Bitter Blood (4 page)

Wow, it really was good for free drinks. But that wasn’t all.

For a moment, Claire couldn’t quite understand what she was reading. Her eyes kept going over it, and over it, and finally it all snapped into clear, razor-sharp focus, and she pulled in a deep, shaking breath. The paper creased as her grip tensed up.

“Yeah,” Eve said. Claire met her gaze wordlessly. “It’s telling him he gets a free pass to kill one person a year, just on a whim. Or more if he plans it out. You know, like a special treat.
Privilege.
” There was nothing in her tone, or her face, or her eyes. Just…blank. Locked down.

Eve took the paper from Claire’s unresisting hand, folded it, and put it back in the envelope with the gold card.

“What—what are you going to say to him?” Claire couldn’t quite get her head adjusted. This was wrong, just…wrong.

“Nothing good,” Eve said.

And that was the precise moment when the kitchen door opened, and Michael stepped inside. He was wearing a thick black canvas cowboy-style duster coat, broad-brimmed hat, and black
gloves. Eve had teased him earlier that he looked like an animé superhero, but it was all practical vampire sun-resistant gear. Michael was relatively still newborn as a vampire, which meant he was especially vulnerable to the sun, and to burning up.

Now, he whipped off his hat and gave the two of them an elaborate bow he’d probably copied from a movie (or, Claire thought, learned from one of the older vamps), and rose from that with a broad, sweet smile. “Hey, Claire. And
hello
, Mrs. Glass.” There was a special gentleness when he said
Mrs. Glass
—a private kind of thing, and it was both breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Heartbreaking, because in the next second, he knew something was wrong. The smile faltered, and Michael glanced from Eve to Claire, then back to Eve. “What?” He dumped the hat and his gloves on the table, and shed the coat without looking away from Eve’s face. “Baby? What’s wrong?” He walked to her and put his hands on her shoulders. His wedding ring matched hers, even down to the ruby inset, and it caught the light the way Eve’s had earlier.

Bloodred.

It was terrible, Claire thought, that he was still so much
Michael
—still exactly as he’d been when she first met him—eighteen, though they were all catching up to him now in age. It wasn’t fair to call him pretty, but he was gorgeous—tumbles of blond curls that somehow always looked perfect; clear, direct blue eyes the color of a morning sky. His pallor gave him the perfect look of ivory, and when he stood still, as he was now, he looked like some fabulous lost statue direct from Greece or Rome.

It wasn’t fair.

Eve held the gaze between herself and her husband, and said, “This is for you.” She held up the inner envelope with his name written on it in flowing script.

For a second, Michael clearly didn’t know what it was…and then Claire saw him realize. His eyes widened, and something like horror passed over his expression and was quickly hidden underneath a blank, carefully composed mask. He didn’t say anything, but just took his hands from her shoulders and accepted the envelope. He stuck it in his pocket.

“You’re not even pretending to be curious?” Eve said. Her voice had gone deep in her throat and had taken on a dangerous edge. “Great.”

“You read it?” he asked, and took it out again to open it up. The card fell out, again, but he deftly snatched it out of the air without any effort. “Huh. It’s shinier than I thought it’d be.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

He unfolded the letter. Claire was no good at reading those micro-expressions people on TV were always talking about on crime shows, but she thought he looked guilty as he read it. Guilty as hell.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, which was exactly the wrong thing to say, because it made Claire (and almost certainly Eve) think about every guy ever caught cheating. Luckily, he didn’t stop there. “Eve, all vampires get the hunting privilege; it’s just part of living in Morganville—it’s always been the rule, even when nobody in the human community knew. Look, I don’t want it. I opposed the whole idea at the meetings—”

“Which you didn’t tell us about at all, jerk,” Eve broke in. “We’re
community
!”

Michael took a deep breath and continued. “I told Amelie and Oliver I wouldn’t ever use it, but they didn’t care.”

“Doesn’t matter. You have a free pass for murder.”

