by Rachel Caine
"I think you did," Michael said. "You called her a fang-banger."
The nurse smiled coldly. "If I muttered something under my breath, sir, that shouldn't concern you. You and your — girlfriend — ought to do your business in the waiting room. Or the blood bank."
Michael's hands curled into fists, and his face went tight with rage. "It's not like that."
The nurse — her nametag said her name was Christine Fenton, R.N. —outright sneered at him. "Yeah, it never is. It's always different, right? You're just misunderstood. You want to hurt me, go ahead and try. I'm not afraid of you. Any of you."
"Good," Michael said. "You shouldn't be afraid of me because I'm a vampire. You ought to be scared because you just trash-talked my girlfriend to her face."
Nurse Fenton flipped him off and kept walking.
"Wow," Eve said. She almost sounded like herself again, as if having somebody diss her had helped, like a slap in the face. "And people treated me bad when I dated Bobby Fee. Well, at least he was breathing. Mouth-breathing, yeah, but — "
Michael put his arm around her, still staring after the nurse. He had a frown on his face, but he forced it off to smile at Eve and plant a kiss on her forehead.
"You need some rest. Let's go back to the waiting room," he said. "I promise not to embarrass you any more." He guided her that direction, and threw a look back. "Claire? You coming?"
She nodded absently, but her mind was somewhere else, trying to sort through data. Fenton. She'd seen that name before, hadn't she? Not the nurse, though, she'd never met her before and now really didn't look forward to ever seeing her again.
Claire realized she was standing alone in the hallway, and shivered. While this was a modern building, not nearly as nasty as the old, falling-to-ruins abandoned hospital where she and Shane had been chased for their lives, it still brought the creepy. She threw one last, aching glance at the frosted glass doors that read SURGICAL AREA - ADMITTANCE TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She couldn't see anything beyond except vague moving shadows.
She followed Michael back to the waiting room. Richard Morrell was gone, which was good, and Claire sat in silence, rubbing her hands together, still feeling the phantom slickness of Shane's blood on her skin.
"Hey," Michael said. She didn't know how much time had passed, just that she was stiff and sore and tense. She looked up into his crystal-blue eyes, and saw strength and kindness, but just a little bit of a glitter that didn't seem ... natural. "Rest. I can almost hear the gears grinding in your head." Eve was asleep in his lap, curled up like a cat. He was stroking her dark hair. "Here," he said. "Lean in." And he put his arm around Claire, and she leaned, and despite everything that had happened she felt warm and safe.
It all fell in on her then, all the fear and the pain and the fact that Shane had gotten shot, right in front of her, and she didn't know how to deal with that, didn't know how to feel or what to say or do and it was all just ...
She turned her face into Michael's blue silk shirt and cried, silent heaving sobs that tore up out of her guts in painful jerks. Michael's hand cradled her head, and he let her cry.
She felt him press his cool lips to her temple when she finally relaxed against him, and then she just slid away, into the dark.
###
Claire fought her way, panicked, out of a nightmare, and into another one. Hospital. Shane. Surgery.
Eve was shaking her with both hands on her shoulders, babbling at her, and she couldn't follow the words, but the words didn't matter at first.
Eve was smiling.
"He's okay," Claire said in a whisper, then louder. "He's okay!"
"Yeah," Eve said, the words tumbling out in a confusing bright flood, way too fast. "He's out of surgery, it was touch and go, he had a lot of internal bleeding, he's going to be in ICU for a few days before they let him come home, and he'll have a temporary bracelet, you know, the plastic kind?"
Claire tried to literally shake the sleepy fog out of her head. "Plastic — wait, don't you always get one of those in the hospital? Like an ID tag?"
"Do you? Really? How weird. Oh. Well, in Morganville you leave it on when you leave, and it protects you for up to a month after surgery. Kind of like a temporary vampire restraining order." Eve actually bounced up and down. "He's going to be okay, oh my God, he's going to be okay!"
