Midnight Bites (13 page)

Right now, that wasn't much comfort.

Up ahead, I saw the looming bulk of the Glass House—one more block to go. I could make it, I could. I had to. Jane and Trent and Guy were gone. I owed it to them to live through this.

The car sped up behind me as I crossed the street to the next corner. Four houses to go, all still and lightless.

There was a porch light on in front of 716, and it cast a glow on the pillars framing the porch, picked out the boards in the white fence in front. There were lights on inside, and I saw someone pass in front of a window.

“Michael!” I screamed it, and put everything into one last sprint. The car eased ahead of me and pulled in at the curb with a squeal of brakes, tires bumping concrete. A door flew open to block the sidewalk, and I gasped, picked up my suitcase, and tossed it over the fence. It weighed about fifty pounds, but I managed to toss it anyway. I grabbed the rough whitewashed boards with their sharp tops and vaulted over, got my shirt caught on the way and ripped it open. No time to worry about that. I dragged my suitcase over the night-damp grass and yelled his name again, with even more of an edge of panic. “Michael! It's Eve! Open the door!”

They were behind me. They were right behind me. I knew it, even though I didn't dare look back and they made no sound. I could feel it. I felt something grab the suitcase, nearly twisting my arm out of the socket, and I let go, stumbling against the porch stairs. The house stretched above me, gray and ghostly in the dark, but that porch light, that was life.

Something caught my foot. I screamed and kicked, fighting to get free. My searching fingers scratched at the closed wood of the door, and I tasted dust again. I'd been close, so close. . . .

The door opened, and warm yellow light spilled out over me. Too late. I tried to grab for a handhold, but I was being yanked backward . . . and I could feel breath on the back of my neck. Cold, rancid breath.

Something flew over my head and slammed into the vampire pulling on me, knocking him flying. I crawled back toward the door and got a hand over the threshold.

Michael Glass grabbed my hand and dragged me inside with one long pull. My feet made it over the line just a fraction of a second before another vampire slammed into the invisible barrier there.

Brandon. Oh, damn, he was angry. Really angry. Vampires usually didn't look like movie vamps—they were all about the fitting in—but right now he clearly didn't care. His eyes had turned bloodred, and his face was whiter than I'd ever made mine. And I could see fangs, fangs a viper would have envied, flicking down from their hiding place to flash in menace.

Michael Glass didn't flinch. He looked pretty much as I remembered him, only . . . better, somehow. Stronger. Tall, built, golden hair that waved and curled surfer-style. He had blue eyes, and they were fixed on Brandon. Not afraid, but wary.

“You okay?” he asked me. I nodded, unable to say anything that would really cover how I felt. “Then get out of the way.”

“Huh?”

“Your legs.”

I pulled them in, and he calmly shut the door in Brandon's face. I sat there on the wooden floor, knees pulled in to my chest, and tried to slow my heart down from triple digits. “God,” I whispered, and rested my forehead on my knees. “That was close.”

I heard the rustle of fabric. Michael had crouched down across from me, back to the opposite wall. He was wearing some comfortable old jeans, a faded green cotton shirt, and his feet were long and narrow and bare. “Eve?” he asked. “What the hell was that?”

“Um . . . my eighteenth-birthday present.” I was shivering, and I realized my skull shirt was displaying a whole lot more bra than I'd ever intended. Kind of a plunge bra. Victoria's Secret. Not so much of a secret right now. “Brandon's pissed.”

Michael rested his head against the wall and looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You didn't sign.”

I shook my head, unable to say much about that.

“You can stay until dawn, but you need to go then. You got someplace to go?”

I just looked at him miserably, and I felt tears starting to bubble up again. What had I been hoping for? Some white knight hottie to save me? Well, I wasn't going to get it from Michael. He hadn't even come outside to get me; he'd just thrown a chair or something.

Still, he'd opened the door. Nobody else on this street had, or would have.

“Okay,” Michael said softly. He stretched out a hand and awkwardly patted me on the knee. “Hey. You're okay, right? You're safe in here. Don't cry.”

