Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(17)

“She killed her!” Shane screamed, and felt his knees go out from under him, because saying it had made something awful become horribly real. “She killed Alyssa!”

Michael hadn’t realized, Shane saw; his friend’s face went white, and he looked at the house, and whatever he said, Shane couldn’t hear it over the violent pounding of his heart. He tried to get up. Michael stepped back, but Richard Morrell kept him down.

“Shane!” Richard was yelling, and shaking him, but all Shane could see was Monica’s face over her brother’s shoulder. She wasn’t smiling anymore. In fact, she looked as pale as Michael, and now she was staring at the house, too.

Like she hadn’t known.

Like she hadn’t thought.

Shane kept screaming, and fighting, until Richard finally rolled him over and put him in handcuffs, but even then, Richard’s hand on his back was only there to keep him down.

To keep him from doing something insane.

Monica, you stupid bitch.

She hadn’t known. She hadn’t realized Alyssa was still in the house.

And Shane didn’t care. He didn’t really care about anything anymore.

By the time the fire was out, Monica was gone.

? ? ?

Time passed. Things happened. Shane didn’t much care, still; he felt numb, even days later. He felt numb when he picked through the wreckage of the house, looking for something that hadn’t been destroyed. Looking for something of his sister’s.

The cops brought him in, along with his parents, and gave them the dog and pony show. Terrible accident, faulty wiring, no reason to believe . . .

It was bullshit. Shane knew it. Big cover-up, because Mayor Morrell’s precious baby girl just couldn’t be a killer. Wouldn’t be right.

Sometime in there, his dad got screaming drunk and his mom started taking Valium and still, Shane really didn’t care. He sat alone, mostly. He thought about nothing. He just . . . existed. They were stuck in some crappy motel room with borrowed clothes and no money and no home, and Lyssa was gone. So what did any of it matter anyway?

Michael kept coming over; he kept trying to talk, trying to get Shane to think about something else. And that was cool and all, but Shane just couldn’t even care about Michael, either. He guessed Michael knew. He saw the pain in his friend’s face, the confusion, but none of it touched him.

He just wanted people to leave him the hell alone.

He was out buying a pizza—they never ate anything else these days, when the three of them remembered to eat at all—when he saw Monica Morrell outside the store. She was with her brother, the cop.

Shane put the pizza down on the counter and walked outside.

Richard got in the way, fast. “No,” he said, and put a hand flat on Shane’s chest. “Listen to her. Just listen.”

Monica looked bad. Worse than Shane had ever seen her. She wasn’t pretty; her face was puffy and red, her eyes swollen, like she’d been crying for days. Her hair was stringy and unwashed. She looked miserable.

He didn’t care. He wanted to hurt her, and it took everything he had inside—everything he had left—not to deck Richard and go after her, right then.

But somehow, he stood there, numbed, waiting.

“I didn’t know,” she said. Her voice was muffled, and her nose was running. She was crying again. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know.”

“She didn’t do it,” Richard said, staring into Shane’s face. For a Morrell, he didn’t look like a complete jerk, but again, Shane just couldn’t care. “My sister did not do this. Understand? She was trying to piss you off, and she pretended she’d started the fire. She didn’t know Alyssa was in the house. She wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t torch your house. It was an accident.”

Shane laughed. It was a dry, empty sound, and he saw Monica flinch, like he’d hit her. “Oh, man,” he said. “You really don’t know her at all, do you?”

Richard’s face turned hard. “I know this,” he said. “You come near my sister, and this is going to get ugly. You want your parents to lose another kid?”

Shane didn’t answer. He looked past Richard, at Monica, and made a little gun out of his finger and thumb.

Then he silently fired it at her.

Then he went back, got his pizza, and went to the motel, where the world was still dying in slow motion.

? ? ?

Two days later, Michael’s grandfather Sam Glass arranged for them to get out of Morganville. Shane didn’t know how, didn’t know why, didn’t care. His father was sober enough to drive, for a change. His mother—he didn’t know what his mother was doing anymore.

They drove past the borders of Morganville, and it occurred to Shane that maybe this was Richard’s way of keeping Shane away from his sister. Well, it had worked. They were out of town, and heading . . .

“Where are we going?” Shane asked. It was the first thing he’d said in hours.

His dad said tightly, “Nowhere.”

And he was right about that.





NEW BLOOD




Dedicated to Samantha Monical for her support of the Morganville digital series Kickstarter Here is our second original story for this collection, and in a way, it’s an outside look into the last story you read. This is about Eve and Michael, and life before and after the fire at Shane’s house. I really enjoyed getting to write from Eve’s point of view; she’s tremendous fun, and looks at things from angles I hadn’t considered before—especially her relationship with her brother. This story has it all: sweet romance, evil Monica, sinister Bloodmobile, and yet another view of the Collins family disaster.