Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(22)
“Me?” Shane stood up in one smooth, fluid movement, and for a moment she felt that gravitational shift again, pulling her in. “You know me. I’m a Boy Scout. Always prepared.”
“Show me your goodies, then,” Claire said, and caught herself in a laugh. “By which I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” he said, and leaned in very close to whisper in her ear. “Though if you’ve got a few minutes—”
She shivered, tempted in some utterly instinct-driven part of her, but she shook her head. “Later,” she said, just as softly. “Why are we whispering?”
“Because it turns you on?”
“Oh, and it doesn’t you? Because that’s a little obvious.”
He cleared his throat and stepped back, held his hands palm out in surrender, and said, in a normal tone of voice, “Okay, then, armory it is. Buzz killer.”
She smacked him on the arm, which of course did absolutely nothing except hurt her own palm, and followed him down the hallway to his room.
“Wow,” she said as he swung the door open. “I thought you moved out when you followed me.”
“I did,” he said. “This is what I didn’t take with me.”
What he hadn’t taken was pretty much a complete room, right down to the twisted sheets still on the bed. Clothes in the closet. Much-abused cross-trainers and heavy work boots piled in the corner. Shane went to a chest in the corner and pulled open the first drawer.
“Have at it,” he said. “See, want, take.”
Shane was a slob in his room—seriously—but in the way he kept and stored his weapons, he was meticulous. The top drawer held silver things—chains, jewelry, weapons. Claire took a silver-coated dagger, chains for her throat and wrists, and skipped the rest. He closed that drawer and went down one, revealing a selection of guns that, even given that they lived in Texas, was probably excessive. She shook her head. He raised his eyebrows, but went down another drawer.
Crossbow. She liked that. It was one of the small, light ones, easy to aim and with surprising power, and she grabbed the bolts that went with it.
“Can I interest you in an honest-to-God army flak jacket?” he asked, and kicked the bottom drawer. “Guaranteed effective, but it’d probably be way too big for you. Plus, it’s not exactly easy to get up if you go down. Sort of the overturned-turtle problem. Matching helmet, though, so at least you look cool while you’re flopping around helplessly getting murderated.”
She shook her head. He stepped forward, took her head between his big, warm hands, and tilted her chin up so that their eyes met. “You need to figure out how to stop her from doing this, you know?”
“I know,” she said. “I’d just rather be fully armed while I do it. In case.”
He kissed her, very gently. “I’ve got your back. Way back, obviously. Just—don’t ask me to go too close to the vamps right now, okay? Including Michael. I don’t want to hurt him.” He meant that, she knew it—for all that had happened between them, all the strangeness, he and Michael were at heart brothers and best friends, and always would be.
Without Shane, Claire knew that stopping Eve—not to mention protecting her—would be severely challenging; Eve was a madwoman when she was determined about something, and she was never more determined about anything than about Michael.
They were going to need help. Without Hannah on their side, and with the vampires out of reach, Claire tried to imagine who might be willing and able to jump . . . and failed, at least until she felt a small shiver of air press by her and was reminded of something.
“Shane,” she said, “have you seen Miranda since we got back?”
The Glass House was complicated. It wasn’t just a house, and hadn’t been for a long time. It had a certain power to it, a certain sentience that Claire couldn’t explain, except that it must have come from what Myrnin did to the town to make it safe for the vampires. The thirteen original Founder Houses had all been linked—a kind of active transportation and defensive network that Claire couldn’t define, still, as anything but magical. Few of those remained now, but the Glass House was the first, and still the strongest. It had the capability of doing crazy stuff, but the most striking was that it could choose to save people who died within its walls. Michael, at first. Then Claire, briefly. And most recently, teen psychic Miranda, who had sacrificed herself so that Claire could live.
But Miranda, already psychic before her death, had powers that the rest of them didn’t have; her abilities allowed her to go outside of the walls of the house, and sustain herself in real human form out there, too. But she still lived here—was trapped here, in a very real sense, because she couldn’t stay away indefinitely.
Shane was shaking his head. “No. Haven’t seen the kid, which is weird. Should have thought about her earlier, but she just kind of keeps to herself.”
“I think she might be useful,” Claire said. “And besides, she’s probably lonely, don’t you think?”
“Lonely isn’t the worst problem someone in Morganville can have. But check the third floor. She made that her space up there after you left.”
The third floor didn’t exist. Shane was referring to a secret room in the attic—one with a hidden door off the main second-floor hall. A room Claire hadn’t been in for some time . . . but it made sense that Miranda would find it cozy. After all, she could, when she wanted, ghost in and out without making any sound at all—and it was a cool, if creepy, place. Just the thing for a teen who was more than a little creepy herself at the best of times.