Many Bloody Returns

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life Rachel Caine

Rachel Caine is known for the bestselling Weather Warden series, as well as her hot new young adult series, The Morganville Vampires. She’s also written novels for the Silhouette Bombshell line, and has numerous other books and short stories to her credit. Visit her website at www.rachelcaine.com for news and updates.

Eighteenth birthdays in Morganville are usually celebrated one of two ways: getting totally wasted with your friends or making a terrifying life-or-death decision about your continued survival.

Not that there can’t be some combination of the two.

My eighteenth birthday party was held in the back of a rust-colored ’70s-era Good Times van, and the select guest list included some of Morganville’s Least Wanted. Me, for instance—Eve Rosser. Number of people who’d signed my yearbook: five. Two of them had scrawled C YA LOSER. (Number of people I’d wanted to sign my yearbook? Zero. But that was just me.)

And then there was my best friend, Jane, and her sister, Miranda. I’d invited Jane, not Miranda. Jane was okay—kind of dull, but seriously, with a name like Jane? Cursed from birth. She did like some cool things, other than me of course. Wicked ’80s make-out music, for instance. BPAL—Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab—perfume, particularly from the Dark Elements line, although I personally preferred the Funereal Oils. Jane wasn’t Goth—more Preppy Nerd Girl than anything else—but she had some style.

Miranda, the uninvited one, was a kid. Well, Miranda was a weird kid who’d convinced a lot of people she was some kind of psychic. I didn’t invite her to the party, because I didn’t think she’d be loads of fun, and also she wasn’t likely to bring beer. Her BPAL preferences were unknown, mainly because she didn’t live on Planet Earth.

Which left Guy and Trent, my two excellent beer-buying buddies. They were my buddies mostly because Guy had a fake ID that he’d made in art class, and Trent owned the party bus in which we were ensconced. Other than that, I didn’t know either one of them that well, but they were smart-ass, funny, and safe to get drunk with. Guy and Trent were the only gay couple I actually knew, gaydom being sort of frowned upon in the Heartland of Texas that was Morganville.

We were all about the ironic family values.

The evening went pretty much the way such things are supposed to go: guys buy cheap-ass beer, distribute to underage females, drive to a deserted location (in this case, the creepy-cool high school parking lot) to play loud headbanger music and generally act like idiots. The only thing missing was the make-out sessions, which was okay by me; most of the guys of Morganville were gag worthy, anyway. There were one or two I would have gladly crawled over barbwire to date, but Shane Collins had left town, and Michael Glass…well, I hadn’t seen Michael in a while. Nobody had.

Jane brought me a birthday present, which was kind of sweet, especially since it was a brand-new mix CD of songs about dead people. Jane knows what I like.

I was still a mystery to Guy and Trent, though. Granted, Morganville’s a small town, and all us loser outcast freaks had a nodding acquaintance. The pecking order goes something like this: geeks, freaks, nerds, druggies, gays, and Goths. Goths were on the bottom because the undead think wannabes are disgusting if they’re serious about it, or dangerously smart-assed if they aren’t. Which I wasn’t. Mostly.

Oh, I forgot to mention: vampires. Town’s run by them. Full of them. Humans live here on sufferance, heavy on the “suffer.”

See what I mean about the ironic family values?

I could tell that Guy had been trying to think of a way to ask me all night, but thanks to consuming over half a case of beer with his Significantly Wasted Other, he finally just blurted out the question of the day. “So, are you signing or what?” he asked. Yelled, actually, over whatever song was currently making my head hurt. “I mean, tomorrow?”

Was I signing? That was the Big Question, the one all of us faced at eighteen. I looked down at my wrist, because I was still wearing my leather bracelet. The symbol on it wasn’t anything people outside of Morganville would recognize, but it identified the vampire who was the official Protector for my family. However, as of that morning, I was no longer in that select little club of people who had to kiss Brandon’s ass to continue to draw breath.

I also would no longer have any kind of deal or Protection from any vampire in Morganville.

What Guy was asking was whether or not I intended to pick myself a Protector of my very own. It was traditional to sign with your family’s hereditary patron, but no way in hell was I letting Brandon have power over me. So I could either shop around to see if any other vampire could—or would—take me, or go bare…live without a contract.

Which was attractive but seriously risky. See, Morganville vampires don’t generally kill off their own humans, because that would make life difficult for everybody, but free-range, unProtected humans? Nobody worries much what happens to them, because usually they’re alone, and they’re poor, and they disappear without a trace.

Just another job opening at the Chicken Shack fry machine.

They were all looking at me now. Jane, Miranda, Guy, and Trent, all waiting to hear what Eve Rosser, Professional Rebel, was going to do.

I didn’t disappoint them. I tipped back the beer, belched, and said, “Hell, no, I’m not signing. Bareback all the way, baby! Let’s live fast and die young!”

Guy and I did drunken high fives. Trent rolled his eyes and clicked beer bottles with Jane. “They all say that,” he said. “Right up until the AIDS test comes back. Then there’s the wailing and the weeping….”