Claire scrambled out of her seat, grabbed Eve's arms, and the two of them bounced together up and down, then fell into a hug and squealed.
"I'll just — let you guys do that," Michael said. He was sitting in the chairs watching, but he was smiling. He looked tired.
"What time is it?" Claire asked.
"Late. Early." Eve checked her skull watch. "About six in the morning. Michael, you should get home, it'll be dawn soon. I'll stay here with Claire."
"We should all go home," Michael said. "He's not going to wake up for hours yet. You could change clothes."
Claire looked down at herself, and grimaced tiredly. "Yeah, I could," she admitted. Shane's blood had soaked into her patterned tights, and she thought Michael could probably smell it. She could even smell it, a musty, rotten odor that made her gag. "Eve? You want to go too?"
Eve nodded. The three of them walked out of the waiting room and down the long, empty hallway toward the elevators. They passed the front desk, where Nurse Fenton glared at them. When Claire looked back, as they waited for the elevator, Nurse Fenton was dialing the phone.
"Why do I know that name?" she asked, and then realized, duh, she was with two Morganville natives. "Fenton? You guys know anything about her?"
The elevator arrived. Eve stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby, and she and Michael looked at each other for a second.
"The family's been here for generations," Michael said. "Nurse Charming out there's a new arrival. She came to TPU for school, married into the family."
"You met her husband," Eve said. "Officer Fenton, Brad Fenton. He's the one who — "
"The one who showed up when Sam was attacked," Claire blurted. "Of course! I forgot his name." Why did that still leave her vaguely uneasy? She couldn't remember anything that Officer Fenton had done that had made her think he was anti-vamp; he'd acted quickly enough when Sam was in trouble. Not like his wife, who clearly wasn't as open-minded.
She worried about it for a while, but couldn't see any real connection, and there were other things to think about. After all, Shane was okay, and that was all that mattered.
###
A shower helped, but it didn't banish the dull ache between Claire's eyes, or the strange gray cast the world had taken on. Exhaustion, she guessed, and stress. Nothing looked quite right. She changed clothes, grabbed her backpack, and went back to the hospital — this time, taking a cab, despite it being broad daylight — to wait for visiting hours to start in ICU. No sign of Jason, but then, she hadn't expected him to be that obvious. Or that stupid. He'd managed to get away with it this long.
But then again ... He really hadn't struck her as all that far-thinking, either. More of a want-take-have kind of guy. So what did that mean? Was Eve right? Was this a giant official cover-up, and Jason had been given free rein to run around town raping and killing and shooting as the mood moved him? She shuddered to think.
Nurse Fenton was, mercifully, off duty when Claire arrived. She checked in with the younger, nicer lady at the desk, whose name was Helen Porter, and went to find the least uncomfortable chair in the waiting area. The building wasn't completely lame; there were laptop connections and desks, and she set herself up there. The wireless was crap, but there was a LAN connection, and that worked fine.
Of course, the filters restricted where she could go on the internet, and she quickly grew frustrated trying to find out what was happening in the world outside of Morganville ... more of the same, she guessed. War, crime, death, atrocity. Sometimes it hardly seemed that vampires were the bad guys, given the things people did to each other without the excuse of needing a pint of O neg to
get through the day.
She wondered if the vampires had made any headway tracking down who could have staked Sam. Surely they'd found out something. Then again, they hadn't had a lot of luck cornering Shane's dad, either ...
Her laptop connection stopped working, right in the middle of an email to her parents. She'd been avoiding making the call, because there was this dangerous temptation to start spilling out her hurt and fear and look for comfort — after all, wasn't that what parents were for? —but if she did, they'd either come running to town, which would be bad, or they'd try to pull her out of school again, which would definitely be worse. Worse in every way.
Still, she knew she was overdue to talk to her mom, and the longer she put it off, the more stress it was going to be for both of them.
Claire logged off the laptop, packed it, and opened up her new cool phone. It glowed with a pale blue light when she dialed the number, and she heard faint clicking. That probably meant the call was being recorded, or at least monitored. More reason to be careful about what she said ...
