Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(21)

Eve sank down on her bed, weak at the knees, and reached over for her stuffed gargoyle. She hugged him hard for a while, then reached out and picked up the walkie-talkie from her bedside table. She turned it on. “Earth to Uranus,” she said. “Come in, Uranus.”

Static crackled, and even the comfort of her unconditionally loving stuffed animal felt a little empty, until she heard her brother’s voice come through the speaker. “My call sign’s Charon, dumbass. In case you forgot.”

“That’s just a moon, not even a planet.” She let a second or two go by, and then said, “You okay, Jase?”

“Like you care.” There was a dull resentment in Jason’s voice. He was younger than she was, but in some ways he was also way older. And harder. “Anything that takes the heat off you, right?”

“I didn’t even know he was here! What the hell, Jase, you pulled a knife?”

“So what? I like knives.”

All of Eve’s good intentions shriveled, because she knew he did. He’d shown her one six months ago, a long, wicked thing, and he’d cut her with it. Accidentally, he’d said. She hadn’t been so sure. Still wasn’t. Jason . . . something had broken in Jason, and she didn’t know how to fix it. It made her feel awful and hollow inside.

“How bad did he get you?” she finally asked.

“It won’t show.”

“Shit . . .” It felt bad sitting here, separated, not knowing what to say. Not knowing what to do. “I wish—”

“You wish you had a spine, Sis? You wish you could stand up to the old man? Don’t worry about it. Next time he raises a hand to me, I’ll break it off. Count on it.”

Just like that, he was off the radio. She tried him again, but he didn’t answer. Eve slowly stretched out on her bed, pulled a Nightmare Before Christmas blanket over herself when the chills set in, and tried to think about what to do. Call the cops? Yeah, she’d tried it. Mom had shut that down right at the door, and nobody was going to listen to bad-kid Jason and his weird Goth sister anyway. Not like the cops in Morganville ever really cared too much.

She was half-asleep when her mother knocked on her door and told her dinner was on the table. Eve rolled out of bed, took her hair out of the pigtails, and shook it down around her face so it mostly covered her eyes—her go-to strategy for dealing with her family—and got ready to endure dinner. Dad would be passed out, so it’d just be a silent affair anyway; Jason would be simmering with rage, Mom would be checked out on a mental vacation, and the meal would be horrible. So not looking forward to creamed corn and Spam.

Eve heard a sound at the window, and turned, thinking it was a branch, or maybe—insanely—Michael Glass trying to get her attention.

Instead, a vampire smiled at her from the other side of the window. Brandon. Eurotrash sleek, a chin sharp enough to cut. He looked completely normal just now. A completely normal Peeping Tom, looking in like he wanted to leap through the glass and do terrible, terrible things to her.

Eve bit back a scream. If she yelled, Brandon would be gone in the next instant like a bad dream, and it might even rouse her dad from his alcoholic slumber. Besides, Brandon couldn’t get in. Not without an invitation, which she damn sure wasn’t going to give. I’m still underage, you asswipe, she thought as she yanked the curtains closed to shut him out. You don’t have any right to try to get me. Not that age mattered much to Brandon. He’d been creeping on her since she was twelve. It still made her feel sick and anxious, but she didn’t let it get to her. Not much, anyway.

When she peeked out, he was gone. Probably his idea of a joke. Ugh. If she complained about it, he’d say he was patrolling the property; he was, after all, their ink-on-contract family Protector. Nothing she could do about it. Like so much else wrong in her life.

Dinner was, as she’d predicted, silent. Jason picked at his food, staring sullenly down; his hair was hanging in his face, just like Eve’s, and although their mom chattered on about nothing, and ignored everything really going on, neither of them said a word beyond a grunt or a one-word answer. When they were done, Eve carried the dishes into the kitchen and washed them. Jason dried. They worked in silence, and when she glanced over, she saw Jase was keeping an eye on the couch in the living room, where their dad was passed out with beer cans on the floor around him.

They were careful not to clatter anything too loudly.

It was a weird fact of life that after all that adrenaline, all that fear, all that strain, Eve fell asleep within seconds once she was in bed. She rarely had nightmares. Maybe bad dreams weren’t really necessary when you lived one in real life. . . . But she thought she was having one when she woke up to the sounds of sirens and a flickering glow that wasn’t sunrise filtering through the curtains. She got up, pulled on her black fuzzy bathrobe, and pulled the fabric back to stare outside.

There was a house on fire about six blocks away, blazing, shooting flames into the sky. The clock read two in the morning, and she had a sick feeling that whoever had been in that place might not have gotten away safe. The fire department was already there; she could see the fire trucks and the flashing lights.

There was a knock on her bedroom door. Eve answered it, and found her mother standing there in her own bathrobe. Without asking, Mom pushed past and went to the window.

“Yeah, sure, come on in,” Eve said. She closed the door and dead-bolted it again. “I just woke up. Do you know whose house it is?”