“Jesus, Trent, you’re the laugh of the party.”

“That’s life of the party, honey bunches. Oh, wait, you’re right. Not in Morganville, it isn’t.” God, Trent was hyper, which was weird for a guy consuming as many brews as he had. Maybe he was just naturally that way. Maybe his Ritalin had worn off. Anyway, it was bugging me.

“Boo-ha-ha. Is that funny at all in other vans in town?” Jane asked. “Because it’s not so funny in here, ass pirate.”

“You should know, princess; you’ve been on your back in every van in town,” Trent shot back.

“Hey, bitch!” Jane tossed an empty bottle at him; Trent caught it and threw it in the plastic bin in the corner. Which, I had to admit, meant that despite the jittering, Trent could hold his liquor, because he led the field in ounces consumed by a wide margin. “Seriously, Eve—what are you going to do?”

I hadn’t thought about it. Or, actually, I had, but in that what if kind of way that was really just bullshit bravado…but now it was down to do-or-don’t, or it would be when the sun came up in the morning. I was going to have to choose, and that choice would rule the rest of my life.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten quite so trashed, given the circumstances.

“Well, I’m not signing with Brandon,” I said slowly. “Maybe I’ll shop around for another patron.”

“You really think anybody else is going to stand up and volunteer if Brandon’s got you marked?” Guy asked. “Girl, you got yourself a death wish.”

“Yeah, like that’s news,” Jane said. “Look how she dresses!”

Nothing wrong with how I was dressed. A skull T-shirt, a spiked belt low on my hips, bike shorts, fishnets, black and red Mary Janes. Oh, maybe she was talking about my makeup. I’d done the Full-On Goth today—white face powder, big black rings around my eyes, blue lips. It was sort of a joke.

And also, sort of not.

“It doesn’t matter,” said a small, quiet voice that somehow cut right through the music.

I’d almost forgotten about Miranda—the kid was sitting in the corner of the van, her knees drawn up, staring off into the distance.

“It speaks,” Trent said, and laughed maniacally. “I was starting to think you’d just brought the kid along to protect your virtue, Jane.” He gave her a comical flutter of his long, lush eyelashes.

Miranda was still talking, or at least her lips were moving, but her words were lost in a particularly loud guitar crunch. “What?” I yelled, and leaned closer. “What do you mean?”

Miranda’s pale blue gaze moved and fixed on me, and I wished it hadn’t. There was something really strange about the girl, all right, even if her rep as the town Cassandra was exaggerated. She’d supposedly known about the fire last year that burned the Collins family out; people even said she predicted that Alyssa Collins would die in the fire. Jane said Miranda made it all up after the fact, but who knew? The girl had a double helping of weird, with creepy little sprinkles on top.

“It doesn’t matter what you decide to do,” she said louder. “Really. It doesn’t.”

“Yeah?” Trent asked, and leaned over to snag another beer from the Coleman cooler in the center of the van floor. He twisted off the cap and turned it over in his black-polished fingers. “Why’s that, o Madame Doom? Is one of us going to die tonight?” They all made hilariously drunken ooooooooo sounds, and Trent upended the bottle and chugged.

“Yes,” Miranda whispered. Nobody else heard her but me.

And then her eyes rolled up in her skull, and she collapsed flat out on the filthy shag carpet on the floor of the van.

“Jesus,” Guy blurted, and crawled over to her. He checked her pulse and breathed a sigh of relief. “I think she’s alive.”

Jane hadn’t moved at all. She looked more annoyed than concerned. “It’s okay,” she said. “She had some kind of vision. It happens. She’ll come out of it.”

Trent said, “Damn, I was starting to get worried it was the beer.”

“She didn’t have any, moron.”

“See? Serious beer deficiency. No wonder she’s out.”

“Shouldn’t we do something?” Guy asked anxiously. He was cradling Miranda in his arms, and she was as limp as a rag doll, her head lolling against his head. Her eyes were closed now, moving frantically behind the lids like she was trying to look all directions at once, in the dark. “Like, take her to the hospital?”

The Morganville hospital was neutral ground—no vampires could hunt there. So it was the safest place for anybody who was, well, not working at full power. But Jane just shook her head.

“I told you, this happens all the time. She’ll be okay in a couple of minutes. It’s like an epileptic seizure or something.” Jane looked at me curiously. “What did she say to you?”

I couldn’t figure out how to tell her, so I just drank my beer and said nothing.

Probably a mistake.

Jane was right, it took a couple of minutes, but Miranda’s eyes fluttered open, blank and unfocused, and she struggled to sit up in Guy’s arms. He held on for a second, then let go. She scrambled away and sat in the far corner of the van, next to the empty bottles, with her hands over her head. Jane sighed, handed me her beer, and crawled over to whisper with her sister and stroke her hair.

“Well,” Trent said. “Guess the emergency’s over. Beer?”

