Bite Club E-Book

Rachel Caine

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Morganville Vampires
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

After discovering that vampires populate Morganville - and surviving a number of adventures - Claire Danvers has come to realize that for the most part, the undead just want to live their lives. But someone else has other ideas. There's a new extreme sport being broadcast over the Internet: bare-knuckle fights pitting captured vampires against one another - or, worse, against humans. Tracking the signal leads Claire and her friends to discover that what started as an online brawl will soon threaten everyone in Morganville. And if they want to survive, they'll have to do a lot more than fight...

Leseprobe

Praise for the Morganville Vampires series

‘Ms Caine uses her dazzling storytelling skills to share the darkest chapter yet … An engrossing read that once begun is impossible to set down’

Darque Reviews

‘Filled with delicious twists that the audience will appreciatively sink their teeth into’

Genre Go Round Reviews

‘Keeps you on the edge of your seat; even in the background scenes you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it always does’

Flames Rising

‘A fast-paced, page-turning read packed with wonderful characters and surprising plot twists. Rachel Caine is an engaging writer; readers will be completely absorbed in this chilling story, unable to put it down until the last page’

Flamingnet

‘If you love to read about characters with whom you can get deeply involved, Rachel Caine is so far a one hundred per cent sure bet to satisfy that need’

The Eternal Night

‘Rachel Caine brings her brilliant ability to blend witty dialogue, engaging characters, and an intriguing plot’

Romance Reviews Today

‘A rousing horror thriller that adds a new dimension to the vampire mythos … An electrifying, enthralling coming-of-age supernatural tale’

Midwest Book Review

‘A solid paranormal mystery and action plot line that will entertain adults as well as teenagers. The story line has several twists and turns that will keep readers of any age turning the pages’

LoveVampires

Praise for Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series

‘You’ll never watch the Weather Channel the same way again’

Jim Butcher

‘Rachel Caine takes the Weather Wardens to places the Weather Channel never imagined!’

Mary Jo Putney

‘The Weather Warden series is fun reading … more engaging than most TV’

Booklist

‘A fast-paced thrill ride [that] brings new meaning to stormy weather’

Locus

Bite Club

The Morganville Vampires

BOOK TEN

RACHEL CAINE

To Bizzie O’Meara. Congratulations on your new job as Amelie’s assistant.

To Sarah Weiss, for the unenviable job of trying to help keep me out of the paper jungle.

And to you, dear reader, because only you have made Bite Club possible. Bless you.

Contents

PraiseTitle PageDedicationINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENTRACK LISTACKNOWLEDGEMENTSAdvertisementAvailable from ALLISON & BUSBYAbout the AuthorCopyright

INTRODUCTION

WELCOME TO MORGANVILLE. YOU’LL NEVER WANT TO LEAVE.

So, you’re new to Morganville. Welcome, new resident! There are only a few important rules you need to know to feel comfortable in our quiet little town:

obey the speed limits,don’t litter,whatever you do, don’t get on the bad side of the vampires.

Yeah, we said vampires. Deal with it.

As a human newcomer, you’ll need to find yourself a vampire Protector – someone willing to sign a contract to keep you and yours from harm (especially from the other vampires). In return, you’ll pay taxes … just like in any other town. Of course, in most other towns, those taxes don’t get collected by the Bloodmobile.

Oh, and if you decide not to get a Protector, you can do that, too … but you’d better learn how to run fast, stay out of the shadows, and build a network of friends who can help you. Try contacting the residents of the Glass House – Michael, Eve, Shane, and Claire. They know their way around, even if they always end up in the middle of the trouble somehow.

Welcome to Morganville. You’ll never want to leave.

And even if you do … well, you can’t.

Sorry about that.

CHAPTER ONE

Looking back on it later, Claire thought she should have known trouble was coming. But, in Morganville, anything could be trouble. Your college professor doesn’t show for class? Probably got fanged by vampires. Takeout forgets to put onions on your hamburger? The regular onion-delivery guy disappeared – again, probably due to vampires. And so on. For a college town, Morganville had a remarkable lot of vampires.

Claire was an authority on all those subjects: Texas Prairie University and, of course, the vampires. And mysterious disappearances. She’d almost been one of those, more often than she wanted to admit.

But this problem wasn’t a disappearance at all. It was an appearance … of something new, something different, and something cool, at least in her boyfriend Shane’s opinion, because as Claire was sorting the mail for their weird little fraternity of four into the ‘junk’ and ‘keep’ piles, Shane grabbed the flyer she’d put in ‘junk’ and read it with the most elated expression she’d ever seen on his face. Scary. Shane didn’t get excited about much; he was guarded about his feelings, mostly, except with her.

Now he looked as delighted as a little kid at Christmas.

‘Mike!’ he bellowed, and Claire winced and put her hands over her ears. When Shane yelled, he belted it out. ‘Yo, Dead Man, get your ass down here!’

Michael, their third housemate here at the Glass House, must have assumed that there was an emergency under way … not an unreasonable assumption, because, hey, Morganville. So he arrived at a run, slamming the door back and looking paler than usual, and more dangerous than normal, too. When he acted like a regular guy, he seemed quiet and sweet, maybe a little too practical sometimes, but Vampire Michael was a whole different, spicy deal.

Yeah, she was living in a house with a vampire. And, strangely, that was not the weirdest part of her life.

Michael blinked the tinges of red away from his blue eyes, ran both hands through his wavy blond hair, and frowned at Shane. ‘What the hell is your problem?’ He didn’t wait to hear, though; he walked over to the counter and got down one of their mismatched, battered coffee mugs. This one was black with purple Gothic lettering that spelt out POISON. The cup belonged to their fourth housemate, Eve, but she still hadn’t made an appearance this morning.

When you sleep later than a vampire, Claire thought, that’s probably taking it a little too far.

As he filled the mug with coffee, Michael waited for Shane to make some sense. Which Shane finally did, holding up the cheaply printed white flyer. It curled around the edges from having been rolled up to fit in the mailbox. ‘What have I always wanted in this town?’ he asked.

‘A strip club that would let in fifteen-year-olds?’ Michael said.

‘When I was fifteen. No, seriously. What?’

‘Guns “R” Us?’

