Bitter Blood

NINE CLAIRE

Shane preceded Claire into the house by a couple of steps as she shut and locked the door behind them; apparently that was a lucky thing, because as she was turning the dead bolt, she heard him say, “Oh, crap,” in a voice that was choked with laughter, and then a startled yelp from Eve, followed by the sound of scrambling and flailing. Shane backed up next to Claire and held her back when she would have moved forward.

“Trust me,” he said. “Wait a second.”

Michael and Eve were in the parlor, the front living area that was so rarely used, except for dropping coats and bags and miscellaneous stuff, and from the hasty whispers and rustles of clothes, Claire quickly figured out exactly why Shane was holding her back.

Oh.

“I guess I should have said, Put your pants on,” Shane said, loudly enough that they could hear. “Alert, there’s a barely legal girl out here.”

“Hey!” Claire swiped a hand at him, which he easily avoided. “What were they doing?”

“What do you think?”

Pink-faced, Eve leaned around the frame of the doorway and said, “Um…hi. You’re early.”

“Nope,” Shane said with merciless good cheer. “It’s sundown. Not a bit early. You got clothes on?”

“Yes!” Eve said. Her cheeks burned brighter. “Of course! And you didn’t see anything anyway.” There was a bit of worry to her voice, though, and Shane made it worse with a big, utterly unsympathetic smile.

“Married people,” he said to Claire. “They’re a menace.”

Eve eased out of the door, zipping up her blouse—it was one of those with a front zip—and cleared her throat. “Right,” she said. “We really need to talk, you guys.”

“You know, my dad sucked at most things, but he did give me the birds and bees Q&A when I was ten, so I’m good,” Shane said. Man, he was enjoying this way too much. “Claire?”

She nodded soberly. “I think I understand the basics.”

Eve, still blushing, rolled her eyes. “I’m serious!”

Michael finally appeared behind her. He was dressed, kind of; his shirt was unbuttoned, though he was doing it up as quickly as he could. “Eve’s right,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding at all. “We need to talk, guys.”

“No, we don’t,” Shane said. “Just text me or something next time. We could go grab a burger or a movie or—”

Michael shook his head and walked inside the parlor. Eve followed him. Shane sent Claire a look that had a little bit of alarm in it, and finally shrugged. “Guess we’re talking,” he said. “Whether we want to or not.”

Michael and Eve hadn’t taken seats, when the two of them came in; they were standing with their hands clasped, for solidarity, apparently.

“Uh-oh,” Shane murmured, and then put on a cheerful smile. “So, Mikey, what up? Because this looks like more than just a ‘how was your day’ kind of discussion.”

“We needed to talk about something,” Eve said. She looked nervous, and—for Eve—she’d dressed super plainly, just a black shirt and jeans, not a single skull or shiny thing in evidence, except for the subtle glimmer of her wedding ring. “Sorry, guys. Sit down.”

“You first,” Shane said as Claire dumped her backpack with a heavy clunk by the wall. Michael exchanged a look with Eve, and then sat beside her on the old velvet sofa, while Claire settled in the armchair and Shane leaned on the top of it, his hand on her shoulder. “If we’re playing guessing games, I’m going to go with—you’re pregnant. Wait, can you be? I mean, can the two of you…?”

Eve flinched and avoided looking at the two of them. “That’s not it,” she said, and bit her lip. She twisted her wedding ring in agitation, and then finally said, “We’ve been talking about getting our own place, guys. Not because we don’t love you, we do, but—”

“But we need our own space,” Michael said. “I know it seems weird, but for us to feel really together, married, we need to get some time to ourselves, and you know how it is here; we’re all in one another’s business here.”

“And there’s only one bathroom,” Eve said mournfully. “I really need a bathroom.”

Claire had suspected it was coming, but that didn’t make it feel any better. She instinctively reached up for Shane’s hand, and his fingers closing over hers made her feel a little steadier. She’d gotten so used to the idea of the four of them together, always together, that hearing Michael talk about moving stirred up feelings she’d thought she’d outgrown…feelings that hadn’t been on her radar since she’d first walked in the door of the Glass House.

She suddenly felt vulnerable, alone, and rejected. She felt homesick, even though she was home, because home wasn’t the way she’d left it this morning.

“We want you to be happy,” Claire managed to say. Her voice sounded small and a little hurt, and she didn’t mean it that way, not at all. “But you can’t move out—it’s your house, Michael. I mean, it’s the Glass House. And you two are…Glass. We’re not.”

“Screw that,” Shane said immediately. “Sure, I want you two crazy kids to be happy, but you’re talking about busting up something that’s good, really good, and I don’t like it, and I’m not going to be all noble and pretend I do. Together, we’re strong—you’ve said that yourself, Michael. Now all of a sudden you want more privacy? Dude, that’s about as logical as Let’s split up in a horror movie!”

Michael gave him a look as he finished buttoning his shirt. “I think it’s pretty obvious privacy’s an issue.”

“Not if you don’t decide to get crazy in a room without a locking door. Or, you know, a door.”

“It’s just that we were waiting on you guys, and we were nervous, and…it just happened,” Eve said. “And we’re married. We have the right to get crazy if we want to. Anywhere. At any time.”

“Okay, I get that,” Shane said. “Hell, I’d like a little spontaneous sexytime, too, but is it worth putting us all in danger? Because Morganville ain’t safe, guys. You know that. You go out of this house, or make us leave it, and something is going to happen. Something bad.”

“Have you taken up Miranda’s fortune-telling?” Eve asked. “I could say something about crystal balls….”

“Don’t need a psychic friend to tell me it’s nasty out there and bound to get worse. Michael, you’re on Team Vampire. Are you saying you don’t think it’s going toxic with Amelie and Oliver in charge?”

Michael didn’t try to answer that one, because he couldn’t; they’d all agreed on it already.

Eve jumped in, instead. “We could get a house in the vampire quarter,” she said. “Free. It’s part of Michael’s citizenship in town. It wouldn’t be a problem except—”

“Except that you’d be living in Vamp Central, and the only thing with a pulse in a couple of square blocks, surrounded by people who think of you as an attractively shaped plasma container?” Shane asked. “Problem. Oh, another problem: Mikey, you said yourself that being around us, meaning all of us, helped you cope with your instincts. Now you’re talking about isolating yourselves with a bunch of also-deads. Not smart, man. It’ll make you more vamp, and it’ll put Eve in more danger, too.”

