Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(66)

“Well, you vamped out, my dad made me promise to kill you—”

“Seriously.”

“That wasn’t serious?”

“We used to hang. I miss you having my back.”

“I still have your back.”

“Do you?”

Shane looked at him in silence for a long few seconds without blinking, and said, “If you don’t know that, you don’t know shit about me, bro. Do I like it that you’re sucking down O neg like it’s SlimFast? Hell, no. Creeps me the hell out and it always will. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll always have your back.”

“Then let me have yours once in a while,” Michael said, and held out his fist. Shane bumped it, or tried; his coordination was way off. “Next time, don’t go wandering around out in the dark, bleeding and wearing a Bite Me sign.”

“Oh, blow me,” Shane groaned. “I’m fine.”

“Please. You’re so fine you’re about thirty seconds from telling me all your deep, dark secrets and crying, or else puking your guts out.”

“Yeah, screw you, too, buddy.” Shane closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the sofa. The room was doing loop-de-loops, and it was kind of fun at first, and then not so much.

“I worry about you,” he heard Michael say very quietly. “I wasn’t kidding about the death wish. Jesus, Shane, you keep doing this kind of thing, you’ll end up dead in a ditch. Or worse.”

“Maybe it’s what I deserve.” He couldn’t believe he’d just said that out loud, but it was true. Maybe it was what he deserved. He hadn’t been able to protect Alyssa. He hadn’t been able to save his mother. The pain—the pain helped, because it was like paying back a debt. Nobody understood that, though. They just thought he was nuts.

He felt a cold hand on his shoulder, and looked up to see Michael standing there, staring at him with so much—everything—in his eyes that it made him feel scared. Nobody should know him that well. Nobody.

But at least Michael didn’t say it. He just said, “Come on, man. Let’s get you upstairs before you puke all over my guitar.”

“Don’t tell Claire I came home drunk,” Shane said.

“Hell no.”

“Because I will end you.”

“If you survive the hangover,” Michael said, “we’ll see who wins that throw-down.”

? ? ?

Michael was right about the hangover. Shane woke up with his guts heaving and his mouth tasting like he’d sucked on old sweat socks, and he rolled over in bed and moaned. He hadn’t ralphed, but it had been close. He figured he still might. His head was pounding like Metallica’s drummer, and he wanted to just make it all go away.

Not an option, though. He got up, slipped on a pair of cheap sunglasses and a ratty T-shirt and jeans that had seen better days, and shuffled downstairs to grab a tall glass of water. There was a pot of coffee on the burner, so he poured a cup of that, too, and took both to the kitchen table. He’d downed the water and was about to start on the coffee when the knocking came at the back door.

Well, not so much knocking as pounding. Which was really not good with his head already keeping the beat to a different, sadistic drummer.

Shane groaned, got up, and opened the door without checking to see who it was, mainly because death was preferable to the pain his head was giving him as long as that pounding was going on.

It was two someones, actually. Shane stared at them for a long, bloodshot second, then stepped back to let them in. “Wow, a visit from the mayor,” he said. “And it’s not even election season. How you doing, Dick?”

Richard Morrell—who was never known as Dick, except to Shane—gave him a pained, long-suffering look. For all his faults—and God knew he had a lot, starting with being related to that psycho-bitch Monica—Dick never let the little things get to him. Which was why it was so much fun to try. He looked tanned and fit, and he was wearing an expensive suit, though why he bothered in Morganville was anybody’s guess.

“Shane,” said the second person, a tall, dark-skinned woman with a scar on her face, tightly cornrowed hair pulled back in a bun, and who was wearing a crisply ironed police uniform, all her brass gleaming. She wore the gun like she’d been born with it on her hip. “Sorry for the early visit. I heard you had a late night.”

He shrugged, but he was glad he was wearing the sunglasses to hide his expression. And the bloodshot eyes. “No problem, Chief Moses,” he said. “Coffee?”

“I never say no to coffee,” Hannah Moses said, with a charming, professional kind of smile. Shane got a couple of mugs out of the cabinet and filled them, brain churning furiously against the numbing fog of the hangover. Why are they here? What did I do? Because the chance they could be here for anyone else seemed pretty long, and pretty small. He was always the one in trouble with the law.

He carried the mugs back to the kitchen table, which was piled with old, discarded copies of the Morganville Daily and flyers for things he never paid attention to; he shoved it all to the side. “Sorry,” he said. “Not my kitchen duty day.” As Hannah and Richard sat down and started sipping their drinks, he said, “No offense, but we’ve got a coffee shop about six blocks away. Vampire owned. Any particular reason you’re dropping in on me for your caffeine fix?” Please say no.