by Rachel Caine
He turned toward her, and his gaze fixed on the silver cross in the hollow of her throat.
“You’re an idiot,” Claire said.
Shane considered that, and nodded. “I really am, mostly.”
“And then you have to go and do these awesome things—”
“I know. I did say I was mostly an idiot.”
“You kind of have your good moments.”
He didn’t quite smile. “So you like it?”
She put her hand up to stroke the cross’s warm silver lines. “I’m wearing it, aren’t I?”
“Not that it means we’re—”
“You said you loved me,” Claire said. “You did say that.”
He shut his mouth and studied her, then nodded. There was a flush building high in his cheeks.
“Well, I love you, too, and you’re still an idiot. Mostly.”
“No argument.” He folded his arms across his chest, and she tried not to notice the way his muscles tensed, or the vulnerable light in his eyes. “So, you moving out?”
“I should,” she said softly. “The other night—”
“Claire. Please be straight with me. Are you moving out?”
She was holding the cross now, cradling it, and it felt warm as the sun against her fingers. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to do laundry first, and that might take a month. You saw the pile.”
He laughed, and it was as if all the strength went out of him. He sat down on his unmade bed, hard, and after a moment, she walked around the end and sat next to him. He put his arm around her.
“Life is a work in progress,” Shane said. “My mom used to say that. I’m kind of a fixer-upper. I know that.”
Claire sighed and allowed herself to relax against his warmth. “Good thing I like high-maintenance guys.”
He was about to kiss her—finally—when they both heard a sound from overhead.
Only there was nothing overhead. Nothing but the attic.
“Did you hear that?” Shane asked.
“Yeah. It sounded like footsteps.”
“Oh, well, that’s fantastic. I thought it was supposed to be exit-only or something.” Shane reached under his bed and came up with a stake. “Go get Michael and Eve. Here.” He handed her another stake. This one had a silver tip. “It’s the Cadillac of vampire killers. Don’t dent it.”
“You are so weird.” But she took it, and then dashed to her room to grab the thin silver knife Amelie had given her. No place to put it, but she poked a hole in the pocket of her jeans just big enough for the blade. The jeans were tight enough to keep the blade in place against her leg, but not so much it looked obvious, and besides, it was pretty flexible.
She hurried down the hall, listening for any other movement. Eve’s room was empty, but when she knocked on Michael’s door, she heard a startled yelp that sounded very Eve-like. “What?” Michael asked.
“Trouble,” Claire said. “Um, maybe? Attic. Now.”
Michael didn’t sound any happier about it than Shane had been. “Great. Be there in a second.”
Muffled conversation, and the sound of fabric moving. Claire wondered if he was getting dressed, and quickly tried to reject that image, not because it wasn’t awesomely hot, but because, well, it was Michael, and besides, there were other things to think about.
Such as what was upstairs in the attic.
Or who.
The door banged open, and Eve rushed out, flushed and mussed and still buttoning her shirt. “It’s not what you think,” she said. “It was just—oh, okay, whatever, it was exactly what you think. Now, what?”
Something dropped and rolled across the attic floor directly above their heads. Claire silently pointed up, and Eve followed the motion, staring as if she could see through the wood and plaster. She jumped when Michael, who’d thrown on an unbuttoned shirt, put a hand on her shoulder. He put a finger to his lips.
Shane stepped out of his room, holding a stake in either hand. He pitched one underhand to Michael.
Where’s mine? Eve mouthed.
Get your own, Shane mouthed back. Eve rolled her eyes and dashed into her own room, coming back with a black bag slung across her chest, bandolier-style. It was, Claire assumed, full of weapons. Eve fished around in it and came up with a stake of her very own. It even had her initials carved in it.
“Shop class,” she whispered. “See? I did learn something in school.”
Michael pressed the button to release the hidden door, and it opened without a sound. There were no lights upstairs that Claire could see. The stairs were pitch-black.