“I never said we were moving to the vampire quarter,” Michael said. “Eve was just pointing out we could, not that we would. We could find something else, something close. The old Profit place is still for sale down the street. Amelie gave me a bequest, so I’ve got money to put down.”

“Michael…We are not moving into that pit,” Eve said. It sounded like an old argument. “It smells like cat urine and old-man clothes, and it’s so ancient, it makes this place look like the house of the future. I don’t think it has phone lines, never mind Internet. Might as well live in a cardboard box.”

“Always an option,” Shane said cheerfully. “And you’d have a huge bathroom. Like, the entire world.”

“Ugh, gross.”

“It’s what you pay me for.”

“Remind me to give you a negative raise.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Michael interrupted, and shut them both down, hard. “Besides, it’s not just the four of us anymore. It’s Miranda.”

The conversation came to a sudden and vivid halt, and they all waited to see what would happen. It was night; that meant Miranda had physical form.

But it didn’t necessarily mean she could hear everything.

Claire lowered her voice to an instinctive, fierce whisper. “Hey! Don’t be that way!”

“Look, I’m not saying I don’t have sympathy for her; I do, a lot. I used to be her,” Michael whispered back. “I know what it feels like being trapped in here. It drives you half crazy, and the only way you can survive it, the only way, is to be around people who think of you as…normal. But she doesn’t have that. We know what she is. We know she’s around all the time, and that means she tiptoes around us, and we tiptoe around her, and—it’s just not good, okay? It’s not.”

“So, what do you want me to do?” Miranda asked. They all flinched and turned. She hadn’t been there before, but now she’d appeared in the doorway to the hall, just like the spooky ghost she sometimes was. Claire was almost sure it was deliberate. “Leave?”

“You can’t,” Michael said. He did it gently, but there wasn’t any doubt in it, either. “Mir, you knew when you came here that last time”—when she’d been killed here, he meant—“that there’d never be a way to leave again. The house saved you, and protects you, but you have to stay inside.”

“Just because you did?” Miranda said. There was something different about her now, Claire realized; she was wearing a definitely not-Miranda outfit. No dowdy oversized dresses this time, or cheap fraying sweaters; she was wearing a skintight black sheer shirt with a black skull printed on it, and beneath that, a red scoop-neck that somehow managed to give her cleavage—just the suggestion, but still. For Miranda, that was…quite a change. “I’m not you, Michael.”

“Maybe not, but do you have to become Eve?” Shane asked. “Because I’m pretty sure you raided her closet.”

“I bought those for her!” Eve protested. “And anyway, she looks cute in them.”

She did. Miranda had also gathered her hair up in two thick ponytails on either side of her head, and used a little of Eve’s eyeliner. It was a little Goth, but not full-on, either. It suited her.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” Miranda said, ignoring both Eve and Shane this time. She was totally fixed on Michael, her eyes steady and wide. “It’s about me, being here all the time. You feel like you can’t hide from me. Well, that’s true. You can’t. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is, and you know it better than anyone. You can’t just…turn off, like some kind of light. You’re here, and you’re bored.”

“I know,” Michael said. “Mir—”

“That’s why you don’t want to stay here. Because I’m here. It’s not about them at all.”

“No, honey, it’s not really—” Eve bit her lip and glanced from Michael to Miranda and then back again. “It’s not that, I swear….”

“Don’t swear,” Miranda said, “because I know I’m right.”

“She is,” Michael said. When Eve turned toward him, he held up a hand to stop the outburst. “I’m sorry, but like I said, I’ve been there. I know how it feels. I can’t just…ignore her. And I can’t enjoy life in here knowing how miserable she is, or at least is going to be.”

“You were miserable?” Eve said in a small voice. “Really? With us?”

“No—I didn’t mean—” He made a frustrated sound and plumped down in one of the chairs, elbows on his knees. “It’s hard to explain. Being around you, the three of you, was all that made things bearable, most days. The world just keeps getting smaller and smaller until it smothers you like a plastic bag over your face. With her here, I—I remember how that feels. I dream about it.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Miranda demanded. “I saved Claire’s life, you know! I died for her!”

“I know that!” Michael snapped back. “I just wish you’d done it somewhere else!”

Even Shane sucked in a breath at that one and said, softly, “Bro—”

“No,” Miranda said. Her chin was trembling, and she blinked back tears, but she didn’t fall apart. Claire felt an aching urge to hug her, but Miranda looked as if she might break if anyone touched her. “It’s not his fault. He’s right. I made this happen, and it isn’t fair. Not to him, not to me, not to anybody. It’s a mess, and I did it. I thought—I just thought that it was perfect. That I’d finally have a real home, real family, people who—” Her voice broke and faded, and she shook her head. “I should have known. I don’t get those things.”

“I didn’t mean that—,” Michael said, but she turned and walked off.

None of them reacted at first. Claire thought nobody quite knew what to think, or to do, and then she saw Michael flinch and rise to his feet. She didn’t know why until she heard the front door opening.

“No!” he shouted, and flashed at vampire-speed out of the room.

“The hell?” Shane blurted, and rushed after him, followed by Eve and Claire. “What—”

Claire pushed past him as he stopped, and she sucked in a deep, startled breath.

Because Miranda was outside. On the porch. And Michael was standing there, holding on to her arm as she fought to pull free. He was holding on to the doorframe, stretched fully out, and Miranda must have had a tiger’s strength in that small body, because he was clearly having trouble keeping his grip. “Stop!” he yelled at her. “Miranda, I’m not letting you do this!”

“You can’t stop me!” she screamed back, and there were tears streaking her face now in uneven trains of running eyeliner. She looked horrified and tragic and very, very upset. “Let go!”

“Come back inside. We can talk about it!”

“There’s nothing to talk about. You don’t want me here, so I just need to go!”

“You can’t go—you’ll die!” Claire blurted. She pushed past Michael and out onto the porch and grabbed Miranda in a bear hug. She could feel the girl’s not-quite-real heart pounding against her forearm, out of terror, anger, or sheer adrenaline. “Miranda, think. Come back inside and we’ll talk it over, all right? None of us wants you to die out here!”

“I’m dying in there, if you all leave! This way you can stay; you can be happy again—”

“It’s not you; I never meant that!” Michael was afraid, Claire thought, really and starkly afraid that this was all his fault. “You can’t do this. We’ll work it out.”

Miranda went very still for a second, though her heart continued to race uncontrollably fast, and she let out a deep, surrendering sigh. “All right,” she said. “You can let go.”

Michael said, “If you come inside, sure.”

“I will.”

Claire loosened her grip, just a little.