“No,” I said, and drained my last bottle. I was feeling loose and sparkly, and I was going to be seriously sorry in the morning—oh, it was morning. Like, nearly 2 a.m. Great. “I need to get home, Trent.”

“But the night’s barely late–middle age!”

“Trent. Man, I have to go.”

“Party pooper. Okay, fine.” Trent shot me a resentful look and jerked his head to Guy. “Help me drive, okay?”

“You’re driving?” Guy looked alarmed. Trent had downed lots of beer. Lots. He didn’t seem to be feeling it, and it wasn’t like we had far to go, but…yeah. Still, I didn’t feel capable, and Guy looked even more bleary. Jane…well, she hadn’t been far behind Trent in the Drunk-Ass Sweepstakes either. And letting a fourteen-year-old epileptic have the wheel wasn’t a better solution.

“Not like we can walk,” I said reluctantly. “Look, drive slow, okay? Slow and careful.”

Trent shot me a crisp OK sign and saluted. He didn’t look drunk. I swallowed hard and crawled back to sit with Jane and Miranda. “We’re going home,” I said. “Guess you guys get dropped off first, right? Then me?”

Miranda nodded. “Sit here,” she said. “Right here.” She patted the carpet next to her.

I rolled my eyes. “Comfy here, thanks.”

“No! Sit here!”

I looked at Jane and frowned. “Are you sure she’s okay?” And made a little not-so-subtle loopy-loop at my temple.

“Yeah, she’s fine,” Jane sighed. “She’s been getting these visions again. Most of the time they’re bullshit, though. I think she just does it for the attention.”

Jane was looking put out, and I guess she had reason. If Miranda was this much fun at parties, I could only imagine what a barrel of laughs she was at home.

Miranda was getting more and more upset. Jane gave her a ferocious frown and said, “Oh, God. Just do it, Eve. I don’t want her having another fit or something.”

I crawled across Miranda and wedged myself uncomfortably into the corner where she indicated. Yeah, this was great. At least it was going to be a short drive.

It was what was waiting at the end of it that I was afraid of. Brandon. Decisions. The beginning of my adult life.

Trent started the van and pulled a tight U-turn out of the high school parking lot. There were no side windows, but out of the back windows I saw the big, hulking ’30s-era building with its Greek columns fading away like a ghost into the night. Morganville wasn’t big on streetlights, although there were a crapload of surveillance cameras. The cops knew where we’d been. They knew everything in Morganville, and half of them were vampires.

God, I wanted to apply for the paperwork to get the hell out, but it was a waste of time. I needed an acceptance letter to an out-of-state university or waivers from the mayor’s office. I wasn’t likely to get either one with my grades and ’tude. No, I had to face facts: I was a lifer, stuck in Morganville, watching the world go by.

At least, until somebody cut me out of the herd and I became a snack pack.

Trent was driving faster than we’d agreed. Not only that, the van was veering a little to the side of the road. “Yo, T!” I yelled. “Eyes front, man!”

He turned to look back at me, and his pupils were huge and dark, and he giggled, and I had time to think, Oh shit, he’s not drunk; he’s high, and then he hit the gas.

Miranda’s hand closed over my arm. I looked at her, and she was crying. “I don’t want them to die,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Oh, Jesus, Mir, would you stop?” Jane said, and smacked her hand away. “Drama princess.”

But I was looking at Miranda, and she was staring at me, and she slowly nodded her head.

“Here it comes,” she said, and transferred the stare to her sister. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

And then something bad happened, and the world ended.

I walked away from the smoking wreckage. Staggered, actually, coughing and carrying the limp body of Miranda; she was alive, bleeding from the head but still alive.

My brain wouldn’t bring up anything about Trent, Jane, or Guy. Nothing. It just…refused.

I walked until I heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and dropped to my knees, with Miranda in my lap.

The first cop on the scene was Richard Morrell, the son of the mayor. I’d always thought that even though his family was poisonous, he was kind of a nice guy. He’d been kind to me when I’d had to testify against my brother, after Jason…did what he did. Richard proved it again now by easing Miranda out of my arms and to the ground, cushioning her head gently to keep it from bumping against the pavement. His warm hand pressed on my shoulder. “Eve. Eve. Anybody else in there?”

I nodded slowly. “Jane. Trent. Guy.” Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d imagined all of that. Maybe they were about to crawl out of that twisted mass of metal and laugh and high five….

Too much imagination. I imagined dead, bloody bodies crawling out of the wreck and swayed. Nearly collapsed. Richard steadied me. “Easy,” he said. “Easy, kid. Stay with me.”

I did. Somehow, I stayed conscious even when the ambulance drivers wheeled the gurneys past me. Miranda was taken first, of course, and rushed off to the hospital with flashers and sirens.

They didn’t bother hurrying for the others. They just loaded the black zippered bags into one ambulance, and it drove away. They wanted me to go with them, but I told them no, I was fine, because no way was I getting in there with the bodies of my friends. I couldn’t.