Michael, by common consent, went first, vampire eyes, and all. Shane followed, then Eve; Claire brought up the rear, and tried to move as silently as possible, although not really all that silently, because the stairs creaked beneath the weight of four people. At the top, Claire ran into Eve’s back, and whispered, “What?”
Eve, in answer, reached back to grip her hand. “Michael smells blood,” she whispered. “Hush.”
Michael flicked on a light at the other end of the small, silent room. There was nothing unusual, just the furniture that was always here. There were no signs anybody had been here since the Goldmans and Myrnin had departed.
“How do we get into the attic?” Shane asked. Michael pressed hidden studs, and another door, barely visible at that end of the room, clicked open. Claire remembered it well; Myrnin had shown it to her, when they’d been getting stuff together to go to Bishop’s welcome feast.
“Stay here,” Michael said, and stepped through into the dim, open space.
“Yeah, sure,” Shane said, and followed. He popped his head back in to say, “No, not you two. Stay here.”
“Does he just not get how unfair and sexist that is?” Eve asked. “Men.”
“You really want to go first?”
“Of course not. But I’d like the chance to refuse to go first.”
They waited tensely, listening for any sign of trouble. Claire heard Shane’s footsteps moving through the attic, but nothing else for a long time.
Then she heard him say, “Michael. Oh man . . . over here.” There was tension in his voice, but it didn’t sound like he was about to jump into hand-to-hand combat.
Eve and Claire exchanged looks, and Eve said, “Oh, screw it,” and dived into the attic after them.
Claire followed, gripping the Cadillac of stakes and hoping she wasn’t going to be forced to try to use it.
Shane was crouched down behind some stacked, dusty suitcases, and Michael was there, too. Eve pulled in a sharp breath when she saw what it was they were bending over, and put out a hand to stop Claire in her tracks.
Not that Claire stopped, until she saw who was lying on the wooden floor. She hardly recognized him, really. If it hadn’t been for the gray ponytail and the leather coat . . .
“It’s Oliver,” she whispered. Eve was biting her lip until it was almost white, staring at her former boss. “What happened?”
“Silver,” Michael said. “Lots of it. It eats vampire skin like acid, but he shouldn’t be this bad. Not unless—” He stopped as the pale, burned eyelids fluttered. “He’s still alive.”
“Vampires are hard to kill,” Oliver whispered. His voice was barely a creak of sound, and it broke at the end on what sounded almost like a sob. “Jesu. Hurts.”
Michael exchanged a look with Shane, then said, “Let’s get him downstairs. Claire. Go get some blood from the fridge. There should be some.”
“No,” Oliver grated, and sat up. There was blood leaking through his white shirt, as if all his skin were gone underneath. “No time. Attack on City Hall, coming tonight—Bishop. Using it as a—diversion—to—” His eyes opened wider, and went blank, then rolled up into his head.
He collapsed. Michael caught him under the shoulders.
He and Shane carried Oliver out to the couch, while Eve anxiously followed along, making little shooing motions.
Claire started to follow, then heard something scrape across
the wood behind her, in the shadows.
Oliver hadn’t come here alone.
A black shadow lunged out, grabbed her, and something hard hit her head.
She must have made some sound, knocked something over, because she heard Shane call her name sharply, and saw his shadow in the doorway before darkness took all of it away.
Then she was falling away.
Then she was gone.
13
Claire came awake feeling sick, wretched, and cold. Someone was pounding on the back of her head with a croquet mallet, or at least that was how it felt, and when she tried to move, the whole world spun around.
“Shut up and stop moaning,” somebody said from a few feet away. “Don’t you dare throw up or I’ll make you eat it.”
It sounded like Jason Rosser, Eve’s crazy brother. Claire swallowed hard and squinted, trying to make out the shadow next to her. Yeah, it looked like Jason—skanky, greasy, and insane. She tried to squirm away from him, but ran into a wall at her back. It felt like wood, but she didn’t think it was the Glass House attic.
He’d taken her somewhere, probably using the portal. And now none of her friends could follow, because none of them knew how.
