Bitter Blood (35 page)

Miranda knew that better than anyone, apparently.

Despite Michael’s winning personality and movie-star smile, it wasn’t working. Michael had a definite effect on girls, when he was really trying…and
boy
, was he trying. Claire could feel the tingle from five feet away, and it wasn’t even directed at her. He’d always had charm, but lately she’d realized that as a vampire, he was fully capable of wielding it like a weapon—a kinder one, but powerful in its own right.

But Jenna seemed immune.

Claire couldn’t see Miranda, and she had the sinking feeling that maybe she’d lost her nerve and run, but then she saw a ghostly face peeking out from behind the bookcases. Claire headed that way, trying not to look obvious about it. She leaned in next to her and muttered, “Michael needs to know what you’re doing.”

“Waiting,” Miranda said.

“For what?”

Miranda was looking past her, Claire realized—looking at the window that faced west, toward twilight.

Toward the sun slipping steadily below the horizon.

“For sunset,” she said, and stepped out from behind the bookcase. Clearly a ghost. Clearly a walking dead girl.

There was a sudden, vivid silence as Michael, Jenna, and Angel all stopped talking, and everyone focused right on Miranda. Claire could even hear the tiny mechanical whir of Tyler adjusting the focus on his camera.

“Hello,” Miranda said. “My name is Miranda. I’m a ghost.”

And then she vanished.

“No!” Jenna screamed. “No, please, come back! I want to help you.
We
want to help. Don’t run!”

And that was the exact moment the sun completely set outside, and Miranda fell out of the ceiling, going from mist to solid in midair, and thumping flat on her face on the floor in the middle of the rug.

She said, in a muffled voice, “Ow.”

No one said anything else for a moment. And then Jenna said, in a flat, odd voice, “Tyler? Please tell me you got that.”

*      *      *

For what felt like minutes, nobody seemed able to move. The three ghost hunters looked like wax statues, frozen in their poses, unable to process what they’d just seen. Tyler finally moved the camera away from his eyes and blinked, as if not sure exactly what had gone wrong with his eyes.

“Well, that was awkward,” Shane finally said, and crouched down next to Miranda. “You okay, kid?”

She wasn’t. She stayed facedown for a long moment, shuddering, and Claire remembered with a shock that when Michael had been trapped as a ghost, he’d reexperienced how he’d died, every day. That was particularly awful for Miranda, who’d been killed by the draug—not a pleasant way to go.

Shane helped her sit up, and Miranda gave him a grateful, brave little smile. “Sorry,” she said, “but I needed to get their attention.”

“Well, you’ve got it,” Jenna said, barking out a laugh. “We
can’t
leave. We have the biggest thing that’s ever been recorded in ghost hunting. Hell, not just ghost hunting. Science. This isn’t just huge, it’s—it’s world-breaking! It changes everything!”

Angel clearly didn’t know what to say. He was staring down at Miranda with a curiously blank expression, as if he really didn’t know how to handle this at all. He was more of an actor than someone who really believed, Claire thought, and unlike Jenna, who saw it as vindication, he saw it as upheaval. When Miranda plunged out of the air, his world had definitely broken, and it looked as if he’d be a while trying to put it all back together again.

Tyler hadn’t said a word. He was still recording, as if too frozen to stop, but Claire heard him muttering under his breath, “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap, what the hell!”

She’d felt the same way, the first time she’d seen Michael coalesce
out of thin air. But by then, she’d already known about vampires. Her world had already been spun off its axis; the ghost team was having to make a whole lot of adjustments pretty damn quickly.

Jenna leaned in toward Miranda as she climbed to her feet. “You’ve been speaking to me, haven’t you? Trying to help us?”

“No, I—” Miranda looked tired, and very worried. “I wanted to warn you. You were getting them all upset. It was going to get you hurt.”

“Who?”

“All the ghosts.”

“But that’s why we’re here, to talk to—”

“Morganville isn’t like any other town,” Miranda said, cutting her off, and met her eyes with an intensity that made Jenna blink. “You came here looking for ghosts, and they heard you. And that’s dangerous. There’s—okay, I can’t explain so much of it, but there’s power here. Old power. And sometimes the dead can use it if you give them access. You opened up the tap, I guess. And now we need to shut it off before something worse happens.”

