The Morganville Vampires Collection (The Morganville Vampires #1-4) (18 page)

‘No talking in class,’ John said, and laughed. When he did, his fangs came down. His were longer than
Brandon’s, and looked scarier, somehow. Claire gulped and focused on the book in front of her. The cover said
Native Grains of the New World
. A whole book about grain. Wow. She wondered how Professor Wilson had stayed sane all these years.
Corn is a member of the
grass family and is native to the American continents
… She flipped pages. More about corn. She didn’t know you could write so much about one plant.

Beside her, Professor Wilson swore softly under his breath, and she looked up, startled. His face had gone pale, except for two red spots high in his cheeks. He quickly faked a smile and held up a finger striped with red. ‘Paper cut,’ he said. His voice sounded high and tight, and Claire followed his stare to see Angela and John moving closer, watching the professor’s finger with eerie concentration. ‘It’s nothing. Nothing at all.’ He groped in his pocket, came out with a handkerchief, and wrapped it around his bloodied finger. In trying to attend to that, he knocked the book he’d been reviewing to the floor. Claire automatically bent to pick it up, but Wilson’s foot hooked around it and scooted it out of her reach. He bent over and in the darkness under the desk…switched books.

Claire watched, open-mouthed. What the hell was he doing? Before she could do anything stupid that might give him away, there was a ding from the elevator across the room, then the rumble of opening doors.

‘Ah,’ Wilson said with evident relief. ‘Time to go, then.’ He reached down, picked up the hidden book, and slipped it into his leather satchel with such skill Claire wasn’t absolutely sure she’d seen it. ‘Come along, Neuberg.’

‘Not her,’ John said, smiling cheerfully. ‘She gets to stay after class.’

‘But—’ Claire bit her lip and made desperate eye contact with the professor, who frowned and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Sir, can’t I go with you? Please?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Come along, I said. Mr Hargrove, if you don’t like it, please take it up with management. I have a class.’

He might have pulled it off, too, if Angela hadn’t been so sharp-eyed, or suspicious; she stopped him half-way to the elevator, opened up his portfolio, and took out the book he’d stashed away. She leafed through it silently, then handed it to John, who did the same.

Both of them looked at the professor with calm, cool, oddly pleased eyes.

‘Well,’ Angela said, ‘I don’t know, but I think this may be a violation of the rules, Professor. Taking books from the library without checking them out first. Shame, shame.’

She deliberately opened the first page and read, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ and
then flipped carefully through, stopping at random spots, to read lines of text. It all sounded right to Claire. She flinched when Angela pushed the book at her. ‘Read,’ the vampire said.

‘Um…where?’

‘Anywhere.’

Claire recited a few lines in a faltering voice from page 229.

‘
A Tale of Two Cities
,’ John said. ‘Let me guess, Professor…a first edition?’

‘Mint condition,’ Angela said, and plucked it out of Claire’s trembling hands. ‘I think the professor has a nice retirement plan, composed of screwing us out of our rightful profits.’

‘Huh,’ John said. ‘He didn’t look quite so dumb as that. Got all those degrees and stuff.’

‘That’s just paper smarts. You never can tell about what’s really in their heads until you open them up.’ The two of them were talking like he wasn’t even there.

Professor Wilson’s pale skin had a sweaty gleam on it now. ‘A moment of weakness,’ he said. ‘I really do apologise. It won’t ever happen again, I swear that to you.’

‘Apology accepted,’ Angela said, and lunged forward, planted her hand on his chest, and knocked him flat to the floor. ‘And by the way, I believe you.’

She grabbed his wrist, raised it to her mouth, and
paused to strip off his gold wristwatch band and toss it on the floor. As it rolled, Claire’s stricken eyes caught sight of the symbol on the watch face. A triangle. Delta?

Her shock broke at the sound of the professor’s scream. Grown men shouldn’t scream like that. It just wasn’t right. Fright made her angry, and she dropped her book bag, took the canister off her shoulder, and yanked off the top.

Then she threw liquid nitrogen all over Angela’s back. When John turned on her, snarling, she splashed what was left at his face, aiming for his eyes. Wilson rolled to his feet as Angela collapsed, shrieking and thrashing; John reached out for him, but she’d managed to hurt him, too – he missed. Wilson grabbed his satchel and she got her book bag; they ran for the elevator. A very surprised professor – someone she didn’t recognise – was standing there, open-mouthed; Wilson yelled at him to stand aside, leapt into the cage, and pressed the Down button so frantically Claire was afraid it would snap or stick or something.

