by Rachel Caine
Oliver’s face suddenly popped up in front of the window. They all screamed—even Michael—and jumped back. Shane tried to push Claire behind him. She smacked at him until he left her alone.
She wanted to hear what Oliver had to say.
“It’s nearly five o’clock,” Oliver said, his voice muffled by the window glass. “We’re running out of time, Michael. Either invite me in and give me the book, or I’m afraid this is going to get unpleasant.”
“Wait!” Claire balled her hands into fists. “I want to trade for it!”
His eyes weighed her, and dismissed her. “I’m very sorry, my dear, but that opportunity has come and gone. We’re in much rougher waters now. Either hand over the book, or we’ll come in and get it. I promise you, this is the best deal you’re likely to get this side of hell.”
Michael yanked down the shade. “Shane. You, Eve, and Claire get into the pantry room. Move it.”
“No way!” Eve declared. “I’m not leaving you!”
He took her hand and locked eyes with her, in a way that made Claire’s knees go weak even at several feet away. “They can’t hurt me, except by hurting the house itself. They can’t kill me, except by destroying the house. Understand? You guys are the vulnerable ones. And I want you safe.”
He kissed her hand, darted a self-conscious look at Claire and Shane, and then kissed her lips, too.
“Huh,” Shane said. “Thought so.” He took Claire’s hand. “Michael’s right. Better get you girls someplace safe.”
“You, too, Shane,” said Michael.
“No way!”
“Not the time to be proving anything, dude. Just take care of them. I can take care of myself.”
Maybe, Claire thought. And maybe he just wanted them out of the way in case he couldn’t.
Either way, she didn’t have a chance to protest. Shane steered her and Eve into the kitchen, loaded them down with water and prepackaged food like Pop-Tarts and energy bars, and helped them stack things in the dark, gloomy hiding place where Claire had spent her first morning in the Glass House.
She didn’t know if Shane really might have followed Michael’s orders—it was possible, she guessed—but just as they were pushing the last of the supplies into the narrow little doorway, there was a loud crashing of glass from the living room.
“What the hell?” Shane blurted, and ducked out to see what was going on. Claire went after him, and when she looked back, Eve was following, too.
But they didn’t get very far, because the kitchen window smashed into splinters, and Claire and Eve stopped and turned to look.
Oliver was standing just outside the window. They heard more glass breaking, all over the house.
“Girls,” he said. “I’m sorry to do this. Truly I am. But you’re not giving me much choice. Last chance. Invite me in, and this can end peacefully.”
“Bite me!” Eve taunted. “Oh, wait…you can’t, can you? Not from way out there!”
His eyes flared, and his fangs snapped down. Threat display. That was what it was called when a rattlesnake shook its tail, or a cobra spread its hood. He was giving them a clear sign that he didn’t find them very funny.
“The book,” he said. “Or your lives. That’s the only deal you’re going to get, Claire. I suggest you make the right choice quickly.”
“It’s okay,” Eve said. “They can’t come inside.”
Oliver nodded, his faded, curling hair blowing in the hot night wind. “That’s true,” he said. “But then, I’m hardly all alone.”
And he stepped aside as a policeman, in uniform, broke out the remaining glass with a nightstick and hopped up on the windowsill to climb through.
Eve and Claire screamed and ran.
The living room was a mess of broken furniture, scattered papers, struggling bodies—Shane punched out some guy in a black jacket, who flew back out of the window and into the arms of some waiting, snarling vampires. Michael was fighting a couple more, whom he just bodily picked up and threw out. As Eve and Claire skidded into the room and broke right and left, the cop in pursuit ran headlong into Michael and got tossed out, as well.
“They’re coming in!” Eve screamed, and slammed the kitchen door and jammed a chair under the handle. Michael grabbed the nearest bookcase—not the one with the Bible on it, Claire saw—and pulled it over to block the window, then leaned the sofa against it.
“Upstairs!” he yelled. “Move it!”