“This is insane,” Angel said, and stood next to Jenna. “Clearly, this is the most sophisticated hoax I’ve ever seen, but…”

“Shut up,” Jenna said. She was staring intently at Miranda, and suddenly she reached out and took the girl’s hand in hers. “You feel real. You look real.”

“I am,” Miranda said. “Half the time. But it’s because I’m like you. I had power, and the house could use that to save me—not all the way, but this way. During the day, though, I’m mostly invisible. It was hard to make you see me just now, even inside the house. I’m getting better, though.”

“You’re—you’re a real spirit.”

“Yes,” she said, and shook Jenna’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Jenna burst out in a delighted laugh and kept shaking Miranda’s hand until the girl finally pulled free.

“It’s a hoax,” Angel said again. “Jenna, you can’t believe any of this. It’s obviously…”

“It’s okay,” Miranda said to him. “It’ll take time to sink in. I know.”

“Shut up!” he growled at her.

“Hey!” Eve said, and took a step forward. “She’s a
kid
. Watch your mouth. Miranda, you don’t have to talk to them. If that’s going to be their attitude, they can shove that camera up their—”

“Eve,” Michael said, and shook his head. “Not helpful.” He got behind Tyler and tapped him on the shoulder. “I’m going to need that thing.”

Tyler jerked forward, crowding protectively shoulder to shoulder with Angel. “Oh
hell
no, man. You’re not taking this away.”

“You don’t think so?” Michael’s eyes had little random flickers of red showing. Claire waved at him behind their backs and pointed toward her own eyes, then at him. He caught the message, and she saw him calm down with an effort. “Look, whatever you think you saw, you just didn’t understand. There’s nothing supernatural going on here. It’s a trapdoor. She came from the next floor up.”

Tyler and Angel both craned their necks to look up at the totally smooth ceiling…and Michael, vampire fast, snatched the camera away and backpedaled when Tyler came after him. “Don’t make me crush it,” he said. “It looks expensive.”

“It is, man. Give it back!”

“Sure. Hang on.” Michael looked it over, ignoring Tyler’s attempts to grab it away again, and found the memory chip, which he ejected. He held it up, and handed the camera back. “No problem.”

“You can’t keep that!”

“Not planning to,” Michael agreed. He snapped it in half, then tore the halves into smaller pieces. Then he put the pieces in his jeans pocket. “Done. Sorry, Mir, but you know they can’t walk out of here with that footage.”

She nodded in agreement, but Claire sensed something was wrong, especially when Tyler exchanged a fast glance with Angel and Jenna. “You asshole,” Tyler muttered, but it sounded like something he felt he ought to say, not that he deeply felt. He backed off. “Maybe we should go, guys. Next thing, they’ll be breaking our necks. Angel’s right. This is some hell of a hoax.”

Jenna looked at Miranda again. “You can talk to me,” she said gently. “You really can. I’m not afraid of you.”

“No,” Miranda said. “I know. But I’m afraid of you. And what you can do. You made them hungry, and now they’re dangerous. Don’t you understand that?”

“Maybe,” Jenna said. “My twin sister died, and she stayed with me for the longest time. Not real, like you are, but—there. But she changed. Turned evil. I had to…I had to get rid of her, send her away.”

“You don’t understand,” Miranda said. “It wasn’t something else. It was
you
. You changed her. You made her see a way back, and that makes them—us…
ghosts
—desperate. Desperate enough to do anything. It’s you that’s making it happen.”

“You’re not one of them, those lost people. You’re loved here. Loved. Protected. And that’s good; that’s really good. I just want to be sure you’re protected from the things your friends can’t see and fight.” Jenna took in a deep breath and blew it out. “I think that you and I together could—could fix whatever it was I did wrong. You could show me how.”

“You need to leave,” Miranda said. “You need to go before it’s too late and everything goes completely wrong. I’m sorry.”

“But—”

“I’m going to need the rest of the recordings,” Michael said to Tyler. “Sorry, man.”

“We don’t have anything else,” Tyler said. “You just broke the crap out of our whole show.”

Shane looked at Michael, eyebrows raised, and Michael shook his head. “Lying his ass off,” he said.
Heartbeat,
Claire thought. He could hear them. He might not be able to always tell when one individual was lying, but it was easier for him if there were three people all in on the same falsehood. More people meant more data, like a triangulation of the truth.

