The Morganville Vampires Collection (The Morganville Vampires #1-4) (45 page)

She followed him. He swung open the first door on the hall, and behind him she saw about ten people talking very intensely. They all looked at Ian with a
definite
Get out
vibe, and as he shut the door, Claire realised that all ten of them were vampires.

Not Sam, though, but given what Sam had told her, and what she’d heard from Michael and Eve, that made sense. He’d be hanging around the humans, right? The vampires didn’t want any part of him.

‘Wrong room,’ Ian said unnecessarily, and moved to the next one. She couldn’t see over his shoulder, but he closed it in a hurry. ‘
Really
wrong room. Sorry.’

There were about ten doors on the hallway, but they didn’t get that far. Claire was feeling kind of light-headed – in fact, she was dizzy. Maybe it was the heat. She took another gulp from the bottle, but that just seemed to make her feel nauseous. As Ian opened the fourth door, she said, ‘I don’t feel so good.’

Ian smiled and said, ‘Well, that was fast,’ and shoved her into the room. ‘I thought I was going to have to work a little harder, but you’re pretty easy.’

There were three other guys in the room. She didn’t know any of them… No, wait, one looked familiar.

The jerk from the UC coffee bar, the one who’d been so mean to Eve. He was one of them. She turned towards Ian, confused, but he was locking the door.

Her knees felt wobbly, and so did her head.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong…but she hadn’t had anything to drink. She’d been careful…

Not careful enough
. The first water bottle he’d brought her, he’d opened it first.

Stupid, Claire. Stupid, stupid, stupid
. But he’d seemed so…nice.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ she said, and backed up as one of the guys reached for her. There wasn’t a lot of space. It was somebody’s bedroom, most of it taken up by a bed, a dresser with the drawers hanging half-open. Dirty laundry piled in a corner.
Oh God
. It hit her hard that Eve had no idea where she was, she had no cell phone, and even if she screamed, no one would hear her over the music. Or care.

She remembered what Eve had done that terrible evening after the biker shoved his way in.
You need
a weapon
. Yeah, but Eve was older and bigger, and wasn’t drugged at the time…

She nearly tripped over a baseball bat sticking out from under the bed. She grabbed it and took up a bleary, weaving batting stance. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she said, and screamed at the top of her lungs. ‘Eve!
Eve!
I need help!’

She took a wild swing at Ian, who was strolling forward, and he ducked it easily. She reversed and slammed the butt end of the bat towards him, and
that one, he didn’t duck. It hit him squarely in the mouth, and he staggered back, bleeding.

‘You
bitch
!’ he said, and spit blood. ‘Oh, you are gonna pay for that.’

‘Hold up,’ said the coffee bar jerk, who was leaning against the door with his arms folded. ‘You put the full dose in her bottle, right? And she drank it?’

Ian nodded. He fished around in the laundry pile and found a sock to press against his mouth and nose. Good. She hoped it was filthy. And had athlete’s foot on it.

‘Then all we have to do is wait a couple of minutes,’ the jerk said. ‘She’s not going anywhere except to la-la land.’ He high-fived his buddies. Ian continued to glare at her. They were all between her and the door. There was a window, but it was the second floor and she wasn’t even steady enough to stand, much less free-climb. Claire gripped the bat in sweaty, numbed hands, and saw sparkles at the edges of her vision. Everything looked bleary. She felt waves of heat sweep over her, and then an icy chill. Michael? Was Michael here? No, Michael couldn’t leave the house…

Somehow, she was sliding down to a sitting position on the floor. The bat was still clutched in her hands, but she was tired, very tired, and she felt so sick and hot…

Somebody rattled the doorknob. Claire summoned
up whatever was left of her strength and screamed, ‘Help! Get help! Eve!’

Ian said, and grinned at Claire with bloody teeth, ‘Just somebody looking for a place to screw. Don’t worry, baby. We won’t hurt you. Not that you’ll remember, anyway.’

She pretended to be worse off than she really was (although truthfully, she was pretty bad) and, mumbling, let her eyes drift half-closed.

‘That’s it,’ the coffee bar jerk said. ‘She’s out. Get her on the bed.’

She’d never really done this before, but she was imagining hard how Eve would have handled it. She let the bat kind of wobble and fall to rest in her lap, aligned with her leg, as if it had gotten too heavy to hold up. (Not quite. Just nearly.)