Shane made a harsh buzzer sound. ‘OK, to be fair, yeah, that’s a good alternate answer. But no. I always wanted a place to seriously train to fight, right? Someplace that didn’t think aerobics was a martial art. And look!’

Claire took the paper from Shane’s hand and smoothed it out on the table. She’d only glanced at it when sorting mail; she’d thought it was some kind of gym. Which it was, in a way, but it wasn’t teaching spin and yoga and all that stuff.

This one was a gym and martial arts studio, and it was teaching self-defence. Or at least that was what Claire took from the graphic of some guy in a white jacket and pants kicking the crap out of the air, and the words DEFEND YOURSELF in big, bold letters at the bottom.

Slurping coffee, Michael leant over her shoulder. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Weird.’

‘Nothing weird about people wanting to learn a few life-preserving skills, man. Especially around here. Not like we’re all looking forward to a peaceful old age,’ Shane said.

‘I mean, it’s weird who’s teaching,’ Michael said. ‘Being that this guy’ – he tapped the name at the bottom of the page – ‘is a vampire.’

Vassily was the name, which Claire made out only when she squinted at it. Small type. ‘A vampire’s teaching self-defence,’ she said. ‘To us. Humans.’

Shane was thrown for just about a minute, and then he said, ‘Well, who better? Amelie put out a decree that humans were free to learn this stuff, right? Sooner or later, some vamp was bound to make some cash off of it.’

‘You mean, off of us,’ Claire said. But she could see his point. A vampire martial arts instructor? That would have to be all kinds of scary or awesome, or both. She wouldn’t have gone for it, personally; she doubted she had half as much muscle or body mass as it was going to require. But Shane … well, it was a natural for Shane. He was competitive, and he didn’t mind taking some punishment as long as he enjoyed the fight. He’d been complaining about the lack of a real gym for a while now.

Claire handed the flyer back to him, and Shane carefully folded it up and put it in his back pocket. ‘Watch yourself,’ she said. ‘Get out of there if anything’s weird.’ Although in Morganville, Texas, home of everything weird, that was a pretty high bar to surpass. After all, there was a vampire teaching self-defence. That in itself was the strangest thing she’d seen in a while.

‘Yes, Mom,’ Shane said, but he whispered it, intimately, close to her ear, and then kissed that spot on the neck that always, every time, made her blush and shiver. ‘Eat your breakfast.’

She turned and kissed him full-on, just a sweet, swift brush of lips, because he was already moving … and then he did a double take and came back to kiss her again, slower, hotter, better.

Michael, sliding into a seat at the kitchen table with his coffee cup, flipped open the thin four-page Morganville newspaper and said, ‘One of you is supposed to be somewhere right about now. I’m just saying that, not in a dad kind of way.’

He was right, and Claire broke off the kiss with a frustrated growl, low in her throat. Shane grinned. ‘You’re so cute when you do that,’ he said. ‘You sound like a really fierce kitten.’

‘Bite me, Collins.’

‘Whoops, wrong housemate. I think you meant that for the one who drinks plasma.’

Michael gave him a one-fingered salute without looking up from his study of the latest Morganville High School sports disaster. Claire doubted he was actually interested in it, but Michael had to have reading material around; she didn’t think he slept much these days, and reading was how he passed the time. And he probably got something out of it, even if it was just knowledge of local football to impress Eve with.

Claire grabbed her breakfast – a Pop-Tart just ringing up out of the toaster – and wrapped it in a napkin so she could take it with her. Book bag acquired, she blew Shane and Michael an air kiss as she hit the back door, heading out into a cold Morganville fall.

Fall in other parts of the world was a beautiful season, filled with leaves in brown, orange, yellow … here, the leaves had been brown for a day and then dropped off the trees to rattle around the streets and yards like bones. Another depressing season, to add to all the others that were depressing in this town. But at least it was cooler than the blazing summer; that was something. Claire had actually dug out a long-sleeve tee and layered another shirt over it, because the wind gusts carried the sharp whip of approaching winter. Pretty soon, she’d need a coat and gloves and a hat, and maybe boots if the snow fell hard enough.

Morganville in summer was dull green at best, but now all the grass was burnt dry, and most of the bushes had lost their leaves. Now they were black skeletons shivering in the cold. Not a pretty place, not at all, although a few house-proud people had tried some landscaping, and Mrs Hennessey on the corner liked those weird concrete animals. This year, she had a fake grey deer sipping from an empty stone fountain, and a couple of concrete squirrels that looked more menacing than cute.

Claire checked her watch, took a bite of her Pop-Tart, and almost choked as she realised how little time she had. She broke into a jog, which was tough considering the weight of the bag on her shoulder, and then kicked it to a full run as she passed the big iron gates of Texas Prairie University. Fall semester was a busy time; lots of new, stupid freshmen wandering around confused with maps, or still unpacking the boxes from their cars. She had two or three near-collisions, but reached the steps of the Science Building without much incident, and with two whole minutes to spare. Good; she needed them to get her breath back.

As she munched the rest of her breakfast, wishing she had a bottle of water, others she knew by sight filtered past her … Bruce, from Computational Physics, who was almost as out of place here as she felt; Ilaara from one of the maths classes she was in, but Claire couldn’t sort out which one. She didn’t make close friends at TPU, which was a shame, but it wasn’t that sort of school – especially if you were in the know about the inner workings of Morganville. Most of the just-passing-through students spent the year or two they were here with the usual on-campus partying; except for specific college-friendly stores that were located within a couple of blocks, they never bothered to leave the gates of the university. And that was probably for the best.

It was dangerous out there, after all.

Claire found her classroom – a small one; nothing at her level of study had big groups – and took her usual seat in the middle of the room, next to a smelly grad student named Doug, who apparently hated personal hygiene. She thought about moving, but the fact was there weren’t many other places, and Doug’s aura was tangible at ten feet away, anyway. Better to get an intense dose close-up so your nose could adjust quickly.

Doug smiled at her. He seemed to like her, which was scary, but at least he wasn’t a big chatterbox or one of those guys who came on with the cheesy innuendos – at least, not usually. She’d certainly sat next to worse. Well, maybe not in terms of body odour, though. ‘Hey,’ he said, bending closer. Claire resisted the urge to bend the other way. ‘I hear he’s springing a new lab experiment on us today. Something mind-blowing.’