And it was just enough for Miranda to twist like a wild thing, ponytails whipping in Claire’s face, and when Michael yelled and tried to pull her in, Miranda grabbed hold of his arm and bit him, hard enough to make him let go.

And then she stumbled backward, free, down the steps, and sprawled on the ground in the yard.

They all froze—Miranda, Claire, Michael, Eve, and Shane who had lunged out as well. The only thing moving was a single fluttering moth circling the yellow glow of the porch light.

Miranda slowly got up.

“Um…,” Shane said, when no one spoke. “Shouldn’t she be, I don’t know, dissolving?”

Michael took a step down toward her, and Miranda skipped backward. He held out his hand, palm out, as if she were a lost child who might bolt out into traffic. “Mir, wait. Wait. Look at yourself. Shane’s right. You’re not—going away.”

“I’m still on the property.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “I couldn’t leave the doorway, let alone get down into the yard. Claire?” He looked at her as she stepped down next to him, because she’d had a brief period trapped in a ghostly state, too. She nodded.

“I couldn’t leave, either,” she said. “Miranda, how are you doing this?”

“I’m not!” She took another step backward down the sidewalk, toward the fence. “I’m just trying to—to get out of your hair, okay? If you’ll just let me go!”

It seemed so quiet out tonight. The houses of Lot Street were sketched out in broad strokes of grays; the sky overhead had turned the color of lapis, and the stars were bright and cold. There were no clouds. The temperature had already fallen at least ten degrees, as was typical for the desert; it’d dip down almost to freezing before dawn.

“How did it feel? Going outside?” Michael asked.

Miranda gave a little shudder. “Like…pushing through some kind of plastic wrap, I guess. It felt cold, but it’s colder out here. Much colder. Like I’m moving away from a fire.”

“But you feel okay? Not coming to pieces?” Eve said. She was watching with wide, scared eyes. “Miranda, please, don’t go any farther, okay? Just stay where you are. Let’s—think about this. If you don’t want us to go, we’ll stay, okay? We’ll all stay in the house. We’ll all be friends and be a family for you. I promise. We won’t let you down.”

“It’s better if I go.” Miranda shuddered again. She looked pale now, but not exactly ghostly. Just cold. Claire wondered if she should get her a coat, but that was stupid; the idea was to get her back in, not help her stay out.

That plan didn’t seem to be working so well, because as Claire tried to take a step closer, Miranda opened the front gate in the leaning picket fence, which was badly in need of paint.

“No!” the four of them said, in chorus, and Michael took a chance, a big one. He rushed the girl, at vampire-speed, hoping to get hold and pull her back inside before she stepped out onto the public sidewalk, off Glass House property altogether.

But he didn’t make it.

Miranda ducked and ran all the way to the street.

To the middle of the street, where she stopped, shuddering almost constantly now, and looked up at the wide Texas sky, the moon, the stars.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m going to be okay. See? I don’t have to be inside all the time. I can go out. I’m fine….”

But she wasn’t fine; they could all see it. She was milky pale and her teeth were chattering. It wasn’t that cold outside; Claire’s breath wasn’t even steaming, but from the way Miranda was shaking, it might as well have been below freezing.

“You’re not fine,” Eve said. “Mir, please, come back. You’ve proven your point. Yeah, you can leave—” She glanced at Michael and mouthed, Why?, but he only shrugged. “You can leave anytime you want. So let’s go inside and celebrate, okay? Besides, it’s dark. You’re vamp bait in the middle of the street like this.”

“What are they gonna do—bite her?” Shane asked. “She’s dead, Eve. I don’t even think she has blood.”

“Yes, she does,” Michael said. He was watching Miranda with a concerned expression now. “She’s got a living body, for the nighttime, just like I did. She can be hurt at night. And drained. It just wouldn’t kill her permanently; at least I don’t think it would…. I think she’d come back.”

“Renewable blood resources,” Eve said softly. “There’s a nightmare for you. We can’t let them find out about her. We need to get her back inside and figure out how she’s able to do this.”

“How? She won’t let any of us get close!”

“Surround her,” Eve said. “Michael, Shane, get on the other side. Claire and I will come in from this side. Box her in. Don’t let her run. We’ll just herd her back inside.”

“She’s strong,” Michael warned. “Crazy strong.”

“She won’t hurt us,” Eve said. Michael glanced down at his arm, which was still healing and showed bite marks. “Well, not much, anyway.”

“You and your strays,” he said, but Claire could tell there was love behind it. “All right, we’ll do it your way. Shane?”

“On it.”

Michael and Shane spread out, right and left, circling around Miranda and leaving her a wide berth in the middle of the road as Eve and Claire closed the distance from the front. Claire supposed it looked weird, but if anyone was watching from the other houses, no one made a sound. Not a curtain twitched. Not only did the town of Morganville not care; it didn’t even notice when a tweener was stalked by four older teens.

Even if they had good intentions.

Miranda wasn’t trying to get away, though. She had wrapped her thin arms around her body and was shuddering in continuous spasms now, and her skin looked less real, more like glass with mist behind it.

“Miranda,” Claire said softly, “we need to get you inside. Please.”

“I can do this,” Miranda said. She was staring down at herself with a blank expression, but there was a stubborn set to her chin, and she wiped her cheeks with the back of a hand and squared her shoulders. “I can live out here. I can. I don’t need to be in there.”

“You do,” Eve said. “Maybe it’s a gradual thing. You need to work on it a little at a time. So we can try again tomorrow night. Tonight, hey, come inside; we’ll watch a movie. You get to pick.”

“Can we watch the pirate movie? The first one?”

“Sure, honey. Just come inside.”

Shane and Michael were making steady progress coming up from behind Miranda, and Michael nodded to Claire as she got into position. “Let’s all go in,” he said. Miranda shuffled awkwardly in place, as if her legs didn’t want to move, and turned to look at him over her shoulder. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to you, Mir.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s a little late for that, but I appreciate the thought. Did you know? I can’t tell the future anymore? It’s as if all the power I had went somewhere else.” She gestured down at herself. “Into this.”

That…might make some weird kind of sense, Claire thought, that Miranda’s powerful psychic gifts—the same ones that had led her to die inside the Glass House to save Claire’s life—had become a kind of life-support system for her, after death.

“But it means I don’t know anymore,” Miranda said. Her voice was fainter now, almost like a whisper. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m scared.”

“You don’t have to be,” Claire said, and stretched out her hand.

Miranda hesitated, then reached out.