And when Ian walked up to grab her, she brought the bat straight up with as much force as she could manage. It smacked him right where it would hurt the most, and Ian crumpled with a high-pitched, breathless scream, huddled in on himself.

Claire forced her legs to hold her, and slid back up to a standing position. She was leaning for support, and lucky to be in a corner, where the two angled walls let her look like she wasn’t about to topple over. Her arms were shaking, and the guys would have seen that if she’d tried to raise the bat, so she
tapped it casually against her leg. ‘Who wants some?’ she asked. ‘I won’t hurt you. Much.’

It was all show, and they only had to wait. Coffee Bar Jerk knew that, all too well, and she could feel the drug – what the hell was it? – stealing away her concentration, her strength, making her slow and stupid and all-too-easy prey.

Shane
, she thought, and forced herself to stand upright just a little longer.
Shane needs me. I’m not
letting this happen
.

‘You’re bluffing,’ Coffee Bar Jerk said, and came around the bed. Claire took a swing at him, missed, and smacked the bat into the wood so hard it rattled her teeth.

He grabbed the bat on the backswing and easily twisted it out of her grip. He tossed it to one of the other two guys, who caught it one-handed. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was really stupid. This could have been real nice and easy, you know that, right?’

‘I have Amelie’s Protection,’ Claire said.

He grabbed her by the throat of her sheer black skull-printed shirt, and dragged her forward. Her legs folded when she tried to pull away.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I’m not from this stupid town. None of us are. Monica said that was the way to go, to get around the dumbass rules, whatever they are. Whoever Amelie is, she can kiss my ass.
After you’re done doing it.’

The door to the hall gave a dry, metallic pop, and swung slowly open. Claire blinked and tried to focus her eyes, because there was someone standing there. No, two someones. One had red hair. Wasn’t there something about red hair…? Oh yeah. Sam had red hair. Sam the vampire. Sam I Am. Michael’s grandpa, wasn’t that just too weird?

The door no longer had a knob on the outside. The one on the inside fell out with a dull thud to the carpet and rolled under the bed.

‘Claire!’ Oh, that was
Eve
. ‘Oh my God…’

‘Excuse me,’ Sam said, ‘but what did you say about Amelie?’

Coffee Bar Jerk let go of Claire’s top, and she slid back down the wall. She fumbled around for something to use for a weapon, but all she came up with was another set of filthy socks that had missed the laundry. For some reason, that seemed funny. She giggled and rested her head against the wall to let her neck relax. Her neck was working too hard.

‘I said that Amelie can kiss my ass, Red. And what are you going to do about it? Stare me to death?’

Sam just stood there. Claire couldn’t see anything about him change, but it was like the room just went…cold. ‘You really don’t want to do this,’ Sam said. ‘Eve, go get your friend.’

‘Yeah, Eve, come on in, we’ve got a nice big bed!’ Ian giggled. ‘I hear you know how to have a real good time.’ He tossed the bloody sock he’d been pressing to his nose down on the floor and got ready to grab Eve if she came inside. Sam looked at the discarded sock for a second, then picked it up and squeezed it, drizzling blood into the palm of his hand.

And then he licked it up. Slowly. Meeting the eyes of every guy facing him.

‘I said,’ he whispered, ‘you really don’t want to do this.’

Claire heard a great big buzzing in her head, like a hive full of bees.
Oh, I’m going to pass out, because
that was gross
.

‘Shit,’ Ian whispered, and backed up. Fast. ‘You’re sick, man!’

‘Sometimes,’ Sam agreed. ‘Eve, go get her. Nobody’s going to touch you.’

Eve cautiously edged past him, hurried to Claire, and gave her a fast embrace before she hauled her upright again. ‘Can you walk?’

‘Not very well,’ Claire said, and gulped down nausea. The world kept coming in hot and cold flashes, and she felt like she was going to throw up, but somehow it was all smeared and funny, even the terror in Eve’s eyes.

Not so funny when Coffee Bar Jerk decided to
grab Eve, though.

He lunged over the bed, reaching for Eve’s wrist – Claire was too fuzzy to know why he was doing it. Maybe he was hoping to use her as some kind of shield against Sam. But whatever he meant, it was a bad decision.

Sam moved in a flicker, and when Claire blinked, Coffee Bar Jerk was up against the wall, eyes wide, staring at Sam’s face from a distance of about three inches.

‘I said,’ Sam whispered, ‘nobody was going to touch her. Are you
deaf
?’

