Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(32)

Trent started the van and pulled a tight U-turn out of the high school parking lot. There were no side windows, but out of the back windows I saw the big, hulking thirties-era building with its Greek columns fading away like a ghost into the night. Morganville wasn’t big on streetlights, although there were a crapload of surveillance cameras. The cops knew where we’d been. They knew everything in Morganville, and half of them were vampires.

God, I couldn’t wait to apply for my paperwork to get the hell out, but in order to do that, I needed an acceptance letter to an out-of-state university, or waivers from the mayor’s office. I wasn’t likely to get either one, with my grades and ’tude. No, I was a lifer, stuck in Morganville, watching the world go by.

At least, until somebody cut me out of the herd and I became a Snack Pack.

Trent was driving faster than we’d agreed. Not only that, the van was veering a little to the side of the road. “Yo, T.!” I yelled. “Eyes front, man!”

He turned to look back at me, and his pupils were huge and dark, and he giggled, and I had time to think, Oh shit, he’s not drunk—he’s high, and then he hit the gas.

Miranda’s hand closed over my arm. I looked at her, and she was crying. “I don’t want them to die,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Oh Jesus, Mir, would you stop?” Jane said, and smacked her hand away. “Drama princess.”

But I was looking at Miranda, and she was staring at me, and she slowly nodded her head.

“Here it comes,” she said, and transferred the stare to her sister. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

And then something bad happened, and the world ended.

? ? ?

I walked away from the smoking wreckage. Staggered, actually, coughing and carrying the limp body of Miranda; she was alive, bleeding from the head but still alive.

My brain wouldn’t bring up anything about Trent, Jane, or Guy. Nothing. It just . . . refused.

I walked until I heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and dropped to my knees, with Miranda in my lap.

The first cop on the scene was Richard Morrell, the son of the mayor. I’d always thought that even though his family was poisonous, he was kind of a nice guy; he proved that now by easing Miranda out of my arms and to the ground, cushioning her head gently to keep it from bumping against the pavement. His warm hand pressed on my shoulder. “Eve. Eve. Anybody else in there?”

I nodded slowly. “Jane. Trent. Guy.” Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d imagined all of that. Maybe they were about to crawl out of that twisted mass of metal and laugh and high-five. . . .

Too much imagination. I imagined dead, bloody bodies crawling out of the wreck, and swayed. Nearly collapsed. Richard steadied me. “Easy,” he said. “Easy, kid. Stay with me.”

I did. Somehow, I stayed conscious even when the ambulance drivers wheeled the gurneys past me. Miranda was taken first, of course, and rushed off to the hospital with flashers and sirens.

They didn’t bother hurrying for the others. They just loaded the black zippered bags into one ambulance, and it drove away. The fire department hosed down the wreck, and it smelled like burned metal and reeking plastic, alcohol, blood. . . .

I was still kneeling there on the pavement, pretty much forgotten, when Richard finally came back, did a double take, and looked grim. “Nobody came to get you? From your family?”

“You called them?”

“Yeah, I called,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

I wiped my face. The white makeup was almost gone, and my skin was wet; I hadn’t even known I was crying.

Not a mark on me.

Sit here, Miranda had told me. Right here. Like she’d known. Like she’d picked me over her own sister.

I couldn’t stop shaking. Officer Morrell found a blanket in the back of his patrol car and threw it around my shoulders, and then he bundled me in the back and drove me the five miles back home. All the lights were on at my parents’ house, but it didn’t look welcoming. I checked the time on my cell phone.

Four a.m.

“Hey,” Richard said. “It’s the big day, right? Time to grow up, Eve. I’m sorry about your friends, but you need to focus now. Make the right choices. You understand?”

He was trying to be kind, as much as he knew how to be; must have been hard, considering the * genes he’d been given. I tried to think what his sister, Monica, would have said in the same situation. What a bunch of trashed-out losers. They shouldn’t be in our cemetery. We’ve got a perfectly good landfill.

I knew Monica too well, but that wasn’t Richard’s fault. I nodded to him numbly, gave back the blanket, and walked up the ten steps from the curb to my parents’ front door.

It opened before I reached for the knob, and I was facing Brandon, the family’s vampire Protector.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Eve,” he said, and stepped back. “Come in.”

I swallowed whatever smart-ass remark I might normally have given him, and looked back over my shoulder. Richard Morrell was looking through the window of the police cruiser at me, and he gave a friendly wave and drove off. Like I was in good hands.

You know every stereotype of the romantic, brooding vampire? Well, that’s Brandon. Dark, broody, bedroom eyes, wore a lot of black leather. Liked to think he was badass, and what the hell did I know? Maybe he was.