Given that she worked for the smartest guy in Morganville, maybe the entire world, and given that he was at least a few hundred years old and drank blood, Claire suspected her scale of mind-blowing might be a little bigger than Doug’s. It wasn’t unusual to go to Myrnin’s secret lair/underground lab (yes, he actually had one) and find he’d invented edible hats or an iPod that ran on sweat. And considering that her boss built blood-drinking computers that controlled dimensional portals, Claire didn’t anticipate any problems understanding a mere university professor’s assignments. Half of what Myrnin gave her to read wasn’t even in a living language, anyway. It was amazing what she’d learnt – whether she wanted to or not.

‘Good luck,’ she said to Stinky Doug, trying not to breathe too deeply. She glanced over at him, and was startled to see that he was sporting two spectacular black eyes – healing up, she realised after the first shock, but he’d gotten smacked pretty badly. ‘Wow. Nice bruises. What happened?’

Doug shrugged. ‘Got in a fight. No big deal.’

Someone, Claire thought, disliked his body odour a whole lot more than usual. ‘Did you win?’

He smiled, but it was a private, almost cynical kind of smile – a joke she couldn’t share. ‘Oh, I will,’ he said. ‘Big time.’

The door banged open at the far end of the room, and the prof stalked in. He was a short, round little man, with mean, close-set eyes, and he liked Hawaiian shirts in obnoxiously loud colours – in fact, she was relatively sure that he and Myrnin might have shopped at the same store. The Obnoxious Store.

‘Settle down!’ he said, even though they weren’t exactly the rowdiest class at TPU. In fact, they were perfectly quiet. But Prof. Larkin always said that; Claire suspected he was actually deaf, so he just said it to be on the safe side. ‘Right. I hope you’ve all done your reading, because today you get to do some applications of principles you should already know. Everybody, stand up, shake it off, and follow me. Bring your stuff.’

Claire hadn’t bothered to unpack anything yet, so she just swung her backpack to her shoulder and headed out in Professor Larkin’s wake, happy to be temporarily out of the Doug Fug. Not that Larkin was any treat, either … he smelt like old sweat and bacon, but at least he’d bathed in recent memory.

She glanced down at his wrist. On it was a braided leather band with a metal plate incised with a symbol – not the Founder symbol that Claire wore as a pin on the collar of her jacket, but another vampire’s symbol. Oliver’s, apparently. That was a little unusual; Oliver didn’t personally oversee a lot of humans. He was above all that. He was the don in the local Morganville Mafia.

Larkin saw her looking and sent her a stern frown. ‘Something to say, Miss Danvers?’

‘Nice bracelet,’ she said. ‘I’ve only seen one other like it.’ The one she’d seen had been around the wrist of her own personal nemesis, Monica Morrell, crown princess (she wished!) of Morganville. Once the daughter of the mayor, now the sister of the new mayor, she thought she could do whatever she wanted … and with Oliver’s Protection, she probably could still, even if her brother, Richard, wasn’t quite as indulgent as Daddy had been.

Larkin just … didn’t seem the type Oliver would bother with, unless he wasn’t what he seemed.

Larkin clasped his hands behind his back as they walked down the almost-empty, wide hallway, the rest of the class trailing behind. ‘I ought to give you a pass from today’s experiment,’ he said. ‘Confidentially, I’m pretty sure it’s child’s play for you, given your … part-time occupation.’

He knew about Myrnin, or at least he’d been told something. There weren’t many people who actually knew Myrnin, and fewer still who’d been to the lab and had any understanding of what went on in there. She’d never seen Larkin there or heard his name mentioned by anybody with clout.

So she was careful with her reply.

‘I don’t mind. I like experiments,’ she said. ‘Providing they’re not the kind that try to eat me or blow me up.’ Both of which, unfortunately, she’d come across in her job at the lab.

‘Oh, nothing that dramatic,’ Larkin said. ‘But I think you might enjoy it.’

That scared her a bit.

Arriving at the generic lab room, though, there didn’t seem to be anything worth breaking a sweat over. Some full-spectrum incandescent lights, like you’d use for indoor reptiles; on each table, some small, ranked vials of what looked like …

Blood.

Oh, crap. That was never a good sign in Morganville (or, Claire thought, anywhere else, either). She came to a sudden stop and sent Larkin a wide-eyed look. The rest of the class was piling in behind her, talking in low tones; she knew Doug had arrived because of the blanket of body smog that settled in around her. Of course, Doug took the lab stool beside her. Dammit. That blew, as Shane would have said; Claire covered her discomfort by sending him a small, not very enthusiastic smile as she dropped her backpack to the ground, careful of the laptop inside. She hated sitting on lab stools; they only emphasized how short she was. She felt like she was back in second grade again, and unable to touch the floor from her chair.

Larkin assumed his position in the centre of the lab tables and grabbed a small stack of paper from his black bag. He passed out the instructions, and Claire read them, frowning. They were simple enough – place a sample of the ‘fluid’ on a slide, turn on the full-spectrum lighting, observe and record results. Once a reaction was observed, mix the identified reactive blood with control blood until a nonreaction was achieved. Then work out the equations explaining the initial reaction and the nonreaction, to chart the energy release.

No doubt at all what this is about, Claire thought. The vamps were using students to do their research for them. Free worker bees. But why?

Larkin had a smooth patter, she had to admit; he joked around, said that with the popularity of vampires in entertainment it might be fun to apply some physics to the problem. Part of the blood had been ‘altered’ to allow for a reaction, and part had not. He made it all seem very scientific and logical, for the benefit of the eight out of ten non-Morganville residents in the room.

Claire caught the eye of Malinda, the other one in the room who was wearing a vampire symbol. Malinda’s pretty face was set in a worried, haunted expression. She opened her eyes wide and held up her hands in a silent What do we do?

It’ll be OK, Claire mouthed. She hoped she wasn’t lying.

‘Cool,’ said Stinky Doug, leaning over to look at the paper. Claire’s eyes watered a little, and she felt an urge to sneeze. ‘Vampires. I vant to drink your bloot!’ He made a mock bite at her neck, which creeped her out so much, she nearly fell off the stool.

