Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(134)

Michael’s fingers itched to pick up his guitar and play, but he also knew it was probably the wrong time. Instead, he went upstairs and knocked softly on Claire’s closed bedroom door.

She opened it. Her cell phone was in her hand, but she put it on her dresser and walked back to her bed to sit down.

“Rozhkov is bad news,” she said to him.

“Kinda got that already.”

“Amelie wouldn’t say much. She just said not to let him inside.”

“I wish she’d imparted that wisdom a little earlier. Like before we let him inside.”

Claire smiled a bit, but she looked pale and serious as she stared at him. “She didn’t say it in so many words, but Eve’s in danger. I could read between the lines. I don’t know why he wants her, but if he does, it’s not for fashion tips and henna tattoos.”

“She’s not going to like being guarded.”

“Nope,” Claire said, and the smile grew wider. “She’s not going to like it a bit. We should probably take turns so we all get the blame equally.”

“She’s not going out after dark.”

“You’re going to have to tell her that yourself, because I am not sticking my hand in that wasps’ nest.”

It wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation, for certain. “I guess it’s my job. Thanks for helping watch out for her.”

“We look out for each other. We’re family. It’s what we do. Is that the door?”

Michael had heard it, too—the doorbell was broken, so it made a weird buzzing sound that was sometimes hard for human ears to hear, but Claire had found a way of attuning herself to it even from up here. To him, it sounded like a fly buzzing in his ear—annoying, and alarming.

Even more alarming when Eve yelled out, “I’ll get it!” from downstairs.

Michael didn’t think; he just moved. It was rare he engaged the speed vampire life had given him, at least here in the house; he’d grown so used to mimicking human behavior around his friends and with Eve that it came almost naturally. But just now, with the prickling awareness of danger seeping into him, he didn’t even consider appearances.

Shane yelped when Michael passed by him, but Michael was gone and down the hallway before the sound even registered. Eve was at the end of the hallway, cracking the door open. She wasn’t as careful as she should have been, but the fact that Rozhkov was a vampire, and the house was on alert about him, had probably lulled her into a false sense of security.

It wasn’t Rozhkov out there. It was a human—a scared one. Michael recognized him as Mr. Lockhart, from down the block. “Please,” the man said, as Michael joined Eve at the door. “Please, you’ve gotta help me. He’s in my house.”

“Who?” Eve asked. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll call the police,” Michael said. He was pulling out his cell.

“No!” Lockhart shoved at the door, and Eve let him open it wider so he could thrust his desperate, sweaty face closer. “No, please, he said—he said he’d kill my wife if you did. He said you know what he wants. Please. You’ve gotta help.”

They all went still and silent. Lockhart wasn’t lying; his distress hung in the air around him like a white-hot electric cloud, and Michael could smell the adrenaline flooding through his bloodstream. Claire sent him an anxious, pleading look; Shane had gone tense and unreadable.

It was Eve who punched Michael on the shoulder, swung the door open, and said, “We can’t let this happen. You know that.”

His hand flashed out without any real planning, grabbed her shoulder, and pulled her back across the threshold when she stepped outside. “No,” he said, when she opened her mouth to yell. “Eve, it’s you he wants. It’s you. And you can’t do this.”

She gave him a blackly miserable look, one that chilled him in places he hadn’t know he could still feel the cold. “Do you think he’ll do what he says?”

Yes, Michael thought, but he kept himself from saying so. He tried not to project what he felt for Eve onto Lockhart, desperate to save his own wife, but he couldn’t help it. He’d always been way too softhearted about these things for a vampire—he knew that. But falling in love with Eve—falling more in love with her every day, it seemed—he couldn’t not know what Lockhart felt.

Eve was still pinning him with that bleak stare. “Michael. We can’t let her die. I can’t.”

“And I can’t let you go.”

“Dude,” Shane said, “what makes you think you let any of us do any damn thing?”

And he shoved past, out the door, and down the steps, with Claire fast on his heels. That left him and Eve standing together, with Lockhart looking at them in silent, tormented distress.

“He’s right,” Eve said. “What makes you the boss of me? Are we partners, or not?”

He didn’t like it, but he let go. “Partners,” he said. “Which means what you do affects us both. All right?”

She kissed him. It was a quick, warm, sweet thing, and it made him crave her in too many ways to comprehend, and then she was gone, heading after Claire and Shane toward the Lockhart house.

Michael closed and locked the door behind them, because . . . Morganville.