with a vampire named Valerie, apparently. Claire didn’t know much about her, but she supposed that was a good thing. If nobody was talking about her, Valerie was probably playing by the rules. Mostly.
“Hey, Eve,” Kim said, and slid into the third chair at the small table. “Who’s the burn victim?”
Claire felt herself stiffen, she just couldn’t stop herself. “I’m Claire,” she said, and forced a smile. “Hi.”
“Hey,” Kim said, and dropped Claire like a bad boyfriend to focus on Eve. “Oh my God, did you hear they cast Stanley?”
“No! Who?” Eve leaned forward, wide-eyed. “God, tell me it’s not that kid from high school.”
“No. Guess again.”
“Um . . . no clue.”
“Radovic.”
“Get out!” Eve jiggled in her chair, grabbed Kim’s hands, and then they both let out a wild, high-pitched scream of excitement.
Claire blinked as a mocha was thumped down in front of her. She looked up at Oliver, who was studying her with cool, distant eyes. He raised his eyebrows, didn’t speak, and went back to his job.
“Who’s Radovic?” Claire asked, since he seemed to be the most exciting thing since indoor plumbing. She couldn’t remember which character Stanley was, but she thought he was the wife-beating rapist—not somebody she felt inclined to squeal over.
“He runs the motorcycle shop,” Eve said. “Big biker dude, shaved head, muscles TDF.”
“TDF?” Claire cocked her head. “Oh. To die for.” She lowered her voice. “So, is he . . . you know?” She mimed fangs. Both of the Goth girls laughed.
“Hell no,” Kim said. “Rad? He’s just cool, that’s all. In that dangerous kind of way. I think he’s way more scary than any of them I ever met.” By which she meant vampires.
“I guess we don’t meet the same ones,” Claire said.
“Because mine? Plenty scary.” And . . . she knew that all of a sudden, she was trying to one-up Kim, and she didn’t like that about herself. She also didn’t like Eve and Kim being besties all of a sudden while she was sitting like a poor, pathetic lump on the sidelines with her disfigured face, with Oliver bringing her sympathy mocha.
That was just sad.
Kim barely glanced at her. “Yeah?” She sounded totally uninterested. “Hey, E, can I catch a ride to rehearsal tonight? Would you mind?”
“Nope. Hey, can I come in and see what you’re working on?” Eve threw Claire a quick smile. “Kim’s kind of an avant-garde artist. She’s really cool; I love her stuff.” There was a real glow in Eve’s eyes, an excitement that made Claire feel cold and a little pissed off. I’m your friend, she wanted to say. I’m cool, too, right? So she wasn’t some weird artist type who made art out of used toilet paper rolls and chicken bones—so what? What made that cool, anyway?
Eve didn’t hear all the mental arguments. Kim said something about the script, and they both got out their copies and flipped pages, talking about theme and motif and things Claire honestly couldn’t care less about, because she was now officially in a miserable mood.
She gulped the mocha as fast as humanly possible, given that Oliver had heated it up to the surface temperature of lava. She felt truly betrayed, not just because Eve had dragged her into the middle of Common Grou
nds with her face looking like undercooked hamburger, but because she was sitting there chattering away with Kim, ignoring Claire’s presence entirely now.
As Claire got up, though, Eve blinked and looked at her. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah.” Claire couldn’t bring herself to sound too apologetic. “I need to get home.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, I just thought—I thought you’d like to meet Kim, that’s all. Because she’s cool.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Kim said. She didn’t sound all that sincere about it, but more like she wished Claire would hurry up and hit the bricks so she could get back to her BFF-fest with Eve. “Hey, you guys live in that house with Michael Glass and Shane Collins, right? What a couple of hotties!”
Claire didn’t like that Kim had even noticed Shane, much less knew his last name. Eve didn’t seem to mind at all. She just nodded, eyes wide. “They are, right? Man candy. We know!”
Claire grabbed her backpack. “I really have to go.”
“Claire—you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Kim was kind of smirking at her behind her drink, and Claire had a wild impulse to dump that coffee all over her.