And most likely, all three of the ghost hunters knew Tyler had backups.

“I read people really well,” he said. It was an obvious lie, but he didn’t give Tyler time to argue. “All right, all three of you, out the door. If you want me to take your whole van apart next, I’ll be happy to do that, too.”

“Or, you know, punch you,” Shane said cheerfully. “This is Texas. We have the right to do that when you break into our house.”

He left it to Eve to say, “Or worse,” in a voice so low and dark, it qualified as Goth all by itself.

Jenna shot to her feet. “Fine. If you want to doom this little girl to an eternity of pain and torment, you’re doing exactly the right things. You’re not prepared for what’s going to happen to her. I am!”

Maybe that was kind of true; it was very hard to tell. But in any case, Claire was fed up with half-truths and aggression, especially when her head was pounding so very hard. “Just get out,” she said wearily. “She’s our responsibility. We’ll take care of her. If she’s right, you’ve done enough damage already around here.”

That was when Jenna turned and focused on her, really focused, and Claire saw something familiar in her cool, pale eyes. It was the same distant look she’d seen so often in Miranda…here and not here at the same time. “You dreamed it,” she said. “It’s true. I see…water. A hole. A silver cross in a circle. Someone’s trying to reach you.”

“Yeah, yeah, save the Vegas act, lady,” Shane said, and pushed her forward toward the door. Angel and Tyler were already making their way out ahead of her. “If we want professional help, we’ll call the Ghostbusters. At least they have matching uniforms. Ciao.”

Miranda followed them, looking anxious. “Claire,” she said, and caught her arm. “
Claire!
It’s dark out there.”

“It’s okay. They have a van,” she said. She wasn’t feeling particularly charitable toward the
After Death
team just now. If Michael was right—and she honestly figured he was—then Jenna’s interest in stirring up the dead had brought back Shane’s sister, and that, that was unforgivable. “They’ll be fine. Don’t worry about them.”

“The ghosts know what she is. They’ll follow her, eating little bits of her. She won’t feel it at first, but then she’ll get tired and sick, and they could kill her, Claire. Worse: they could get strong enough to do other things. Dangerous things. She’s really powerful.”

“I think she’s full of it,” Claire said, but now that her anger was fading a bit, she ran what Jenna had said to her through her head.
Water. Hole. Silver cross in a circle.
That fit with her dream about the hole in the ground, and the water around her legs.
Someone is trying to reach you
. “I think she was just making it up, Mir. Listen, you stay here. We’re going to make sure they leave, okay?”

Miranda shuddered. “I can’t go out there again.”

Even so soon after sunset it was dark outside, darker than
Claire had expected; the orange bands on the horizon were already fading, being painted over by shades of purple and blue. The biggest, bravest stars had already made appearances overhead, but there was no moon, not yet.

The
After Death
van was parked on the street, two houses down; they’d probably had trouble finding the place. Claire remembered seeing them checking maps. They’d probably been looking for the Glass House already.
Ugh.
To think she’d thought Angel was kind of greasily charming in the beginning. Now, she never wanted to see him again.

There was no sign of the mass of ghosts she’d seen before when they’d been in the house, which seemed weird; she could feel something out here, an uneasy sensation on the back of her neck, a phantom whisper on the wind. On instinct, Claire stepped back over the threshold into the house, and as she did, she saw the mists come into focus again. All the ghosts crowded now around Jenna as she headed for the van.

Inside the house, the ghosts were visible. Out there, in the real world, there was nothing.

Shane was already down the steps, and Claire hurried down to join him. “They’re leaving too easily,” he said. “Didn’t it seem to you like they just let that thing with the memory card go too fast?”

“What choice did they have?” she asked. “Michael had it and broke it before they could do much.”

“Yeah, but…” Shane shook his head. “I expected more drama out of them. They’re on TV. It’s kind of what they do for a living.”

“The camera was off.”

“For people like them, the camera’s never off….” His eyes suddenly widened, and he dashed forward to take the camera out of Tyler’s hands. Tyler resisted, yelling for help, and suddenly
it was a tangle of guys—Angel, Tyler, Shane, and Michael, all wrestling for control of the thing. Not too surprisingly, given the players, Michael won and tossed it to Shane.