But the second their skin touched, Miranda’s cracked like the thinnest ice, and an icy fog spilled out, searing Claire’s fingers with chill. She drew back with a cry, and there were cracks all over Miranda’s body now, racing through in lace black lines, and then she just…

She just broke.

For a few seconds the fog held together in a vague girl shape, and Claire heard a cry, a real and surprised and scared cry…

And then she was gone. Just completely gone, except for empty clothes lying in the street.

“Mir!” Claire felt the pressure in her hand vanish, and lunged forward, scissoring the air, hoping for something, anything…but there was nothing—just empty space.

Miranda had vanished completely, and her last word seemed to echo over and over in Claire’s mind.

Scared.

“Oh God,” she said in a whisper, and felt tears sting her eyes. Miranda had been dealt raw deals her whole life, up to and including dying in the Glass House at the hands of the draug, but it had felt like, finally, she was getting something going her way. A place of safety. A life, however limited, that she could call her own.

It was just…very sad—so sad that Claire felt tears choking her, and she fell into Shane’s arms, clinging to his solid warmth for a long few moments before he whispered in her ear, “We have to go back. It’s not safe out here.”

She didn’t want to go, but there wasn’t any point in risking their lives for someone who was already gone. So she let him guide her back toward the Glass House. Michael and Eve were already there. Eve, uncharacteristically, hadn’t shed a tear, from the flawless state of her mascara; she was usually the one prone to bursting into tears, but not this time. She just looked blank and shocked.

“Maybe she’s okay,” Eve said. Michael put his arm around her. “Maybe—oh God, Michael, did we make this happen? We started this, with all the talk about moving. If we hadn’t said that she was bothering us, maybe she wouldn’t have…have…”

“It’s not your fault,” Shane said quietly. “She was bound to try it, sooner or later; once she figured out she could make it out the door, she was going to keep pressing her luck. And anyway, you could be right. She might still be okay. Maybe she’s just not anchored anymore. It could be harder for her to get back or let us know she’s still around. Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow.”

He was trying to put the best face on it, but no matter what, it was grim. They’d lost someone, out here in the dark—a scared little girl, left on her own. Maybe for good.

And from the look in his eyes, even Shane knew they were all to blame.

Claire had been looking forward to spending the night in Shane’s company, in all the shades of meaning that might hold, but Miranda’s disappearance had taken all the joy out of it for them both. Michael and Eve seemed to be just the same. They all ended up sitting on the couch together and watching a DVD that none of them particularly cared about—something about time travel and dinosaurs—just because Eve had mentioned that it had been Miranda’s favorite out of their little store of home videos. Claire closed her eyes for most of it, leaning her head on Shane’s chest, listening to his slow, strong heartbeat, and allowing his steady strokes of her hair to soothe the grief a little. When the movie ended and silence fell, Michael finally asked if anybody wanted to play a game, but nobody seemed willing to take up the controllers—not even Shane, who had, as far as Claire could remember, never turned it down. That split Michael and Eve upstairs to their room, and left Claire and Shane sitting by themselves.

It felt chilly. Claire found herself shivering, but she didn’t want to move away from Shane’s embrace; he solved that by taking the afghan from the back of the couch and wrapping it around them both. “Well,” he finally said, “I guess the issue of moving is off the table, at least for right now.”

“Guess so,” Claire said. Tears threatened again, but she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand in an angry swipe. Enough. She knew she wasn’t really crying for Miranda at the moment; she was just feeling sorry for herself, for losing another brick in the wall of her zone of safety, for more change when she just wanted everything to stay the same. “But the issue’s not going away. And we can’t let our friends just…leave, Shane. It’s not right. It’s not safe.”

“It’s Morganville,” he said, and kissed her gently. “Safety isn’t something we get guaranteed.”

“They do.” She really meant, He does, because Michael was the one with the exemption to human rules, but surely that extended to Eve now that she was his wife. Wife—what a weird word; it still didn’t sound quite real to Claire’s mental ears. Eve was a wife. And Shane had raised the even weirder possibility that someday Eve might be a mother. Maybe that shouldn’t have been quite so strange to her, but she hadn’t had any other friends who’d gotten married; it was still a foreign concept when applied to an actual person, and she didn’t altogether understand why Michael and Eve, who’d been so easy with sharing a house when they were all single-but-committed, would be so weird about it now that there’d been an actual church ceremony.

“Well, you might have a point. The Glass family’s had special consideration for a long time,” Shane agreed. “Probably because as a rule they weren’t douche bags. But Eve’s family…” He hesitated, as though wondering whether this was something he should share. Then he must have decided it was, because he said, “Eve’s family had a bad rep, going back generations.”

“For…?”

“Some people suck up and stomp down, if you know what I mean. Eve’s family was like that: sucking up to the vamps at every opportunity, stomping on the heads of everybody they thought beneath them. Bullies. Kind of like the Morrells, only on a much smaller scale. That didn’t get them respect from the vamps, or the humans; they didn’t have money to buy people off, or the power to make them afraid. So I wouldn’t say Eve was born with the immunity idol or anything. Not like Michael was, when he was human. Everybody liked the Glass family.”

Claire had known Eve’s dad was bad, and her mom was pretty much wallpaper, but the knowledge that it had gone on for generations was revolting. Generation after generation, pandering to the vampires for favors, and giving up their children when the vampires got interested—as Brandon, the Rossers’ Protector, had ordered Eve to be given to him. Eve hadn’t played along, which was part of why she’d ended up in the Glass House with Michael in the beginning. She’d been so willing to rebel that she’d risked death to do it.

“So, you’re saying that Eve could be hit from both sides if she leaves this house.”

“I’m saying I think it’s pretty much certain. She’s got nobody but Michael to look after her, and he can’t be there all the time. She wouldn’t want him to be. It just…makes me worry.” Shane smiled a little and gave her a sideways glance. “Don’t get jealous. You’re still my number one girl.”

“I’m not worried,” she said. She really wasn’t. “I’m scared, too. And what happens when Michael and Eve aren’t there for us? Because we’re in the same boat, right? I have some respect from the vamps, but your family…”

“Yeah, the Collins family went out of its way to make itself unwelcome around here. And vampires don’t forget. Ever.” He sighed and snuggled her closer against him. “You know, we really should get some sleep. It’s almost three in the morning, and you’ve got class today, right?”

She did. Her heart wasn’t in it, but she couldn’t afford to blow off any more lectures; the old days of professorial indulgences were over. Her newly minted grade B was enough to prove that. “Just a little longer,” she said. “Please?”