But she didn’t.
“Bye?” Eve said, and made it a kind of pathetic question. Claire didn’t answer. She just pushed past Kim’s chair, not being too careful about it, and headed for the door.
Behind her, she heard Kim’s clear, carrying voice say, “Wow, what crawled up her ass and didn’t die?”
Claire threw a venomous look back over her shoulder, and saw Oliver watching her with a very slight frown grooving his forehead. Eve looked stricken, clearly surprised at Claire’s departure. Kim . . . Kim wasn’t even watching her. She just lifted one shoulder in an I-can’t-be-bothered shrug.
Then Claire was outside, taking deep breaths of the dry air and lifting her face to the sudden, swirling push of the wind. Sand hissed over the sidewalk, blown in from the desert.
Claire, miserably aware that she was in a horrible mood, walked home with the feeling that everyone, absolutely everyone, was watching her.
4
Michael was playing guitar in the living room of the house when Claire stomped down the hall, dumped her backpack without much care for the electronic feelings of the laptop inside, and threw herself full length down on the sofa. Michael stopped in mid-chord, and she sensed he was staring at her, but she didn’t look. Eventually, he started up again. The music spilled over her, beautiful and complicated, and as Claire lay there and just concentrated on breathing, she felt some of the awful tension inside her start to ease up. Still a horrible day, but she could never feel too angry when Michael was playing.
“So,” he said, not looking up from the frets as he tried out a complicated new flood of sound, “I’m thinking of going electric. What do you think?”
“Eve dumped me. I’ve been best-friend dumped.”
Michael’s playing stuttered, then smoothed out again. “Huh. I’m guessing that’s a no?”
“There’s this girl, Kim? You know who she is?” Michael nodded, but didn’t say anything. Claire felt her hands curl into fists, and deliberately, carefully straightened them out. “So this Kim, she’s like perfect and all. Ooooh, she’s an artist. And all of a sudden she and Eve have everything in common and I’m just—the stranger who doesn’t get the jokes.”
“I’ve met Kim,” Michael said. His voice was neutral, and he kept his gaze on his guitar. “She’s like a black hole; she just pulls people right out of their orbits. Eve’s still your friend. She’s just crushing on Kim because Kim never wanted to hang with her before.”
“So what’s the story of the fantastic Kim, anyway?”
He shrugged, and shot her a quick, unreadable look. “She went to OLOM, so I didn’t know her all that well.”
“OLOM?” Claire repeated.
“I forget you didn’t grow up here. Our Lady of Mystery. Catholic school across town run by the scariest nuns you’ve ever seen. Anyway, Kim bailed on school when she was fourteen, I think. She’s our resident funky-artist type, I guess—more likely to flip you off than shake your hand.”
“I’ll bet she sucks.”
It looked like Michael was trying hard to hide a smile. “Art’s always subjective. She may suck to you.”
“She doesn’t to you?” Claire felt a little sinking sensation. Oh, great, of course Michael would like Kim, too. Shane probably not only liked her, but had dated her, and was secretly still in love with her. Claire Danvers, New Girl, was probably the only person in Morganville who didn’t think Kim was all that, supersized.
Michael stilled the strings on his guitar with the flat of his palm and sat back, finally looking right at her. “You should get to know her,” he said. “She’s—interesting. Just don’t get too close.”
“She treated me like crap.”
“She does that,” he agreed. “Did you know she survived a vampire attack when she was homeless and sixteen?”
Claire swallowed whatever she’d been about to say, which would have been snarky and sarcastic. Instead, she said, “Survived how?”
“Killed the vamp trying to drain her. She could have been executed—town rules. Instead, she was acquitted. No jail time. Brandon wasn’t happy about it—he was Amelie’s second-in-command at the time—but he had to swallow it. So really, there are only two humans in Morganville who’ve ever killed a vampire and gotten away with it.”
“Kim and who else?”
Michael raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Richard Morrell,” he said.