“No,” he said, and took her hands in his, a gesture so quick she couldn’t avoid it, but gentle enough that she could have pulled
away if she’d wanted. “No, Eve. You know me better than that. I’m trying to change it.”

Her eyes filled with tears, suddenly, and she collapsed against his chest. Michael put his arms around her and held her tightly, his head resting against hers. He was whispering. Claire couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it really wasn’t any of her business.

She took the glass of milk Eve had poured for herself, seeing as how it was sitting there unwanted, and drank it.
He still should have told us,
she thought, and slit her envelope open with a steak knife to take out her own letter and ID card. It felt weird, seeing her information on there. Even though the vampires had always known what her blood type was, where she lived…it felt different, somehow.

Official.

As if she were some kind of commodity. Worse: with the chip in it, it meant she couldn’t hide, couldn’t run. She now, as Eve had said,
had papers
, just as they demanded in those old black-and-white war movies; she had to carry the card or get arrested (today’s encounter had proven that), and it meant that they could round her up whenever they wanted…for questioning. Or for sticking her in some kind of prison camp.

Or worse.

One thing was certain: Shane Collins was not going to like this at all…and just as she thought about that, Shane banged in the swinging door of the kitchen, headed straight for the refrigerator, and snagged himself a cold soft drink, which he popped open and chugged three swallows of before he stopped, looked at Eve and Michael, and said, “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you guys are fighting again. Seriously, isn’t there supposed to be a honeymoon period or something?”

“We’re not fighting,” Michael said. There was something in
his voice that warned this was a bad time for Shane to get snarky. “We’re making up. We’ll be upstairs.”

Shane actually opened his mouth to say something else, but he suddenly shivered and took a step back. “Hey!” he said, and looked up at the ceiling. “Stop it, Miranda! Brat.”

Miranda was…well, the Glass House teen ghost. A real, official one. She’d died here, in the house—sacrificed herself, in the battle with the draug—and now she was part of it, but invisible during the day.

She could still make herself felt, when she wanted to; the cold spot she’d just formed around Shane was proof of how she felt about his impulse to harass Michael and Eve just now. Miranda couldn’t be heard or seen during the daytime, but she could sure make her displeasure known.

And they’d probably hear about it tonight, in detail, when she materialized.

Claire sighed as Michael led Eve out of the room with an arm around her shoulders. “Here,” she said, and passed Shane the envelope with his name on it. “You should sit down. You’re really not going to like this.”

Sitting Shane down to discuss things didn’t help, because all it accomplished was an overturned chair, and Shane stalking the kitchen in dangerously black silence. He tried to throw his ID card in the trash, but Claire quietly retrieved it and put it back on the table, along with hers. Eve’s still sat abandoned on the counter.

“You’re going along with this?” he finally asked. She’d been watching him as he paced; there was a lot to learn about her boyfriend when he wasn’t saying anything, just from the tenseness of his muscles, and the way he held himself. How he looked right
now was telling her that he was on the verge of punching something—preferably something with a set of fangs. Shane had gotten better about controlling his impulses to fight, but they never really went away. They couldn’t, she supposed. Now he stopped, put his back to the wall, and used both hands to push his shaggy, longish hair back from his face. His eyes were wide and dark and full of challenge as he looked at her.

“No,” she said. She felt steady, almost calm, really. “I’m not going along with it. None of us is—we
can’t
. Are you coming with me to talk to Amelie about it?”

“Hell yes, I’m coming with you. Did you think I’d let you go alone?”

“Do you promise to keep your cool?”

“I promise I won’t go starting any fights. But I’m taking a little insurance, and you’re carrying, too. No arguments. I know you don’t think Amelie’s exactly on our side anymore, so trusting her’s off the table.” He pushed off the wall and opened the cabinets under the sink; under there were several black canvas bags of equipment, all of it damaging to vampires in some way.

