The Morganville Vampires Collection (The Morganville Vampires #1-4) (69 page)

‘No!’ Claire cried, and lunged back towards them, but Eve grabbed her tightly and swung her around towards the coffee shop again.

‘Get inside!’ she screamed.

‘Let go—’

They stopped fighting each other as a shadow
stepped out of the alley, right in front of them, blocking the way.

A long silver line glinted in the starlight. A knife.

It was Eve’s brother Jason, looking as greasy and starved and fevered as he had at the party.

‘Hey, sis,’ he said, and the knife turned, and turned, and turned. ‘I knew you’d be coming this way. Soon as I heard you left the party without your bloodsucking bodyguard, I knew the time was right.’

‘Jason’ – Eve let go of Claire and stepped in between the two of them – ‘this isn’t her problem. Let her go.’

Claire was torn – watch Jason, who was terrifying, or pay attention to what was happening behind her, because Shane was fighting now, fighting for his life, and he was already hurt. She risked a glance back and saw Shane grab the baseball bat from his attacker, hit a home run to the guy’s shoulder, and send him spinning into the brick wall. The frat guy went down, screaming, but Shane was clearly not doing well, either – he lurched, off balance, and went down to his hands and knees. The bat rolled away.

‘Oh God,’ Claire whispered. There was blood running down his face, dripping in a wet thread to the pavement. ‘
Shane!
’

Shane shook his head, and the blood flew in a spray, splattering the concrete around him. He looked
up, saw her, and blinked.

Then he saw Eve, and behind her, with the knife, Jason.

Shane fumbled for the bat, found it, and climbed to his feet. He stumbled forward, grabbed Claire and pushed her behind him, then yanked Eve away from Jason, as well. He set his feet wide apart and took up a batting stance.

He looked pale and shaken and half-dead, but Claire knew he wasn’t backing down.

‘Leave them alone,’ he said. Not a yell, not a threat, just a low, quiet voice with absolute control. ‘Walk away, Jason.’

Jason lost his smile. He put the knife in his pocket and held up his hands. ‘Sure. Sorry, man. Don’t go all Sammy Sosa on me.’ He lowered his hands again and stuffed them in his coat pockets, looking casual, but there was an avid glitter to his eyes, and a cruel twist to his thin lips. ‘I heard you found a present in your basement. Something girl-shaped.’

Eve groaned, and Claire reached out to steady her when she swayed. ‘Jason,’ Eve whispered, and she looked awful, as though she was going to throw up. ‘Oh God,
why
?’

Shane took a step forward, bat raised and ready, and Jason backed up again. ‘Doing it there, that was just fun,’ he said. ‘But it’s not about the girls. I had
to show them I was ready.’

‘Ready?’ Eve echoed. ‘Oh
God
, Jase, is that what this is about? You’re just some pathetic wannabe vampire making his bones?’ Eve sounded so freaked it made Claire’s guts knot up. ‘You’re trying to
impress
them? By killing?’

‘Sure.’ Jason shrugged. He looked thin and weedy, almost lost inside that black leather jacket. ‘How else do you get attention around here? And I’m going to get
lots
of attention. Starting with you, Claire.’

Shane yelled – it wasn’t even words, just a yell of pure fury – and swung at him. Jason jumped back, faster than Claire would have expected, and the bat missed him. Then he lunged forward. Shane was off balance, not really steady on his feet, but that wouldn’t matter; if Jason was crazy enough to want to go hand-to-hand with Shane, it was all over.

Wasn’t it?

Jason punched Shane low in the stomach, and Shane made a surprised sound and took a step back from him.

Shane was
backing away
…

And then Claire saw the knife in Jason’s hand, glittering silver and red, and for a second she didn’t understand, she didn’t understand at all.

It wasn’t until Shane’s hand opened and the baseball bat hit the pavement with a noisy rattle,
and Shane collapsed to his knees, that she realised that he’d been stabbed.

Shane didn’t seem to understand it, either. He was panting, trying to say something, but he couldn’t get the words out. His eyes were wide and confused. He tried to get up, but couldn’t.

Jason pointed the knife at him, slung it in an arc that spattered them all with blood drops, and turned and walked away. He put the blade back in his pocket. People were coming out of Common Grounds, looking puzzled and alarmed, and at the forefront was Oliver. Oliver’s head turned quickly to stare at Jason’s departing form, and then he focused on them.

Claire dropped to her knees next to Shane. He looked desperately into her face, and slowly collapsed to his side.

His hands were clutching his stomach, and there was so much blood…

Eve hadn’t moved. She was just – standing there, in her lovely black dress, staring blindly after her brother.

Oliver grabbed her and shook her. Her black hair flew wildly, and when he let go, Eve sank down in a defeated slump against the building’s brick wall. Oliver shook his head impatiently and turned to Claire, and Shane.

