The Morganville Vampires Collection (The Morganville Vampires #1-4) (64 page)

Oliver licked it off.

‘OK, that’s just
gross
,’ Claire said faintly. ‘Let go.
Let go
!’

‘You belong to Amelie,’ he said, and let her go. ‘I can taste it. Smell it on you. You’re right, I can’t touch you, not anymore. But the others, you’re wrong about them. While they’re in the house they’re safe, but not out there, not in
my
town. Not for long.’

‘I made a deal!’

‘Did you? Did you see in writing that your friends would be protected from all attacks? Because I very much doubt that, little Claire. We’ve been writing agreements for thousands of years, and you’re only sixteen years old. You have no idea what kind of deal you’ve made.’ Oliver actually sounded a little sorry for her, and that
was
scary. He folded his arms and leant against the door. He was in his usual good-guy disguise tonight: a tie-dyed T-shirt, battered cargo pants, his greying, curling hair pulled back in a ponytail. He’d probably just closed up Common Grounds, she figured. He smelt like coffee. She wondered what Oliver wore on his days off, if he wasn’t trying to intimidate. Pyjamas? Fuzzy slippers? One thing she’d figured out about the vampires in Morganville, they were never exactly what they seemed to be, even the bad ones.

‘Fine,’ she said, and backed away from him until her heels hit the first step. She sat down. ‘You tell me what I’ve done.’

‘You’ve upset the balance of power in the town,
and that’s a terrible thing, little Claire. You see, Amelie intended to be queen of this little kingdom. She thought I was safely dead when she did so. When I came here a year ago, many people decided that they’d rather listen to me than to her. Not all, of course, and not even a majority. But she’s won no real friends during her long existence, and it isn’t only the humans who are trapped here, you know. It’s the vampires as well.’

This was a new idea to her. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We can’t leave,’ he said. ‘Not without her permission. As I said, she fancies herself the cold White Queen, and most are content to let her. Not all. I was working to come to some…arrangements with her, to let a number of us leave Morganville and set up a community outside of her influence. Things had been static here for fifty years, you see, since she made the last vampire. Now Amelie feels the need to protect her position. She’s blocked me. She won’t allow me to make a move without her permission.’ He lowered his chin and stared at her, and it chilled her deep inside. ‘I don’t like to be controlled. I tend to get…unhappy.’

‘Why are you talking to me? What can I do?’

‘
You
, stupid little child, are her pet. When you want something, she indulges you. I want to know
why.’

Amelie hadn’t exactly indulged her the last time they’d talked, although the cell phone sitting abandoned in her room might argue otherwise. ‘I don’t
know
!’

‘She thinks you have something she needs, or she’d hardly bother. She’s seen whole cities die without shedding a tear or lifting a finger. It’s not altruism.’

Myrnin. It’s about Myrnin. If I weren’t learning
from him
…She couldn’t say that, didn’t even dare to really think it through. Oliver was unnerving, and sometimes he seemed downright psychic. ‘Maybe she’s lonely.’

He laughed, a harsh bark of sound with no amusement in it. ‘She certainly deserves to be.’ He took a step forward. ‘Tell me why she needs you, Claire. Tell me what she’s hiding, and I’ll make a deal, a perfectly straightforward one: I’ll give your friends my direct Protection. No one will hurt them.’

She didn’t say anything this time; she just looked back at him. She didn’t dare
not
look at him; even when she was watching him she had the eerie feeling that somehow he was creeping up behind her, ready to do something awful to her when she least expected it.

Oliver made a sound of deep frustration. ‘You stupid, stupid girl.’ He shoved past her, going up the
stairs so lightly the wood hardly even creaked. After a second, the hidden, knobless door sighed open. Claire got up, steadied herself for a second, and then stepped out into the hallway. Nobody else had heard a thing, apparently. It was quiet as the grave.

Oliver’s hands closed around her shoulders, and he moved her out of his way by simply picking her up and putting her down, as if she weighed nothing. He didn’t let go once he’d done it; he stepped up behind her, bent down, and whispered, ‘Not a sound, Claire. If you wake your friends and they come against me, I’ll destroy you all. Understand?’

She nodded.

She felt the cold pressure of his hands go away, but not his presence, and she was surprised when she looked back and saw that he was gone.

As if he’d never been there at all.

