Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(48)

A uniformed Morganville cop tapped on the driver’s side window. Michael rolled it down. The cop hadn’t been prepared to find a vampire driving, and I could see him amending the harsh words he’d been about to deliver.

“Going a little fast, sir,” he finally said. “Something wrong?”

Michael looked at the burns on his wrists, the bloodless slices on his arms. “Yeah,” he said. “I need an ambulance.”

And then he slumped forward, over the steering wheel. The cop let out a squawk of alarm and got on his radio. I reached out to ease Michael back. His eyes were shut, but as I stared at him, he murmured, “You wanted five minutes.”

“I wasn’t looking for a Best Supporting Actor award!” I muttered back.

Michael did his best impression of Vampire in a Coma for about five minutes, and then came to and assured the cop and arriving ambulance attendants he was okay.

Then he told them about my dad.

They found Jerome, still and evermore dead, with a silver-tipped arrow through his head. They found a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz next to him.

There was no sign of Frank Collins.

Later that night—around midnight—Michael and I sat outside on the steps of our house. I had a bottle of most illegal beer; he was guzzling his sixth bottle of blood, which I pretended not to notice. He had his arm around Eve, who had been pelting us both with questions all night in a nonstop machine-gun patter; she’d finally run down, and leaned against Michael with sleepy contentment.

Well, she hadn’t quite run down. “Hey,” she said, and looked up at Michael with big, dark-rimmed eyes. “Seriously. You can bring back dead guys with vampire juice? That is so wrong.”

Michael almost spat out the blood he was swallowing. “Vampire juice? Damn, Eve. Thanks for your concern.”

She lost her smile. “If I didn’t laugh, I’d scream.”

He hugged her. “I know. But it’s over.”

Next to me, Claire had been quiet all night. She wasn’t drinking—not that we’d have let her, at sixteen—and she wasn’t saying much, either. She also wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out at the Morganville night.

“He’s coming back,” she finally said. “Your dad’s not going to give it up, is he?”

I exchanged a look with Michael. “No,” I said. “Probably not. But it’ll be a while before he gets his act together again. He expected to have me to help him kick off his war, and like he said, his time was running out. He’ll need a brand-new plan.”

Claire sighed and linked her arm through mine. “He’ll find one.”

“He’ll have to do it without me.” I kissed the soft, warm top of her hair.

“I’m glad,” she said. “You deserve better.”

“News flash,” I said. “I’ve got better. Right here.”

Michael and I clinked glasses, and toasted our survival.

However long it lasted.





LUNCH DATE


I rarely wrote stories from Claire’s point of view, mainly because she’s the main character in the books, so it seemed redundant to have her take the lead in the shorts, too. But I did enjoy it from time to time, such as in this short story (free on the Web site) that just gives us a taste of the romance building between Claire and Shane. This is set in that late-romance period somewhere around Feast of Fools when things are hot . . . but not yet reaching the boil that they would in Carpe Corpus.

One of Shane’s many terrible jobs is featured, which is always fun for me. Poor Shane. Poor bosses.





Lunch was always an iffy proposition at the Glass House. Some days all of Claire’s housemates were in; most days nobody was. Some days, there was food in the fridge. Most days, not. Claire had made a fine art out of scrounging up crackers and cans of soup. Her favorite was cream of tomato. Yum.

She was slurping up her soup, alone as usual, when she heard a thump from upstairs. Odd. She knew for a fact that Eve was at her job on campus, and Michael was off teaching guitar lessons. Shane . . . Well, she never knew for sure where Shane would be, but she’d looked for him before making lunch and there hadn’t been any sign of him.

Not another visitor through the portal. Honestly, having one of those mystic doorways in the house was getting to be a royal pain. “Grand Central Station,” Claire said, then sighed and gulped down the rest of her lunch before dumping the bowl in the sink and heading upstairs. The house was a comfortable mess, but it was slowly creeping toward the Oh my God, who lives here? kind of mess, so she’d have to get on everybody’s case to do a little picking up. Just to show she wasn’t immune, she picked up a stack of books she’d left on the dining table and carried them upstairs with her.

Once she’d dumped the books on top of—well, all the other books she’d been meaning to find a shelf for, Claire grabbed the miniature baseball bat Shane had bought her—aluminum, but electroplated in silver. Good for vampire-whacking, should the need come up. It was surprisingly heavy.

The thump came again. Not, as she would have thought, from Amelie’s private room upstairs, or from the attic.

It was coming from Shane’s room.

Claire took a firm grip on the bat, and flung open the door. “Freeze!” she yelled. Stress made her voice sound too high, like the squeak of a little girl on helium. Embarrassing. And not intimidating.