Eternal Kiss (23 page)

As the resident dude, Shane was responsible for the acquisition of party favors, like glow-in-the-dark necklaces and drinks. Non-alcoholic drinks for Claire, however, because I am a stern house mother even if I suck as a role model. One thing I had to watch out for was the other kind of party favors being passed around, stranger to stranger—white pills, mostly, although there were the light-em-if-you-got-em kind, too. I let people pass things to me, then dumped them in the trash. It wasn’t because I was Miss Self Restraint; it was more because I knew better than to trust most people in Morganville.

We’d had hard lessons about that last year. Especially Claire. This year, she was still polite, but fending off the weirdos with much more ease. Of course, having her own personal shaggy-haired Hefner at her side might have had something to do with that.

I started to worry about Michael. Usually, a side trip to the blood bank didn’t take up more than thirty minutes, but by the time an hour had passed, he still wasn’t in the house.

I went in search of a quiet corner to call him. My mistake was that I didn’t tell Shane or Claire, who had their arms wrapped around each other and were dancing their hearts out.
No, I struck out on my own.

Hear that sound? It’s Eve Rosser and her backup band, The Spectacular Lapse of Judgment.

The warehouse was loud, tinny, and crowded; dark spaces were already filled with the make-out brigade. I kept going, down a narrow little hallway, until the noise was only a thud, not a roar, and took out my phone from its hiding place (yes, in my costume, and I’m not telling you where). I started to dial Michael’s phone.

Something touched my shoulder. It felt like an ice-cold electric shock.

“Hey!” I yelped, and whirled around. There was a vampire facing me.

Not Michael.

My heart rate went from sixty to five hundred in two seconds flat, because I knew this guy, and he wasn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality. “Mr. Ransom,” I said, and carefully nodded. I knew him because he was one of Oliver’s crew, but I’d rarely seen him, even at Common Grounds, the coffee shop where the vampires felt free to mingle with the humans according to strict ground rules. He avoided humans as much as possible, in fact.

“Eve,” Mr. Ransom said. He was a tall, thin guy with straw-brittle hair and a kind of vague look in his eyes. Tonight, he was dressed in a black jacket, black shirt, black pants, all straight out of the Goodwill box. Nothing quite fit him.

Mr. Ransom owned the funeral parlor, although he didn’t work there. He was kind of a vampire hermit. He didn’t get out much.

“Sorry, I’m on the phone,” I said. I waved the phone for evidence, pressed DIAL, and listened.
Come on, come on …

He didn’t pick up.

“He will not answer,” Mr. Ransom said. “Michael.”

I quietly folded the phone and stared at him. “Why? What’s happened?”

“He has been delayed.”

“And you came all this way to tell me? Um, thanks. Message received.” I decided to try to tough it out and walked right past him.

He grabbed me again. I spun, meaning to smack him good (a super-bad move on my part), and he caught my hand effortlessly in his. Now I was face to face with a vampire I hardly knew, with my hand restrained, and the noise from the rave had kicked up again to metal-melting levels, which meant screaming would get me nowhere but hoarse, and dead.

“Let me go,” I said as calmly as I could. “Now, please.”

He raised pale eyebrows, staring right into my eyes. His were dark, like puddles of oil, full of shine but nothing else. It looked like he was searching for something to say. What he came up with was, “Do you want to become a vampire?”

“Do I—what? No! Hell no!” I yanked, but I couldn’t break his grip. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t be
you
doing it, Mister Creepy!”

“Then do you wish Protection?” he asked, and reached into his jacket. He took out a bracelet, standard Morganville issue—a plain silver thing with a symbol engraved on the front of it.
Mr. Ransom’s symbol, I guessed, which would mark me as his property. If I took the bracelet, I’d be free from casual fanging by all the other bloodsuckers, but not from him, if he took a notion.

I made a throwing-up sound. “No.
Let go,
you ice-cold moron freak!”