I didn't want to cry, but that was how I vented, and boy, did I need to vent. All the fury and grief and rage and confusion just boiled up inside, and forced their way out. I was shaking, sobbing like a
punk,
and after a couple of shaking breaths I felt Michael move across to sit next to me. His arm went around me, and I turned toward his warmth, soaking his shirt with tears. I would have told him everything then, all the bad stuff . . . the van, my friends, Brandon. I would have told him how Brandon gave my dad a pay raise when I was fifteen in return for unrestricted access to me and Jason. I would have told him everything.

Lucky for him I couldn't get my breath.

Michael was good at soothing; he knew not to talk, and he knew just how to touch my hair and how to hold me. It wasn't until the storm became more like occasional showers, and I was able to hiccup steady breaths, that I realized he had a clear view down my bra.

“Hey!” I said, and tried to artfully tuck the torn edges of my shirt under the strap. Michael had an odd look on his face. “Free show's over, Glass.”

Trent would have snapped back some snazzy insult, but not Michael. Michael just looked uncomfortable, and edged away from me. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn't—”

Well, if he wasn't, I was offended. I gave good bra: 34B.

I raised my eyebrows.

Michael held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, yeah. I was. That makes me an asshole, right?”

“No, that makes you male and straight,” I said. Was it wrong I felt relieved? “I just need to change my— Oh, damn. My suitcase! It's still out there—”

Michael got up and walked down the polished wooden
hallway.
The house felt warm, but strange—old and, despite the big open rooms, kind of claustrophobic. Like it was . . . watching.

I loved it.

The living room was normal stuff—couch, chairs, bookcases, throw rugs. A guitar case lying open on a small dining table, the guitar lying abandoned on the couch as if he'd put it down to see what the trouble was out in the yard. I'd heard Michael play before, though not recently. People had said he'd given it up . . . but I guessed he hadn't.

Michael pulled the blinds and looked out. “It's on the lawn,” he said. “They're going through it.”

“What?” I pushed him out of the way and tried to see for myself, but it was all just a black blur. “They're going through my stuff? Bastards!” Because I had some lingerie in there that I seriously wanted to keep private. Well, maybe share with one other person. But privately. I yanked the cord on the blinds and moved them up, then unlocked the window and threw up the sash. I leaned out and yelled, “Hey, assholes, you touch my underwear and—”

Michael yanked me back by my belt and slammed the window shut about one second before Brandon's face appeared there. “Let's not taunt the angry vampires,” he said. “I have to live here.”

Deep breaths, Eve. Right. Suitcase not as important as jugular. I sat down in one of the chairs, trying to get hold of myself and not even sure who that was anymore. Myself, I mean. So much had changed in five hours, right? I was an adult now. I was on my own in a town where being alone was a death sentence. I'd made a very bad enemy, and I'd done it deliberately. I'd been disowned by my own family, not that they'd been much of a family in the first place.

“Need a roommate?” I asked, and tried for a mocking smile. Michael hesitated in the act of reaching for his guitar, then settled in on the couch with the instrument cradled in his lap like a favorite pet.
He picked out random notes, pure and cool, and bent his head. “Sorry. Bad joke.”

“No, it's not,” he said. “Actually—I might consider it. You and me, we always got along in school. I mean, we didn't know each other that well, but—” Nobody had known Michael really well, except his buddy Shane Collins, but Shane had bugged out of Morganville with his parents after his sister's death. Everybody had wanted to know Michael, but he was private. Shy, maybe. “It's a big house. Four bedrooms, two baths. Hard to manage it by myself.”

Was he offering? Really? I swallowed and leaned forward. My shirt was coming loose again, but I left it that way. I needed every advantage I could get. “I swear, I'm good for rent. I'll get a job somewhere, at one of the neutral places. And I clean stuff. I'm a demon with cleaning.”

“Cook?” He looked hopeful, but I had to shake my head. “Damn. I'm not so great at it.”

“You'd have to be better than me. I can screw up the recipe for water.”

He smiled. He had one of those smiles—you know the ones, the kind that unleash lethal force on girls in the vicinity. I couldn't remember him smiling in high school. He was probably aware that it might cause girls to faint, or unbutton clothes, or something.