Claire looked up, mute with misery, and saw Oliver staring down at them.

For just a second, she thought she saw something in him. Maybe just a tiny glimmer of empathy.

‘Someone is calling the ambulance,’ he said. ‘You should put pressure on the wound. He’s losing a lot of blood. It’s a waste.’ The blood, he meant. Not Shane.

‘Help me,’ Claire said. Oliver shook his head. ‘
Help
me!
’

‘You’ll find that vampires aren’t particularly good with the wounded,’ he said. ‘I’m doing you a favour by staying away. And don’t try to order me, little girl. That gold bracelet of yours means almost nothing to me, except that I shouldn’t leave witnesses behind.’

Shane coughed, wet and hard, and blood trickled out of his mouth. He looked as pale as Michael. Vampire pale.

Claire cradled him in her arms. Oliver glanced at Eve, frowned, and went away. People were coming closer, murmuring, asking questions, but Claire couldn’t make any sense out of it. She pressed down on the wet bloody mess of Shane’s shirt, felt him tense and try to squirm away, and didn’t let him.
Pressure
on the wound
. It seemed to take for ever until she heard the distant sound of sirens approaching.

Shane was still breathing when they loaded him inside the ambulance, but he wasn’t moving, and he
wasn’t talking.

Claire went to Eve, got her on her feet, and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We should ride with Shane.’

Oliver was staring at the wet, dark smears of blood on the concrete, and as Claire helped Eve up into the back of the ambulance, he looked at one of his coffee shop employees and nodded towards the mess.

‘Clean it up,’ he said. ‘Use bleach. I don’t want to smell it all night.’

Shane survived the trip, and they rushed him right into surgery. Eve sat silent in her black velvet dress, looking more Goth than ever, and wildly out of place in the soothing neutral waiting room. Claire kept getting up and washing her hands, because she kept finding more of Shane’s blood on her clothes and skin.

Eve was crying quietly, almost hopelessly. For some reason Claire didn’t cry at all. Not at all. She wasn’t even sure she could. Did that make her sick? Screwed up? She wasn’t sure whom she could ask. She couldn’t seem to feel anything right now except a vague sense of dread.

Richard Morrell came to take their statements. It was simple enough, and Claire had no hesitation in turning in Jason for the stabbing. ‘And he confessed,’ Claire added. ‘To killing those girls.’

‘Confessed how?’ Richard asked. He sat down in the chair across from her in the lounge area, and Claire thought he looked tired. Older, too. She guessed it wasn’t easy being the semi-sane one in the family. ‘What exactly did he tell you?’

‘That he left one for us,’ she said, and glanced at Eve, who hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t, as far as Claire could tell, actually blinked. ‘He called them presents.’

‘Did he mention any of them by name?’

‘No,’ she whispered. She felt very, very tired all of a sudden, as if she could sleep for a week. Cold, too. She was shivering. Richard noticed, got up, and came back with a big grey fleece blanket that he tucked around her. He’d brought a second one for Eve, who was still wrapped in Shane’s black coat.

‘Is it possible that Jason just said that because he knew about the bodies being found near your house?’ Richard asked. ‘Did he talk about anything more specific that wasn’t in the papers?’

Claire almost said yes to that, but she stopped in time. The police didn’t know about the girl being found in their basement. They thought she’d been taken to the church by her killer.

She had no choice. She just shook her head.

‘It’s possible Jason’s all talk, then,’ Richard said. ‘We’ve been watching him. We haven’t seen anything
to prove that he’s got any involvement with these dead girls.’ He hesitated, then said, very gently, ‘Look. I don’t want to make this about Shane, but he did have a bat, right?’

Eve raised her head, very slowly. ‘What?’

‘Shane had a bat.’

‘He took it from another guy,’ Claire said, nearly tripping over the words in her hurry to get them out. ‘A guy from Monica’s party. Shane got jumped; he was just defending himself! And he was trying to get Jason to back off—’

‘We have witnesses who say that Shane swung the bat at Jason after Jason had put away his knife.’

Claire couldn’t find the words. She just sat there, lips parted, staring into Richard’s weary, hard eyes.

‘So that’s it,’ Eve said. Her voice started out soft, but hardened quickly. ‘It’s all going to be Shane’s fault, because he’s Shane. Never mind that some frat ass tried to knock his head off, or that Jason
stabbed
him
. It’s still Shane’s fault!’ She stood up, stripped away the blanket, and threw it at him. Richard grabbed it before it hit his face, but just barely. ‘Here, you’ll need it for your cover-up!’ She stalked away, slender and pale as a lily in all that black.

‘Eve—’ Richard sighed. ‘Dammit. Look, Claire, I have to have the facts, OK? And the facts are that during the confrontation, Jason put his knife away,
Shane had a bat, and Shane threatened him. Then Jason stabbed him in self-defence. Is that right?’

