Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(36)

“Where is Eve, exactly?”

“Out,” Jenna said. She sounded very blunt, and very disapproving. “I warned her, but she said she couldn’t stay. She went back to try to see Fallon.”

“I thought she went to see him when she left our house!”

“They wouldn’t let her in. She came back to find me, and we both saw you get taken to jail. Not sure which one of us held the other back, actually, but maybe your good sense is starting to rub off on us. We didn’t jump in and get ourselves arrested, at least,” Shane said. Claire swung around to stare at him, wide-eyed; so many questions ran through her mind that she couldn’t pick a single one out of the blur.

“But—” Claire couldn’t express how much she didn’t like the idea of Eve—angry and frustrated even more than she had been—heading at Fallon like a guided missile. It was pretty obvious, though, that there wasn’t much either one of them could do about it at this point.

“Look, it makes sense. It’s pretty clear he’s running the show here; if she can get in to see him—and I really don’t see anybody stopping her—then nobody’s going to storm Fallon’s office to march her out in cuffs. And if she can really intimidate him into letting her see Michael, maybe she can give him a chance to get away, or bust Amelie out. She’s the only one who’s got a shot at being our inside man. Woman. Whatever. Let’s face it—none of us is exactly in a mastermind position right now.”

“Does she know even about the dead guy?”

“Oh, she knows,” Jenna said. “Eve thinks the guard was killed at the prison and moved to your house, and she thinks she might be able to find out who did it, and why. I think her exact phrase was, I’m going to Nancy Drew this crap.”

“Bet she didn’t say crap,” Shane said.

“I’m paraphrasing.”

Eve’s plan was dangerous, and Claire immediately felt a rush of adrenaline, thinking of her trapped alone without anybody to trust. Michael, sure, but Michael couldn’t help—not unless something changed drastically.

Myrnin had been uncharacteristically quiet since they’d arrived, and she glanced over to see him frowning down at his flip-flops. He probably missed his vampire bunny slippers.

“Do the guards at the mall know you’re out?” she asked Myrnin. He didn’t look up.

“That’s very doubtful,” he said. “I did kill the guard who spotted me, after all.”

They all stopped what they were doing, and there was a second or two of silence.

Shane’s head suddenly snapped around, and he turned his whole body after it, facing Myrnin.

And took a step toward him. He said, in a voice tight with fury, “Would that be the dead guard in our damn basement?”

“Well, of course, how many dead guards could there be? Why, did you kill one, too? Wasteful.”

Shane snarled. It came from somewhere deep in his chest, a wet animal sound that Claire had never heard before, and hoped she’d never hear again. He took another step toward Myrnin, and Myrnin’s eyes flared an immediate, alarmed crimson. “Claire,” he called sharply. “Mind your young man. Do you really want me to have to kill him?”

It was the offhanded way he said it that terrified Claire. She forgot sometimes, despite her best efforts, that Myrnin was only mostly sane, and only mostly human.

And she wasn’t sure what Shane was right now, either.

Jenna and Miranda instinctively got out of the way, and even though every instinct in her body screamed at her to do the same, Claire stepped in the middle, faced Shane, and met his eyes squarely. They didn’t look right. Not right at all. The color—the blankness—it was all wrong.

He lunged forward, staring past her at Myrnin, and she could have sworn she saw a poisonous spark of yellow in his eyes.

She didn’t move. She lifted both hands, palms out, and he ran into them, jolting her hard and driving her back a step—but it shifted his focus away from Myrnin and onto her.

And the alien look in his eyes flickered, and died away, leaving just Shane. Angry, yes, amped up well beyond where he ought to be, but whatever had been set in motion, she’d stopped it.

For now, anyway.

Shane held up both hands, backed up a step, and then spun around and stalked away, breathing hard. “Why are you protecting him?” He didn’t quite yell it at Claire, and she knew it cost him to hold it down to just an angry accusation.

“Good question,” she said, and turned to Myrnin. “You killed a man,” she said. “And you brought him to our house?”

“In all fairness, I was looking for you,” he said, “but you weren’t yet home. I had to do something with him. Normally I would have taken him to the graveyard—by the by, it’s a great place to dispose of an excess corpse, one just digs up an old grave and—”

There were parts of him that she just would never reach, and knew she should never, ever try, for both their sakes.

Shane turned around, and Claire instinctively grabbed hold of his arm, because she still sensed the suppressed violence in him. He was under enough control not to lunge at Myrnin—which would end badly anyway—but she also knew sometimes he just couldn’t quite control those impulses, and she didn’t want to see anyone hurt. “You dumped a dead man in our house, and what? Just forgot about it?”