‘Don’t ever do that again,’ she said. Doug looked a little surprised at her reaction. ‘And by the way, showers. Look into them, Doug!’

That was a little too much snark for Claire’s usual style, but he’d scared her, and it just came out. Doug looked wounded, and Claire immediately felt bad. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said very sincerely. ‘It’s just … you don’t smell so great.’

It was his turn now to look ashamed. ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking down at the paper. ‘I know. Sorry.’ He got that look again, that secret, smug look. ‘Guess I need to get rich enough nobody cares what I smell like.’

‘That, or, you know, showering. That works better.’

‘Fine. Next time I’ll smell just like a birthday bouquet.’

‘No fair just throwing on deodorant and aftershave or something. Real washing. It’s a must.’

‘You’re a tough sell.’ He flashed her a movie-star grin that looked truly strange with the discolouration around his eyes. ‘Speaking of that, once I take that shower, you interested in going out for dinner?’

‘I’m spoken for,’ she said. ‘And we have work to do.’

She prepped the slide, and Doug fired up the lamp. The instant the full-spectrum lighting hit the fluid, there was a noticeable reaction – bubbling under the glass, as if the blood had carbonated. It took about thirty seconds for the reaction to run its course; once it had, all that was left was a black, ashy residue.

‘So freaking cool,’ Doug said. ‘Seriously. Where do you think they get this stuff? Squeeze real vampires?’ There was something odd about the way he said it – as if he actually knew something. Which he shouldn’t, Claire knew. Definitely, he shouldn’t.

‘It’s probably just a light-sensitive chemical additive,’ Claire said. ‘Not sure how it works, though.’ That was true. As much as she’d studied it, she didn’t understand the nature of the vampire transformation. It wasn’t a virus – exactly. And it wasn’t a contaminant, either, although it had elements of that. There were things about it that, she suspected, all of their scientific approaches couldn’t capture, try as they might. Maybe they were just measuring the wrong things.

Doug dropped the uncomfortable speculation. He wasn’t so bad as a lab partner, if you forgot the stinky part; he was a good observer, and not half-bad with calculations. She let him do most of the work, because she’d already done much of this with Myrnin. It was interesting that Doug came up with a slightly different formula in the end than she had on her own, and, she thought, his was a little more elegant. They were the first to come up with a stable mixture of the blood, and the second to come up with calculations – but Doug’s, Claire was confident, were better than the other team’s. You didn’t have to finish first to win, not in science. You just had to be more right than the other guys.

All was going OK until she caught Doug trying to pocket a sample of the blood. ‘Hey,’ she said, and caught his wrist. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Why not? It would be awesome at parties.’

Again, there was that unsettling tone, a little too smug, a little too knowing. Whatever it was he intended to do with it, she doubted he was going to show off at parties with it.

‘Just don’t.’ Claire met his eyes. ‘I mean it. Leave it alone, he might be checking. It might be … toxic.’ Fatal, she meant, because if the vamps found out Doug was sneaking out samples … well. Accidents happened, even on the TPU campus. Stupidity wasn’t covered by the general Protection agreement, and Doug seemed to have caught a little bit too much of a clue.

Doug grudgingly dropped it back to the table. Prof. Larkin came around, checked out the sample bottles, and recorded them against a master sheet. As he walked away and she and Doug packed their bags, Claire said, ‘See? I told you he’d be checking.’

‘Yeah,’ Doug whispered back. ‘But he already checked us out.’

And before she could stop him, he grabbed a couple of the vials and stuck them in his bag, and took off.

Claire swallowed the impulse to yell, and a second one, to kick the table in frustration. She didn’t dare tell Larkin; he was Protected, and Doug had no idea what he was getting into. She had to get him to give the vials back. Dumb-ass wouldn’t have any idea what to do with them, anyway.

She hoped.

CHAPTER TWO

Unfortunately, Stinky Doug wasn’t that easy to find. For one thing, she’d never learnt his last name. Hacking into Professor Larkin’s class records would be easy enough, but Claire had other classes, one after another, right up through mid afternoon. Then she was scheduled for the lab – the real one. And an evening of weird science with the weirdest boss ever.

Myrnin, she hoped, wouldn’t notice if she was a little late. He had a pretty flexible concept of time.

Claire stopped off in the University Centre, which had Wi-Fi, and claimed a table in the coffee bar area. Her housemate Eve must have finally dragged herself out of bed, because she was behind the counter, yawning and sipping a massively large cup of what, knowing Eve, must have been pure espresso.

‘Hiya, cutie,’ Eve said, and leant on the bar to smile at Claire. ‘Mornings are hard.’

‘It isn’t morning,’ Claire said, straight-faced.

Eve made a tragic face. ‘I stand corrected. Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don’t do them anymore.’ She took a gulp from her cup, shuddered, and said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Caffeinate me. So, Beautiful Brainiac, what can I do for you?’

‘The usual, I guess.’

‘One piping-hot mocha, extra large, coming up!’ Eve rang it up and took Claire’s money. As she counted out change, she shook her newly shag-cut black hair back from her pale face and grinned. The grinning didn’t really go with the whole Goth thing, but that was Eve. She didn’t do labels. ‘Hey, did you get how excited Shane was about that martial arts thingy? He almost ran me over when I came downstairs. I never saw somebody so thrilled to be invited to an ass kicking.’

‘He was pretty stoked,’ Claire agreed. ‘How about you? Are you going?’

‘Take classes? That I actually pay for? What do you think I am – a college girl or something? Besides, I defend myself just fine.’ She did, actually. Eve not only made her own stakes, but she also blinged them out with crystal designs. The wooden ones were sort of like stun guns for vamps; wood couldn’t kill most of them, just immobilise them, unless the vamps were very young, like Michael.

But Eve also made silver ones, and those were deadly. Claire felt a shiver along her spine as she remembered just how deadly they could be. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d destroyed one vampire that way. Nasty. And even though she’d done it in self-defence, she hadn’t felt good about it.

‘Hmmm,’ Eve was saying now, in a contemplative kind of way. She tapped her lip with one black fingernail and smiled. ‘There could be a use for that gym after all, now that I think about it. You know, there is one martial art I like.’