The doors rolled shut, and the elevator began to fall. Claire tried to get her breathing under control, but it was no good; she was about to hyperventilate. Still, she was doing better than the professor. He looked awful; his face was as grey as his hair, and he was breathing in shallow, hard gasps.

‘Oh dear,’ he said weakly. ‘That wasn’t good.’
And then he slowly collapsed down the wall of the elevator until he was in a sitting position, legs splayed loosely.

‘Professor?’ Claire lunged forward and hovered over him.

‘Heart,’ he panted, and then made a choking sound. She loosened his tie. That didn’t seem to help. ‘Listen. My house. Bookshelf. Black cover. Go.’

‘Professor, relax, it’s OK—’

‘No. Can’t let them have it. Bookshelf. Black—’

His eyes got very wide, and his back arched, and she heard him make an awful noise, and then…

Then he just
died
. Nothing dramatic about it, no big speeches, no music swelling to tell her how to feel about it. He was just…gone, and even though she pressed her shaking fingers to his neck, she knew she wouldn’t feel anything, because there was something different about him. He was like a rubber doll, not a person.

The elevator doors opened. Claire gasped, grabbed her books and the empty silver canister, and sprinted down the blank cinder-block hallway to the end, where a fire door opened into bright afternoon sunlight.

She stood there for a few long seconds, just shaking and gasping and crying, and then tried to think where to go. Angela and John thought her name was Neuberg, which was good – she supposed not so good for Neuberg, if one existed – but they’d find out who she was eventually.
She needed to be home before that happened.

Bookshelf. Black cover.

Professor Wilson had been in that room for seven years, sorting through books. Probably slipping out those he thought might be worth something on the black market.

What if…?

No. It couldn’t be.

Except…what if it was? What if a year ago, or five years ago, Professor Wilson had
found
that book the vampires were so intent on having, and decided to hang on to it for a rainy day? After all, she’d been basically planning to do the same thing, only for her it was already stormy weather.

She needed his address.

It wasn’t far to the Communication Arts Building, and she ran as much of the way as she could before the pain in her still-bruised ankle and still-raw back made her slow down. Two flights of steps brought her to the offices, and she passed up Professor Wilson’s closed and locked office to stop next to the cluttered desk out in the open between the corridors. The nameplate read V
IVIAN
S
AMSON
, but everyone just called her Dragon Lady, and the woman sitting behind it had earned the name. She was old, fat, and legendarily bad-tempered. There was no smoking in all university buildings, but the Dragon Lady had
an overflowing ashtray on the corner of her desk and a glowing cigarette hanging out of the corner of her red-painted lips. Beehive hair, straight out of old movies. She had a computer, but it wasn’t turned on, and as far as Claire could tell from the two-inch-long bright red nails, the Dragon Lady didn’t type, either.

She ignored Claire and kept on reading the magazine open in front of her.

‘Um – excuse me?’ Claire asked. She felt sticky with sweat from the run in the heat, and still kind of sick from what had happened at the library. The Dragon Lady turned a page in her magazine. ‘I just need—’

‘I’m on break.’ The red-clawed hand took the cigarette out of the red-painted mouth for a trip to the ashtray to shed some excess. ‘Not even supposed to be here today. Damn grad students. Come back in half an hour.’

‘But—’

‘No buts. I’m on break. Shoo.’

‘But Professor Wilson sent me to get something from his house, but he didn’t give me the address.
Please
—’

She slapped the magazine closed. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. I’m going to wring his neck when he gets back here. Here.’ She grabbed a card from the holder on her desk and pitched it at Claire, glaring. ‘If you’re some nutcase, it’s not my problem. You tell His Highness
that if he wants to roll around with undergrads, he can damn well remember to tell them his own damn address from now on. Got it?’

‘Got it,’ Claire said in a very small voice.
Roll
around with
… She wasn’t going to think about that. Not at all. ‘Thank you.’

The Dragon Lady puffed a cloud of smoke out of both nostrils and raised eyebrows plucked into more of a suggestion than an actual form. ‘You’re a polite one. Go on, get out of here before I remember I’m supposed to be off today.’

Claire escaped, clutching the card in her sweaty fingers.

