Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(70)

And just like that, he was gone. Eve looked after him for a few seconds with a sad expression, then turned the heat off under the pasta and started hunting around for the strainer. She didn’t talk about Michael’s absence after that, just focused on the food.

Shane was hungry, and he wolfed down a bowl, barely stopping to provide mmm-hmm commentary to Eve’s monologue, which was like a bright, manic soundtrack he barely understood. He was thinking about Michael. About what he’d promised to do. Five minutes after sitting down, he was rinsing out his bowl at the sink.

“Hey,” Eve called from the other room. “I know it was good and all, but what’s the rush?”

“Got someplace to be,” he called back, feeling a stab of guilt at her silence after that pronouncement. “Sorry.” That sounded lame.

“I needed some me time, anyway,” Eve said. “Where are you going?”

“I’m dating a supermodel on the side.”

“Ha-ha, very funny. Is that what you want me to tell Claire?”

Shane stuck his head back into the living room area, where Eve still sat at the dining table in the corner, poking morosely at her half-full bowl. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “But it’s important, okay?”

She raised her head and looked at him, and for all the Goth white paint on her face and the thick black lines around her eyes, not to mention the screaming purple lipstick, for a second she looked just like his mother. Back when his mother was still . . . herself. “You need to say where you’re going,” Eve said. “It’s not safe if you just—take off. You know that. You grew up knowing that.”

“Yeah,” he said, and avoided her stare. “Well, this time, I can’t. I’ll be back.”

He was out the back kitchen door before she could yell anything after him, and he stuck the helmet on and grabbed the bike and rolled it silently down the drive to the street, where he kicked it into gear. Michael’s car was long gone, of course, but that didn’t really matter; he kicked the motorcycle into a dull growl, and then into a roar as he rounded the corner. He liked the way it responded to him when he leaned one way, then another, dodging around imaginary obstacles. It was full dark out, and Morganville wasn’t big on security lighting, but the night vision built into the helmet was freaking amazing—everything looked ghostly green, but perfectly visible. There were a few cars on the street, mostly the dark-tinted variety that Michael drove, but he ignored them. All the vampmobiles looked alike, especially at night, but Eve had given Michael a glow-in-the-dark bumper sticker, and it easily distinguished him from the rest.

Shane caught sight of the green-glowing death’s-head in less than three minutes, and eased back on his speed. The engine noise faded to a throb, and he hung back—as much as possible, in Morganville—and tried to look inconspicuous. Not easy to do, but he was wearing a black jacket and a black helmet, and the bike’s paint blended in with the darkness.

Michael made some turns, leading him off into the broken-down industrial area on the south side of the town; they passed up the old tire factory, for which Shane was grateful because he had bad, creepy memories of that place. They also passed up the old hospital, shuttered and half-destroyed. There were a bunch of not-very-stable rusted barns that passed for workshops and storage warehouses. Again, no stopping.

Michael kept going, heading for the edge of town. Shane started to worry about that; as a vampire, Michael could conceivably have permission to go outside the boundaries, but he knew that if he tried it, somewhere, someone would notice. Plus, he didn’t fancy getting any of the town’s memory tinkering, especially now that he knew who, and what, was doing it. He’d heard way too much on that subject from Claire to feel comfortable. Shane unconsciously backed off on the speed and watched the sedan’s glow-in-the-dark skull begin to get smaller. He hesitated for a second, then pressed the throttle again, harder. The engine growled a threat, and he headed for the wrong side out of town.

But Michael didn’t go past the town limits sign. Instead, he took a left turn into the darkness, down a street that looked as if it had been built dilapidated, not to mention deserted. Shane pulled far back on his speed, almost coasting. Michael was turning his car right into a dirt yard in front of one of those almost-falling-down tin buildings, streaked with rust like mold.

Shane parked, killed the engine, but kept the cool night-vision helmet on. He crouched down, well aware Michael could see in the dark if he tried, but his best friend’s attention was all on the building ahead of him. Michael looked hesitant, even as far away as Shane was; he stood by his car for a long second, then walked forward. Slowly. From what Shane could tell, it was like a man walking to his own execution.

Dammit. Shane realized that he couldn’t just . . . wait here. He’d have to follow Mike inside, which was nine kinds of crazy, not to mention suicidal. Michael was into something bad, maybe not by his own choice. It was no place for a human to be, especially without backup.

But he couldn’t let Mike go by himself.

Shane moved as quietly as a lifetime of living in Morganville had trained him, toward the dark, sinister-looking doorway through which Michael had vanished. It occurred to him that Eve was never going to forgive him if he got himself killed out here without telling her first.

He didn’t want to even think about Claire. Not right now. It might make him turn around and leave.