“Can’t say no to that.”

And they fell asleep, spooned together on the couch and wrapped in the afghan, until a crashing noise—shockingly loud—brought Claire awake with a flailing spasm.

She couldn’t get her breath to ask, but Shane vaulted over her, landed cat-footed on the wood floor, and ran to the hallway. He was gone only a second before he came back at a dead run. “Fire!” he yelled, and slammed through the kitchen’s swinging door as Claire fumbled on her shoes. He came back in seconds, toting the big red extinguisher. “Get Michael and Eve up, and get out of the house through the back door!”

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer her; he was already gone, pelting back down the hall. As she flew up the stairs, she heard him opening the front door, and she smelled acrid smoke.

Michael, dressed and ready, already had the bedroom door open, and Eve was belting a red silk kimono around her body. She took one look at Claire’s face and slipped her feet into untied Doc Martens. “Let’s go,” she said, and led the way down the steps. Michael split off from them at the bottom, heading for the front; he grabbed up a heavy rug, yanking it like a magician right out from under the couch, and ran to join Shane in fighting the fire.

Claire and Eve went out the back. “What happened?” Eve asked as she flipped the locks open. “We heard something, but—”

“I don’t know,” Claire said. “Whatever it was, it was loud.”

She started to plunge outside, but Eve held her back, craned her head out the door, and took a careful survey of the dark yard before saying, “Okay, go.”

It was a mistake. A bad one.

Because they didn’t look up.

The vampire dropped down behind them, cutting them off from the house, and Claire didn’t even notice his appearance until she heard Eve give a little surprised gasp. That was all she had time for, because in the next instant he was already right behind them, with his hands closed around Claire’s shoulders…

But only to shove her violently out of the way.

She fell and rolled, fetching up with a painful slam against the bark of the old live oak tree that Myrnin had climbed to get into her bedroom. It wasn’t Myrnin who’d dropped in this time. This was Pennyfeather, a pallid, long-faced friend of Oliver’s who reminded her of a skeleton held together with string and a covering of flesh. He wasn’t interested in Claire. Not at all.

He had hold of Eve, fingernails shredding the red silk of her robe. She screamed and tried to break free, but he was too strong; Claire could see the gouges in Eve’s arms that his claws left as she struggled to get free.

“If you want to be one of us,” Pennyfeather said with a dreadful grin, “one of us really should oblige you. Your husband seems incapable of doing his duty.”

That sounded awful, and as the implication sank in, Claire gasped and tried to get up. She didn’t have anything to fight him—no stakes, no knives, not even a blunt object—but she couldn’t just let him…do whatever he was going to do. As she scrambled up, her hand fell on a tree branch—broken, with curled-up, dried leaves along its length.

It was sheared off in a sharp, angular point toward the thicker end. The break looked fresh, and it took Claire a moment to realize that it was this branch that had broken under Myrnin’s feet as he launched himself through her window the night before.

She grabbed it and launched herself into a run at Pennyfeather, yelling at the top of her lungs. It was a war cry, coming from someplace deep and primal inside, and she should have been afraid, she should have felt awkward or tentative or stupid, but she just felt filled with red, red fury, and determination.

She’d already lost Miranda tonight. She wasn’t losing Eve, too.

Eve saw her coming, and her dark eyes widened. Pennyfeather was too intent on pulling Eve’s head to the side and prepping his fangs for the bite to notice, and Claire had an instant of clarity to realize that if she kept going, heading straight for them, she was likely to skewer Eve along with the vampire.

So Claire changed course, ran past them, whipped around, and lunged, full extension, just like Eve had taught her to do when they’d been messing around with fencing foils. She put her whole body into it, the straight line of her back continuing the same angle as her stiffened left leg, and her right arm extended up, out, and she slammed her weapon into Pennyfeather’s back, neatly to the left of center.

The branch was too thick to make it completely through the ribs, but it shocked him, and he gave a shriek that made the hair stand up on Claire’s arms. He let go of Eve, and she toppled forward in a heap of tattered red silk, crouched, and spun to face him with a look on her face so murderous that Claire was momentarily shocked. Pennyfeather didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to claw the wood out of his back, but even when he grabbed hold, the springy wood bent, and he only managed to scrape it partly free before it snapped out of his hand.

“Get the bag,” Eve snapped to Claire, and she nodded and dashed back into the kitchen. In seconds, she had hold of one of the black canvas totes they kept ready, but by the time she’d made it back outside, Pennyfeather had yanked the branch free, ripped it to pieces, and was stalking toward Eve with a low, furious growl and one piece still held as a club in his clawed hand.

There was no time to get to Eve. Claire did the next best thing; she spun around and flung the bag. It arced through the air and hit the grass at Eve’s feet, spilling out a confusion of objects, but Eve didn’t hesitate over choices. She grabbed a small bottle, popped the plastic cap, and threw the contents in Pennyfeather’s face.

Silver nitrate.

His growl turned to a howl, rising in volume and pitch until it hurt Claire’s ears, and he sheared off from making his run at Eve to claw at his face. The liquid silver clung like napalm, and burned about as fiercely. Claire grabbed the bag, stuffed items inside as fast as possible, and grabbed Eve’s wrist. “Come on!” she yelled, and they ran around the side of the house, feet sliding on the loose white gravel.

Michael and Shane were at the front, and between the last blast of the fire extinguisher and smothering flaps of the rug, they’d put out a fire that had blackened a ten-foot section of the exterior of the house. Broken glass lay around the base of it, and as they got closer, Claire smelled the sharp, almost-sweet stench of gasoline.

There was something pinned to their front door, too, fluttering pale in the night breeze.

Michael dropped the rug and flashed at vampire-speed to catch Eve in his arms. He must have smelled the blood from her cuts, Claire thought; she could see the faint, iridescent shine of his eyes. “What happened?” he asked, and touched the claw slashes on her kimono. “Who did this?”

“Pennyfeather,” Claire said. Now that the adrenaline rush was passing, she felt weirdly shaky, and she was beginning to realize how many things she’d done that could have gone badly wrong for her. For Eve, too. “It was Pennyfeather. He was—he was going to bite her.”

Michael made a hissing noise, like a very angry and dangerous snake, and blurred out of sight toward the backyard. Shane’s gaze followed him, but he didn’t go along; he reached instead for the bag that Claire held and sorted through the contents. He handed Eve a knife, gave Claire another of the bottles of silver, and for himself, a baseball bat—a regular bat, except that the last six inches of the business end were coated with silver plate. “Been dying to try this out,” he said, and gave them both a tight, wild smile. “Batter up.” He swung it experimentally, nodded, and rested it on his right shoulder. “You good, Eve?”