‘You know,’ Shane said twenty minutes later, ‘I’d feel a whole lot better about the two of us if you didn’t think I was the go-to guy for breaking and entering.’

They were standing on the professor’s back porch, and Claire was peering through a murky window into an equally murky living room. She felt a flash of guilt about the breaking-and-entering part – but she had called him – just before her heart did a funny little painful flip and she heard him say again in her head
the two of us
.

She didn’t dare look at him. Surely he didn’t mean that, exactly. That meant, you know, friendship or something. He treated her like a kid. Like his sister. He didn’t – he couldn’t—

But what if he could?

And she couldn’t believe she was thinking this
now, on the doorstep of a dead man. The memory of Professor Wilson’s limp, rubbery body steadied her, and she was able to finally stand back from the window and meet Shane’s eyes without fluttering like some scared sparrow. ‘Well, I couldn’t ask Eve,’ she said reasonably. ‘She’s at work.’

‘Makes sense. Hey, look, what’s that?’ Shane pointed. She whirled to stare. There was a sound of tinkling glass behind her, and when she turned back he was opening the back door. ‘There. Now you can say you didn’t know I was going to do it. Crime free.’

Well, not exactly. She was still carrying the metal cylinder over her shoulder. She wondered if the vampires had recovered yet, and if anybody had thought to question the TA at the chem lab. She hoped not. He was nice, and in his own way he was brave, but she had no illusions that he wouldn’t sell her out in a hot second. There weren’t a whole lot of heroes left in Morganville.

One of the last of them turned in the doorway and said, ‘In or out, kid, daylight’s burning.’

She followed Shane over the threshold into Professor Wilson’s house.

It was kind of weird, really – she could see that he’d been here hours ago, living his life, and now the house seemed like it was waiting for him. Maybe not so much weird as sad. They came in through the kitchen, and
there was a cereal bowl, a glass, and a coffee cup in the dish strainer. The professor had eaten breakfast, at least. When she touched the towel underneath the strainer, it was still damp.

‘Hey,’ Shane said. ‘So what are we looking for in here?’

‘Bookshelves,’ she said.

‘Yo. Found ’em.’ He sounded odd. She followed him into the next room – the living room – and felt her stomach sink a little. Why hadn’t she thought about this? He was a
professor
. Of course he’d have a jazillion books…and there were, floor to ceiling, all the way around the room. Crammed in together. Stacked on the floor in places. Stacked on tables. She’d thought the Glass House was a reader’s paradise, but this…

‘We have two hours,’ Shane said. ‘Then we’re gone. I don’t want to risk you out on the street after dark.’

She nodded numbly and went to the first set of shelves. ‘He said it had a black cover. Maybe that will help.’

But it didn’t. She began pulling out all the black-bound books and piling them on the table; Shane did the same. By the time they’d met in the middle of the shelves, an hour had passed, and the pile was huge.

‘What the hell are we looking for?’ he asked, staring at it. She didn’t suppose
I don’t know
would be an answer that would get any respect.

‘You know the tattoo on Eve’s arm?’

Shane acted like she’d stuck him in the butt with a fork. ‘We’re looking for
the
book?
Here?
’

‘I—’ She gave up. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. It’s worth a try.’

He just shook his head, his expression something between
You’re crazy
and
You’re amazing
. But not in a good way. She pulled up a chair and began leafing through the books, one after another. Nothing… nothing…nothing…

‘Claire.’ Shane sounded odd. He handed her a black leather-bound book. ‘Take a look.’

It was too new. They were looking for an old book, right? This was…this was a Holy Bible. With a cross on the front.

‘Look
inside
,’ he said. She opened it. The first few gold-leafed pages were standard, the same familiar words she’d grown up with, and still believed. Eve had said they had a few churches in Morganville, right? Maybe they had services. She’d have to check.

Midway through Exodus, the pages went hollow, and there was a tiny little volume hidden inside the Bible. Old. Very old. The cover was water-stained dirty leather, and scratched into it was a symbol.

The
symbol.

Claire pulled it out of the Bible and opened it.

‘Well?’ Shane demanded after a few seconds. ‘What
about it?’

‘It’s—’ She swallowed hard. ‘It’s in Latin.’

‘So? What does it say?’

‘I don’t
read
Latin!’

‘You’re kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn’t that the international language for smart people?’

