Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(54)

But she wasn’t fine; they could all see it. She was milky pale and her teeth were chattering. It wasn’t that cold outside; Claire’s breath wasn’t even steaming, but from the way Miranda was shaking, it might as well have been below freezing.

“You’re not fine,” Eve said. “Mir, please, come back. You’ve proven your point. Yeah, you can leave—” She glanced at Michael and mouthed, Why?, but he only shrugged. “You can leave anytime you want. So let’s go inside and celebrate, okay? Besides, it’s dark. You’re vamp bait in the middle of the street like this.”

“What are they gonna do—bite her?” Shane asked. “She’s dead, Eve. I don’t even think she has blood.”

“Yes, she does,” Michael said. He was watching Miranda with a concerned expression now. “She’s got a living body, for the nighttime, just like I did. She can be hurt at night. And drained. It just wouldn’t kill her permanently; at least I don’t think it would…. I think she’d come back.”

“Renewable blood resources,” Eve said softly. “There’s a nightmare for you. We can’t let them find out about her. We need to get her back inside and figure out how she’s able to do this.”

“How? She won’t let any of us get close!”

“Surround her,” Eve said. “Michael, Shane, get on the other side. Claire and I will come in from this side. Box her in. Don’t let her run. We’ll just herd her back inside.”

“She’s strong,” Michael warned. “Crazy strong.”

“She won’t hurt us,” Eve said. Michael glanced down at his arm, which was still healing and showed bite marks. “Well, not much, anyway.”

“You and your strays,” he said, but Claire could tell there was love behind it. “All right, we’ll do it your way. Shane?”

“On it.”

Michael and Shane spread out, right and left, circling around Miranda and leaving her a wide berth in the middle of the road as Eve and Claire closed the distance from the front. Claire supposed it looked weird, but if anyone was watching from the other houses, no one made a sound. Not a curtain twitched. Not only did the town of Morganville not care; it didn’t even notice when a tweener was stalked by four older teens.

Even if they had good intentions.

Miranda wasn’t trying to get away, though. She had wrapped her thin arms around her body and was shuddering in continuous spasms now, and her skin looked less real, more like glass with mist behind it.

“Miranda,” Claire said softly, “we need to get you inside. Please.”

“I can do this,” Miranda said. She was staring down at herself with a blank expression, but there was a stubborn set to her chin, and she wiped her cheeks with the back of a hand and squared her shoulders. “I can live out here. I can. I don’t need to be in there.”

“You do,” Eve said. “Maybe it’s a gradual thing. You need to work on it a little at a time. So we can try again tomorrow night. Tonight, hey, come inside; we’ll watch a movie. You get to pick.”

“Can we watch the pirate movie? The first one?”

“Sure, honey. Just come inside.”

Shane and Michael were making steady progress coming up from behind Miranda, and Michael nodded to Claire as she got into position. “Let’s all go in,” he said. Miranda shuffled awkwardly in place, as if her legs didn’t want to move, and turned to look at him over her shoulder. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to you, Mir.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s a little late for that, but I appreciate the thought. Did you know? I can’t tell the future anymore? It’s as if all the power I had went somewhere else.” She gestured down at herself. “Into this.”

That…might make some weird kind of sense, Claire thought, that Miranda’s powerful psychic gifts—the same ones that had led her to die inside the Glass House to save Claire’s life—had become a kind of life-support system for her, after death.

“But it means I don’t know anymore,” Miranda said. Her voice was fainter now, almost like a whisper. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m scared.”

“You don’t have to be,” Claire said, and stretched out her hand.

Miranda hesitated, then reached out.

But the second their skin touched, Miranda’s cracked like the thinnest ice, and an icy fog spilled out, searing Claire’s fingers with chill. She drew back with a cry, and there were cracks all over Miranda’s body now, racing through in lace black lines, and then she just…

She just broke.

For a few seconds the fog held together in a vague girl shape, and Claire heard a cry, a real and surprised and scared cry…

And then she was gone. Just completely gone, except for empty clothes lying in the street.

“Mir!” Claire felt the pressure in her hand vanish, and lunged forward, scissoring the air, hoping for something, anything…but there was nothing—just empty space.

Miranda had vanished completely, and her last word seemed to echo over and over in Claire’s mind.

Scared.

“Oh God,” she said in a whisper, and felt tears sting her eyes. Miranda had been dealt raw deals her whole life, up to and including dying in the Glass House at the hands of the draug, but it had felt like, finally, she was getting something going her way. A place of safety. A life, however limited, that she could call her own.