Shane grabbed Claire by the hand and pounded up the steps, half dragging her; she missed a step and stumbled, and pulled him off-balance just at the right moment, because the bat that was swung at his head missed and thumped into the wall with a crack of wood. Another person hiding at the top of the stairs, this one female and tall. Shane grabbed the bat away from her and menaced her with it, driving her back down the hallway. Claire recognized her—one of the dorm girls, Lillian.
“Don’t!” Lillian yelled, and put up her arms when Shane pulled back the bat.
“Hell,” Shane spit in disgust. “I can’t hit a girl. Here, Claire. You hit her.” He tossed her the bat. Claire grabbed it and came to a clumsy batting stance, wishing she’d paid more attention in phys ed. Lillian screamed again and ran into the open doorway of Eve’s room. Eve, coming up the stairs, screamed, too, for different reasons.
“Hey! That’s my room, bitch!” And she flew in to grab Lillian by the hair, swing her around, and throw her out into the hall, then shoved her toward the stairs. “Michael! This one needs to go out!”
She shoved her again. Lillian tottered down the steps, and shrieked once more before leaving the building at speed, propelled by Michael-power.
“Check the rooms,” Shane panted. “If one got in, there are probably more. Don’t take chances. Yell for help.”
Claire nodded and hurried to her room. It looked quiet, thank God—the windows were unbroken, and there was no sign of anybody hiding in the closets or under the bed. Same for the bathroom, although she had a bad shower-curtain moment. She heard crashing from down the hall. Shane had found somebody. She ran out into the hall and started to come to his defense, then hesitated when she saw that Eve’s door was now open a crack.
She’d left it closed.
She opened it slowly, as silently as she could, and peeked around the edge…
…and saw Eve up against the wall, and Miranda holding a knife at Eve’s throat. She recognized the bruises and bite marks on her neck first, then the faded blue eyes as the girl’s head turned toward her.
“Don’t,” Miranda said. “I have to do this. Charles says I need to. To make the visions stop. I want it to stop, Claire. You understand, right?”
“Let her go, Miranda, okay? Please?” Claire swallowed hard and stepped into the room. She could hear fighting from down the hall. Shane and Michael were busy. “You don’t want to hurt Eve. She’s your friend!”
“It’s too much,” Miranda said. “So many people dying, and I can’t do anything. Charles said he’d make it go away. All I have to do is—”
“What? Kill Eve? Really, don’t—you don’t want to—to do anything—” Panicked, she looked to Eve for help. One thing was for sure: the pallor in Eve’s face wasn’t makeup.
“Yeah,” Eve said faintly. “I’m your friend, Mir. You know that.”
Miranda shook her head so hard her dark hair flew. The knife trembled against Eve’s throat, and she squeezed her eyes shut, whispering something that sounded like, “Charles,” and when she opened her eyes again she looked different. Not scared. Focused.
She’s going to do something. I need to— Claire didn’t have time to figure it out; she just moved, because Eve was moving, her arm flashing up and smacking Miranda’s elbow. In the second that the knife was away from Eve’s throat, Claire grabbed a thick handful of Miranda’s hair and yanked, hard, dragging her backward. Miranda shrieked and slashed wildly at them. Eve’s upraised arm got a bloody cut, and Claire moved backward, gasping, holding on to Miranda’s hair and trying to sta
y out of cutting range.
Miranda swept the knife around and cut off the clump of hair a couple of inches away from Claire’s knuckles. Ohno…
Miranda lunged at her, knife held out, and Claire ran into the black bedside table, toppled over onto the black satin comforter, and saw the knife coming for her.
“Hey!” Eve screamed, and spun Miranda around and slapped her, hard, across the face. Twice. When Miranda tried to stab her, Eve smacked the girl’s hand into the wall and twisted her wrist until Miranda’s fist opened and the knife dropped to the wood floor.
Miranda started crying. It was a hopeless, helpless sound, and if Claire hadn’t been angry-scared, she might have actually felt sorry for her. “No, no, I don’t want to see it anymore, I don’t want to—he said he’d make it stop—”
Eve grabbed her by the arm, opened up the closet door, and stuffed Miranda inside, then jammed a wooden chair under the door handle to hold it shut. She looked furious and really, really hurt. Her arm was bleeding all over the place—not spurting, but flowing pretty freely. Claire grabbed up a black towel lying on the bureau and pressed the makeshift bandage to the wound; Eve blinked, like she’d forgotten all about it, and held it in place.
