The Morganville Vampires Collection (The Morganville Vampires #1-4) (20 page)

This time, when they came up for air, he pulled completely back. His face was flushed; his eyes were bright. Claire’s lips felt swollen, warm, utterly deliciously damp.
Oh
, she thought.
I guess I should have done the
tongue thing
. Putting theory into practice was hard when her brain kept wanting to short out entirely.

‘OK,’ Shane said. ‘That – that shouldn’t have happened.’

‘Probably not,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m leaving in two days. It’d be stupid if I never even kissed you.’

She wasn’t absolutely sure who kissed whom this time. Maybe it was gravity tilting, stars exploding. It felt like it. His hands were free this time, and they cupped her face, stroked her hair, her neck, down to her shoulders…

She gasped into his open mouth, and he moaned.
Moaned
. She had no idea a sensation could go through her like that, travelling through her skin and nerves like lightning.

His hands stopped right there, at her waist.

When their tongues touched, gentle and tentative and wet, it made her knees weak. Made her whole spine rattle like dry bones. Shane put his right arm around her waist, holding her close, and cupped the back of her head with his left.

OK, this was
kissing
. Serious kissing. Not just a kiss before moving out, not a goodbye, this was
Hello,
sexy
, and wow, she’d never even
suspected
that it could feel this way.

When he let go, she fell back to sit on the bed, utterly weak, and she thought that if he followed her,
she’d fall back and…

Shane took two giant-sized steps backward, then turned and walked out into the hall. Facing away from her. In a kind of dreamlike trance she watched the strong, broad muscles of his back moving under his shirt as he took deep breaths.

‘OK,’ he said finally, and turned around. But staying well out in the hall. ‘OK, that really shouldn’t have happened. And we’re not going to talk about that, right? Ever?’

‘Right,’ she said. She felt like there was light dripping from her fingertips. Spilling out of her toes. She felt full of light, in fact, warm buttery sunlight. ‘Never happened.’

He opened his mouth, then closed it, and closed his eyes. ‘Claire—’

‘I know.’

‘Lock the door,’ he said.

She got up and swung it mostly closed. One last look at him through the gap, and then she clicked it shut and flipped the dead bolt.

She heard a thump against it. Shane was slumped on the other side; she just knew it.

‘I am
so
dead,’ he muttered.

She went back to bed and lay there, full of light, until morning.

No sign of Shane on Monday morning, but she got up way early – just after Michael would have evaporated into mist, in fact. She showered and grabbed a Pop-Tart from the cabinet for breakfast, washed the dishes that had been dumped in the sink from last night’s disaster of Parental Dinner – hadn’t that been Michael’s job? – and emptied out her backpack to stuff in the metal canister (to return to the chem lab, which made it borrowing, not stealing) and the Bible with its concealed secret.

And then she thought,
It won’t do any good if they
just steal it from me
, and took it out again and put it on the shelves, wedged in between an old volume 10 of the
World Encyclopaedia
and some novel she’d never heard of. Then she stepped out, locked the door, and began walking towards the school.

The chem lab was busy when she arrived between classes, and she had no trouble slipping into the supply room to put the canister back in place, after carefully wiping her fingerprints from everything she could think of. That moral duty done, she hustled to the admissions office to put in her paperwork to withdraw from school. Nobody seemed surprised. She supposed that there were a lot of withdrawals. Or disappearances.

It was noon when she walked down to Common Grounds. Eve was just arriving, yawning and bleary-eyed; she looked surprised to see Claire as she handed over the cup of tea. ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house,’ she said. ‘Michael and Shane said—’

‘I need to talk to Oliver,’ Claire said.

‘He’s in the back.’ Eve pointed. ‘In the office. Claire? Is there anything wrong?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think something’s about to be right for a change.’

The door marked O
FFICE
was closed. She knocked, heard Oliver’s warm voice telling her to enter, and came in. He was sitting behind a small desk in a very small room, windowless, with a computer running in front of him. He smiled at her and stood up to shake her hand. ‘Claire,’ he said. ‘Good to see you’re safe. I heard there had been some…unpleasantness.’

Oliver was wearing a tie-dyed Grateful Dead
T-shirt and blue jeans with faded patches on the knees – not so much style as wear, she figured. He looked tired and concerned, and she thought suddenly that there was something about him a lot like Michael. Except that he was here in the daytime, of course, and at night, so he couldn’t be a ghost. Could he?

‘Brandon is very unhappy,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid that there’s going to be retaliation. Brandon likes striking from an angle, not straight on, so you’d better watch out for your friends, as well. That would include Eve, of course. I’ve asked her to be extra careful.’

She nodded, heart in her throat. ‘Um…what if I have something to trade?’

Oliver sat down and leant back in his chair. ‘Trade for what? And to whom?’

‘I – something important. I don’t want to be more specific than that.’