She didn’t answer. She sat for a few seconds, just staring at him, and then stood up, stripped off the blanket, and handed it to him.

‘You’re going to need a bigger cover-up,’ she said. ‘See if there’s a circus in town. Maybe you can borrow a tent.’

She walked down the hall to see if Shane was out of surgery.

He wasn’t.

Eve was pacing the hallway, stiff with rage, hands clenched into fists barely visible as knots in the too-long sleeves of the coat. ‘Those sons of bitches,’ she said. ‘Those
bastards
! They’re going to put Shane down; I can feel it.’

‘Put him down?’ Claire repeated. ‘What do you mean, put him down? Like, a dog?’

Eve glared at her. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and wet with tears. ‘I mean even if he makes it through the surgery, they’re not going to let him get out of this. Richard practically told us; don’t you get it? It’s the perfect frame. Shane took the swing, Jason acted in self-defence, and nobody’s even going to look at Jason for these murders. They’ll just bury it, like they bury the bodies.’

She stopped talking, and her eyes refocused over
Claire’s shoulder. Claire turned.

Michael was striding towards them, lean and powerful and tall, and he headed straight for Eve. No hesitation, as if nothing had happened. As if they hadn’t seen him bending over a dead girl at the party.

He stopped just inches away from Eve, and held out his hands.

‘I went looking for you guys. I finally tracked you to Common Grounds. How is he?’ he asked. His voice was hoarse.

‘Not so good,’ Eve whispered, and flowed into his arms like water through a broken dam. ‘Oh God. Oh God, Michael, it all went wrong, it’s all wrong—’

He sighed and wrapped his arms around her, and rested his golden head next to her dark one. ‘I should have come with you. I should have made you get in the damn car. I was going to, but…things happened; I had to take care of it at the party. I never thought you’d try to walk home.’ He paused, and when he finally went on, his voice was thick with pain. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Claire said. ‘You know you can’t make Shane do something he doesn’t want to do. Or Eve, for that matter. Or me.’ She put a hand hesitantly on Michael’s arm. ‘You didn’t kill that girl, did you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I found her when I was searching for Jason. I was trying to find him and get him out of the party. He was probably already gone by then.’

‘Then who—’

Michael looked up, and his blue eyes were fiercely bright. ‘That’s what I had to take care of. There were vampires there, hunting. I had to stop it.’

One of the nurses passing by slowed, watching Michael and Eve. Her eyes narrowed, and she stopped to stare. She muttered something, then walked on.

Michael turned to the nurse, who was already halfway down the hall. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘What did you say?’

The nurse stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face him. ‘I didn’t say anything.
Sir
.’ That last word sounded sharp enough to cut.

‘I think you did,’ Michael said. ‘You called her a fang-banger.’

The nurse smiled coldly. ‘If I muttered something under my breath,
sir
, that shouldn’t concern you. You and your…
girlfriend
…ought to do your business in the waiting room. Or the blood bank.’

Michael’s hands curled into fists, and his face went tight with rage. ‘It’s not like that.’

The nurse – her name tag said her name was Christine Fenton, RN – outright sneered at him. ‘Yeah, it never is. It’s always different, right? You’re
just
misunderstood
. You want to hurt me, go ahead and try. I’m not afraid of you. Any of you.’

‘Good,’ Michael said. ‘You shouldn’t be afraid of me because I’m a vampire. You ought to be scared because you just trash-talked my girlfriend
to her
face
.’

Nurse Fenton flipped him off and kept walking.

‘Wow,’ Eve said. She almost sounded like herself again, as if having somebody diss her had helped, like a slap in the face. ‘And people treated me bad when I dated Bobby Fee. At least he was breathing. Mouth-breathing, yeah, but—’

Michael put his arm around her, still staring after the nurse. He had a frown on his face, but he forced it off to smile at Eve and plant a kiss on her forehead.

‘You need some rest. Let’s go back to the waiting room,’ he said. ‘I promise not to embarrass you anymore.’ He guided her in that direction, and threw a look back. ‘Claire? You coming?’

She nodded absently, but her mind was somewhere else, trying to sort through data.
Fenton
. She’d seen that name before, hadn’t she? Not the nurse, though; she’d never met her before and now really didn’t look forward to ever seeing her again.

Claire realised she was standing alone in the hallway, and shivered. While this was a modern
building, not nearly as nasty as the old, falling-to-ruins abandoned hospital where she and Shane had been chased for their lives, it still gave her the creeps. She threw one last, aching glance at the frosted-glass doors that read S
URGICAL
A
REA
– A
DMITTANCE
TO
A
UTHORISED
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY
. She couldn’t see anything beyond except vague moving shadows.

She followed Michael back to the waiting room. Richard Morrell was gone, which was good, and Claire sat in silence, rubbing her hands together, still feeling the phantom slickness of Shane’s blood on her skin.