“Maybe she was just under his spell. Like you were, when you—” Okay, maybe it hadn’t been smart to bring that up, Claire thought.
“That’s why I slapped her,” Eve said. “But I don’t think that’s it. Miranda’s always been crazy. I just thought—well, I thought she wasn’t that crazy.”
Eve looked better. More color in her face, anyway…and then Claire thought, no, she looked too good.
Claire’s eyes turned to the broken window. Outside, there was a slight edge of sunlight climbing above the horizon, and the sky had turned a deep blue gray.
“Michael!” she blurted. “Oh my God!”
She left Eve and ran into the hall. Shane was just coming out of his room, shaking out his right hand. His knuckles were bloody. “Where’s Michael?” she yelled.
“Downstairs,” he said. “What the hell is that?”
Claire realized with a shock that somehow she was still holding the handful of Miranda’s severed hair. She made a face and let go, then fluttered her hand to shake off the clingy strands. “You don’t even want to know. Oh, Miranda’s locked in Eve’s closet, by the way.”
“Well, that’s a bonus. Sorry, but I really don’t like that kid.”
“She’s not growing on me, either,” Claire admitted. “Come on, we need to get to Michael.”
“Trust me, he’s doing okay without us.”
“No, he’s not,” she said grimly. “The sun’s coming up.”
He didn’t get it for a second, and then he did, and oh, boy. He was gone before she could yell at him to wait for her.
She reached the bottom of the staircase a few seconds behind, and saw him race across to where Michael was grabbing another—presumably, human—intruder on his way in through the broken-down front door.
“I don’t need you!” he yelled at them both, and tossed the guy halfway to Kansas. “Get upstairs! Shane, show her where!”
Shane ignored him, plunged past him and into the hallway. Guarding the front door. Michael started to follow him, and stepped into the growing light from the back window.
He spun to look at it, then wordlessly at Claire. She saw the outright fear in his eyes. “No,” he said. “Not now!”
She couldn’t say or do anything to help, and she knew it. “How long…?”
The terrible look on his face pretty much answered the question, but he said it anyway. “Five minutes. Maybe less. Dammit!”
As if the vampires knew, there was a rattle at the window behind the bookcase blocking it. It heaved uneasily, then started to topple forward. Michael got in between it and the floor, caught it, and flung it back upright, then braced it again with the sofa.
“Back up!” Michael ordered her, and she retreated to the stairs. She could hear Shane fighting in the hall again. “Claire, you and Eve need to find a way to block everything. Seal it up. Don’t let Shane—”
She wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but just then he gasped and doubled over, and she knew that it was lost. He looked pale. Paler.
Mist.
Gone, along with a fading ghost of a scream.
Eve skidded to a stop beside her, eyes wide. “He’s gone,” she whispered, as if she really couldn’t believe it. “He left us.”
“He couldn’t help it.” Claire took her hand. “Come on, Eve, let’s get the bookcase down the hall. We need to wedge it in the doorway.”
Eve nodded numbly. It was like all the fight had gone out of her, and Claire understood why…. What hope was there now? Michael had been handling things, but without him…?
“Help me,” she said to Eve, and she meant it in every way she could.
Eve gave her a tiny little smile and squeezed her fingers. “You know I will.”
Between the three of them, they managed to block the front door pretty thoroughly, wedging the bookcase in place and bracing it with two more at an angle. Sweaty, panting, scared, they looked at each other.
It got quiet. Weirdly quiet.
“Well?” Eve looked around the corner. “I don’t see anything….”
“Can we get to the pantry?” Claire asked. “I mean, I don’t hear anybody….”
“Too risky,” Shane said. He grabbed the phone from a pile of debris and started dialing on the fly, then dropped it. “They cut the line.”
Eve pulled her cell phone out of a holster on her belt. Shane grabbed for it, checked the signal, and held up his hand for a high five. He was already dialing when they smacked it. “Come on,” he muttered, pacing, listening. “Pick up, pick up, pick up….”