“Seriously?” Because Richard Morrell was now the mayor of Morganville, one of the three most important people in town, and it boggled Claire’s mind to think that the vamps had allowed him to just . . . walk away from that. “When?”
Michael didn’t have time to answer, because his cell phone started playing “Born to Be Wild,” and he pulled it to check the screen. “Got to get ready,” he said. “Sorry. Story time later. Hey, trust me, Kim’s a force of nature, but like a storm, she moves on. Eve will be fascinated for a while, but Kim will find somebody else soon enough. It’s how she rolls.”
Claire had the really strong impression that he wasn’t telling her everything. Or anything, really. But he didn’t give her time to go into it, either, just storing his guitar in the case and heading upstairs.
“Get ready,” she repeated, still simmering. “Yeah, everybody’s got somewhere to be but me. You should get to know Kim; she’s interesting.” Claire put a load of mockery into her Michael impression. “Yeah right.”
The back door opened and closed, floorboards creaked in the kitchen, and Claire smelled the delicious wood-smoke aroma of barbecue. She couldn’t help but smile, because hey—barbecue.
And, of course, the one bringing it.
“Hey,” Shane said, and leaned over the couch to stare down at her. His hair was getting longer, and even more slacker-messy, as if he’d gone after the most annoying bits with a pair of scissors. Or garden trimmers. It should have looked horrible, but on him, somehow . . . it looked hot.
Not that she was in any way prejudiced.
“Hey,” she replied, and held up her hand for him to smack. Instead, he took it and kissed it lightly.
“Why the mopey face? Did I forget to say something?”
“From you, hey is good enough.” She sighed. Complaining about Kim hadn’t been the great release she’d thought it would be; Michael had been on the fence, at best, and she had no reason to think Shane would be any different. “I’m just in a terrible mood.”
“This I’ve got to see.” Shane leaned over and stared into her eyes. “Wow. Yeah, that’s terrifying. I can see that you’re one second from snapping, Hannibal Lecter.”
She sighed. “Nobody’s scared of me.”
“Nope. Nobody. That’s a good thing, Claire.”
“Says the guy who scares everybody.”
Shane consi
dered that and smiled slowly. She loved the way one side of his smile pulled higher than the other, and the little dimple that formed there. “I don’t scare you.”
“Well. Only a little, maybe.”
“I’ll have to work on getting rid of that little bit,” he said. “Speaking of scary, how’s your freaky boss?”
“Don’t know, didn’t go, don’t care,” she said. “My face hurts.”
“So you’re moping because your face hurts?”
“I’m ugly and nobody loves me.”
“Wrong,” he said, “and really wrong.” He kissed her fingers again, and this time, his lips stayed warm on her skin for a long time. “Michael’s getting ready?”
Claire let out an annoyed breath. “Yeah. Everybody’s got somewhere to go but me, and—what?” Because she was getting an odd look.
“The theater at TPU? He’s playing tonight? Packed house? Remember?”
Oh crap. No, she’d forgotten all about it, and now she felt—if possible—even worse. “I’m an idiot,” she said. “Oh man. I’ve been whining like a two-year-old about Kim. I forgot he was trying to get himself together for the show.”
“Kim?” Shane’s attention snapped into bright focus. “Kim. Goth Kim?”
“Yeah, what’s her last name, anyway? Weird Kim. That one.”
“Where’d you meet Kim?”
“Eve. I guess they’re in the play together?”
“Oh, crap,” Shane said. His expression changed, went guarded. “So you talked to her.”
“I wasn’t worth talking to.”
Was she wrong, or was that a little flicker of relief? “Probably a good thing. She’s kind of a flake.”
“Kind of?” Claire’s eyes narrowed. “Did you date her?”
His eyes went wide, and there was a fatal second of silence before he said, “Not—exactly. No. I—no.”
“Did you hook up?”
He started to answer, then shook his head. “I’ve got no good options here,” he said. “Whatever I say, you’re going to believe I did, right? But even if I did, it was a long time ago, and anyway, I’m with you now. All right?”