He did let go. It surprised me so much that I scrambled backward, tottering on my high heels, and bounced into the wall behind me.
Great,
I thought.
The one time I don’t wear vampire-killing accessories
. Maybe I could use the shoes? No, wait, that would mean bending over in the catsuit. Really not possible. I settled for sliding against the wall, heading for the safety of the crowds.

Ransom slowly sank down to a crouch, his back to the wall, and put his head in his hands. It was so surprising that I stopped moving away and just stared at him. He looked … sad. And dejected.

“Ah—” I wet my lips. “Are you okay?” What a
stupid
question! And why did I even care? I didn’t. I couldn’t care less about his bruised feelings.

But I wasn’t leaving, either.

“Yes,” he said. His voice was soft and muffled. “I apologize. This is … difficult. Moving among humans in this way. I thought you wished to be turned.”

“Why?”

He raised his head and mutely indicated his face, then mine, which was made up very pale under my Catwoman mask. “You seem to be playing at being one of us.”

“Okay, first, I’m
goth,
not a vampire wannabe. Second, it’s a
fashion thing, okay? So, no. I don’t. Ewwww.” My pulse was slowing down some as I realized that maybe I’d read the situation all wrong after all. Mr. Ransom was a refreshing change from the vampires that tried to eat me first, talk later. “Why offer me Protection?” That was the equivalent of becoming part of a vampire’s household. He would have to provide certain things, like food and shelter, and in return, the human paid part of their income to him, like a tax. Also, at the blood bank, their donations would be earmarked for him.

In short: ugh. Not for me.

“You don’t have a bracelet,” he said. “I thought perhaps your Protector had died in the late unpleasantness. I was being polite. In my day—”

“Well, it isn’t your day,” I snapped. “And I’m not shopping for a vamp daddy, so just … leave me alone. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. He still looked dejected, like some shabby street person whose bottle of booze had run out.

I thought of something less uncomfortable to ask. At least, I thought it was. “You said Michael had been delayed,” I said. “Where? At the blood bank?”

“Near there,” Ransom said. “He was taken away.”

I forgot all about Ransom and his weirdness. “Taken away where? How? Who took him?” I advanced on the vampire, and all of a sudden the leather catsuit didn’t seem ridiculous at all. I was practically channeling the soul of a supervillain. “Hey! Answer me!”

Ransom looked up. “Five young men,” he said. “Wearing
the jackets with the snake.”

Five guys wearing Morganville High letter jackets. Jocks, probably. “Did he
want
to go?” I asked. Michael had never been part of the jock crowd, even in high school. This was just odd.

“At first, they wanted me to go,” Ransom said. “I didn’t understand why. Michael told them he would go with them instead, and told me to tell you that he would be delayed.” Ransom gave a heavy sigh. “That I have done.” In about half a heartbeat, he went from a sad little man crouched against the wall to a tall, dangerous vampire standing up and facing me. Never underestimate a vampire’s ability to change moods. “Now I will leave.”

I worked it out a second too late to stop him from going. I guess five jocks had been hassling this sad, weird vampire, and he hadn’t even realized what they were doing because, like he said, he wasn’t out in the human world that much. He hadn’t realized the danger he was in—he literally hadn’t.

Michael definitely had. That was why he’d stepped in, sent Ransom to find me, and gone off without a fight.

Saving somebody, as usual. Although I wondered why he hadn’t just flattened the creeps outright. He
could
have. Any vampire could.

“Wait, can you tell me where exactly—” But I was talking to the empty hall because Ransom had already beat it. Anyway, my words were just about lost in the thunder of a new tune spinning at the rave on the other side of the bricks.

I hurried out of the hallway, back to the rave, and found Shane and Claire still so into each other they might as well have
been dancing at home. I dragged them out of the building, past impassive vampire bouncers, into the cool night air.

“Hey!” Shane protested, and settled his bathrobe more comfortably with a shake. “If you want to leave, all you have to do is say so! Respect the threads. Vintage.”