The fire department hosed down the wreck, and it smelled like burned metal and reeking plastic, alcohol, blood….

I was still kneeling there on the pavement, pretty much forgotten, when Richard finally came back, did a double take, and looked grim. “Nobody came to get you? From your family?”

“You called them?”

“Yeah, I called,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

I wiped my face. The white makeup was almost gone, and my skin was wet; I hadn’t even known I was crying.

Not a mark on me.

Sit here, Miranda had told me. Right here. Like she’d known. Like she’d picked me over her own sister.

I couldn’t stop shaking. Officer Morrell found a blanket in his patrol car and threw it around my shoulders, and then he bundled me in the back and drove me the five miles home. All the lights were on at my parents’ house, but it didn’t look welcoming. I checked the time on my cell phone. Three a.m.

“Hey,” Richard said. “This is the big day, right? I’m sorry about your friends, but you need to focus now. Make the right choices, Eve. You understand?”

He was trying to be kind, as much as he knew how to be; must have been hard, considering the asshole genes he’d been given. I tried to think what his sister Monica would have said in the same situation. What a bunch of trashed-out losers. They shouldn’t be in our cemetery. We’ve got a perfectly good landfill.

I knew Monica too well, but that wasn’t Richard’s fault. I nodded to him numbly, gave back the blanket, and walked up the ten steps from the curb to my parents’ front door.

It opened before I reached for the knob, and I was facing Brandon, the family’s vampire Protector.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Eve,” he said, and stepped back. “Come in.”

I swallowed whatever smart-ass remark I might normally have given him and looked back over my shoulder. Richard Morrell was looking through the window of the police cruiser at me, and he gave a friendly wave and drove off. Like I was in good hands.

You know every stereotype of the romantic, brooding vampire? Well, that’s Brandon. Dark, broody, bedroom eyes, wears a lot of black leather. Liked to think he was badass, and what the hell did I know? Maybe he was. He was badass enough to scare kids, anyway, with those sweet eyes and those cruel hands. Psycho bastard.

I hated his guts, and he knew it.

“Honey?” Mom. She was hovering behind Brandon, looking timid and nervous. “Better come inside. You know you shouldn’t be out there in the dark.”

Dad was nowhere to be seen. I bit my tongue and crossed the threshold, and when Brandon closed the door behind me, it was like the cell slamming shut.

“I was in an accident,” I said. Mom looked at me. We didn’t seem much alike, even when I wasn’t Gothed up…. She had fading brown hair and green eyes, and I took after Dad’s darker looks.

“Oh, yes, Officer Morrell called,” she said. “But he said you weren’t hurt. And you know, we had a guest, we couldn’t just leave.” She smiled at Brandon. My skin tried to crawl off my bones at the sight of that sick, eager-to-please look on her face.

“Three of my friends were killed,” I said. I don’t know why I bothered to say it; not like anyone here really cared. But just for once, I wanted to see my mother feel something for me.

And once again, I was disappointed. “Oh, dear,” Mom said. “That must have been terrible.”

Yeah, once more with feeling, Mom. I sometimes thought maybe this was some kind of play, and Mom was an actress, not a very good one. If that was true, she really phoned in her performance.

“Any of mine?” Brandon asked casually. I gritted my teeth, because I wanted to scream and hit him, and that wouldn’t have done me any good at all.

“N-no,” I managed to stammer over the fury. “Jane Blunt, Trent Garvey, and Guy—” What the hell was Guy’s last name? I wanted to cry now. Or keep on crying, because I wasn’t sure I’d ever stopped. “Guy Finelli.”

Brandon smiled. “Sounds as if Charles had a bad night.” Charles being a rival vamp. I knew he was the Protector for Jane’s family. I hadn’t known he’d been responsible for one or both of the others. Charles was just the opposite of Brandon—a bookish little man, soft-spoken and mild until you pushed him. Not a bad choice, if I had to go shopping for Protectors, I supposed.

God, I hated this. I wanted this over.

“Let’s just do it,” I said, and walked down the hallway to the living room. Predictably, Dad was parked in his recliner with an open beer, probably working on his usual six-pack. He was a bloated vision of my future—two hundred and fifty pounds, sallow and grim and full of rage and resentment he couldn’t fling anywhere but around here, in the house. He managed the biggest local bar, which of course was owned by Brandon. All nice and tidy. Brandon owned the mortgage on the house. Brandon owned the notes on our cars.

Brandon owned us.

And now Brandon was smiling at me, all sleek and horrible with those hungry, hungry eyes, and he was taking a folded, thin sheaf of papers out of the pocket of his long black coat.

“You only wear that thing because you saw it on Angel,” I said, and snatched the paperwork from him. I read the first few sentences. I, Eve Evangeline Walker Rosser, swear my life, my blood, and my service to my Protector, Brandon, now and for my lifetime, that my Protector may command me in all things.

This was it. I was holding my future in my hands, right here.