Her hands and feet were tied. Claire blinked, trying to clear her head. That was a little unfortunate, because with clarity came the awareness of just how bad this was. Jason Rosser really was crazy. He’d stalked Eve. He’d—at least allegedly—killed girls in town. He’d definitely stabbed Shane, and he’d staked Amelie at the feast when she’d tried to help him.
And none of her friends back at the Glass House would know how to find her. To their eyes, she would have just . . . vanished.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her voice sounded rusty and scared. Jason reached out and moved hair back from her face, which creeped her out. She didn’t like him touching her.
“Relax, shortcake, you’re not my type,” he said. “I do what I’m told, that’s all. You were wanted. So I brought you.”
“Wanted?”
A low, silky laugh floated on the silence, dark as smoke, and Jason looked over his shoulder as the hidden observer rose and stepped into what little light there was.
Ysandre, Bishop’s pale little girlfriend. Beautiful, sure. Delicate as jasmine flowers, with big, liquid eyes and a sweetly rounded face.
She was poison in a pretty bottle.
“Well,” she said, and crouched down next to Claire. “Look at what the cat dragged in. Meeow.” Her sharp nail dragged over Claire’s cheek, and judging from the sting, it drew blood. “Where’s your pretty boyfriend, Miss Claire? I really wasn’t done with him, you know. I hadn’t even properly started.”
Claire felt an ugly lurch of anger mix with the fear already churning her stomach. “He’s probably not done with you, either,” she said, and managed to smile. She hoped it was a cold kind of smile, the sort that Amelie used—or Oliver. “Maybe you should go looking. I’ll bet he’d be so happy to see you.”
“I’ll show that boy a real good time, when we do meet up again,” Ysandre purred, and put her face very close to Claire’s. “Now, then, let’s talk, just us girls. Won’t that be fun?”
Not. Claire was struggling against the ropes, but Jason had done his job pretty well; she was hurting herself more than accomplishing anything else. Ysandre grabbed Claire’s shoulder and wrenched her upright against the wooden wall, hard enough to bang Claire’s injured head. For a dazed second, it looked like Ysandre’s ripe, red smile floated in midair, like some undead Cheshire cat.
“Now,” Ysandre said, “ain’t this nice, sweetie? It’s too bad we couldn’t get Mr. Shane to join us, but my little helper here, he’s a bit worried about tackling Shane. Bad blood and all.” She laughed softly. “Well, we’ll make do. Amelie likes you, I hear, and you’ve got on that pretty little gold bracelet. So you’ll do just fine.”
“For what?”
“I ain’t telling you, sweetie.” Ysandre’s smile was truly scary. “This town’s going to have a wild night, though. Real wild. And you’re going to get to see the whole thing, up close. You must be all atingle.”
Eve would have had a quip at the ready. Claire just glared, and wished her head would stop aching and spinning. What had he hit her with? It felt like the front end of a bus. She hadn’t thought Jason could hit that hard, truthfully.
Don’t try to find me, Shane. Don’t. The last thing she wanted was Shane racing to the rescue and taking on a guy who’d stabbed him, and a vampire who’d led him around by a leash.
No, she had to find her own way out of this.
Step one: figure out where she was. Claire let Ysandre ramble on, describing all kinds of lurid things that Claire thought it was better not to imagine, considering they were things Ysandre was thinking of doing to her. Instead, she tried to identify her surroundings. It didn’t look familiar, but that was no help; she was still relatively new to Morganville. Plenty of places she’d never been.
Wait.
Claire focused on the crate that Jason was sitting on. There was stenciling on it. It was hard to make it out in the dim light, but she thought it said BRICKS BULK COFFEE. And now that she thought about it, it smelled like coffee in here, too. A warm, morning kind of smell, floating over dust and damp wood.
And she remembered Eve laughing about how Oliver bought his coffee from a place called Bricks. As in, tastes like ground-up bricks, Eve had said. If you order flavored, they add in the mortar.
There were only two coffee shops in town: Oliver’s place, and the University Center coffee bar. This didn’t look like the UC, which wasn’t that old and was mostly built of concrete, not wood.