‘Which is?’

‘A surprise, Claire Bear. Yeah, that might definitely be some fun. You might even enjoy it, too.’ A tiny, cute frown line slowly appeared between her eyebrows. ‘You OK? You look kind of spooked.’

‘Yeah, coming from someone who looks like an actual ghost …’

‘Respect the awesome look, girlfriend. OK, if you don’t want to talk, don’t. One mocha, coming up! Sit down; I’ll bring it over. It’s slow, anyway.’

It wasn’t just slow; this hour of the day, it was deserted. Claire left Eve to the espresso construction (something Eve was amazingly good at, actually) and flipped open her laptop. It took her exactly seven minutes to hack into Larkin’s class roster and discover that Stinky Doug’s full name was Doug Legrande. Larkin, creepily enough, even had all their addresses, phone numbers, and emails, although Claire was pretty sure she’d never provided him with any of that intel. Either the university was really free with their personal details, or Larkin had connections.

Duh; she already knew that. He had a bracelet from Oliver. Connections didn’t quite cover it.

‘You gonna drink that?’

Claire looked up. Eve was sitting across from her, slumped in the rickety plastic chair, sipping her massive cup of whatever – it was Eve’s own cup, with a cartoony GOT BLOOD? on the side. On campus, it was funny. Off campus … not so much.

As Claire stared blankly at her, Eve nodded to the mocha that had magically appeared next to her laptop. ‘The whipped cream’s getting all melty,’ Eve said. ‘Whipped cream is a terrible thing to waste. Oh, except it’s not real whipped cream, it’s that canned stuff, which is kind of nasty, so there’s that. Maybe a good choice after all. Whatcha doing?’

That was Eve, through and through, even when she was sleepy. Keeping up with her required a healthy gulp of the mocha and a very active brain. ‘I’m trying to find Stinky Doug,’ Claire said. ‘He lives on campus, in Lansdale House, I guess.’

‘Stinky Doug? Oh, God. Please tell me you’re going to do everyone a public service and deliver him some shower gel. The last time he came in here, I thought I was going to have to call those biohazard guys. Although if this is some weird and inconceivable college-crush thing, I don’t want to know. Let me have my fragile illusions.’

Claire rolled her eyes. ‘Trust me, I wouldn’t kiss Doug even after the shower gel and decontamination. No, he did something stupid, and I need to convince him not to make it worse – that’s all.’ She explained about the experiment, the blood, and Doug’s boneheaded move. Eve kept steadily drinking her coffee, eyes half-closed.

‘You considered snitching on him?’ she asked. ‘Because, honestly, wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. Just make sure Larkin knows you didn’t take it. Let him draw his own conclusions.’

‘That’s the same thing as throwing him under the bus,’ Claire said. ‘Look, he’s just dumb, that’s all. And he doesn’t know about’ – Claire waved vaguely around, indicating Morganville – ‘all this.’ Well, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that, actually, but he shouldn’t know. That counted.

‘If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? Caughtdead? I crack myself up.’ Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn’t need. ‘So you’re visiting Stinky Doug and warning him off, without explaining why. Is that your whole plan?’

‘Kinda.’

‘Awesome. Let me know how it goes, Plan Girl.’

‘You have any better ideas?’

Eve took another delicate swallow of coffee. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Stinky Doug has a lot of classes. If you’ve got his dorm-room address, how difficult would it be to toss the place, find the stuff, and get rid of it? Nobody has to know.’

‘Great. And do you actually know a ninja?’

‘Yep,’ Eve said, and gave her a sleepy, luminous smile. ‘He’s my boyfriend.’

Hmmm. Claire had to mull that over for a few seconds, because technically vampires were like ninjas – quiet, sneaky, fast, and deadly. And when they wanted to be, they could be disturbingly invisible. ‘Would he do it?’ she asked. That wasn’t what she wanted to ask, actually; she wanted to ask Will hetellOliver?

Because like it or not, Michael was a vampire in equal measure to being her friend, and even though he tried to stay on the human side, sometimes he had to be a vamp first. Maybe this was one of those times.

Eve jacked up her black eyebrows another half-inch in answer.

‘OK,’ Claire finally said. ‘I admit, he has significant ninja qualities.’

‘Booyah. I will summon the ninja. Oh, and take a lunch break while we burgle.’

‘You’re going, too?’

‘Am I not ninja enough? Are you saying that I lack ninja?’

‘No, I was just thinking you’re a little, uh, recognizable, maybe?’

Eve batted her thick eyelashes. ‘Why, thank you, sweetie. That’s the nicest insult I’ve had today, not counting the jock who said he’d date me but he had a restraining order out for necrophilia. I promise, I’ll dowdy up for the occasion. It’ll take me five minutes.’ She took her cell out of her pocket and texted as she spoke. ‘Promise me you won’t leave without me.’

‘I promise.’

‘Want me to organise Shane into this posse, too?’

‘He’s at work.’ Claire sighed. She would have gladly had Shane added to the mix at this point, but he was already on fragile ground at work, considering he’d ditched twice this month – once for a legitimate sick day, but the other had been just plain boredom. ‘Next time we commit crime, we’ll make sure to include him.’

Eve held up one fist while she kept typing with one thumb, and Claire tapped it. Eve finished with a flurry of keystrokes, snapped the phone shut, and drained her coffee. ‘Right. Mikey’s on the way. I’ll be anti-Eve in five. Enjoy your mocha.’

Claire did, drinking fast. It was a good thing she did, because in just about five minutes, Michael was walking through the big UC open hall outside the coffee area, a guitar case slung over his back. He should have drawn attention – Michael was just plain gorgeous, and girls looked – but he was walking with his shoulders slumped, hands in his pants pockets, looking down, and the whole aura just projected Don’t look at me so strongly that Claire couldn’t see a single person, other than herself, actually taking notice of him.

He slid onto a seat next to her, leaning the guitar case against the table. ‘So, now we’re going to be actual criminals,’ he said.

‘And, see, you brought a guitar.’

He gave her a look. ‘I was on my way to practice.’

‘Oh. Well, thanks.’

‘Sounds like I didn’t have much of a choice. This guy has vampire blood?’