Mom answered the phone on the third ring. "Hello?"
"Hi!" Claire winced at the artificial cheeriness of her tone. Why couldn't she sound natural? "Mom, it's Claire."
"Claire! Honey, I've been worried. You should have called days ago."
"I know, Mom, I'm sorry. I got busy. I got transferred into some advanced classes, they're really great but there's been a lot of homework and reading. I just forgot."
"Well," her mother said. "I'm glad to hear that those teachers are recognizing that you need special attention. I was a little worried when you told me the classes were so easy. You like challenges, I know that."
Oh, I'm challenged now, Claire thought. Between the classes and Myrnin, being stalked by Jason and being terrified for Shane ... "Yeah, I do," she said. "So I guess this is all good."
"What else? How are your friends? That nice Michael, is he still playing his guitar?" Mom asked it as if it was a silly little hobby that he'd give up eventually.
"Yes, Mom, he's a musician. He's still playing. In fact, he was playing in the University Center the other day. He got quite a crowd."
"Well, fine. I hope he's not playing in some of those clubs, though. That gets dangerous."
There was more of that, the danger talk, and Claire worried that her mother was, if not remembering exactly, at least remembering something. Why would she be so fixated on how dangerous things could be?
"Mom, you're overreacting," Claire finally said. "Honest, everything's fine here."
"Well, you started out this semester in the emergency room, Claire, you can't really blame me for worrying. You're very young to be out on your own, and not even in the dorm ..."
"I told you about the problems with the dorm," Claire said.
"Yes, I know, the girls weren't very nice — "
"Not very nice? Mom! They threw me down the stairs!"
"I'm sure that was an accident."
It hadn't been, but there was something about her mother that wasn't going to accept that, not really. For all her fluttering and worrying, she didn't want to believe that something really could be badly wrong.
"Yeah," Claire sighed. "Probably. Anyway, the house is great. I really like it there."
"And Michael has our numbers? In case there's any problem?"
"Yes, Mom, everybody's got the numbers. Oh, speaking of that, here's my new cell phone — " She rattled off the digits, twice, and made her mother read them back. "It's got better reception than the old one, so you can get me a lot easier, okay?"
"Claire," her mother said. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"Yes. I'm fine."
"I don't want to pry, but that boy, the one in the house — not Michael, but — "
"Shane."
"Yes, Shane. I think you should keep your distance from him, honey. He's old for you, and he seems pretty sure of himself."
She did not want to get into the subject of Shane. She'd nearly stumbled over saying his name, it hurt so bad. She wanted to talk to her mother the way she'd used to. They'd talked about everything, once, but there was no way she could really talk about Morganville with her family.
And that meant, there was no way she could talk about anything at all.
"I'll be careful," she managed to say, and her attention was caught by the young nurse standing in the doorway of the waiting area, waving for her attention. "Oh — Mom, I have to go. Sorry. Somebody's waiting for me."
"All right, honey. We love you."
"Love you too." She hung up, slid the phone into her pocket, and grabbed her backpack.
The nurse led her through another set of glass double doors into an area labeled ICU. "He's awake," she said. "You can't stay long, we want him to rest as much as possible, and I can already tell he's going to be a difficult patient." She smiled at Claire, and winked. "See if you can sweeten him up a little for me. Make my life easier."
Claire nodded. She felt nervous and a little sick with the force of her need to see him, touch him ... and at the same time, she dreaded it. She hated the thought of seeing him like this, and she didn't know what she was going to say. What did people say, when they were this scared of losing someone?
He looked worse than she'd imagined, and she must have let it show. Shane grunted and closed his eyes for a few seconds. "Yeah, well, I'm not dead, that's something. One of those in the house is enough." He looked awful — pale as, well, Michael. The baseball bat had left him with Technicolor bruising, and he seemed fragile in ways Claire hadn't even thought about. There were so many tubes and things. She sat down in the chair next to his raised bed and reached over the railing to touch him lightly on his scraped, bruised hand.