She picked up a book without looking and threw it at him. He ducked. It flopped to the floor. Claire flipped pages in the small volume. It was handwritten in faded, coppery ink, the kind of beautiful perfect writing from hundreds of years ago.

She was actually holding it in her hands.

And here she’d been intending to just fake it.

‘We’d better get going,’ Shane said. ‘Seriously. I don’t want to be here when the cops come calling.’

‘You think they will?’

‘Well, if dear old Prof Wilson keeled over after stealing the vampires blind, yeah, I think they’ll send a couple of cops over to inventory the goodies. So we’d better move it.’

She stuffed the journal back into the Bible and started to put it into her backpack, then paused in outright despair. Too much stuff. ‘We need another bag,’ she said. ‘Something small.’

Shane came up with a plastic grocery sack from the kitchen, stuck the Bible inside, and hustled her
out. She looked back at Professor Wilson’s lonely living room one last time. A clock ticked on the mantel, and everything waited for a life that would never start up again.

She was right. It
was
sad.

‘Run first,’ Shane said. ‘Mourn later.’

It was the perfect motto for Morganville.

They made it back home with half an hour or so to spare, but as they turned the corner on Lot Street, where the Gothic bulk of the Glass House pretty much dwarfed all of the other, newer houses around it, Claire’s eyes went immediately to the blue SUV sitting at the kerb. It looked familiar…

‘Oh my God,’ she said, and stopped dead in her tracks.

‘OK, stopping? Not a great idea. Come on, Claire, let’s—’

‘That’s my parents’ car!’ she said. ‘My parents are here! Oh my
God
!’ She practically squealed that last part, and would have turned around and run away, but Shane grabbed her by the neck of her shirt and hauled her around.

‘Better get it over with,’ he said. ‘If they tracked you this far, they’re not going to drive off without saying hello.’

‘Oh,
man
! Let go!’ He did. She twitched her shirt
down over her shoulders and glared at him, and he did an extravagant bow.

‘You first,’ he said. ‘I’m watching your back.’

She was, at least temporarily, more worried about her front.

When she cracked open the door to the house, she could hear Eve’s anxious voice. ‘I’m sure she’ll be here any time – she’s, you know, at class, and—’

‘Young lady, my daughter is
not
in class. I’ve
been
to her classes. She hasn’t been to class the entire afternoon. Now, are you going to tell me where she is, or do I have to call the police?’

Dad sounded
pissed
. Claire swallowed hard, resisted the urge to back up and close the door and run away – mainly because Shane was right behind her, and he was finding this way too funny to let her escape – and walked down the hall towards the voices. Just Eve and Dad, so far. Where was—

‘Claire!’ She’d know that shriek of relief anywhere. Before she could say
Hi, Mom
, she was buried in a hug and a wave of L’Oreal perfume. The perfume stayed longer than the hug, which morphed into Claire’s being held at arm’s length and shaken like a rag doll. ‘Claire,
what have you been doing? What are you doing here?
’

‘Mom—’

‘We were so worried about you after that terrible accident, but Les couldn’t get off work until today—’

‘It wasn’t that big a deal, Mom—’

‘And we just had to come up and see you, but your room is
empty
in the dorm. You weren’t in classes – Claire, what’s happened to you? I can’t believe you’d do something like this!’

‘Like what?’ she asked, sighing. ‘Mom, would you quit shaking me? I’m getting dizzy.’

Mom let go and folded her arms. She wasn’t very tall – just a couple of inches over Claire’s height, even in mid-heeled shoes – and Dad, who was glowering at Shane in the background, was as tall and twice as broad. ‘Is it him?’ Dad asked. ‘Did he get you into trouble?’

‘Not me,’ Shane said. ‘I’ve just got that kind of face.’

‘Shut
up
!’ Claire hissed. She could hear that he thought all this was funny. She didn’t. ‘Shane’s just a friend, Dad. Like Eve.’

‘Eve?’ Her parents looked at each other blankly. ‘You mean—’ As one, they cast horrified glances at Eve, who was standing with her hands folded, trying to look as demure as it was possible to look while wearing an outfit that looked like something a Goth ballerina might wear – all black netting in the skirt and red satin up top. She smiled sweetly, but it was kind of spoilt by the red lipstick (had she borrowed Miranda’s?) and skull earrings.

Mom said faintly, ‘Claire, you used to have such
nice
friends. What happened to Elizabeth?’