She pressed the button behind the painting, and the hidden door sealed itself. Then she picked up her phone from the floor of her bedroom. The call had ended; Travis Lowe was probably on his way over, burning sirens all the way.

She sat down to wait for the panic to start.

There just had to be something out there in the alley, given the response. It wasn’t only a couple of cops, some yellow tape, and a write-up in Captain Obvious’s
underground newspaper; it looked, from Claire’s window, like a full-blown
CSI
-style investigation, with people in white jumpsuits collecting evidence and everything. There was a big blocky van with heavily tinted windows that she guessed housed vampire detectives or forensics people or something, with the emblem of the Morganville police on the side, and she guessed the majority of people roaming around in Michael’s backyard this morning were, in fact, the undead.

Crime-solving undead. That was new.

She wasn’t sure what she was feeling anymore. Light-headed, disconnected, looped. Last night had felt like a dream, and it had passed in a blur from the time she and Shane had come upstairs until she’d heard the rattle of trash cans in the alley.

Someone was ringing the doorbell downstairs. She didn’t move away from the window – couldn’t seem to convince herself to move at all, in fact. It was probably the cops. Travis Lowe had, as she’d thought, already come racing to the rescue, but on finding her unfanged and still alive, he’d called in the full-on police assault.

So those were probably the detectives, Gretchen and Hans, or maybe Richard Morrell coming to take her statement.

Claire looked down at herself.
I should probably
get dressed
. Her wrist was a mess, smeared with slow-leaking blood, and she pressed her T-shirt against it before she could think about what she was doing. Great, now she wasn’t only undressed, she was undressed in bloody nightclothes.

It took ten minutes to shower, change, and bandage up her arm, and then she padded down the stairs in bare feet to face the music.

Her housemates were all standing in the living room, and they all looked at her with identical expressions, blank enough that she came to a stop on the steps. ‘What?’ Claire asked. ‘What’d I do now?’

Michael stepped aside so Claire could see who was sitting cross-legged in the chair, flipping through a bubble-gum pink edition of
Teen People
.

Monica Morrell.

She was dressed in a tight-fitting pink top with diamonds that spelt out BITCH/PRINCESS, and white short-shorts that even Daisy Duke would have thrown out as too trashy. Her tan was deep and dark, and she was lazily dangling a pink flip-flop with a yellow flower on top from her perfectly manicured toes.

‘Hey, Claire!’ she said, and stood up. ‘I thought we could grab some breakfast.’

‘I…what?’

‘Break…fast,’ Monica said, drawing out the word.
‘Most important meal of the day? Do you even
have
parents?’

Claire felt ridiculously off balance. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you here?’

Shane leant against the wall, glaring at Monica. He had a serious bed-head thing going on, and Claire wanted to run her hands through his thick, soft hair and return it to its usual shaggy mess. ‘What a good question. The second best one being, who let her inside? And we’re going to have to throw out that chair. The smell’s never coming out.’

‘I let her in,’ Michael said quietly, and that got him a stare from Shane. ‘Lay off the daggers. It was better to let her in than have her pitch a fit on the porch with all the cops around. We’ve already got enough trouble.’

‘What’s this
we
, paleface? I mean that in the vampire sense, not—’

‘Shut up, man.’

Claire rubbed her forehead, feeling her headache blooming back to hot, throbbing life. She ignored Michael and Shane with an effort and focused on Monica, who had a malicious smile curving her lips. ‘You’re enjoying this,’ Claire said. Monica shrugged.

‘Of course. They’re jackasses to me most of the time; it’s nice to see them take it out on each other for a change. Not that I care.’ Monica arched one
perfectly groomed eyebrow. ‘So? I know you like coffee. I’ve seen you drinking it.’

Eve stepped in between them, and for a second Claire thought her friend honestly looked…dangerous. ‘You’re not taking Claire anywhere. And you’re sure not taking her anywhere near that son of a bitch,’ she said.

‘Which son of a bitch would that be, exactly? Because hey, she lives
here
. It’s not like she’s choosy about who she hangs out with.’

Eve bunched up a fist, and for a second Claire thought she was going to haul off and slug Monica right in her perfect, pouty mouth. But Eve checked herself. Barely.

‘You
so
need to leave our house,’ Eve said. ‘Now. Before something bad happens that I won’t really regret.’

