Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(120)

Mr. Slick named them, but it was a small, tight circle of insiders—himself, Mr. Dead Skinhead, and one other woman named Isis, who was asleep in her trailer near the Ferris wheel.

“Do you have a key to this cage?” Michael finally asked. When the man nodded, he said, “Throw it out to me.”

Mr. Slick tossed it, and Michael effortlessly shagged it out of the air. He dropped it on Skinhead’s body and frowned down at Jeremy’s handiwork. “We need to make it look less—vampire,” he said.

I slowly held up the gun and the knife. “Man, I’m going to regret this,” I said, “but I think I’ve got that covered.”

Best to skip what came next, except to say that I made Mr. Skinhead’s body look like he’d been attacked with a knife to the neck, then shot. A decent coroner—like the ones on TV, say—would have figured out the wounds were postmortem, but it was doubtful that this little burg would have anything like a coroner, much less a good one. If the carnies actually reported the death, which I thought was doubtful.

It’d pass. I felt faint, after, and Michael grabbed me when I staggered while trying to get up. He put his arms around me and held me tight for a few long seconds, and then whispered, “Eve—”

“I’m okay,” I said, and swallowed the nausea that threatened to bubble up. “Just another frakking day in Morganville.”

“You watch way too much TV.”

“Yeah, probs. So? What about this Isis lady?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Michael said, and loosened his hold just enough to put some air between us, but he didn’t let me go. I loved him for that, for knowing just what I needed, and when. “I love you.”

I managed a grin. “Back atcha, stud. You only love me for my body-mutilation skills.”

His smile disappeared, and there was no trace of vampire in his blue eyes, none at all. He looked just like the boy I’d fallen so hard for in high school. An avenging angel, this one. And not a fallen one at all. “No,” he said. “I love you for you. Always.”

I kissed him, which was probably weird, given the circumstances, but I needed to feel his arms around me again, and the solid, safe weight of his body, and the cool, sweet taste of his lips. I needed to know it was okay.

He said, without words, that it was.

Then he stepped back, looked at Jeremy, and said, “I’m here to help you, but I swear to God, if you lay a finger on her, I’ll rip you apart. Are we clear?”

Jeremy shrugged, which I guessed was his version of a yes, and Michael glanced back at me. The silent exchange went something like this: You okay? Yeah. Love you. Love you, too. Etc. Oh, and somewhere in that glance, he also warned me to keep the knife and the gun handy, which I wasn’t about to give up anyway.

“We should go,” Jeremy said, as Michael blurred off through the open doorway. “Don’t want my boss man here to remember anything.”

He was right, but I felt bad leaving—Michael hadn’t said to stay put, but I was uncomfortable with the idea he might not be able to immediately locate me if I got into trouble. Because Jeremy was trouble. He gave off a kind of dark smoke around him—something shadowy in my peripheral vision, as if he clouded himself with it. I had to concentrate and watch him straight on to feel he was there at all. Useful skill, probably, but really scary when I felt like the warm-blooded prey to his cold-blooded, hungry predator.

He kept his word, though. He didn’t touch me, and he walked about three paces ahead, knowing I didn’t want him at my back. Once we were out of the room, though, I stopped, because I’d totally forgotten that this was a dark ride . . . that I’d only found this room in the first place because of Michael’s dark-adapted eyes.

I couldn’t see a damn thing.

I heard Jeremy’s faint, whispery chuckle from a few feet away, and I saw a flash of something that might have been his eyes. Creepy.

“No flashlight?” he asked. “Should be one on the dead guy.”

I went back for it, and didn’t look at the corpse’s face while I pilfered it out of its holster. It was a heavy Maglite, which was good—one more weapon, though I had to put away the gun to hang on to it. The knife was of more use against Jeremy, anyway.

The Maglite had a brilliant beam, and it revealed all the monsters in their tacky glory—Dracula, in his threadbare cloak and dusty coffin; the Wolfman, whose fake fur was molting away; a large spider overhead made of Styrofoam and cloth and real spiderwebs, recently woven by some very ambitious arachnid. The place was filthy, and full of rats and cockroaches, and I was real glad of my stomping boots, again.

The worst, most real monster in here was Jeremy, who looked the color of exposed bone, and whose eyes were as alien as anything you’d find on earth. His smile was something he’d learned, not something he felt, and even though he was small and wiry and looked pathetic in his baggy khaki pants, I was so afraid of him it was hard to breathe.

But he kept his word.

We made it out, into the cold, sharp wind; overhead, the rusty Grim Reaper creaked as he swayed. I saw nothing moving outside except some rolling tumbleweeds and blowing trash.

Jeremy walked off a few feet, then stopped, staring up at the sky. He closed his eyes, and took in a deep, slow breath, as if he wanted to drink in the world around him. For that moment, he looked his physical age—I had no idea how old he really was, but he looked maybe a growth-spurt thirteen, maybe fourteen. Really young to become a vampire, but depending on when that had happened, thirteen or fourteen might have been adult, pretty much.