Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(55)

They were trapped in the car.

“Shane?” I whispered into the phone. I could hear the drunk jocks high-fiving and booyahing one another in the trucks from here. A couple rolled out of the back and began to jump around on the hood of my car, rocking it on its springs.

“Well, the good news is you drive a damn tank,” he said, but I heard the tension in his voice.

“Can you get out of there?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, much more calmly than I would have. “But I think the longer we let them play on the bouncy castle, the fewer of these guys you’ve got to deal with on your end.” He paused. “Bad news: I can’t back you up in person if I do that.”

I swallowed hard and went back to my original position on the side of the field house. “Stay put,” I said. “I’ll yell if I get in trouble. Rescue is more important than moral support.”

If he answered, I didn’t hear him, because just then a big, beefy guy rounded the corner of the field house carrying a case of beer. He dropped it with a noisy crash of glass at the sight of me.

Shane had been right. The costume was not stealthy.

? ? ?

“Look what I found prowling around,” my jock captor announced, and shoved me into the doorway of the field house. My heels skidded on the tile floor, and I lost my balance and fell . . . into Michael’s arms.

“Oh,” I breathed, and for a second, even given the circumstances, being in his arms felt wonderful. He held me close, then pushed me away from him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

“Saving you?”

“Awesome job so far.”

“Fine, criticize . . . Hey!” Beefy Jock Guy, who’d dumped the case of empty beer bottles outside, had plucked the phone from my hand, peered at the screen, and shut it off.

He looked tempted to do the macho phone-breaky thing, so I snapped, “Don’t even think about hurting my phone, you jackass.” He shrugged and pitched it into the far corner of the room.

“She’s cute,” the jock said to Michael. “Bet she likes to party, right?”

I ignored him, and looked around to see what I’d gotten myself into. Not good. Mr. Ransom’s assessment had been right. Big guys, all wearing Morganville jock jackets. The smallest of them was twice the size of Michael, and he wasn’t exactly tiny.

I still couldn’t figure out what Michael was doing here, though. He was just standing there, and he could have wiped the room with these guys, right? But he hadn’t.

“What’s going on?” I asked. Michael slowly shook his head. “Michael?”

“You need to go,” he told me. “Please. This is something I need to do alone.”

“What? Kick jock ass? Shane is going to be very disappointed.” Looking into Michael’s eyes, I saw the red starting to surface. I blinked. “Did you, ah, snack?”

“No,” he said. “I was on my way in when they tried to take Ransom off with them.”

“And you just had to get in the middle of that.”

Michael’s eyes were turning an unsettling color, almost a purple, as the red swirled around. It was pretty. From a distance.

“Yes,” he said. “I kind of did. See, they wanted Ransom to come bite somebody.”

My own eyes widened. “Who?”

For answer, Michael turned, and I saw a frail young girl sitting on a bench at the back of the room, dressed in a cheap-looking Cleopatra costume. I recognized her after a long couple of seconds. “Miranda?” Miranda was sort of a friend, in that uncomfortable not-quite way. She was about ninety pounds of pure crazy, fragile as glass, and I knew from personal experience that sometimes she could see the future. Sometimes. Sometimes she was just plain nuts.

She’d been under Protection by a vampire named Charles, until recently. I didn’t know for sure, but I strongly suspected that Charles had gotten more than just blood out of the kid. I was glad he was dead, and I hoped it had hurt. Miranda didn’t need more screwed-up sprinkles on top of her utterly boned life.

“Mir?” I stepped back from Michael and walked over to her. She was very quiet, and unlike most other times I’d seen her, she wasn’t bruised, or shaking, or otherwise in distress. “Hey. Remember me?”

She gave me an irritated look. “Of course. You’re Eve.” Wow. She sounded completely normal. That was new. “You’re not supposed to be here.” What, according to her visions?

“Well, I am here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“They were supposed to find me a vampire,” Miranda said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I looked around at the jocks, an entire backfield of muscle, with blank curiosity.

“Why them?” And why, more important, would they be willing to do a favor for a kid like Miranda?

She knew what I was thinking. I saw it in the weird smile she flashed. “Because they owe me favors,” she said. “I’ve been making them money.”

Oh God, I could see it now. Morganville had a small, but thriving, betting underworld. What better to put your money on in a Texas town than football? The jocks had used Miranda’s clairvoyant abilities to pick winners, they’d cleaned up, and now she was asking them to pay her price.

A vampire? That was her price? Even for Mir, that was just plain weird.