‘Hey,’ Michael said. She didn’t know how much time had passed, just that she was stiff and sore and tense. She looked up into his crystal blue eyes, and saw strength and kindness, but also just a little bit of a glitter that didn’t seem…natural. ‘Rest. I can almost hear the gears grinding in your head.’ Eve was asleep in his lap, curled up like a cat. He was stroking her dark hair. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Lean in.’ And he put his arm around Claire, and she leant, and despite everything that had happened, she felt warm and safe.

It all fell in on her then, all the fear and the pain and the fact that Shane had been stabbed, right in front of her, and she didn’t know how to deal with that, didn’t know how to feel or what to say or do,
and it was all just…

She turned her face into Michael’s blue silk shirt and cried, silent heaving sobs that tore up out of her guts in painful jerks. Michael’s hand cradled her head, and he let her cry.

She felt him press his cool lips to her temple when she finally relaxed against him, and then she just slid away, into the dark.

Claire fought her way, panicked, out of a nightmare, and into another one.
Hospital. Shane. Surgery.

Eve was shaking her with both hands on her shoulders, babbling at her, and she couldn’t follow the words, but the words didn’t matter at first.

Eve was smiling.

‘He’s OK,’ Claire said in a whisper, then louder. ‘He’s OK!’

‘Yeah,’ Eve said, the words tumbling out in a confusing bright flood, way too fast. ‘He’s out of surgery. It was touch and go. He had a lot of internal bleeding. He’s going to be in ICU for a few days before they let him come home, and he’ll have a temporary bracelet, you know, the plastic kind?’

Claire tried to literally shake the sleepy fog out of her head. ‘Plastic…wait, don’t you always get one of those in the hospital? Like an ID tag?’

‘Do you? Really? How weird. Oh. Well, in
Morganville you leave it on when you leave, and it protects you for up to a month after surgery. Kind of like a temporary vampire restraining order.’ Eve actually bounced up and down. ‘He’s going to be OK, oh my God, he’s going to be OK!’

Claire scrambled out of her seat, grabbed Eve’s arms, and the two of them bounced together up and down, then fell into a hug and squealed.

‘I’ll just…let you guys do that,’ Michael said. He was sitting in the chairs watching, but he was smiling. He looked tired.

‘What time is it?’ Claire asked.

‘Late. Early.’ Eve checked her skull watch. ‘About six in the morning. Michael, you should get home; it’ll be dawn soon. I’ll stay here with Claire.’

‘We should all go home,’ Michael said. ‘He’s not going to wake up for hours yet. You could change clothes.’

Claire looked down at herself, and grimaced tiredly. ‘Yeah, I could,’ she admitted. Shane’s blood had soaked into her patterned tights, and she thought Michael could probably smell it. She could even smell it, a musty, rotten odour that made her gag. ‘Eve? You want to go, too?’

Eve nodded. The three of them walked out of the waiting room and down the long, empty hallway towards the elevators. They passed the front desk,
where Nurse Fenton glared at them. When Claire looked back, as they waited for the elevator, Nurse Fenton was dialling the phone.

‘Why do I know that name?’ she asked, and then realised,
duh
, she was with two Morganville natives. ‘Fenton? You guys know anything about her?’

The elevator arrived. Eve stepped in and pushed the button for the lobby, and she and Michael looked at each other for a second.

‘The family’s been here for generations,’ Michael said. ‘Nurse Charming out there’s a new arrival. She came to TPU for school, married into the family.’

‘You met her husband,’ Eve said. ‘Officer Fenton, Brad Fenton. He’s the one who—’

‘The one who showed up when Sam was attacked,’ Claire blurted. ‘Of course! I forgot his name.’ Why did that still leave her vaguely uneasy? She couldn’t remember anything that Officer Fenton had done that had made her think he was anti-vamp; he’d acted quickly enough when Sam was in trouble. Not like his wife, who clearly wasn’t as open-minded.

She worried about it for a while, but couldn’t see any real connection, and there were other things to think about. After all, Shane was OK, and that was all that mattered.

A shower helped, but it didn’t banish the dull ache
between Claire’s eyes, or the strange grey cast the world had taken on. Exhaustion, she guessed, and stress. Nothing looked quite right. She changed clothes, grabbed her backpack, and went back to the hospital – this time, taking a cab, despite it being broad daylight – to wait for visiting hours to start in ICU. No sign of Jason, but then, she hadn’t expected him to be that obvious. Or that stupid. He’d managed to get away with it this long.

But then again
…He really hadn’t struck her as all that far-thinking, either. More of a want-take-have kind of guy. So what did that mean? Was Eve right? Was this a giant official cover-up, and Jason had been given free rein to run around town raping and killing and stabbing as the mood moved him? She shuddered just thinking of it.