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to be, if you want me to act as any kind of go-between for you. I can’t trade if I don’t know what I’m offering.’

She realised she was still holding her teacup, and put it down on the corner of the desk. ‘Um…I’d rather do it myself. But I don’t know who to go to. Whoever can order Brandon around, I guess. Or even higher than that.’

‘There is a social order to the vampire community,’ Oliver agreed. ‘Brandon’s hardly at the top. There are
two factions, you know. Brandon is part of one – the darker side, I suppose you could say. It depends on your viewpoint. Certainly, from a human standpoint, neither faction is exactly lily-white.’ He shrugged. ‘I can help you, if you’ll let me. Believe me, you don’t want to try to contact these people on your own. And I’m not sure they’d even allow you to do so.’

She bit her lip, thinking about what Michael had said about the deals in Morganville. She wasn’t good at it; she knew that. And she didn’t know the rules.

Oliver did, or he’d have been dead a long time ago. Besides, he was Eve’s boss, and
she
liked him. Plus, he’d been able to keep Brandon from biting her at least twice. That had to count for something.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I have the book.’

Oliver’s grey eyebrows came down into a straight line. ‘The book?’

‘You know. The
book
.’

‘Claire,’ he said slowly, ‘I hope you understand what you’re saying. Because you can’t be wrong about this, and you absolutely can’t lie. Bluffing will get you, and all your friends, killed. No mercy. Others have tried, passing off fakes or pretending to have it, then running. They all died.
All of them
. Do you understand?’

She swallowed again, convulsively. Her mouth felt very dry. She tried to remember how it had felt last
night, being warm and full of light, but the day was cold and hard and scary. And Shane wasn’t here. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I understand. But I have it, and I don’t think it’s a fake. And I’m willing to trade for it.’

Oliver didn’t blink. She tried to look away, but there was something about him, something hard and demanding, and she felt a real surge of fear. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But you can’t do this by yourself. You’re too young, and you’re too fragile. I’ll undertake this for you, but I’ll need proof.’

‘What kind of proof?’

‘I need to see the book. Take photographs of at least the cover and one inside page, to prove that it’s legitimate.’

‘I thought vampires couldn’t read it.’

‘They can’t, at least according to legend. It’s the symbol. Like the Protection symbols, it has properties that humans can’t really understand. In this case, it confuses the senses of vampires. Only humans can read the words inside – but a photograph removes the confusion, and vampires will be able to see the symbol for what it is. Wonderful thing, technology.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘I have a meeting this afternoon that I can’t postpone. I’ll come to your house this evening, if that’s all right. I’d like a chance to speak with Shane and Eve, as well. And your other friend, the one I’ve never seen come in –
Michael, correct? Michael Glass?’

She found herself nodding, a little alarmed and not even sure why she should be. It was OK, wasn’t it? Oliver was one of the good guys.

And she had no idea whom else she could turn to, not in Morganville. Brandon? Right. There was a good option.

‘Tonight,’ she echoed. ‘OK.’

She stood up and walked out, feeling strangely cold. Eve looked up at her, frowned, and tried to come after her, but there were people crowding at the coffee bar, and Claire hurried to the door and escaped before Eve could corner her. She didn’t want to talk about it. She was sickly certain she’d just made a terrible mistake, but she didn’t know what, or why, or how. She was so caught up in it, lost in her own head and lulled by the hot safety of the sun, not to mention people on the streets, that she forgot not all the dangers came at night in Morganville. The first warning she had, in fact, was the low rumble of an engine, and then she was being knocked off-balance and stumbling against the sun-heated finish of a van door, which slid aside.

She was being pushed from one side, pulled from the other, and before she could do more than yelp, she was in the van, bodies were piling on top of her, and the van door slammed shut on the sun. She slid on the
carpeted floor as the van accelerated off, and heard whoops and laughter.

Girls’ laughter.

Somebody was kneeling on her chest, making it hard to breathe; she tried to twist and throw her off, but it didn’t work. When she blinked away stars she saw that the person on top of her was Gina, looking freshly made-up and fashion perfect, except for the sick gleam in her eyes. Monica was kneeling next to her, smiling a tight, cruel little smile. Jennifer was driving. There were a couple of other girls in the van, too, ones she remembered from the basement confrontation at the dorm. Apparently, Monica was still recruiting, and these two had made the cut to Advanced Psycho School.

‘Get off me!’ Claire yelled, and tried to bat at Gina; Monica grabbed her hands and yanked them over her head, painfully hard. ‘Bitch, get
off
!’

Monica punched her in the stomach, driving out what little air she had, and Claire whooped for breath. Gina’s weight made it incredibly hard to breathe. Could you kill somebody like this? Smother a person like this? Maybe if the victim was small…like her…

The van was still going, taking her farther and farther away from safety.

‘You,’ Monica said, leaning over her, ‘really pissed me off, fish. I don’t forget things like that. Neither does
my boyfriend.’