Monica gave her a look. ‘I’m sorry, were you talking? Because I think I dropped off. Claire? I’m not here to banter with the mentally challenged. I’m just trying to be friendly. If you don’t want to go, just say so.’

Claire felt ridiculously like laughing, it was so weird. Why was this happening to her?

‘What do you really want?’ she asked, and Monica’s lovely, crazy eyes widened. Just a little.

‘I want to talk to you without the Losers Club
hanging over my shoulder. I figured we could have breakfast, but if you’re allergic to caffeine and pastry…’

‘Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of my friends,’ Claire said. That brought
both
of Monica’s eyebrows up.

‘Oooookay. Your funeral,’ she said, and glanced at Shane. ‘So where was your boyfriend last night after midnight?’

‘Who?
Shane?
’ What time had she left his room, anyway? Late. But…not after midnight.

‘None of your damn business where I was,’ Shane said to Monica. ‘Eve told you to get out. The next step is I throw your skanky ass and see if you bounce when you hit the porch. I don’t care whose pet you are; you don’t come here and—’

‘Shane,’ Monica interrupted with elaborate calm, ‘shut the hell up. I saw you, idiot.’

Claire waited for Shane to give her a biting comeback, but he just sat there. Waiting. His eyes had gone very dark.

‘They don’t know, do they?’ Monica continued, and tapped her rolled-up copy of
Teen People
against her hip. ‘Wow. Shocker. Bad boy keeps secrets. That
never
happens.’

‘Shut up, Monica.’

‘Or you’ll
what
? Kill me?’ She smiled. ‘There
wouldn’t even be DNA left when they were done with you, Shane. And the rest of you, too.
And
your families.’

‘What’s she talking about?’ Eve asked. ‘Shane?’

‘Nothing.’

‘
Nothing
,’ Monica mocked. ‘Deny everything. That’s a brilliant plan. Then again, it’s what I’d expect from someone like you.’

Michael was frowning at Shane now, and Claire couldn’t resist, either. Shane’s dark eyes darted to each of them in turn, Claire last.

‘The cops aren’t going to find any bodies out there in the alley. And they’re not going to find one anywhere else in your house,’ Monica said, ‘because Shane moved a body last night, out the back door.’

Shane
still
wasn’t saying anything. Claire covered her mouth with her hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re lying.’

Monica folded her arms. ‘Why exactly would I do that? Why would I admit to hanging around watching your house unless I had to? Embarrassing! Look, if I’m lying, all it takes is for him to deny it. Ask him. Go on.’ She was staring right at Shane.

Shane’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything. For a frozen second or two, nobody moved, and then Michael said, ‘
Christ
, Shane, what the hell?’

‘Shut up!’ Shane snapped. ‘I had to! I thought I
heard something down in the basement last night, when I was getting some water in the kitchen. So I went to check it out. And—’ He stopped, and Claire saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, hard. ‘She was dead down there. At the bottom of the stairs, as if somebody had just…thrown her. For a second I thought it was’ – he glanced at Eve, then away – ‘I thought it was you. I thought you’d tripped and fallen down the stairs or something. But when I got down there, it wasn’t you. And she was dead, not just knocked out.’

Eve sank down on the arm of the sofa, looking as stunned as Claire felt. ‘Who? Who was it?’

‘I didn’t recognise her. Some college girl, I guess. She didn’t look local and she wasn’t wearing a bracelet.’ Shane took in an audible deep breath. ‘Look, we’ve been in enough trouble as it is. I had to get rid of her. So I wrapped her up in one of the blankets out of the boxes down there and carried her out. I put her in the trunk of your car—’

‘You
what
?’ Michael snapped.

‘And I drove her to the church. I left her there, inside. I didn’t want to just…dump her. I thought’ – Shane shook his head – ‘I thought it was the right thing to do.’

Monica sighed. She was checking out her fingernails with exaggerated boredom. ‘Yeah, yeah,
touching. The point is, when I saw you, you were hauling a dead chick into the trunk of
his
car. And I just can’t
wait
to tell my brother. You know my brother, right? The cop?’

Unbelievable. ‘What do you
want
?’ Claire practically yelled it at her.

‘I told you. Breakfast.’ Monica gave her a sunny movie-star smile. ‘Please. If you say yes, I just could forget all about what I saw. Especially since I was, you know, out after curfew, and I don’t want to get asked about why. Think of it as mutually assured destruction.’