‘I guess so. Larkin was using it for some experiment. I suppose it was authorised.’

‘Larkin? Had to be. He wouldn’t dare do it on the side.’ Michael nudged her empty mocha cup with a fingertip. ‘Where’s Eve?’

‘Right here, Ninja with Fangs.’ Eve leant over behind him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him right over the cool blue veins. ‘Claire said I had to go in disguise as a regular person.’

And she had. Eve had scrubbed off every trace of her Goth persona, and tied her black hair back in a tight ponytail. She’d changed into a plain black hoodie – one without skulls or symbols, so Claire could only figure she’d raided someone else’s locker for it. The only thing left to indicate she wasn’t like every other college-age girl on campus were the thick-soled boots she was wearing. Still, those weren’t all that noticeable. She’d even thrown on an old pair of blue jeans.

‘Wow. We really are stealthy now,’ Claire said, and shut her computer. ‘Can we store stuff in the back?’

‘Sure, my locker has an actual lock.’

Claire raised her eyebrows and tugged the cord of the black hoodie. ‘And you keep this in it?’

‘I didn’t say that the locks couldn’t be picked. But, actually, my good buddy Edie never locks hers, anyway. Come on, let’s get the storage taken care of.’

In the end, they left Michael’s guitar, Claire’s backpack (with laptop), and pretty much everything else behind, as Eve set up the Lunch Break sign on the counter and locked up the register. In a surprisingly short time, they were headed out again. Michael had brought a leather hat, which looked kind of sloppy-cool and shaded his face and neck. He kept his hands in his pockets.

‘You’re not as sensitive anymore,’ Claire said. ‘To the sun, I mean.’ Because when Michael had first been venturing out, he’d had to drape himself in a blanket to keep from burning.

‘Well, it’s cloudy,’ he pointed out. It was; there were ominous dark masses in the sky, and the sun had disappeared behind the curtain. ‘And I’ve got on two layers. But, yeah, it’s better now than it was.’ He said it as if he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, which was strange. Claire supposed that becoming more stable meant he also felt more like a vampire. ‘I’ll be OK unless the sun comes out full strength again.’

Which, Claire could tell, it wouldn’t. Rain was coming, the kind of torrential desert rain that would drown the streets and create flash floods out in the arroyos outside of town, and would be completely gone tomorrow. There were already flashes of hidden lightning inside the clouds.

Luckily, they weren’t far from Stinky Doug’s dorm. It housed both male and female students, which was lucky, because it meant the three of them were even less noticeable, and there weren’t any sign-ins required. Once they’d made it to the stairwell, Michael took off the hat, stuffed it in his jacket, and ran up the steps with so much ease that Claire, puffing a little in his wake, wondered if maybe this vampire thing might not be OK after all. Eight flights of stairs wasn’t her thing.

At the top, she and Eve caught their breath and caught up with Michael as he stepped out to check the hallway. He motioned them to follow, so it must have been clear. Claire was surprised to see that this dorm hall was pretty much like her old one, the one she’d first lived in when she’d moved to Morganville – dingy, battered, smelling like old beer and desperation. Doors were closed all along the hall, except for a couple at the end that blasted music she didn’t recognise at top volume in some kind of stereo war.

Stinky Doug’s room was the third on the left. Michael paused in front of it, leant forward and listened, then nodded. He jiggled the knob. Locked.

That was why it was good to have a vampire along, because a simple twist of his wrist, and that lock problem? Solved. Michael pushed open the door and disappeared inside, and Eve and Claire followed, shutting the door behind them.

And Claire choked, because Stinky Doug’s personal aroma was nothing compared to the state of his dorm room. Her eyes watered. She couldn’t stand to take a full breath, because she was deeply afraid she was going to vomit. Not that it would make the stench any worse.

‘Eww,’ Eve said, pitifully, holding her nose shut. ‘Oh, my God! What died?’

Michael turned on the lights. For a couple of seconds, they stared in silence, and then Eve said, in a very small, muffled voice, ‘It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.’

Because Doug was lying on the bed, eyes open and staring, and he was definitely, completely dead. Not for long, Claire guessed, because blood still dripped from the wound in his neck.

It wasn’t a vampire bite. There was a huge pool of blood soaked into the mattress beneath Doug, staining his T-shirt crimson.

Michael had gone very, very pale; marble white, in fact. He leant over the body, maybe checking for signs of life, and shook his head. As Claire and Eve stood rooted to the spot in shock, he ransacked Doug’s backpack, then patted down the dead man’s pockets, pulling out keys, a cell phone, breath mints (it made Claire suddenly sad that he carried those when he was so generally unpleasant to the senses), a wallet, some change.

No vials of blood.

‘We have to go,’ Michael said. ‘Now. Right now.’

‘Was it – was it the vamps?’ Eve asked. ‘Can you tell?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘But—’

‘The ones I know wouldn’t be that bloody,’ Michael said. ‘We have to go.’

They were heading for the stairs, and Claire was still feeling a strange, distant sense of disconnection, when the reality of what she’d seen actually hit her, like colour and sound and smell all snapping into focus at the same instant.

Doug was dead. He’d been murdered.

She stopped, put her back against the hallway wall, and slid down to a crouch. She couldn’t breathe. Her whole body was shaking. She’d seen a lot of unpleasant things since moving to Morganville, but this … this was worse. This seemed so … cold.

And the worst part of it was, Michael thought that the monsters hadn’t done it. Not the side of town she usually thought of as monsters, anyway.

Eve was bending over her, pulling on her arm. Having lost the Goth make-up, she looked stark right now, washed pale. ‘Come on, Claire, we need to get the hell out of here. Too many questions.’

‘But we can’t … just leave him—’

‘We won’t,’ Michael said, and took her other arm. He pulled her to her feet and held her there until her knees stopped shaking. ‘But we’re not staying. Eve’s right.’

Claire clung to the handrail on the way down. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the way Doug’s face had seemed so slack and empty, the way his eyes stared, all pupils. The way the blood had soaked his bed beneath him.

She stopped on the third-floor landing and put her head down, breathing fast. Eve and Michael were already halfway down to the next level, but they turned and came back. They were talking, but she couldn’t hear them.