“This was my favorite robe,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, but it was from rage as much as from fear, Claire thought. “Dammit. It was vintage!”

Shane was still watching the side of the house, around which Michael had disappeared. He was clearly wondering if he ought to go back him up. Claire put a hand on his arm and drew his focus, just for a second. “Eve got Pennyfeather with a face full of this,” she said, and held up her bottle. “He’s got a handicap, and Michael’s really pissed off.”

That eased some of the tension in Shane’s back and shoulders, at least. “I don’t want to leave you two alone out here,” he said. “The fire’s out. Get back inside and lock the doors. Go.”

“What about you guys?”

“If you hear us crying for our mommies, you can come rescue us, but hey, Eve’s kinda half naked and bleeding out here.”

Shane had a great point, and as Claire looked over at her, she saw that Eve was gripping the knife in a white-knuckled hand and shivering badly. It was cold out, and the shock was setting in.

Claire took her arm and steered her up the steps. Shane watched them until they reached the door, and then nodded to her and dashed away into the dark, bat held at the ready. She pushed open the door and hustled Eve inside, then paused and looked at what was pinned to the wood.

She supposed it was Pennyfeather’s writing, because it was hard to read, spiky, and had a nasty brownish color to the ink that might well have been blood.

It said, Done by Order of the Founder, and it was pinned deeply into the wood by a giant knife, like a bowie knife on steroids.

Claire worked it back and forth until she could pull it out of the door’s surface, folded the piece of paper, and locked up with trembling fingers.

Eve was standing there watching her, an unreadable expression on her face. She was still shaking. “It’s a death sentence, isn’t it?” she said. “Don’t lie, Claire. You’re not good at it.”

Claire didn’t even try. She held up the knife. “On the plus side,” she said, “they left us another weapon. And it’s sharp.”

Truthfully, that was cold comfort indeed. And in the end, after Michael and Shane came back in without Pennyfeather, who’d managed to run for his life despite taking a pretty good battering from both of them, nobody much felt like celebrating.

Or sleeping.

Morning brought light and warmth, but not much in the way of reassurance; the cops came and took statements, looked over the damage to the house, and photographed the slashes on Eve’s arms (which, upon inspection at the hospital, fortunately turned out not to be as deep as they’d looked).

The police declined to include the destruction of her vintage robe as a separate charge of vandalism. They also played dumb about who Pennyfeather was, or even that vampires existed at all, even though both men were plainly wearing Protection bracelets in full view. Typical. Once upon a time, Claire could have called on some Morganville police detectives who had reputations for impartiality…but they were all gone now. Richard Morrell had been police chief before he’d been mayor, and he’d been fair about it; Hannah had been great in the same role, but now Richard was dead, and Hannah was helpless to act.

Done by Order of the Founder. That said…everything, really. It meant that whatever tenuous claim the four of them had to safety in Morganville was officially cancelled.

Claire stayed with Eve as long as she could, but classes were calling, and so was her in-jeopardy grade point average; she grabbed her book bag, kissed Shane quickly, and dashed off at a jog to Texas Prairie University. Nothing was going to happen during the day, at least from the vamp quarter. Morning was well advanced over the horizon, and she had to skip her normal stop for coffee and flat-out race the last few hundred yards to make it into the science building, up the stairs, and down the long, featureless hall to her small-group advanced study class. Today was thermodynamics, a subject she normally loved, but she wasn’t in the mood for theory today.

It was more of an applied sciences day—such as the amount of fuel required to burn down a house. Claire slipped into her classroom seat, earning a dirty look from Professor Carlyle, who didn’t pause in his opening remarks.

Pennyfeather had been the one who’d attacked them, but that didn’t mean he’d been acting alone; he could have thrown the Molotov cocktails at the front of the house and then jumped up on the roof to wait for them to exit the back, but somehow, Claire thought there was more to it. Someone in the front, and Pennyfeather waiting for Eve, specifically. And while it was a little bit of a relief not to be the main target, it was unsettling. Eve wasn’t helpless, but somehow she was more vulnerable. Maybe it was just that Claire wanted desperately for Michael and Eve to somehow work out, and for the town to stop hating them, and…

“Danvers?”

She looked up from consideration of her closed textbook; she didn’t even remember getting it out of her bag. She’d lost track of time, she guessed, and now Professor Carlyle—a severe older man with a close-cropped brush of gray hair and eyes the color of steel—was staring at her with a displeased expression, clearly waiting for something.

“Sorry?” she said blankly.

“Please provide the equation for the subject on the board.”

She focused behind him. On the chalkboard, he’d written Harmonic Oscillator Partition Function.

“On the board?”

“Unless you’d like to perform it in interpretive dance.”

There was a stir of laughter and smirking from the ten other students, most of whom were master’s candidates; they were at least five years older than she was, every one of them, and she wasn’t popular.

Even here, nobody liked a smart-ass.

Claire reluctantly rose from her desk, went to the chalkboard, and wrote zHO = 1/(1-e-a/T).

“Where?” he asked, without a trace of satisfaction.

Claire dutifully wrote down where a=hv/k.

Carlyle stared at her in silence for a moment, then nodded. Apparently, that was supposed to make her feel insecure. It didn’t. She knew she was right; she knew he’d have to accept it, and she waited for that to happen. Once he’d given her the signal, she put down the chalk and walked back to her desk.

But Carlyle wasn’t done with her quite yet. “Since you did so well with that, Danvers, why don’t you predict the following for me?” And he scribbled on the board another equation: K_p=P_b/P_a-[B]/[A]. “What happens if T is infinitely large?” T was completely missing from that equation, but it didn’t really matter. T was an implied variable, but that was misleading. It was a trick question, and Claire saw many of the others open their books and begin flipping, but she didn’t bother. She met Carlyle’s eyes and said, “K equals two.”

“Your reasoning?”

“If T is infinitely large, all the states of energy are equal and occupied. So there are twice as many states in B as A. K equals two. It’s not really a calculation. It’s just a logic exercise.”

She was taking advanced thermodynamics purely to help her understand some of what Myrnin had accomplished in building his portal systems in Morganville…. They were doorways that warped space, and she knew there had to be some explanation for it in physics, but so far, she’d found only pieces here and there. Thermodynamics was a necessary component, because the energy produced in the transfer had to go somewhere. She just hadn’t figured out where.

