Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(102)

Goldman’s smile was sad, and ghostly. “You do realize that just as all men are not the same, all vampires are not the same? The worst murderers I have ever met in my long life were breathing men who killed not for sustenance, but for sport. Or worse, for beliefs.”

“Don’t suppose we can just agree I’m screwed up and call it a day?”

He looked at me with such level, kind intensity that I felt uncomfortable, and then he said, “There are a surprising number of people who care about what happens to you. The fact that you are here, instead of behind bars, would seem to tell you that, I’d think. Yes?”

I shrugged. I knew it looked like I was the typical surly teen, but I didn’t much care what a vamp thought of me. So I kept insisting to myself, anyway. I’d gotten myself in it deep this time—deeper than it looked. Before, they’d let me slide because I was a messed-up kid, and then because I’d managed to end up on the right side (by their definition) of the problem, even against my own dad.

But this time I didn’t have any defense. I’d voluntarily gotten involved in the illegal fight club at the gym; I’d let myself get drugged up and stuck in cages to duke it out with vampires. For money. On the Internet.

It was that last part that was the biggest violation of all—breaching the wall of secrecy about Morganville. Sure, nobody on the Internet would take it seriously; it was all tricks, special effects, and besides, to the average visitor who wanted to come poke around, it was just another boring, roll-up-the-sidewalks-at-dusk town in America.

That didn’t change the fact that I’d risked the anonymity—the safety—of the vampires. I was lucky I hadn’t been quietly walled up somewhere, or buried in a nice, deep grave somewhere in the dark. The only reason I hadn’t been killed outright was that my girlfriend had some pull with the vamps, and she’d fought for me. Hard.

She was the reason I was sitting here, instead of taking up a slab in the local mortuary. So why had I said her name when he’d asked me about being angry?

I hadn’t answered, even though the silence stretched thin, so Dr. Goldman leaned back in his chair and tapped his pen against his lips a moment, then said, “Why do you feel you need to fight, Shane?”

I laughed out loud. It sounded wild and uncontrollable, even to me. “You’re not serious with that question, right?”

“I don’t mean fight when your life is in danger; that is a reasonable and logical response to preserve one’s safety. According to the records I’ve reviewed, though, you seem to seek out physical confrontation, rather than wait for it to come to you. It started in school, it seems. . . . Although you were never classified as a bully, you seemed to take special care to seek out those who were picking on others and—how would you say it?—teach them a lesson. You cast yourself as the defender of the weak and abused. Why is that?”

“Somebody’s got to do it.”

“Your father, Frank Collins—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted him flatly. “Just stay the hell off the topic, okay? No discussions about my freaking obvious daddy issues, or my mother, or Alyssa dying, any of that crap. I’m over it.”

He raised an eyebrow, just enough to tell me what he thought about that. “Then shall we discuss Claire?”

“No,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. Weirdly.

He must have sensed it, because he said, in that gentle and quiet tone, “Why don’t you tell me about her?”

“Why should I? You already know her.”

“I want to know how you see her.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. “She doesn’t know it, but she is. And she’s so—” Fragile. Vulnerable. “—stubborn. She just doesn’t know when to give up.”

“You seem to have that in common.”

We had a lot in common, weird as that might seem; she was from a sheltered, protected place, a family who loved her, a dad who would never betray her, but somehow that had given her an unshakable belief that she could survive anything. I had that, too, but it came from the opposite direction; I knew what it felt like to lose everything, everyone, and understand that it was just me against the darkness.

But it was more than that. Complicated, what I felt for her.

And I didn’t want to look too closely at it. “I try to look after her,” I said. That was meant to be a blowoff, but Goldman seemed to find it more interesting than I’d intended.

“Does she need looking after, do you think?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“And your job, the job of all boyfriends, is to protect her,” he said. It almost sounded like my own voice, in my own head. “Is that what you believe?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. No-brainer.

“What do you think Claire would say if she heard that?”

I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, a little. “She’d smack me,” I said. “She doesn’t think she needs a bodyguard—she’s always telling me that.” The smile faded too fast, because a cascade of images burned through my brain, uncontrollable and violent: Claire smiling at me. Claire smiling at Myrnin. Myrnin turning crazy on us, as he always did. And Claire just . . . accepting that. Again.

The scars on her neck, pale and small but obvious to me.