‘Brandon?’ Claire wheezed. ‘Jeez, at least get one with a pulse!’

For that, she got punched again, and this time it hurt bad enough she started to cry, furious and helpless. Gina put a hand around her neck and began to squeeze. Not enough to kill her, just enough to hurt and make it even harder to gasp for precious little air.

They could keep this up for hours if they wanted. But Claire thought they probably had a lot more in store.

Sure enough, Monica reached in her pocket and brought out a lighter, one of those butane ones with a long, bright flame. She brought it close to Claire’s face. ‘We’re going to have a barbecue,’ she said. ‘Roast freak. If you live, you’re going to be hideous. But you shouldn’t worry about that, because you probably won’t live, anyway.’

Claire screamed with whatever she had, which wasn’t much; it startled Monica, and it positively scared Jennifer, who was driving; she twisted to look back, turning the wheel while she did.

Mistake.

The van careened to the right, and smashed into something solid. Claire flew through the air, with Gina riding her like a magic carpet, crashed into the
padded back of the seats, and Monica and Gina rolled in confusion as the van skidded to a stop.

Claire shook off her panic and lunged for the van door. She bailed out. The van had ploughed into the rear of another car, parked along the side, and car alarms were going off. She felt dizzy and almost fell, then heard Monica yelling furiously behind her. That pulled her together, fast. She began running.

This part of downtown was mostly deserted – shops closed, only a few pedestrians on the street.

None of them would look at her at all.

‘Help!’ she yelled, and waved her arms. ‘Help me! Please—’

They all just kept walking, as if she were invisible. She sobbed for a second in horror, and then pelted around the corner and skidded to a stop.

A
church
! She hadn’t seen a single one the entire time she’d been in Morganville, and there one was. It wasn’t a big one – a modest white building, with a small-sized steeple. No cross on it, but it was unmistakably a church.

She darted across the street, up the steps, and hit the doors at a run.

And bounced off.

They were locked.

‘No!’ she yelled, and rattled the doors. ‘No, come on, please!’

The sign on the door said that the church was open from sundown to midnight. What the hell…?

She didn’t dare think too much. She jumped off the steps and ran around the side, then the back. Next to the dumpster there was a back door with a glass window in it. It was locked, too. She searched around and found a broken piece of wood, and swung it like a baseball bat.

Crash!

She scraped her arm reaching through the broken window for the lock, but she made it, and slammed the door behind her. She locked it, frantically looked around, and found a piece of black poster board to prop against the blank space where the window had been. Hopefully, it would pass a quick glance.

She backed away, sweating, aching now from the crash and the run, and turned to go into the chapel. It was unmistakably a chapel, with abstract stained-glass windows and long rows of gleaming wood pews, but there was no cross, no crucifix, no symbol of any kind. The ultimate Unitarian church, she guessed.

At least it was empty.

Claire sank down on a pew midway back through the sanctuary and then stretched full length on the red velvet padding. Her heart was beating fast, so fast, and she was still so very scared.

Nobody knew where she was. And if she tried to
leave, Monica might…

They were going to burn me alive.

She shivered and wiped tears from her cheeks and tried to think, think of
something
she could do to get out of this. Maybe there was a phone. She could call Eve or Shane? Both of them, she decided. Eve for the car, Shane for the bodyguard duty. Poor Shane. He was right – she really ought to stop calling him every time she needed brute strength. Didn’t seem fair, somehow.

Claire froze, unable to breathe, as she heard a soft noise in the chapel. Like fabric moving. A bare whisper, maybe just a curtain moving in the air-conditioning breeze, right? Or…

‘Hello,’ said the very pale woman leaning over the pew and looking down on her. ‘You would be Claire, I believe.’

Once the paralysing terror receded just a little, Claire finally placed her. She knew she’d seen her; it had been just a split-second glance, but this was the woman – the vampire – who’d been brought to Common Grounds in a limousine after closing time.

What was she doing in a
church
?

Claire slowly sat up, unable to take her eyes off of the woman, who was smiling slightly. Light filtered in softly from the stained-glass windows and gave her a
golden glow.

‘I followed you,’ the woman said. ‘Although in truth, I do like this church quite a bit. Very peaceful, don’t you think? A sacred place. And one that grants those within it a certain…immunity from danger.’

Claire licked her lips and tasted salt from sweat and tears. ‘You mean you won’t kill me here.’

The smile stayed intact. If anything, it widened a little. ‘I mean exactly that, my dear. The same goes for my guards, of course. I assure you, they’re present. I am never left alone. It is part of the curse of the position I hold.’ She smiled and tilted her head an elegant fraction. Everything about her was elegant, from the shining golden crown of her hair to the clothes she was wearing. Claire wasn’t much for noticing fashion, unless it was worn by girls kicking the crap out of her, but this outfit looked like something out of old formal photographs from her mother’s time. Or grandmother’s.