Brandon held out a pen. My father tore his attention away from the glowing escape of the television and took a sip of beer, watching me with angry intensity. My mother looked nervous, fluttering her hands as I stared without blinking at the black Montblanc the vampire was holding out.

“Happy birthday, by the way,” Brandon said. “There’s a signing bonus. Ten thousand dollars.”

“Guess I could bury my friends in style with that,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry about that.” Brandon shrugged. “Their family contracts cover that sort of thing.”

Mom sensed what I was thinking, I guess, because she blurted, “Eve, honey, let’s hurry. Brandon does have places to go.” She encouraged me with little vague motions of her hands, and her eyes were desperate.

I took a deep breath, held the crisp paper in both hands, and ripped it in half. The sound was almost drowned out by my mother’s horrified gasp and the sound of the beer can crushing in my father’s hand.

“You ungrateful little—” Dad said. “You disrespect your Protector like that? To his face?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much just like that.” I ripped the contract in quarters and threw it at him. The paper fluttered like huge confetti, one piece landing on his shoulder until Brandon calmly brushed it off. “Fuck off, Brandon. I’m not signing with you.”

“No one else will take you,” he said. “And you’re mine, Eve. You’ve always been mine. Don’t forget it.”

My dad got out of his recliner and grabbed my arm. “You’re signing that paper,” he said, and shook me like a terrier shaking a rat. “Don’t be stupid! Don’t you know what you’re doing? What you could cost your family if you do this?”

“I’m not signing anything!” I screamed, right in his face, and took Brandon’s expensive pen and stomped on it with my Mary Janes until it was a leaking black stain on the floor. “You can be slaves if you want, but not me! Not ever again!”

Brandon didn’t look angry. He looked amused. That was bad.

Dad shoved me and sent me reeling. “Then you’re gone,” he said. “I won’t have you in my house, eating my food, stealing my money. If you want to go out there bare, then do it. See how long you last.” He turned to Brandon. “Our Protection stays intact if she leaves, right?”

Brandon inclined his head and smiled.

I was stunned, at least a little; Dad had never even threatened a thing like that before. I backed away from him, into Mom. She got out of the way, but then, she always did, didn’t she? She had all the backbone of a balloon.

She avoided my eyes completely. “You’d better go, honey,” she said. “You made your choice.”

I turned and ran down the hall to my room, slammed the door, and dragged my biggest suitcase out from under the bed. I couldn’t take much, I knew that; even taking a suitcase was risky, because it slowed me down. But I couldn’t wait for dawn; I had to get out of here now, before Brandon stopped me. He wasn’t supposed to use compulsion on me, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t.

I filled up the bag with underwear, shoes, clothes, and a few mementos that I couldn’t leave, just in case Dad decided to fill up the barbecue with my belongings the minute I was out the door. I left the family photos, even the good ones, the ones from when I was a little kid and our family wasn’t a total freak show. I didn’t want those memories, and I didn’t want pictures of my brother Jason, who was better off in jail, where he was currently rotting. Seeing his face made me feel sick.

I went out the back door, since Brandon was still talking to Mom and Dad in the front, and dragged the suitcase as quietly as possible across the backyard to the alley. Alleys in Morganville are freaky at night and wildly dangerous, but I didn’t have much choice. I hurried, bouncing my suitcase over rough, rutted ground and past foul-smelling trash bins, until I was on the street.

And I realized I had no idea where to go. No idea at all. All the friends I’d had were dead—dead tonight—and I couldn’t even really grieve about that; I didn’t have time. Life-saving had to come first, right? That’s what I kept telling myself.

Didn’t help me carry that giant boulder of guilt.

Cabs didn’t run at night, because cabbies knew better, and besides, there were only two in the whole town. No bus service. At night, you either drove or you stayed home, and even driving was dangerous if you were unProtected.

I could go to the local motel for the night, the Sagebrush, but it was a good twenty-minute walk, and I didn’t think I had twenty minutes. Not tonight. I’d officially forfeited Brandon’s Protection when I’d ripped up that paper, and that meant I was an all-you-can-suck buffet until I got somebody to take me in. Houses had automatic Protection. Any house.

Michael. Michael Glass.

Michael lived only a few blocks away. I’d gone to school with Michael, crushed hard on Michael from a distance, and semistalked him after he graduated, attending every single guitar-playing gig he’d landed in Morganville. He was really good, you see. And a sweetheart. And little baby Jesus, he was wicked hot. And he had his own house.

I knew the Glass House. It was one of the historical homes of Morganville, all gently decaying Gothic elegance, and Michael’s parents had moved out of Morganville on waivers two years ago. Michael lived there all alone, as far as I knew.

And it was only three blocks away.

I had no idea if he was home, or if he’d be stupid enough to let me in when I was running for my life, but it was worth a try, right? I broke into a jog, the wheels of my suitcase making a whirring, grating hiss on the sidewalk. The night felt deep and dark, no moon, only starlight, and it smelled like cold dust. Like a graveyard. Like my graveyard.

I thought of Trent, Guy, and Jane, in their silent black bags. Maybe they were in cold metal drawers by now, filed away. Lives over.