“We'll think about it until tomorrow night,” he said. “Pick any room but the first one—that's mine. Sheets are in the closet. Towels are in the bathroom.”

“My suitcase—”

“After dawn.” He was looking down again, picking out a sweet, quiet melody from the strings. “I've got someplace I have to go before then, but you'll be safe enough just going out to get it and coming right back inside. I don't think Brandon's pissed enough to hang around in the sun.”

Hopefully. Some vampires could, and we all knew it, but Brandon seemed more of a night person. “But—you'll come back, right?”

“I'll be back by dark,” he promised. “We'll talk about the rent then. But for now, you should—” He looked up. His gaze reached the level of my chest, fixed, and then lowered again. The smile this time was directed at the guitar. “Put on a new shirt or something.”

“Well, I would, but all my shirts are in my suitcase, getting molested by Brandon and his funboys.” I flipped a finger at the window, in case they were watching.

“Get something out of my closet,” he said. I thought he was playing something from Coldplay's catalog now, something soft and contemplative. “Sorry about staring. I know you've had a tough night.”

There was something so damn sweet about that, it made me want to cry. Again. I swallowed the impulse. “You don't know the half of it,” I said.

This time, when he looked up, his gaze actually made it to my face. And stayed there. “I'm guessing bad.”

“Real bad.”

“You'd tell me if I was a friend, right? And not just some guy whose door you randomly knocked on in the middle of the night?”

I thought about Jane, poor sweet Jane, my best and only real friend. Trent and Guy, who probably had been destined for nothing but still had been, for tonight at least, my friends. “I'm not so good for my friends,” I said. “Maybe we ought to just call you a really nice stranger.” I took a deep breath. “I lost three friends tonight, and it was my fault.”

He kept looking at me. Really looking. It was a little bit hot, and a little bit disconcerting. “Then would you talk to a really nice stranger about it? For”—he checked his watch—“forty minutes? I need to leave before sunrise, but I want you to be okay before I do.”

It took only thirty minutes to tell him about the Life and Times
of Me, actually. Michael didn't say very much, and I felt so tired afterward that I hardly knew it when he got up and went into the kitchen. I must have dozed off a little, because when I woke up, he was kneeling next to my chair, and he had a chocolate brownie on a plate. With a semi-melted pink candle sputtering away on top.

“It's a leftover,” he warned me. “Two weeks at least. So I don't know how good it is. But happy birthday, anyway. I promise you, things will get better.”

They just had.

A brief vignette, and one that I wrote mainly to understand Amelie and Oliver's relationship. This was written very early on, between
Glass Houses
and
The Dead Girls' Dance
. It was also before I'd thought about Bishop, or even much about Myrnin, although I already had the broad strokes of his character in mind. This little scene was written to help me understand how these very long-lived, somewhat disinterested characters would see these teenagers who'd defied them . . . and it also gives us a bit more about Shane's father, since I was beginning to write that book and had a feeling for what was coming.

The characters changed over time, developed more depth and richness and personality, but I think the outlines are there in this story, and the sense of their long view of things.

This was originally posted as part of the Captain Obvious “hidden content” on the Morganville Web site.

O
utside, nightfall had truly come, and it was a glorious darkness.

Amelie stood, one hand holding back the heavy velvet of the draperies, and watched the streetlights of her town blink on one after another. A faint circle of safety for the humans to cling to, an important illusion without which they could not long survive. She had learned a great deal about living with humans, over the past few hundred years.

More than about living with her own kind, she supposed.

“Yes?” She had heard the tiny whisper of movement behind her, and knew one of her servants had appeared in the doorway. They never spoke unless spoken to. A benefit to having servants so long-lived: one could reasonably expect them to understand manners. Not like the children of today, sparking as bright as fireflies, and gone as quickly. No manners. No sense of place and time.

“Oliver,” the servant said. It was Vallery; she knew all their voices, of course. “He's at the gates. He requests a conversation.”