He stopped in midstep. “Dad? Oh, damn, it’s the machine—Dad, listen, if you get this, it’s Shane, I’m at Michael Glass’s house in Morganville, and I need shock and awe, man—come running. You know why.”
He flipped the phone shut and threw it to Eve. “Upstairs, both of you. Get in the secret room. Michael? Are you with us?”
Claire shivered in a sudden cold draft. “He’s here.”
“Watch out for them,” Shane said. “I–I kind of have a plan.” He said it as if he was half surprised. “Girls. Upstairs. Now.”
“But—”
“Go!” He’d learned how to yell orders from Michael, and it seemed to work, because Claire was moving for the stairs without any conscious decision to do it. The cold chill stayed around her, and she saw Eve shivering, too.
The upstairs was quiet, as well, except for the distant knocking sound of Miranda hammering on her door. “I don’t like this,” Claire said. “Oliver knows Michael can’t do anything after dawn, right?”
“I don’t know,” Eve said, and chewed at her bottom lip. Most of her makeup had sweated off or gotten wiped away; even her lips were normal lip color now, for nearly the first time Claire could remember. “You’re right. It’s weird. Why would they just give up now?”
“They haven’t,” said a voice that Claire’s tingling spine recognized before her brain. Michael’s bedroom door opened, and standing there, smiling, was Monica Morrell. Gina and Jennifer were behind her.
They were all holding knives, and that was a hell of a lot scarier than Miranda, no matter how crazy she might be.
Eve got in between Claire and Monica and began backing her away, down the hallway. “Get in your room,” Eve said. “Lock the door.”
“Won’t do you any good,” Monica said, leaning around Eve. “Ask me why. Go on, ask me.”
She didn’t have to. She heard the door open behind her, and whipped around to see a man in a police uniform stepping out into the hallway with his gun drawn.
“Meet my brother, Richard,” she giggled. “Isn’t he cute?” He might have been, but Claire couldn’t look anywhere but at the gun, which was big and shiny and black. She’d never had a gun pointed at her before, and it scared her in ways that even knives
didn’t.
“Shut up, Monica,” he said, and nodded toward the far end of the hall. “Ladies. Downstairs, please. We don’t have to make this bloody.” He sounded harassed more than anything else, like mass home invasion was just something standing between him and morning coffee.
Claire backed up, touched Eve, and whispered, “What do we do?” She was asking Michael, too, for all the good it would do.
“I guess we go downstairs,” Eve said. She sounded defeated.
The chill swept across them stronger than ever. “Um, I think that’s a no?” Warm air flooded in. “That’s a yes?” More warm air. “You’re kidding me, Michael. Stay here?” Fine, if you were already a ghost, but how the hell were the two of them supposed to fight off three girls with knives and a cop with a gun?
Eve fainted. She did it convincingly, too, so well that Claire wasn’t totally for sure that she wasn’t really out. Monica, Gina, and Jennifer looked down at her, frowning, and Claire bent over her, fanning at her face. “She got cut,” she said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.” She hoped that was an exaggeration, but she wasn’t too sure, because the black towel had fallen away from Eve’s arm and it looked soaked.
“Leave her,” said Monica’s brother. “We only need you, anyway.”
“But—she’s bleeding! She needs—”
“Move.” He shoved her, and she nearly ran into the knife Gina was holding out. “Monica, for God’s sake, back the hell off, will you? I think I can handle some little girl!”
Monica frowned at him. “Oliver said we could have her when it’s over.”
“Yeah, when it’s over. Which isn’t now, so back the hell off!”
She shot him the finger, then stepped back to let Claire move past her. Claire did it as slowly as she could, manufacturing a crying jag and some shaking that, once started, felt too real to stop.
“See?” Monica said over her shoulder to Jennifer. “Told you she was a punk.”
Claire doubled over, moaning, and very deliberately puked all over Monica’s shoes. That was all it took. Monica screamed in horror and slapped her, Gina grabbed her, Jennifer stepped away, and Richard, confused by all the sudden girl fighting, took a couple of steps back so he wouldn’t put a bullet in the wrong one.
