Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(22)
Her mother stared at the fire with dry, empty eyes for a moment, and then said, “It could be Mildred Klein’s house—she lives over on that block. Or the Montez family.”
Eve knew Clara Montez, and the name hit her hard. Clara was a junior this year. Pretty and quiet and smart. She had an older brother who’d already graduated, and a sister in junior high, and another one still in elementary school.
Eve grabbed her cell phone from the table and checked contacts; Clara was in her list, and she quickly called. She clutched the phone anxiously while she watched the flames tent higher over the burning bones of the house in the distance.
“It’s not me,” Clara said instantly. She sounded breathless and excited. “It’s the Collins house! Gotta go!”
Eve must have made some kind of a sound, because the next thing she knew, her mother was holding her by the shoulders, asking her what was wrong. Eve’s hands were shaking. She looked back at the fire, heart pounding, mouth dry. Collins.
It was Shane’s house burning.
“I have to go,” she said, and tore free of her mom’s grasp to start yanking things out of drawers. She didn’t care what she came up with—mismatched underwear, a torn pair of sweatpants, a Powerpuff Girls T-shirt. Whatever came out of the drawer, she pulled on. Her mother was talking, but it was just noise. Eve looked at her phone. Another call had come in. This one was from Michael. She checked the voice mail. “It’s Shane,” he said. “His house is on fire!” The call cut off. She could hear the roaring flames in the background.
It was like a kick to the gut that just kept kicking. She didn’t know what to do, what to say, what to ask . . . and finally slipped on shoes. They might have been slippers. She didn’t really care.
When she tried to stand, her mother grabbed her by the shoulders and held her in place.
“No!” her mom said, too loudly. “Eve, you’re not going out there!”
“Mom,” Eve said. “That’s the Collins house. Shane’s house.”
“I don’t care whose house it is! You can’t go out there!”
Eve shook free and left the room. She hesitated, looking at Jason’s door, then kept going. She heard her dad snoring away as she passed her parents’ bedroom. Mom continued to follow her, still arguing, but quietly now; nobody wanted to wake up Dad.
Eve went to the hall closet, pulled up a loose floorboard, and found one of the carved sharp-pointed stakes she’d hidden there. She grabbed her black hoodie and threw it on; it would hold the stake in the pocket without trouble. Her mom’s complaints had changed tone, more of the Why do you have that? Don’t you know what kind of trouble you could get us into? sort of rhythm now, which Eve also ignored.
She was out in the dark before the Don’t blame me if you get yourself killed chorus kicked in, and headed at a run for the fire.
She was about a block away when someone stepped out of the dark into her path, and she yelped, flailed to a stop, and pulled the stake out of her pocket. The shadow stepped into the shallow pool of light from a streetlamp, and she recognized her own brother. “Jason! Jesus, what are you doing out here? Are you crazy?”
“Are you?” he asked. He seemed perfectly at home in the dark, all night-stalking black clothing and bad attitude. “I’m out here all the time. I know how to get around.”
“Are you insane? You’re too young to be out on your own—”
“You heading for the fire?” he interrupted, and she caught her breath and nodded. “Then stop wasting breath and come on.”
They jogged the rest of the way together, and Eve wanted to ask Jason why he went out at night, what he did when he was out here, but the answers sounded like something she really, really didn’t want to know. Besides, her stomach was all in knots thinking about Shane and his family, and as they came closer to the fire, it got worse. The stink of the smoke became horribly real, for one thing; it wasn’t like a pile of wood you burned in a fireplace. It had an acrid, searing stench to it. Burning plastics, cloth, foam, paint . . . all the things that made a building into a home, going up in black, bellowing clouds.
The Collins house was a total loss already. The fire department was really piling water on it to keep it from spreading to other nearby homes, and the heat was intense as Eve got closer. She could feel it battering at her skin like a physical force. The police had set up barriers, and she crowded up against one with a bunch of neighborhood people, some still in pajamas and bathrobes; she spotted the Montez family huddled together, watching in horrified fascination. There were some vampires lurking, but like the humans at the barricades, they were just gawking. Bloodsuckers liked to keep their distance from fire.
“What happened?” Eve asked Mrs. Montez. The older woman had her hair up in curlers under some kind of net bag, and a pink robe wrapped around her plump body. “Do you know?”
Mrs. Montez shook her head. “People say it was set, that fire. I don’t know.”
“Did everybody get out?” Eve was straining to see Shane, or his little sister, Alyssa, or their parents, but she couldn’t spot anybody.
“Not the little girl. She didn’t.” Mrs. Montez shook her head in somber regret, and Eve caught her breath. The night, for all the heat and cinders, felt suddenly very cold. Alyssa? No, that couldn’t be right. It just couldn’t. There was some mistake. Mrs. Montez just didn’t know, that was all. She was just . . . mistaken.