‘She went to Texas A & M, Mom.’

‘That’s no reason not to still be friends.’

Mom logic. Claire decided that Shane had been right – there was no getting out of this one. She might as well jump into the pool; the sharks were circling no matter what she did. ‘Mom, Eve and Shane are two of my roommates. Here. In this house.’

Silence. Mom and Dad looked frozen. ‘Les?’ Mom asked. ‘Did she say she was
living here
?’

‘Young lady, you are
not
living here,’ Dad said. ‘You live in the dorm.’

‘I’m not. I’m living here, and that’s my decision.’

‘That’s
illegal
! The rules said that you have to live
on campus
, Claire. You can’t just—’

Outside the windows, night was slipping up on them, stealthy and quick as an assassin. ‘I can,’ Claire said. ‘I did. I’m not going back there.’

‘Well, I’m not paying good money just to have you squat in some old wreck with a bunch of—’ Dad was at a loss for words to describe how little he thought of Eve and Shane. ‘
Friends
! And are they even in school?’

‘I’m currently between majors,’ Shane offered.

‘Shut
up
!’ Claire was nearly in tears now.

‘All right, that’s it. Get your things, Claire. You’re coming with us.’

All the amusement faded out of Shane’s face. ‘No,
she isn’t,’ he said. ‘Not at night. Sorry.’

Dad got red-faced and even more furious, and levelled a finger at her. ‘Is this why you’re here? Older boys? Living under the same roof?’

‘Oh, Claire,’ Mom sighed. ‘You’re too young for this. You—’

‘Shane,’ Shane supplied.

‘Shane, I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice boy,’ – she didn’t sound especially convinced – ‘but you have to understand that Claire is a very special girl, and she’s very young.’

‘She’s a kid!’ Dad interrupted. ‘She’s sixteen! And if you took advantage of her—’

‘Dad!’ Claire thought her face might be just as red as his, for very different reasons. ‘Enough already! Shane’s my
friend
! Stop embarrassing me!’

‘Embarrassing
you
? Claire, how do you think we feel?’ Dad roared.

In the silence, Claire heard Michael say mildly, from the stairs, ‘I think maybe we’d all better sit down.’

They didn’t all sit down. Shane and Eve escaped to the kitchen, where Claire heard a clattering of pots and furious whispering; she was sitting uncomfortably
on the couch between her parental bookends, looking mournfully at Michael, who was sitting in the armchair. He looked calm and collected, but then, he would. Mom, Dad, this is Michael, he’s a dead guy… Yeah, that would really help.

‘My name is Michael Glass,’ he said, and extended his hand to Claire’s dad like an equal. Dad, surprised, took it and shook. ‘You’ve already met our other two roommates, Eve Rosser and Shane Collins. Sir, I know you’re concerned about Claire. You should be. She’s on her own for the first time, and she’s younger than most kids coming to college. I don’t blame you for being worried.’

Dad, defused, settled for looking stubborn. ‘And who the heck are you, Michael Glass?’

‘I own this house,’ he said. ‘I rent a room to your daughter.’

‘How old are you?’

‘A little over eighteen. So are Shane and Eve. We’ve known each other a long time, and to be honest, we didn’t really want to let another person into the house, but…’ Michael shrugged. ‘We had an empty bedroom, and splitting costs four ways is better. I thought a long time about letting Claire stay here. We had house meetings about it.’

Claire blinked at him. He had? They did?

‘My daughter’s a minor,’ Dad said. ‘I’m not happy
about this. Not at all.’

‘Sir, I understand. I wasn’t too happy about it, either. Even having her here is a risk for us, you understand.’ Michael didn’t have to go into it, Claire saw; her dad totally got it. ‘But she needed us, and we couldn’t turn her away.’

‘You mean you couldn’t turn her money away,’ Dad said, frowning. For answer, Michael got up, went to a wooden box sitting on the shelf, and took out an envelope. He handed it to Dad.

‘That’s what she paid me,’ he said. ‘The whole amount. I kept it in case she wanted to leave. This wasn’t about money, Mr Danvers. It was about Claire’s safety.’

Michael glanced across at her, and she bit her lip. She’d been hoping to avoid this – desperately hoping – but she couldn’t see any way out now. She nodded slightly and slumped back on the couch cushions, trying to make herself small. Smaller.