It took forever to get moving again, and once they were out in the dorm lobby, to try to act normal. She held on to Michael’s arm, mostly for support. Outside, he put his hat on again and led her to the shade of a tree, where she collapsed in a pathetic heap on the dying grass. Overhead, the dry leaves rattled and hissed. A few broke loose in the freshening breeze.

Michael crouched down beside her, and Eve knelt on the other side. ‘Claire?’ he asked. His eyes were very blue, very clear, and very worried. ‘Claire, talk to me. You OK?’

‘No,’ she said. Her voice sounded small and fragile and very far away. ‘He’s dead. Someone killed him.’

Eve and Michael exchanged worried looks. Michael shook his head. ‘I’ll get hold of Richard and Hannah,’ he said. ‘This needs to be handled quietly. They need to know what happened before it gets out of hand.’

And right on cue, the thundering music from the top floor of the dorm cut out, and from an open window came the sound of a girl’s scream, long and loud, with razor-edged horror in it. That was the scream Claire hadn’t voiced, the one that still bubbled inside her. Somehow, hearing someone else do it helped ease the pressure. She didn’t feel quite as faint and sick.

‘I think that ship’s sailed, Michael,’ Eve said, staring towards the dorm. Without the make-up, she looked so young – and so determined. ‘Better make the call fast. This is going to get crazy fast.’

Michael nodded, stood up, and used his cell phone. It wasn’t a long conversation, but then he dialled another number, and that was a lot longer. Oliver, Claire figured, from the general tone and Michael’s body language. Only Oliver could make him that tense.

He came back as he was ending the call, and looked down at her. ‘You going to be OK?’ he asked.

‘You mean, now or generally?’

That made him smile a little. ‘Now.’

‘I can deal,’ Claire said. ‘Generally, that’s going to be a little bit tougher. I wasn’t born in Morganville. Still getting used to all the …’

‘Mayhem,’ Eve said, for once not laughing or making a joke. ‘Blood. Death. Yeah, sadly, it is something you get used to. But still, this one caught me off guard, too. I’ll call Shane, OK?’

‘No, no, don’t. He’ll take off from work, and I’m all right. I’ll be fine.’ She was lying through her teeth. She felt cold and shaky and she wished – oh, God, more than anything – that Shane was here right now. Or her parents. She’d never missed her mom and dad more than she did right at this moment, which was dumb, because what were they going to do?

Hug her. Make her feel safe again, just for a little while. Because that was what parents did, or at least what they were supposed to do. Eve hadn’t had that privilege, because her home life had been crap, and neither had Shane, who’d had the worst dad in the world. But Claire’s family had been great, and she hadn’t even known how much she missed it until – well, now.

While they waited for the sirens to arrive, Claire pulled out her phone and dialled her dad’s cell phone number. He answered on the third ring.

‘Hey, sweetheart,’ he said. He sounded better than he had before, almost normal. Strong. Considering that he’d left Morganville in an ambulance and he’d almost died – not from the vampires, but from his own bad heart – it was so good to hear him be more like himself. The connection crackled and hissed. ‘Sorry for the noise. I’m out walking. It’s getting windy.’

‘Here, too. Looks like it might rain.’

‘We had some rain earlier this morning. Cooled things down quite a bit. How are you, Claire?’

‘Good,’ Claire said, and swallowed. ‘I … just wanted to see how you were doing, Dad.’

‘Doing great. They’ve got me walking a lot, trying to build up the old cardiovascular health again. I have to say, I’m glad I finally got that surgery. I didn’t realise how bad I’d been feeling until I felt better.’ He paused, and with that Dad radar she’d always both loved and dreaded, said, ‘You didn’t just call to say hello, honey. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ The concern in his voice turned her all trembly again, and made her want to cry, but she couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t. ‘It’s pretty much the same here; you know how it is. How’s Mom?’

‘She’s joined some kind of scrapbooking club. I never knew you could spend so much time and money on sticking photos in albums, but that’s your mom. Once she gets excited about something …’

‘I know, she’s a madman,’ Claire finished, and smiled a little. She could just see her mother coming home with bags and bags of stuff to hot-glue into memories. ‘How’s the new house?’

‘Embarrassingly large. With a yard, too. I may have to learn how to garden.’

 ‘Grow me something. Irises. I like irises.’

‘Purple ones, right?’

‘Yeah, purple’s good.’

‘Honey, are you sure you’re all right? You sound odd.’

‘Just … allergies,’ she said, and wiped her leaking eyes. ‘You take care, Daddy. I’ll see you soon, OK?’

‘OK,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Call tomorrow. Your mother will hate me if she doesn’t get her turn.’

‘I will. Bye.’

Eve had turned away, watching the dorm, but she’d been paying attention. As Claire finished her call, she said, ‘Feel better?’

‘Yeah,’ Claire said. She did. Still shaky, but steadier inside, where it counted.

‘I wish I could do that,’ Eve said. ‘Call my mom. But no. Whiny, self-absorbed bitching from her probably wouldn’t have the same effect, although it definitely would make me forget about Doug for a second.’

Michael held out his hand, and Eve took it, and their eyes met for a second before Eve looked away. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Life sucks, we die, or not. Mom is the least of my problems, right?’

‘Right at the moment? Yeah,’ Michael said. ‘And now I want to call my parents.’

Claire thought he might be joking, but with Michael, you never could tell. His parents were cool; she’d met them once, but they didn’t live in Morganville anymore, and they weren’t even nearby. Like Claire’s parents, they’d been given permission to move because of medical problems. Michael didn’t say much about them, but then, Michael was the quiet type.

In any case, he didn’t have time to do anything, because a police car, siren blasting and lights flaring, pulled up in front of the dorm in the parking lot, where a crowd of students was gathering. Almost all of the students promptly pulled their cell phones out, and began busily clicking pictures and taking video of the police presence. Next stop: the Internet. ‘Worst invention ever,’ Claire muttered. Myrnin was already talking about how to disable the features on all cell phones inside of Morganville. Times like this, she kind of saw his point.