“Michael may need help,” I said, and I got their attention, immediately. “You want to come with?”

“I’m not exactly dressed for hand-to-hand,” Shane said, “but what the hell. If I have to hit somebody, maybe they’ll be too embarrassed to trade punches with Hugh Hefner—guy’s got to be about a hundred years old or something.”

I was more worried about Claire. Fairy wings and glitter weren’t exactly going to intimidate anybody … but then again, Claire had other skills.

“You drive,” I said to Shane, and tossed him the car keys. He fielded them with a blinding grin. “Don’t get used to it, loser.”

The grin faded just as quickly. “Where am I going?”

“Around the blood bank. Five Morganville High guys in letter jackets picked Michael up around there. I don’t know why, or how, or why he went without a fight.”

Shane’s face went hard. “You think they lured him off?”

“I think Michael wants to help people. Just like his grandfather.” Sam Glass had always put others ahead of his own safety, and I figured Michael was walking the same path. “It may be nothing, and hell, Michael can handle five drunk jocks, but—”

“But not if they’ve got a plan,” Claire finished. “If they know how to disable him, they could hurt him.”

Neither of them asked why a bunch of teens would want to hurt somebody they hardly knew; it was in teen DNA, and we all knew it, deep down. On Halloween, a bunch of drunk assholes might think it was fun and exciting to hurt a vampire. And then, as they sobered up, they might imagine that they’d be better off killing him than leaving him to identify them later. The Morganville powers-that-be didn’t look favorably on vampire bashing.

“Maybe they needed his help,” Claire said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

We got into the huge black sedan without another word, and Shane peeled rubber.

“What do you think?” I asked aloud, as we started driving through the more unpleasant parts of Morganville. “Where should we start?”

“Depends on whether or not Michael’s picking the place, or the jocks are,” Shane said. His voice sounded low and harsh—Action Shane, not the one who arm-wrestled me for the remote control at home. “The jocks will go someplace they feel safe.”

“Like?” Because I had no idea how jocks thought, in any sense.

Shane did. “Nobody at the football field this time of night. No games this evening.” Because although Morganville paid lip service to other sports, like most Texas towns, football was where it was at. To know Michael was with five guys in letter jackets
meant football was surely involved, if not at the center of things. “I’d say stadium. Maybe the press box or the field house.”

I nodded. Shane took that as permission to hit warp speed. The engine roared as we shot down quiet streets, past derelict houses and empty businesses. Not a fantastic part of town these days. At the end of the street, he took a left, then a right, and we saw the columned expanse of Morganville High School at the crest of a very small hill. To the left and below was the stadium. It wasn’t much, not compared to professional arenas, but it was a respectable size for a small Texas town. The lights were all off.

Shane piloted the car into the parking lot and killed the headlamps. There were a few cars parked here and there. Some had steamed-over windows—I knew what was going on in there. Kids. I wanted to run over, rap on the window and take a cell phone picture, but that would have been rude.

There was a cluster of vehicles, mostly battered pickups, at one end of the lot. The windows were clear. Claire pointed wordlessly over my shoulder at them, and we all nodded.

“What’s the plan?” Shane asked me. I looked at Claire, but she didn’t seem to be Plan Girl tonight. Maybe it was the fairy glitter.

“I’m the one with the stealthy outfit,” I said. “I’m going to go take a look. I’ll keep my phone on, you guys listen in and come running if I get into it, okay?”

Shane raised eyebrows. “That’s stealthy? That outfit?”

“In terms of being black, yes. Shut up.”

“Whatever, Miss Kitty,” he said. “Call me.”

I dialed his number, he answered it and put it on speaker. I slipped out of the car, wondering how anybody could scramble over rooftops dressed like this. Once I was in the shadows, I felt more at home. Nobody around that I could see, and as I did my best to creep along without being spotted, I felt more and more foolish. There was nobody here. I was skulking without any reason.