Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(101)
Like the vampires, with their identification cards and hunting licenses.
If both sides kept escalating, nobody could stand in the middle for long without having a price on his head—and it sounded as though that had already happened. Eve was the first, but any one of them could be next.
The nurse left. Eve watched her go, then closed her eyes and sighed. “Figured that would happen,” she said. “Humans first, and all that crap. They’ve gotten stronger. And now Captain Obvious is back. It’s a bad time to be us, Claire. I have to tell Michael to back off….”
Eve tried to sit up, but the effort left her pale and exhausted. “He never should have gone after them. That’s what they want; don’t you get it? They came after me to get to him. I’m not important. He is. He’s Amelie’s blood—kind of like her son. If they can hurt him, kill him—Claire, go find him. Please. I’ll be okay here. Just go. The worst thing they’re going to do to me is give me crap Jell-O.”
Claire hesitated a long moment, then leaned over and hugged Eve, giving her a gentle and awkward kind of embrace that made her aware of just how fragile the girl was—how fragile they all were.
“Love you,” she said.
“Yeah, whatever, you, too,” Eve said, but she smiled a little. “Go. Give him a call. He’ll listen to you—or at least Shane will.”
And for the love of her, Claire tried, but the phone kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing, straight to voice mail.
And the day slipped away as they anxiously waited.
SIXTEEN
MICHAEL
The anger that had hold of me made me ache all over, especially in my eyeteeth; I’d rarely experienced the urge to bite somebody in pure rage, but damn, I wanted to sink my fangs deep in someone now. Roy Farmer, that little son of a bitch, to start, and then the rest of his murderous little crew.
Eve had looked so broken, lying in that bed. So unlike the bundle of strength and energy I loved. I really hadn’t known, deep down, how much she meant to me until I’d seen her like that, and known, really and deeply known, that I could lose her.
Nobody hurt my girl and got away with it.
Shane was angry, too, but—and this was a reversal of our usual roles as friends—he was the cautious one, the one telling me to play it smart and not let anger drive the bus. He was right, of course, but right didn’t matter so much just now. I wanted blood, and I wanted to taste it and feel the fear spicing it like pepper. I wanted them to know how she’d felt, helpless and terrified and alone.
And yeah, it probably wasn’t fair, but I was angry at Claire for leaving her, even for a moment. I knew she’d done the right thing, drawing off the mob, but that had left Eve lying bleeding on a sidewalk. Alone. And I couldn’t get that image out of my head. She could have died alone.
I understood how Shane felt when he drove his fist through a wall. Some things, only violence could erase.
“Roy lives over on College Street,” Shane said, “but he won’t be there. He lives with his parents. He’s a punk, but not so much of one that he’d run home to his mommy.”
“Where, then?” We were in Eve’s hearse, and Shane was driving; I was sitting in the blacked-out back area. Shane had verbally kicked my ass about risking sunburn when I’d wanted to walk; he’d made me stop off and grab a long coat and hat and gloves, too, just in case. “You know the guy, right?”
“Kinda,” he said. “Roy’s one of those vampire-hunter-wannabe types, came to me a couple of times for pointers on things, and showed me things he was working on as weapons. He hero-worshipped my dad, which tells you a little bit about how screwed-up he is. I never thought he’d do this, though. Not coming out for Eve, or any of us. Didn’t think he’d have the guts.”
“It doesn’t take guts to kick a girl half to death,” I said. Shane said nothing to that, just gave me an uneasy look in the rearview and tightened his grip on the wheel. “Where would he be?”
“Probably at the ’Stro,” Shane said. “He has a sick hand-built Cadillac he likes to show off there. He’s probably getting back-slaps from his buddies about how awesome he is.”
The Astro was an abandoned old drive-in on the outskirts of Morganville, just barely within its borders; it had a graying movie screen that tilted more toward the desert floor every year, and the pavement had cracked and broken in the sun, letting sage and Joshua bushes push up through the gaps. The concession stand had fallen down a couple of years back, and somebody had touched off a bonfire there for high school graduation.
It went without saying that the place was a favorite of the underage drinking and drugging crew.
Shane drove out there. It was close to twilight now, and sunset had stacked itself in bands of color on the horizon; the leaning timbers of the Astro’s screen loomed as the tallest thing around in the flatland, and Shane circled the peeling tin fence until he came to the entrance. The cops made periodic efforts to chain it shut, but that lasted only as long as it took for someone to cut the lock off—and most of those who hung out here had toolboxes built in the beds of their trucks.
Sure enough, the entrance stood gaping, one leaf of it creaking in the fierce, constant wind. Sand rattled the windshield as Shane made the turn, and he slowed down. “Got to watch out for bottles,” he said. “The place is land-mined with them.”