Bitter Blood (14 page)

“That’s a relief. You know, I think you work too hard at those classes. We’d be so happy to see you, honey. Do you think you might be able to come out this weekend?” Claire’s parents lived only a few towns away, in a house that they wouldn’t have been able to afford except that Morganville’s Founder had bought it for them, in a fit of conscience over their daughter’s contributions to vampire survival. Her parents had also once understood about the
vampires, but not anymore. Those memories had faded almost to nothing—a deliberate action by the vamps, or by Amelie in particular. And that was okay. Claire preferred it that way—she liked them thinking she was in a safe place, with people who loved her. It was half true, anyway—the second half.

“Maybe I can try,” she said. If Myrnin was right, she might not have much choice in getting out of town soon. “Mom—I know you were disappointed at me about not going to MIT when they called me, but…”

“I trust you, sweetie. I was just afraid you’d made that decision because of—well, because of Shane. If you really made it because you weren’t ready to go, then that’s all right. I want you to do things the way that’s most comfortable for you. Your dad agrees.” There was an indistinct mumble in the background that
might
have been her dad agreeing, but more likely it was just the opposite, and Claire smiled.

“Shane’s not in charge of what I do,” she said. “But I won’t lie. I didn’t want to leave him here, either. So maybe there’s a little bit of that in there.”

“I—honey, I know you don’t want to hear this again, but are you sure you’re not plunging into something too quickly with him?”

It was a familiar subject, and Claire felt a white-hot stab of annoyance.
Never thought of that, Mom. Wow, what insight!
She wouldn’t say it…. She’d rarely been sarcastic to her parents, but that didn’t stop her from thinking it. Older people so often thought they’d been through everything, experienced everything…but it wasn’t true. Few of them had ever lived in Morganville, for instance. Or apprenticed to a vampire with poor impulse control.

“I’m not,” Claire said. She’d learned that short answers worked best; they made her sound adult and certain. Overexplaining only
opened the door for more lectures. “I know you’re concerned, Mom, but Shane’s a really good guy.”

“I know you wouldn’t stay with him if he wasn’t—you’re a very smart girl. But it does concern me, Claire. And your father. You’re just eighteen. You’re too young to be thinking about spending a lifetime with someone. You’ve hardly even dated anyone else.”

Claire was just about fed up with the
You’re too young
litany. She’d heard it from the time she was old enough to understand the words. The format might change, but the song remained the same: too young to do whatever it was she most wanted to do. And she couldn’t resist saying, “If you hadn’t said I was too young to go to MIT at sixteen, I would never have come to Morganville.”

It was true, but it was a little cruel, and her mother fell silent in a way that told Claire she’d scored.
It’s not a game,
she reminded herself, but she couldn’t help a little surge of satisfaction, anyway.

When her mom restarted the conversation, it was about her new hobby, which had something to do with remodeling the house. Claire listened with half an ear as she flipped pages in her textbook that she’d opened on her lap. She still had another twenty pages of material to digest, and calling home was having the desired effect: it was making her forget all about Myrnin, and what he’d said, and focus back on her studies.

The door to her room opened unexpectedly, and Shane was standing there, bed-headed and yawning. He waved at her. She pointed to the phone and mouthed
Mom.
He nodded, stepped over her, and headed for his own room. Knowing him, he’d be facedown in dreamland in five minutes.

Claire grabbed her stuff and went back into her own room. Mom still hadn’t paused for breath, and except for a few noncommittal uh-huhs, Claire was just a conversational spectator.

A second after she settled in on the bed, there was another
knock at the door—not Shane this time, because it was much more tentative. Claire covered the phone and called, “Come in!”

It was Miranda, who stepped inside and looked around with interest. Claire mouthed to her,
I’m on with my mom.
Miranda nodded and went to stare at the large bookcase in the corner of the room. She began pulling out titles.

“Mom, I’ve got to go,” Claire said. “My friend Miranda’s here. I told you about her. She’s the new one in the house.”

“Oh, okay. Love you, pumpkin. Your dad says he loves you, too. Can’t wait for you to take a look at the carpet samples. I’m sure you can help us decide on that. Maybe this weekend?”

“Thanks, Mom. I love you, too. Yeah, maybe this weekend.”

She hung up and dropped her cell back in her pocket as Miranda wandered over with a couple of books. “Do you mind if I borrow these?” she asked. “I don’t sleep anymore.”

“Any time,” Claire said. “Did you like
Star Wars
?”

“Yes,” she said. Miranda sat down on the bed next to her. She was a small-framed girl, and she seemed even more fragile than Claire, who’d at least put on some muscle these past few years, if she hadn’t grown much taller. Miranda had the seeming physical strength of a stick insect. That was deceptive, of course; Miranda wasn’t really alive in the same way Claire was, and she could draw on the considerable power of the Glass House when she had to, so she could probably break bricks with her hands if necessary.

It was hard not to feel protective, though. The kid just had that look of vulnerability.

“That’s it? Yes? People usually have more to say than that.”

“It was good?” Miranda tried tentatively, and then shrugged. “I guess I’m not really in the mood for movies after all. You know, I used to think that if I couldn’t see the future, it would be terrible, but really, it feels pretty good, not knowing what’s coming. It
makes it more fun to watch movies and things when you can’t guess the ending.” She fell silent for a second, then pushed her hair behind her ear. “But it’d be more fun if I did it with you guys.”

She’d been coming out of her shell slowly, but steadily; she hadn’t quite joined the Glass House gang in full, but she was, at least, an adopted kid who was trying to fit into the family. Claire knew how that felt; she’d come into the house when Shane, Michael, and Eve had already been an established unit of old friends. She knew what it felt like to be an outsider.