Claire didn’t see it, but she imagined he probably flashed some fang right about then, because Coffee Bar Jerk whimpered like a sick dog.

The other boys moved out of Eve’s way without even trying to stop her.

‘Monica,’ Claire said. ‘I think it was Monica. She got Ian to ask me.’

‘What?’

‘Monica got him to ask me. Told them to do this.’

‘
Bitch!
OK, I take it all back. She needs a good blowtorching.’

‘No,’ Claire said faintly. ‘Nobody deserves that. Nobody.’

‘Great. Saint Claire, the patron saint of the kick-me sign. Look, keep it together, OK? We need to get
out of here. Sam! Come on! Leave them!’

Sam didn’t seem inclined to listen. ‘Manners, boys,’ he said. ‘Looks to me like nobody ever taught you any. It’s time you had a lesson before somebody else gets hurt.’

‘Hey, man—’ Ian was holding out his hands in surrender. ‘Seriously. Just having fun. We weren’t going to hurt her. No need to go all Charles Bronson. We didn’t even really touch her. Look. Clothes still on.’

‘Don’t even try.’ Sam continued to stare at Coffee Bar Jerk, who was looking less like a predator, and more and more like a scared kid faced with the big, bad wolf. ‘I like these girls. I don’t like you. Do the maths. Consider yourself subtracted.’

‘Sam!’ Eve’s voice was loud and flat. ‘Enough with the macho hero stuff. We came to find you. Let’s get out of here and talk.’

‘I’m not leaving,’ Sam said, his eyes fixed on the boy he was holding. ‘Not until Disney Princess here apologises, or his head comes off, one of the two.’

‘Sam! What we need to talk about is
important
, and Disney Princess is
not
!’

For a second Claire thought nothing Eve could say would get through, but then she saw Sam smile – it wasn’t a nice smile – and he let Coffee Bar Jerk slide back to the floor. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Consider yourself
horribly tortured. Make sure you think about all the ways I could have hurt you, because if I hear about anything like this happening again, I want you to know what’s coming.’

Coffee Bar Jerk nodded shakily, and kept his back to the wall as he slid over to join his posse.

Sam turned towards the girls, and came forward to touch Claire lightly on the shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’

Claire nodded, a loose flop of her head. That was a mistake; she nearly pitched over, and it took all of Eve’s strength to keep her on her feet.

When she was able to open her eyes and focus again, Sam had moved away, to the door.

‘What?’ Eve asked. ‘And by the way, you’re blocking the escape hatch.’

‘Hush,’ Sam said softly, barely loud enough to be heard over the pounding, relentless beat of the music.

And then Claire heard the screaming.

In a blink, Sam was gone from the doorway. Eve moved out into the hallway, craning her head to look over the rail, and Claire looked, too.

It was chaos down there, and not the happy chaos of a dance. Knots of screaming, pushing people, desperately jamming up the exits from the big open room, all in black clothes, white faces, some splashes
of red here and there…

Blood. There was
blood
.

Sam grabbed both her and Eve by the shoulders, swung them around, and pushed them back inside the room. He looked at Ian, who was still cowering against the wall. ‘You. O Positive. How many exits?’

‘What?… Oh
shit
, did you just call me by my blood type?’

‘
How many exits
?”

‘The stairs! You have to take the stairs!’

Sam cursed under his breath, went to the closet, and yanked it open. It was a walk-in, pretty large, filled with junk. He shoved Claire and Eve inside and held the door open. ‘You,’ he said to the four boys. ‘If you want to live, get in. Touch these girls and I’ll kill you myself. You know I’m serious, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Ian said faintly. ‘Not a finger on ’em. What’s happening? Is it, like, one of those shooting things?’

‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘It’s like that. Get in.’

The boys piled into the closet. Eve dragged Claire to the farthest corner, shoving piles of rank-smelling athletic shoes out of the way, and sat her down. Eve crouched next to her, ready for action, and glared at the guys. They kept their distance.

Sam slammed the door.

Darkness.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Coffee Bar Jerk
demanded. His voice was shaking.

‘People are getting hurt,’ Eve said tightly. ‘Could be you if you don’t shut up.’

‘But—’

‘Just
shut the hell up
!’

Silence. The music was still pounding downstairs, but over it Claire could hear the screaming. She started to go into that funny grey place, but jerked herself back with an effort and squeezed Eve’s tense hand. ‘It’s OK,’ Eve whispered to her. ‘You’re OK. I’m so sorry.’