Carlyle raised his eyebrows and smiled at her thinly. “Someone ate her breakfast this morning,” he said, and turned his laser focus on another hapless student. “Gregory. Explain to me the calculation if T equals zero.”

“Uh—” Gregory was a page flipper, and Carlyle waited patiently while he looked for the answer. It was blindingly obvious, but Claire bit her tongue.

It took Gregory an excruciating four minutes to admit defeat. Carlyle went through three other students, then finally, and with a sigh, turned back to Claire. “Go ahead,” he said, clearly irritated now.

“If there isn’t any T, there isn’t any B,” she said. “So it has to be zero.”

“Thank you.” Carlyle glared at the others in the class. “I weep for the state of engineering, I truly do, if this is the best you can do with something so obvious. Danvers gets bonus credit. Gregory, Shandall, Schaefer, Reed, you all get failing pop quiz scores. If you’d like to solve extra-credit equations, see me afterward. Now. Chapter six, the residual entropy of imperfect crystals…”

It was a grim thing, Claire thought, that even when she got the high grade and dirty looks from her fellow students, she still felt bored and underchallenged. She wished she could go talk to Myrnin for a while. Myrnin was always unpredictable, and that was exciting. Granted, sometimes the problem was to just stay alive, but still; he was never boring. She also didn’t have to sit through the incredibly dense (and wrong) explanations from other students when she was at his lab. If he’d ever had assistants that dumb, he’d have eaten them.

Somehow, she made it through the hour, and the next, and the next, and then it was time to run to the University Center and grab a Coke and a sandwich. It wasn’t Eve’s day to work the counter at the coffee shop, so after gulping down lunch, Claire—done at school for the day—walked to Common Grounds, just to check in on her.

It was only lightly occupied just now, thanks to the vagaries of college schedules; there were a few Morganville residents in the house, and a group of ten students very seriously arguing the merits of James Joyce. Claire claimed a comfortably battered armchair and dumped her bag in it; the chair and everything else smelled like warm espresso, with a hint of cinnamon. Common Grounds, for all its flaws, still had a homey, welcoming atmosphere.

But when she turned to the counter, she saw a sullen young man in a tie-dyed apron and red-dyed emo hair, who glared at her as she approached. He yawned.

“Hi,” she said. “Um, where’s Eve?”

“Fired,” he said, and yawned again. “They called me in to take her shift. Man, I’m fried. Forty-eight hours without sleep—thank God for coffee. What’s your poison?”

At Common Grounds, that might be literal, Claire thought. “Bottled water,” she said, and forked over too much cash for it. Nobody drank Morganville’s tap water. Not after the draug invasion. Sure, they’d cleared the pipes and everything, but Claire—like most of the residents—couldn’t shake the idea that something had once been alive in there.

Better to pay a ridiculous amount for water bottled out of Midland.

“So, what happened this morning to get her fired? Because I know she was planning to come in.”

Counter Guy wasn’t chatty enough to come up with an answer; he just shrugged and grunted as he rang up her purchase and handed over the cold bottle. He had tattoos running up and down his arms, mostly Chinese symbols. Claire considered asking him what they meant, but in her experience he probably didn’t have a clue. He did have one thing in common with Eve: black-painted fingernails.

“Is Oliver here?”

“Office,” Counter Guy said. “But I wouldn’t if I was you. Boss ain’t in a good mood.”

He was probably right, Claire thought, but she knocked anyway, and received a curt, “In,” a command she followed. She shut the door behind her. Counter Guy and the other residents out there wouldn’t come to her rescue if things went badly, and she didn’t want the clueless students involved. They were having enough trouble with James Joyce.

Oliver didn’t even glance up, but then he didn’t need to, she thought; he’d probably identified her before she’d come anywhere near the office, just by her heartbeat or the smell of her blood or something. Vampires were an endless source of creepy. “Pennyfeather attacked Eve last night,” she said. “Did you tell him to do it?”

He still didn’t bother to look up from whatever piece of paper he was reading. He picked up a pen and scribbled down a note, then signed the bottom. “Why?”

“He left a note pinned to the door, ‘Done by Order of the Founder.’”

“I am not the Founder,” he said. “And Pennyfeather is no longer my creature. He does as he pleases. Though I would say his attitude is an accurate weather vane of public opinion among our kind, if that is what you’re asking.” Oliver didn’t ask how Eve was, or what had happened, and that, Claire thought, was different. He’d kind of grown a bit more human since she’d first met him, but now he was back to the bad old vamp, unfeeling and utterly careless of human lives. He wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt Eve, probably, but he wouldn’t bother to help her, either, if it meant he had to make an effort. “Do you have some valid reason for disturbing me, or are you simply trying to annoy me?”

“I know what’s happening,” Claire said softly, and his pen stopped moving on the paper. The sudden silence made her feel breathless, as if she were standing at the edge of a bottomless pit full of darkness. “You’ve wanted to rule Morganville ever since you found out it existed. You came here wanting to get Amelie out of power and make yourself king or something. But she didn’t let you, so you had to get…creative.”

Now he looked up at her, and although his face was human, softened by loose, curling gray hair, the expression and the focus were purely those of a predator. He didn’t say anything.

Claire plunged ahead. “Amelie trusted you. She let you get close. And now you’re playing her to get what you always wanted. Well…it’s not going to work. She may like you, but she’s not stupid, and when she wakes up—and she will—you’re going to be sorry you tried it.”

“I don’t see that my relationship with the Founder is any of your business.”

“You can influence other vampires,” she said. “You told me so before. And you’re subtle about it. Whatever you’re doing to her, stop it before this all goes bad. The humans won’t stand for being cattle, and Amelie won’t let you go as far as you think. Just…back off. Oliver—maybe I’m crazy for saying this, but you’re not like this. Not anymore. I don’t think you really want all this deep down.”

He stared at her with empty, oddly bright eyes, and then went back to his paperwork.

“You may leave now,” he said. “And count yourself lucky you are allowed to do so.”

“Why did you fire Eve?” she asked. It was probably a mistake, but she couldn’t help but ask it. And surprisingly, he answered.

“She accused me of trying to have her killed,” he said. “Just as you did. Unfortunately, I’m unable to fire you. And my patience is now at an end. Begone.”

“Not until you tell me—”

She never even saw him move, but suddenly he was around the desk and slamming the pen into the wood of the door behind her. It was just a simple ballpoint, but it sank an inch deep, vibrating an inch from her head. Claire flinched and came up hard against the barrier at her back. Oliver didn’t move away. This close, he looked like bone and iron, and he smelled—ironically—like coffee. She was forcefully reminded that he’d been a warrior when he was alive, and he wasn’t any less a killer now.