Hannah Moses was second to arrive on the scene, looking crisp and starched in her police uniform; she’d tucked her cornrowed hair up under her cap, and, apart from the gold bar on the lapel of her blue shirt, she looked exactly like the other police, who got busy cordoning off the scene. Two other men got out of a plain grey car that pulled up behind hers. Claire recognised the men with a little start, because she hadn’t seen them in a while. ‘Hey,’ said Detective Travis Lowe, nodding to her. He’d lost weight, she thought, and he looked a little bit greyer than before. Detective Joe Hess hadn’t changed at all, except that his smile was more guarded as he nodded, too. ‘I heard you found yourself a genuine dead person.’

‘Travis,’ Hannah said, frowning at him. ‘Go easy on the kid.’

‘Her? Listen, I know her. She’s tough. She can take it. Right, Claire?’

She nodded, because what else did you do when someone said something like that? But she didn’t feel tough. Not right at this moment. As if he sensed that, Detective Hess cut in front of his partner and came to talk to her. He had a soothing sort of manner, and the gentle tone of voice he used made her feel a little less … lost.

‘Someone you knew, right?’ Hess said. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

‘I—’ Claire suddenly realised that she had a decision to make; tell about the whole reason she and Eve and Michael had come over, or lie and pretend like it was just another of those wacky Morganville coincidences. She didn’t feel like lying, though. Not to Detective Hess. ‘It’s Doug – Doug Legrande. He was my lab partner in Professor Larkin’s class. He took something he shouldn’t have, and I came to ask him to give it back.’

Detective Hess was a hell of a lot sharper than most people in Morganville, and he gave her a sideways look as he said very casually, ‘Would that thing be something that some people in town wouldn’t want to get out?’

‘Blood,’ she said, keeping her voice in a whisper. ‘You know what kind of blood.’

‘I do. So, tell me what happened when you got here.’ And he slowly walked her through it, step by step, from the beginning. He’d also walked her off a little from her friends, and Claire saw that Detective Lowe was talking to Eve, while Michael had Hannah as a conversational partner. Double-checking facts, Claire guessed. The low-key way it was done made her feel a lot less nervous. By the time she was finished, Detective Lowe had finished up with Eve and was sitting on the back bumper of the grey car, making notes with a pad and pen as he talked to Chief Moses. Hannah had notes, too.

‘Did we do anything wrong?’ Claire finally asked, as Hess jotted down something, as well. ‘I mean, we tried to do the right thing. For Doug.’

‘You probably would have been better off reporting it immediately,’ Hess said. That was one thing she liked about him a lot: He was kind about it, but he told her the truth. No matter how difficult it was to hear it. ‘I can’t say this wouldn’t have still happened, because we can’t jump to the conclusion that his theft had anything to do with his murder, but you need to understand that, if it did, Doug didn’t have to die. He might have been in jail, but he would have been safer. Understand?’

She did, and she felt miserable … but, oddly, also more centred. It was what she’d been thinking, anyway. Hearing him say it didn’t make her feel any worse; it made it real enough that she could move on, accept it as a mistake, and plan to never let it happen again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She wasn’t sure if Hess understood, but she thought he probably did.

‘You’re learning,’ he said. ‘Sometimes those lessons come harder than others. I’m glad you’re all right.’

‘Thank you.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Um, how have you been? I haven’t seen you since, you know …’ She didn’t know how to put it. They all avoided talking about Mr Bishop, definitely the coldest vampire she’d ever met; he’d been cruel, calculating, and way too powerful. The fact that they’d survived his attempt to take over Morganville had been amazing … But nobody wanted to risk going through that again.

‘Yeah, since that,’ Hess said. ‘We’ve been working. Travis took a vacation for six months, out of town. Other than that, the usual. This is the first outright murder we’ve had in a while, though.’

He didn’t sound either bothered or excited about it. Just businesslike. Claire didn’t know what to say to that, but it didn’t seem to matter. He walked her back over to the police cars and went to consult with Hannah and his partner.

‘You take me to the most interesting places,’ Eve was saying to Michael when she rejoined them. ‘Murder scenes, interrogations …’

He hugged her silently. Overhead, thunder boomed, and the first drops of rain began to fall.

Claire reached in her backpack and brought out the collapsible umbrella she’d put in, and the three of them stood in its shelter as the rain poured down and the police started their investigation. By the time it let up, Hannah said they could leave.

Claire said goodbye to her friends and went straight to Myrnin.

‘It’s possible,’ Myrnin was muttering to himself, as he paced the floor of the lab. ‘Entirely possible. Likely, even.’

Claire, coming down the steps from the entrance, dumped her book bag at the usual strategic location – meaning, equally accessible if she needed to defend herself or make a quiet exit. She was used to coming into the middle of Myrnin’s conversations with himself. ‘What’s possible?’ she asked.

‘Anything,’ he said absently. ‘But that’s not what I was talking about. Oh, hello, Claire. You’re in good time. I need an extra pair of hands.’

‘As long as I keep them attached,’ she said, which earned her a startled stare.

‘The things you say to me, you’d think I was some sort of monster. Oh, here, help me with this.’ He gestured to one of the lab tables, which held some gleaming new device with brass fittings and – as always with Myrnin – pipes, wires, and some kind of strange-looking vacuum tubes. ‘I need it over there.’ He pointed to an empty table across the room. And then he kept on pacing, his white lab coat (a recent discovery of his, he thought it made him look more official) flaring around him. It was somewhat spoilt by the flopping bunny slippers, their fangs showing with every step.

Oh. He wasn’t going to help her move it. Well, of course he wasn’t. Myrnin could have picked it up with one hand and carried it easily from one spot to another, but he was busy thinking. Carrying things was her job. Today, anyway.

Claire picked up the engine – if that was what it was – and staggered with it over to the other table. It felt like he’d packed it with lead, and knowing Myrnin, that wasn’t much of a stretch. It smelt like blood and flowers, and she hesitated to even guess what its purpose might have been.

‘What’s possible?’ she asked again, leaning against the table and trying to work the kinks out of her arms after stretching them about six inches with the weight of that stupid thing, whatever it was.

Myrnin was muttering under his breath, but he paused and glanced at her, even though he kept pacing. ‘That your friend was murdered by someone who believed he had a drug. Perhaps he was trying to sell the blood.’

‘How did you hear about that already?’ She was surprised, because she’d meant to tell him all about it. Myrnin waved that away.