Claire wanted to be brave and say that she didn’t need any kind of defenses, but she was no longer sure of that. Morganville, since the defeat of the draug, was…different. Different in small, indefinable ways, but definitely not the same, and she wasn’t sure that the rules she’d learned about interacting with Amelie, the vampire Founder, were the same, either. The old Amelie, the one she’d gotten almost comfortable knowing…that woman would not have hurt her just for disagreeing.

But this new, more powerful Amelie seemed different. More remote. More dangerous.

So Claire looked at the contents of the bag he’d opened, and took out two vials of liquid silver nitrate, which she put in the
pockets of her blue jeans. She wasn’t exactly dressed for vampire fighting—not that there was a real dress code for that—but she was prepared to sacrifice the cute sky blue top she had on, in an emergency. Pity she hadn’t picked the black one this morning.

Ah, Morganville. Where dressing to hide bloodstains was just good daily planning.

“We should talk to Hannah first,” she said as Shane picked out a thin-bladed knife that had been coated with silver. He checked the edge on it, nodded, and jammed it back in the leather sheath before he stuck it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket.

“If you think that’ll help,” he said. Hannah Moses was the newly minted mayor of Morganville—she’d been the police chief, but with the death of Richard Morrell, she’d ended up being appointed the First Human of the town. It wasn’t a job Hannah wanted, but it was one she’d accepted like the soldier she’d once been. “Though I figure if Hannah could have done anything about this, it would have already been done. She doesn’t need us to bring her the news.”

That was true enough, but still, Claire couldn’t shake the feeling that they needed allies at their side before dropping in on Amelie. Strength in numbers, and all that; she couldn’t ask Michael, not without asking Eve, and Eve was a hot button for the vampires right now. Michael and Eve were married, really, legally married, and that had cheesed off a good portion of the plasma-challenged in their screwed-up community. Apparently, prejudices didn’t die, even when people did.

Not that the humans seemed all that happy about it, either.

“Still,” she said aloud, “let’s go talk to her and see what she can do. Even if she just comes with us…”

“Yeah, I know—she’d be harder to make disappear.” Shane stepped in and bent his head and kissed her, a sudden and warm
and sweet thing that made her pull her attention away from her worries and focus utterly on him for a moment. “Mmmm,” he murmured, not moving back farther than strictly required for the words to form between their lips. “Been missing that.”

“Me, too,” she whispered, and leaned into the kiss. It had been a busy few months, rebuilding Morganville, finding their lives and place in things again. Then she’d been focusing on getting caught up at school again—once Texas Prairie University had reopened, she’d been determined not to have to repeat any credit hours she’d missed during the general emergency. Her boyfriend had been through some rough times—more than rough, really—but they’d come out of it okay, she thought. They understood each other. Best of all, they actually liked each other. It wasn’t just hormones (though right now, hers were fizzing like a shaken soda; Shane just had that effect on her); it was something else. Something deeper.

Something special that she thought was actually going to last. Maybe even forever.

Shane pulled back and kissed the tip of her nose, which made her laugh just a little. “Gear up, Warrior Princess. We’ve got some adventuring to do.”

She was still smiling when they left the house, hand in hand, walking through the blazing hot midafternoon. Lot Street, their street, was mostly intact from all the troubles Morganville had seen; it even had most of its former residents back in place. As they passed, Mrs. Morgan waved at them as she watered her flowers. She was wearing a bathing suit that was—in Claire’s opinion—way too small, especially at her age, which had to be at least thirty. “Hello, Shane!” Mrs. Morgan said. Shane waved back, and gave her a dazzling grin.

Claire elbowed him. “Don’t bait the cougars.”

“You just don’t want me to have any fun, do you?”

“Not that kind of fun.”

“Oh, come on—she’s not serious. She just likes to flirt. Gives her a thrill.”

“
I’m
not thrilled.”

Shane’s smile this time was positively predatory. “Jealous?”

She was, surprisingly, and hid it under a glare. “Disgusted, more like.”

“C’mon, you think that actor guy is hot, and he’s probably as old as Mrs. Morgan.”

“He’s on TV. She’s modeling a bikini for you two doors down from us.”