“Go,” he said, very softly. “If you’re wise, you will go very, very far from here, Claire. But in any case, go from my presence, now.”

She opened the door.

And as she did so, she had the blurred impression of someone standing a few feet away on the other side, of people scrambling and exclaiming, of Counter Guy yelling “Hey!” Then she zeroed in not on the figure standing before her, but on what the tall, dark figure was holding.

It was a crossbow with a silver bolt.

And before Claire could take a breath or react, the crossbow was raised and fired.

Claire felt a burning brush against her cheek as the bolt zipped past, and she clapped a hand to the bleeding scrape as she turned to see what had happened.

The arrow had slammed home in Oliver’s chest, but it was up and to the right of his heart. Claire stared at it with a feeling of unreality; the silver glint, the slowly spreading crimson circle around the shaft, the bright red feather fletching, and Oliver, pinned in place with surprise as much as pain.

Then he staggered back against his desk. Claire didn’t think; she just acted, reaching out for the crossbow bolt.

He swatted her hand away with impatient fury, hard enough that he could have broken bones, and said through gritted teeth, “You can’t pull it out from the front, fool. Take it through my back!”

He said it as if he had no doubt at all that she’d obey, and for a fraction of a second, Claire was tempted to obey him; that might have been her natural tendency to want to help, or it could have been Oliver exerting his will.

She paused, though, and looked through the still-open doorway.

The attacker was calmly loading up another bolt in the bow. She didn’t—and couldn’t—recognize the person; it was just a blank figure in some kind of black opaque mask, a zipped-up black hooded jacket, and plain, well-worn blue jeans. Black boots. Gloves. Nothing to betray any personal identification at all, not even gender.

The figure looked up and saw her standing there, and she felt a chill, unmistakable and indefinable. Then it pointed to her and jerked a thumb at the door. You. Out.

“Claire!” Oliver snapped. His voice sounded ragged now, and full of fury. “Pull the bolt out!”

“Did you have Pennyfeather try to kill Eve?”

The wound around the silver was starting to smoke and blacken, and it must have hurt a whole lot, even if not immediately fatal, because he tried to snarl at her, but it came out as more of a moan. He collapsed down to a sitting position on the floor, leaning one shoulder against the desk. She almost caved in, almost, because he really looked bad just then…vulnerable and damaged.

But then his eyes flickered bright red in fury, and he said in a poisonous hiss, “I’ll have him kill you if you don’t do as I say, girl. You’re a pet, not a person.”

“Funny,” she said, “seeing as I’m the only thing standing between you and a guy with a crossbow.” Literally. The masked figure was still standing behind her, ready to fire. She was just in the way. “Did you?”

“No!” he roared, and convulsed over on his side. The poison was working on him, and working fast.

Claire turned to face the would-be assassin, who was pointing the crossbow now at her. Directly.

Move, the figure gestured once again, impatiently. Claire shook her head.

“Can’t.” She didn’t try to explain, and she wasn’t sure she actually could; there was not a reason in the world why she shouldn’t walk away from Oliver and leave him to whatever fate was bringing. Clearly the rest of the coffeehouse population had fled, including the students; Counter Guy’s red hair and tats had left the building, too. It was just her, standing between Oliver and death.

She guessed that she was doing it because it didn’t matter that it was Oliver, after all. She’d have done it for anyone. Even Monica. She hated bullies. She hated anyone being kicked when he or she was down, and Oliver was most definitely down.

Whoever the figure holding the crossbow was, he or she considered taking her out to get to Oliver. She could see that, even if she couldn’t see a face, and she knew that in this moment she was in as much danger as she’d ever been in Morganville. She was utterly at the mercy of whatever this person decided. No one could, or would, help.

She smelled the acrid tang of burning flesh behind her. Oliver was bad, and getting rapidly worse.

The masked head nodded, just a little, as if in acknowledgment of what she hadn’t said. The figure lowered the crossbow, stowed it in a black canvas bag, and backed away toward the front of the store. She lost sight of it in the glare of daylight silhouetting the form, though she had the impression that the attacker had stripped off the mask before running out into the street.

Claire didn’t try to follow. She stood there for a few seconds, then turned and looked at Oliver.

“If I do this for you,” she said, “you’re going to owe me. And I’m going to collect.”

He was beyond making a bitter comeback. He just nodded, as if he couldn’t summon up the strength to do more, and managed to roll a little farther over onto his stomach. The sharp, barbed end of the bolt was sticking out of his chest about three inches below his shoulder blade. The edges were wicked, like razors. That might actually be a good thing; it wouldn’t have done quite as much damage that way.

But she needed to get it out before the silver poisoning got much worse—either that, or leave it in for good—which she could just hear Shane saying was still a perfectly valid option.

With gritted teeth, she wrapped the loose fabric of her shirt around the razor-sharp arrowhead, grabbed the shaft just below that, and pulled, hard and fast. She almost stopped when Oliver convulsed again, and his mouth opened wide in a silent scream—silent because he couldn’t draw in breath to fuel it—but she didn’t dare quit. Better it was painful now than deadly later.

It seemed to take forever, but it must have been just a few seconds before she yanked it completely free. She dropped the arrow to the floor with a ringing clang and tried not to think about the blood staining her shirt where she’d pulled it out of his body. Or whose blood it might have been, because it wasn’t really Oliver’s blood, was it? It was borrowed, or stolen, from others.

She stood up, breathing heavily and trying not to feel nauseated by what she’d just done—not just the blood, or the pain she’d caused, but the fact that she’d just saved Oliver’s life. Shane would have been so angry with her, she realized; he’d have walked away and called it karma. Or justice, at least.

But right now, that wasn’t the smart play. If Amelie was out to get them—if she really had sent Pennyfeather, and Oliver hadn’t—then she needed Oliver on their side.

For now.

Oliver rolled over on his back, eyes tightly shut. The wound in his chest was still smoking, and clearly he was in pain, but he’d heal. Vampires always healed.

“You’d better not have lied to me,” she said. “And remember, if you come after Eve, you come after all of us. That’s going to be a lot more dangerous for you than some random dude with a mask and a crossbow.”

He didn’t move, and didn’t speak, but his eyes flicked open and studied her with odd intensity. She couldn’t really decide what he was feeling, but she did decide that she really, truly didn’t care.

She shut the office door on her way out.