I didn’t want to be dead. I didn’t.

So I ran, bumping my suitcase behind me.

I didn’t see a soul on the streets. No cars, no lights in windows, no shadows trailing me. It was eerily quiet outside, and my heart was racing. I wished I had weapons, but those were hard to come by in Morganville, and besides, I had nosy parents who trashed my room regularly looking for contraband of all kinds. Being under eighteen sucked.

Being over eighteen wasn’t looking so great, either.

I heard the hiss of tires behind me, over the puffing of my breath, and the low growl of a car engine. I looked back, hoping to see Richard Morrell following me in the police car, but no such luck; it was a nondescript black sports car with dark-tinted windows.

Vampire car. No question.

Two more blocks.

The car seemed content to creep along behind me, tires crunching over pavement, and I had plenty of panic-time to wonder who was inside. Brandon, in the back, almost certainly; he’d be cruising with his friends, and when he took me, he’d do it in front of an audience.

The suitcase hit a crack in the sidewalk and tipped over, dragging me to an off-balance halt. I saw a light go on in one of the houses I was passing, and a curtain twitch aside, and then the blinds snapped shut and the lights flicked off. No help there. But then, in Morganville, that wasn’t unusual.

I wasn’t crying, but it was close; I could feel tears burning in my throat, right above the terror twisting my guts. This was your choice, I told myself. You couldn’t do anything else.

Right now, that wasn’t much comfort.

Up ahead, I saw the looming bulk of the Glass House—one more block to go. I could make it, I could. I had to. Jane and Trent and Guy were gone. I owed it to them to live through this.

The car sped up behind me as I crossed the street to the next corner. Four houses to go, all still and lightless.

There was a porch light on in front of 716, and it cast a glow on the pillars framing the porch, picked out the boards in the white fence in front. There were lights on inside, and I saw someone pass in front of a window.

“Michael!” I screamed it and put everything into one last sprint. The car eased ahead of me and pulled in at the curb with a squeal of brakes, tires bumping concrete. A door flew open to block the sidewalk, and I gasped, picked up my suitcase, and tossed it over the fence. It weighed about fifty pounds, but I managed to pick it up and throw it. I grabbed the rough whitewashed boards with their sharp tops and vaulted over, got my shirt caught on the way and ripped it open. No time to worry about that. I grabbed my suitcase and started dragging it over the night-damp grass toward the pool of light. I yelled again, with even more of an edge of panic. “Michael! It’s Eve! Open the door!”

They were behind me. They were right behind me. I knew it, even though I didn’t dare look back and they made no sound. I could feel it. I felt something grab the suitcase, nearly twisting my arm out of the socket, and I let go, stumbling against the porch stairs. The house stretched above me, gray and ghostly in the dark, but that porch light, that was life.

Something caught my foot. I screamed and kicked, fighting to get free, but I went down to my hands and knees, then flat as whoever had me pulled. My searching fingers scratched at the closed wood of the door, and I tasted dust again. I’d been close, so close….

The door opened, and warm yellow light spilled out over me. Too late. I tried to grab for a handhold but I was being yanked backward…and I could feel breath on the back of my neck. Cold, rancid breath.

Something flew over my head and slammed into the vampire pulling on me, knocking him backward. I crawled back toward the door and got a hand over the threshold.

Michael Glass grabbed my fingers and dragged me inside with one long pull. My feet made it over the line just a fraction of a second before another vampire slammed into the invisible barrier there.

That vampire was Brandon. Oh, damn, he was angry. Really angry. Our vampires were all about fitting in, but right now he clearly didn’t care what we saw. His eyes had turned bloodred, and his face was whiter than I’d ever made mine. And I could see fangs, fangs a viper would have envied, flicking down from their hiding place to flash in menace.

And Michael Glass didn’t flinch. In fact…he smiled. “You’re not coming in, Brandon, so save it,” he said. “Leave.”

He looked like I remembered him from high school, from the concerts, only…better, somehow. Stronger. Tall, built, golden hair that waved and curled surfer-style. He had blue eyes, and they were fixed on Brandon. Wary, but definitely not afraid.

“You okay?” he asked me. I nodded, unable to say anything that would really cover how I felt. “Then get out of the way.”

“Huh?”

“Your legs. Please.”

I pulled them toward me, and he calmly shut the door in Brandon’s face. I sat there on the wooden floor, knees pulled in to my chest, and tried to slow my heart down from triple digits. “God,” I whispered, and rested my forehead on my knees. “That was close.”

I heard the rustle of fabric. Michael had crouched down across from me, back to the opposite wall. He was wearing some comfortable old jeans, a faded green cotton shirt, and his feet were long and narrow and bare. “Eve Rosser, right?” he asked. “Hi.”

“Hi, Michael.” I was having trouble getting my breath.

“How have you been?”

“Good. You?”

“Fine. What the hell is going on?”