That meant . . . she was at Common Grounds? But Common Grounds didn’t make any sense; there wasn’t any kind of portal leading to it.
Maybe Oliver has a warehouse. That sounded right, because the vampires seemed to own a lot of the warehouse district that bordered Founder’s Square. Brandon, Oliver’s second-in-vampire-command, had been found dead in a warehouse.
Maybe she was close to Founder’s Square.
Ysandre’s cold fingers closed around Claire’s chin and jerked it up. “Are you listening, honey?”
“Truthfully, no,” Claire said. “You’re kind of boring.”
Jason actually laughed, and turned it into a fake cough. “I’m going outside,” he said. “Since this is going to get all personal now.” Claire wanted to yell to him not to go, but she bit her tongue and turned it into a subsonic whine in the back of her throat as she watched him walk away. His footsteps receded into the dark, and then finally a small square of light opened a long way off.
It was a door, too far for her to reach—way too far.
“I thought he’d never leave,” Ysandre said, and put her cold, cold lips on Claire’s neck, then yelled in shock and pulled away, covering her mouth with one pale hand. “You bitch!”
Ysandre hadn’t seen the silver chain Claire was wearing in the dim light, as whisper-thin as it was. Now there were welts forming on the vampire’s full lips—forming, breaking, and bleeding.
Fury sparked in Ysandre’s eyes. Playtime was over.
As Claire squirmed away, the vampire followed at a lazy stroll. She wiped her burned lips and looked at the thin, leaking blood in distaste. “Tastes like silver. Disgusting. You’ve just ruined my good mood, little girl.”
As she rolled, Claire felt something sharp dig into her leg. The knife. They’d found the stake, but she guessed their search hadn’t exactly been thorough; Jason was too crazy, and Ysandre too careless and arrogant.
But the knife wasn’t going to do her any good at all where it was, unless . . .
Ysandre lunged for her, a blur of white in the darkness, and Claire twisted and jammed her hip down at an awkward angle.
The knife slipped and tore through the fabric of her jeans—not much of it, just a couple of inches, but enough to slice open Ysandre’s hand and arm as it reached for her, all the way to the bone.
Ysand
re shrieked in real pain, and spun away. She didn’t look so pretty now, and when she turned toward Claire again, from a respectful distance this time, she hissed at her with full cobra fangs extended. Her eyes were wild and bloodred, glowing like rubies.
Claire twisted, nearly yanking her elbow out of its joint, and managed to get the ropes around her wrist against the knife. She didn’t have long; the shock wouldn’t keep Ysandre at bay for more than a few seconds.
But getting a silver knife to cut through synthetic rope? That was going to take a while—a while she didn’t have.
Claire sawed desperately, and got a little bit of give on the bonds—enough to almost get her hand into her pocket.
But not.
Ysandre grabbed her by the hair. “I’m going to destroy you for that.”
The pain in her head was blinding. It felt like her scalp was being ripped off, and on top of that, the massive headache roared back to a new, sickening pulse.
Claire loosened the rope enough to plunge her aching hand into her pocket and grab the handle of the knife. She yanked it out of the tangle of fabric and held it at a trembling, handicapped en garde—still tied up, but whatever, she wasn’t going to stop fighting, not ever.
Ysandre shrieked and let her go, which made no sense to Claire’s confused, pain-shocked mind. I didn’t stab her yet. Did I? Not that she wanted to stab anybody, even Ysandre. She just wanted—
What was going on?
Ysandre’s body slammed down hard on the wooden floor, and Claire gasped and flinched away . . . but the vampire had fallen facedown, limp, and weirdly broken.
A small woman dressed in gray, her pale hair falling wild around her shoulders, dropped silently from overhead and put one impeccably lovely gray pump in the center of Ysandre’s back, holding her down as she tried to move.
“Claire?” The woman’s face turned toward her, and Claire blinked twice before she realized whom she was looking at.
Amelie. But not Amelie. Not the cool, remote Founder—this woman had a wild, furious energy to her that Claire had never seen before. And she looked young.