Did he? How interesting. She'd thought he'd slink off into the dark and lick his wounds for a year or two, until he was ready to play games with her again. He'd come very near to succeeding this time,
thanks to her own carelessness. She could ill afford another occurrence.

“Show him in,” she said. It was not the safest course, but she found herself growing tired of the safe road. There were so rarely any surprises, or strangers to meet.

Like the surprise of the children living in her house on Lot Street. The angelic blond boy, with his passion and bitterness, woven into the fabric of the house and trapped there. Or the strange girl, with her odd makeup and odder clothing. Or the other boy, the strong one, quick and intelligent and wishing not to seem so.

And the youngest, oh, the youngest girl, with her diamond-sharp mind. Fierce and small and courageous, although she would not know the depths of her abilities for years yet.

Interesting, all of them, and that was a rarity in Amelie's long, long eternity. She had been kind to them, out of no better reason than that. She could afford to be kind, so long as it risked her nothing in return.

Oliver deliberately made noise as he approached her study, a gesture of politeness she appreciated. Amelie turned from the window and sat down in the velvet-covered chair beside it, arranging her skirts with effortless grace and folding her hands in her lap. Oliver looked less harassed than he had; he'd taken time to bathe, change, compose himself. He'd tied his gray curling hair back in the old style, a subtle sign to her that he was willing to accommodate her preferences, and he was perfectly correct in his manners as he bowed to her and waited for her to gesture him to take a seat.

“I am grateful to you for the opportunity to speak,” Oliver said as he settled himself in the chair. Vallery appeared in the doorway with a tray and two silver cups; she gave him a slight nod, and he delivered them refreshment. Oliver drank without taking his eyes from her. She
sipped. “I thought we had an agreement, Amelie. Regarding the book.”

“We did,” she said, and sipped again. Fresh, warm, red blood. Life itself, salty and thick in her mouth. She had long learned how to feast neatly on it. “I agreed not to interfere with your . . . searches. But I never agreed to forgo the opportunity to retrieve it myself, if the chance presented. As it did.”

“I was cheated.”

“Yes,” she agreed softly, and smiled. “But not by me, Oliver. Not by me. And if you should consider taking your petty revenge on the children, please remember that they are in my house, under my sign of Protection. Don't make this cause for complaint.”

He nodded stiffly, eyes sparking anger. He put his cup back on Vallery's tray. It rang empty. “What do you know of the boy?”

“Which boy?”

“Not Glass. The other one. Shane Collins.”

She raised one hand in a tiny, weary gesture. “What is there to know? He is barely a child.”

“His mother was resistant to conditioning.”

Amelie searched her memory. Ah, yes. Collins. There had been an incident, unfortunate as such things were, and she had dispatched operatives to see to the end of it when the elder Collins had taken his wife and son and left Morganville. “She should be dead by now,” she said.

“She is. But her husband isn't.” Oliver smiled slowly, and she did not care for the triumph in his expression. Not at all. “I have a report that he returned to town only an hour ago, and went straight to the house where his son is staying. Your house, Amelie. You are now sheltering a potential killer.” She said nothing, did nothing. After a long
moment, Oliver sighed. “You cannot pretend that this is not a problem.”

“I don't,” she said. “But we shall see what develops. After all, this town is a sanctuary.”

“And the children?” he asked. “Are you extending your Protection to them even if they come after vampires?”

Amelie sipped the last of her blood, and smiled. “I might,” she said.

“Then you want a war.”

“No, Oliver, I want the right to make my own decisions in my own town.” She stood, and Oliver stood, too, as if drawn on the same string. “You may go.”

She went back to the window, dismissing him from her thoughts. If he was inclined to dispute his dismissal, he thought better—possibly because Vallery was not the only servant she had within a whisper's call—and he withdrew from the field without surrender.

Amelie folded her hands on the warm wood of the window ledge and stared at the faint glow of moonrise on the horizon.

“Oh, children.” She sighed. “Whatever shall I do with you?”

She was not in the habit of risking her life or position. Especially not for mere humans, whose lives blinked on and off as quickly as the streetlights below.

If Oliver was right, she would have little choice.