“Um…my eighteenth birthday.” I was shivering, and I realized my skull shirt was displaying a whole lot more bra than I’d ever intended. Kind of a plunge bra. Victoria’s Secret. Not so much of a secret right now. “Brandon’s kind of pissed. I didn’t sign.”

Michael rested his head against the wall and looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You didn’t sign. Oh, man.”

I shook my head, unable to say much more about that. I knew what he was thinking, and he was right: I’d brought trouble right to his door. Some friend. Acquaintance. Whatever. My cousin Bob always used to say No good deed goes unpunished. In Morganville, Bob was damn sure right.

Michael said, “You got someplace to go? Relatives, maybe?”

I just looked at him miserably, and I felt tears starting to bubble up again. What had I been hoping for? Some white knight hottie to save me? Well, I wasn’t going to get it from Michael. He hadn’t even come outside to get me, he’d just thrown a chair or something.

Still, he’d opened the door. Nobody else on this street had or would have.

“Okay,” Michael said softly. He stretched out a hand and awkwardly patted me on the knee. “Hey. You’re okay, right? You’re safe in here now. Don’t cry.”

I didn’t want to cry, but that was how I vented, and boy, did I need to vent. All the fury and grief and rage and confusion just boiled up inside and forced their way out. I was sobbing like a punk, and after a couple of shaking breaths I felt Michael move across to sit next to me. His arm went around me, and I turned toward his warmth, soaking his shirt with tears. I would have told him everything then, all the bad stuff…the van, my friends, Brandon. I would have told him how Brandon gave my dad a pay raise when I was fifteen in return for unrestricted access to me and Jason. I would have told him everything.

Lucky for him I couldn’t get my breath.

Michael was good at soothing; he knew not to talk, and he knew just how to touch my hair and how to hold me. It wasn’t until the storm became more like occasional showers, and I was able to hiccup steady breaths, that I realized he had a clear view down my bra.

“Hey!” I said, and tried to artfully tuck the torn edges of my shirt under the strap. Michael had an odd look on his face. “Free show’s over, Glass.”

Trent would have snapped back some snazzy insult, but not Michael. Michael just looked uncomfortable and edged away from me. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t—”

Well, if he wasn’t, I was offended. I gave good bra: 34B.

He must have seen it in my expression, because Michael held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, yeah. I was. That makes me an asshole, right?”

“No, that makes you male and straight,” I said. Was it wrong I felt relieved? “I just need to change my—Oh, damn. My suitcase! It’s still out there—”

“Come on.” Michael got up and walked down the polished wooden hallway. The house felt warm but strange—old, and despite the big open rooms, kind of claustrophobic. Like it was…watching. I loved it. I had no idea why, but it just felt…right. Strange and odd and right.

The living room was normal stuff—couch, chairs, bookcases, throw rugs. A guitar case lying open on a small dining table, and the acoustic was abandoned on the couch as if he’d put it down to see what the trouble was out in the yard. I’d heard Michael play before, though not recently. People had said he’d given it up…but I guessed he hadn’t. Maybe he’d just given up performing.

Michael pulled the blinds and looked out. “It’s on the lawn,” he said. “They’re going through it.”

“What?” I pushed him out of the way and tried to see for myself, but it was all just a black blur. “They’re going through my stuff? Bastards!” Because I had some lingerie in there that I seriously wanted to keep private. Well, maybe share with one other person. But privately. I yanked the cord on the blinds and moved them up, then unlocked the window and threw up the sash. I leaned out and yelled, “Hey, assholes, you touch my underwear and—”

Michael yanked me back by my belt and slammed the window shut about one second before Brandon’s face appeared there. “Let’s not taunt the angry vampires,” he said. “I have to live here.”

Deep breaths, Eve. Right. Suitcase not as important as jugular. I sat down in one of the chairs, trying to get hold of myself and not even sure who that was anymore. Myself, I mean. So much had changed in five hours, right? I was an adult now. I was on my own in a town where being alone was a death sentence. I’d made a very bad enemy, and I’d done it deliberately. I’d been disowned by my own family, not that they’d been much of a family in the first place.

“I am so screwed,” I said. Michael didn’t say anything to that; it was kind of rhetorical. “So. You look like a nice, nonpsycho kind of guy. Need an unstable roommate with lots of enemies?” I asked, and tried for a mocking smile. Michael hesitated in the act of reaching for his guitar, then settled in on the couch with the instrument cradled in his lap like a favorite pet. He picked out random notes, pure and cool, and bent his head. “Sorry. Bad joke.”

“No, it’s not,” he said. “Actually—I might consider it.”

“What?”

“I didn’t sign, either,” he said.

Oh, man. No, I hadn’t known that; I couldn’t remember who his family’s Protector had been, but it couldn’t have been Brandon. Michael wasn’t wearing a symbol bracelet, so no clues there.