He turned it to twine their fingers together. "You're all right?"
"Yeah," she said. "Jason ran away, after." Walked, really, but she wasn't going to say that. "Eve's okay, too. She was here while you were in surgery, she just went home to change clothes. She'll be back."
"Yeah, I guess the diva dress might have been a little much around here." He opened his eyes and looked at her directly. "Claire. Really. You're okay?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Except that I'm scared for you."
"I'm okay."
"Except for the bullet wound and all the internal bleeding? Yeah, sure, tough guy." She heard her voice quiver, and knew she was about to cry. She didn't want to. He wanted to laugh it off, wanted to be tough, and she ought to let him, right?
He tried to shrug, but it must have hurt, from the spasm that went across his face. One of the machines near Claire beeped, and he let out a slow sigh. "That's better. Man, they give you the good stuff in ICU. Remind me to always get seriously wounded from now on. That minor injury stuff isn't as much fun."
It was wearing him out to talk. Claire got up and leaned over to stroke her fingertips lightly over his lips. "Shhhh," she said. "Rest, okay? Save it for somebody who isn't me. It's okay to be scared. It's okay to be hurt, Shane. With me, it's okay."
For a second his eyes glittered with tears, and then the tears spilled over, threading wet trails into his hair. "Damn," he whispered. "Sorry. I just — I felt it all going away, I felt you going away, I tried — I thought he was going to hurt you and there was nothing I could do about it — "
"I know." She leaned forward and kissed him very lightly, careful of the bruises. "I know."
He cried a little, and she stayed right where she was, his shield against the world, until it was over. Finally, he fell into a light sleep, and she felt a tap on her shoulder. The nurse motioned for her to step out, and Claire carefully pulled her hand free of Shane's and followed.
"Sorry," Helen said. "I'd like for him to sleep a while before we start with the poking and prodding. You can come back this afternoon, all right?"
"Sure. What time?"
Four o'clock. That left her the entire day to kill, and not the slightest idea what she ought to be doing with it. She didn't have to see Myrnin; Amelie hadn't given her any ot
her instructions to follow. It was Saturday, so she wasn't cutting any classes, and she didn't want to go back to the Glass House and just ... worry.
Claire was still trying to decide what to do when she spotted a familiar, well-groomed figure standing outside of the hospital doors.
What was Jennifer, one of Monica's regular clique, doing hanging around here?
Waiting for Claire, apparently, because she hurried to catch up as Claire strode by, heading for the taxi stand. "Hey," she said, and tucked her glossy hair behind her ear. "So. How's Shane doing?"
"Like you care," Claire said.
"Well, yeah. I don't. But Monica wants to know."
"He's alive." That was no more than Monica could learn without her help, so it didn't really matter, and Claire didn't like having Jennifer this close. Monica was creepy, but at least she was Alpha Creepy. There was something pathetic and extra-weird about her two groupies.
Jennifer kept pace with her. Claire stopped and turned to face her. They were halfway down the sidewalk, in the full glare of early-fall sunlight, which at least meant it wasn't too likely some vampire would be sneaking up on her while Jennifer kept her distracted. "Look," Claire said. "I don't want anything to do with you, or Monica, okay? I don't want to be friends. I don't want you sucking up to me just because I'm — somebody, or something."
Jennifer didn't look like she wanted to be sucking up, either. She looked as bitter and resentful as a glossy, entitled rich girl could look, in fact — which was a lot. "Dream on, loser. I don't care who your Patron is, you're never going to be anything more than jumped-up trailer trash with delusions. Friends? I wouldn't be friends with you if you were the last person breathing in this town."
"Unless Monica said so," Claire said spitefully. "Fine, you don't want to exchange friendship rings. So why are you bothering me?"
Jennifer glared at her for a few seconds, stubborn and angry, and then looked away. "You're smart, right? Like, freak-smart?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"You placed out of the two classes we were in together. You must have aced the tests."