Claire hugged her impulsively. “We’ll do that,” she said. “Movie night. Tomorrow. I’ve got a bunch of things I think you’d like.”

“Michael and Eve are going to move out,” Miranda said.

Claire almost fell off the bed as she twisted to get a look at Mir’s face. The other girl was staring down, and she didn’t look like she was making a bad joke; she seemed serious, and a little sad.
“What?”

“I know I’m not supposed to eavesdrop, and I try not to, really, but it’s hard when you’re invisible during the daytime,” Miranda said. “I mean, you’re drifting around bored and there’s nobody to talk to. You can’t even watch TV unless someone else turns it on, and then you have to watch whatever they want—”

“Mir, focus. Why would you say they’re moving out?”

“Because they’re talking about it,” she said. “Eve thinks that it’s hard to feel married when they’re just living the same life, you know? When it’s here, with you and Shane. I know she moved into Michael’s bedroom, but she doesn’t feel like anything really changed. Like, they’re married for reals.”

Claire had honestly never thought about it. It had just seemed, in her mind, like marriage wouldn’t change anything—wouldn’t mean any difference at all in the way Michael and Eve felt around
her and Shane. They’d already been, ah, together, after all. Why should it matter? “Maybe they just need some time.”

“They need
space
,” Miranda said. “That’s what Michael said, anyway. Space and privacy and nobody listening to them all the time.”

Well, Claire could understand the privacy part. She always felt odd about that, too. Even as big as the Glass House was, sometimes it felt very crowded with five people in it. “They shouldn’t move out,” Claire said. “It’s Michael’s house!”

“Well,
I
can’t move, can I?” Miranda said, and kicked her feet. She was wearing cute sneakers, pink with an adorably weird brown bunny face on them. “I don’t want them to go, though. Claire—what happens to me if you guys all leave? Do I just…stay here? Forever? Alone?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Claire said, and sighed. She grabbed a pillow and flopped backward, holding it tight against her chest. “God, this can’t happen now. Like everything wasn’t complicated enough!”

Miranda lay flat, too, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t feel right tonight. The house feels…It feels weird. Anxious, maybe.” The Glass House had its own kind of rudimentary life force to it—something Claire didn’t exactly understand but could feel all around her. And Miranda was right. The house was on edge. “I think it’s worried about us. About what’s going to happen to us all.”

Claire remembered Myrnin’s anxious, determined expression, his insistence that she leave town, and felt a chill.

“We’ll be fine,” Claire said, and hugged the pillow tighter. “We’ll all be fine.”

It was as if the universe had heard her, and responded, because all of a sudden she heard the crash of glass downstairs. Miranda
stood bolt upright and closed her eyes, then opened them to say, “The front window. Something broke it.”

Claire raced her downstairs, with Shane stumbling out of his room in a daze to follow. They found Michael and Eve already there.

The window in the parlor was broken out, and a brick was lying on the carpet in a spray of broken glass. Wrapped around it was another note. Nobody spoke as Michael unfastened the string that held it on and read it, then passed it to Eve, who passed it to Shane, who passed it to Claire.

“Wow,” she said. “I didn’t think they could spell
perverts.
”

“It’s getting worse,” Eve said. “They’re not going to let this go, are they?”

Michael put his arms around her and hugged her tight. “I’m not going to let anything happen,” he said. “Trust me.”

She let out a sigh of relief and nodded.

Shane, ever practical, said, “I’ll get the plywood and hammer.”

W
hen Amelie slept, she seemed little more than a child, small and defenseless, bathed in moonlight like a coating of ice. Her skin glowed with an eerie radiance, and lying next to her, I thought she might well be the most magnificent and beautiful thing I had ever seen.

It destroyed me to betray her, but I really had no choice.

I slipped quietly away through the darkness of this, her most secret of hideaways; it was where Amelie kept those treasures she had preserved through years, through wars, through every hardship that had fallen over her. Fine artworks, beautiful clothes, jewels, books of all descriptions. And letters. So many handwritten letters that seven massive ironbound chests couldn’t contain them all. One or two, I thought, might have come from my own pen. They would not have been love poems. Likely they had been threats.

I moved silently through the rooms to the door, and out into the jasmine-scented garden. It was a small enclosure, but bursting with colorful flowers that glowed even in the darkness. A fountain played in the center, and beside it stood another woman. I’d have mistaken her for Amelie, at a glance; they were alike enough in coloring and height and form.

But Naomi was a very different kind of woman altogether. Vampire, yes; old, yes. And a blood sister to the Founder, through their common vampire maker, Bishop…but where Amelie had the power to command vampires, to force them to her will, Naomi had always wielded her power less like a queen and more like a seductress, though she had little interest in the flesh—or at least, in mine.

Amelie appeared to be made of ice, but inside was fire, hot and fierce and furious; inside Naomi, I knew, was nothing but cold ambition.

And yet…here I was.

“Oliver,” she said, and placed a small, gentle hand on my chest, over my heart. “Kind of you to meet me here.”

“I had no choice,” I said. Which was true—she had taken all choices from me. I raged at it, inside; I was in a tearing frenzy of rage within, but none of it showed on my face or in my bearing. None could, unless she allowed it; she had control of me from the bones out.

“True,” she said. “And how fares my much-beloved sister?”

“Well,” I said. “She could wake at any time. It wouldn’t do for her to see you here.”

“Or at all, since my dear blood sister believes I’m safely dead and gone. Or do I have you to thank for the attempt on my life, Oliver? One of you must have wished me dead among the draug.”

“I organized your assassination,” I confessed immediately.
Again, no choice; I could feel her influence inside me, as irresistible as the hand of God. “Amelie had no part in it.”

“Nor would she have; we’ve held our truce for a thousand years. I’ll have to think of a suitable way to reward you for betraying that. What does she suspect?”