“I was thinking,” he continued, “that maybe we ought to stick together. Those of us who don’t have contracts. Besides, you and me, we always got along in school. I mean, we didn’t know each other that well, but—” Nobody had known Michael really well, except his buddy Shane Collins, but Shane had bugged out of Morganville with his parents after his sister’s death. Everybody had wanted to know Michael, but he was private. Shy, maybe. “It’s a big house. Four bedrooms, two baths. Hard to manage it by myself. Bills and crap.”

Was he offering? Really? I swallowed and leaned forward. My shirt was coming loose again, but I left it that way. I needed every advantage I could get. “I swear, I’m good for rent. I’ll get a job somewhere, at one of the neutral places. And I clean stuff. I’m a demon with the cleaning.”

“Cook?” He looked hopeful, but I had to shake my head. “Damn. I’m not so great at it.”

“You’d have to be better than me. I can screw up the recipe for water.”

He smiled. He had one of those smiles. You know the ones—the kind that unleashes lethal force on girls in the vicinity. I couldn’t remember him smiling in high school. He was probably aware that it might cause girls to faint or unbutton clothes or something.

“We’ll think about it until tomorrow night,” he said. “Pick any room but the first one; that’s mine. Sheets are in the closet. Towels are in the bathroom.”

“My suitcase—”

“After dawn.” He was looking down again, picking out a sweet, quiet melody from the strings. “Look, I’ve got someplace I have to go before then, but you’ll be safe enough if you just go out to get it and come right back inside. I don’t think Brandon’s pissed enough to hang around in the sun.”

“But you can’t go out in the dark! He could—”

“Brandon? No, he couldn’t. Trust me.”

Oh, no. Alarm bells went off. “You’re not—”

He looked up sharply. “I’m not what?”

I mimed fangs.

Michael sighed. “No, I’m not.”

“Well, you know, the whole gone-during-daylight thing…”

“I have a job; maybe you’ve heard of it. You leave the house, make money…? Any other questions?”

“Yeah. Then how come you’re up so late if you have to get up so early?”

He looked at me for a second blankly, like he couldn’t believe I’d asked. “Well,” he said slowly, “I do get up to eat, shower, that kind of thing before work. Why? Don’t you?”

Oh. Put like that, it didn’t sound quite as suspiciously vampiric. I swallowed hard, wondering if I could trust him. If I should. Well, idiot, what choices do you have?

I pulled the silver chain around my neck and flipped the tiny silver cross out to hang over the tattered rags of my shirt. “Touch it,” I said.

“What?” He now clearly thought I was crazy.

“Touch the cross, Michael.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake—”

“I have to be sure.”

He reached out and put a fingertip squarely on the cross, then spread his whole hand over it.

That came comfortably close to the top of my breasts. Not what I’d intended, but…wow. Bonus.

We sat there for a long second, and then Michael cleared his throat and sat back. “Satisfied?” He seemed to realize it was a trick question and didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll be back by dark. We’ll talk about the rent then. But for now, you should—” He looked up. His gaze reached the level of my chest, stopped, and then lowered again. The smile this time was directed at the guitar. “Put on a new shirt or something.”

“Well, I would, but all my shirts are in my suitcase, getting molested by Brandon and his funboys.” I flipped a finger at the window, in case they were watching.

“Get something out of my closet,” he said. I thought he was playing something from Coldplay’s catalog now, something soft and contemplative. “Sorry about the, uh, staring. I know you’ve had a tough night.”

There was something so damn sweet about that, it made me want to cry. Again. I swallowed the impulse. “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

This time, when he looked up, his gaze actually made it to my face. And stayed there. “I’m guessing that means bad.”

“Oh, whole new definitions of bad. But you don’t want to hear about that.”

“You’d tell me if I was a friend, right? And not just some guy whose door you randomly knocked on in the middle of the night?”

I thought about Jane, poor sweet Jane, my best and only real friend. Trent and Guy, who probably had been destined for nothing but still had been, for tonight at least, my buds. “I’m not so good for my friends,” I said. “Maybe we ought to just call you a really nice stranger.” I took a deep breath. “I lost three people tonight, and it was my fault.”

He kept looking at me. Really looking. It was a little bit hot, and a little bit disconcerting. “Then would you talk to a really nice stranger about it? For—” He checked his watch. “Forty minutes? I need to leave, but I want you to be okay before I do.”

It only took thirty minutes to tell him about the Life and Times of Me, actually. Michael didn’t say very much, and I felt so tired afterward that I hardly knew it when he got up and went into the kitchen. I must have dozed off a little, because when I woke up, he was kneeling next to my chair, and he had a chocolate brownie on a plate. With a semimelted pink candle sputtering away on top.

“It’s a leftover,” he warned me. “It was crap in the first place, so I don’t know how good it is. But happy birthday, anyway. I promise you, things will get better.”

I had news for him. They just had.

When the sun came up, I’d have a whole new set of problems. Not the least of which would be finding a workplace not afraid to hire a girl with serious vampire relations issues and a wardrobe that leaned toward the macabre.

But for now?

I took a bite of brownie, smiled at my new housemate, and celebrated my freedom.