You are not immortal. You are lost. And I am showing you the way home.” He meant every word; Claire could see that. There were even tears shimmering in his eyes. He really did believe he was their savior.
“You’re showing me to the grave,” Oliver said. “A cold home- coming, indeed. The answer is no. You’ll get no volunteers here.”
“Not even Michael Glass? Not even when that would reunite him with his lovely girl, who’s been so brave in pleading for his release?”
“Wife,” Eve said. Her voice sounded husky and wrong somehow— dazed, drugged, and deeply afraid. But she was still standing. Still fighting. “I’m his wife.”
“You’re his bait,” Oliver said, and rolled painfully to his feet.
Guards tensed, and Fallon hovered his thumb over the control on the box he held. “Michael won’t be biting, Fallon, so take her out of here before something unfortunate happens.”
“To her?”
“To you,” Oliver said, and there was a deep, dark purr in his voice that made Claire’s skin crawl with a strange mix of dread and anticipation. “No more games, you pathetic shell of a man. You haven’t been saved— you’ve been hollowed out, emptied, made into a shadow of what you were. You’re walking dead, and you know it.
Go shamble toward the grave alone. You’ll find no followers among Amelie’s people.”
Amelie’s people, as Claire well knew, had never been unani- mous about anything, but in this, at least, they kept their differ- ences to themselves. It was just an unmoving, silent block of eerily posed statues, all eyes aimed at Fallon, Eve, and the guards.
Fallon looked defeated, Claire thought . . . but then he said, “Michael, I know you’re here. Oliver’s restrained you somehow, but I know you’re listening to me. Watching. I know you can see Eve, hear her heartbeat, feel her anguish. She loves you, and even I can feel it. Don’t pretend to be indifferent.”
More silence. Fallon didn’t seem surprised; he only paused for effect, Claire thought, before he dropped his bombshell. “She says she is your wife, but she isn’t, you know. There can be no marriage between the living and the dead, neither in the eyes of God nor the eyes of the state. Morganville’s mayor has passed a new law today, one that invalidates any marriages between vampires and humans.
Your marriage has been officially dissolved.”
“What?” Eve turned on him, her mouth open, and in the next second, fury splashed color over her cheeks and she slapped him. Hard. All her fuzziness was gone. “You son of a bitch! You lied to me!”
“Yes,” he said. The mark of her handprint was red on his skin, but he hadn’t moved an inch. “It was necessary. Now, you get to choose. Michael’s made his choice; he could have stepped forward to take the cure, and join you again as your husband, but he’s re- jected it, and he’s rejected you along with it. I’ll offer you now the opposite: reject him. Take off that ring and throw it away. Tell them all that you are proudly human and will stay human, and in return you’ll find a welcome home here in Morganville, with us.”
“Go to hell,” Eve said. Claire hadn’t expected to hear anything else, but the ring of loneliness under the anger surprised her. But of course Eve felt alone; she would. The humans of Morganville had turned against her completely after she’d married Michael, and none of the residents of the Glass House had ever been accepted, not really accepted, because they hadn’t fit into the framework in the first place.
The ground kept shifting around them, around their little is- land of misfits, and Claire couldn’t help but feel this terrible sense, again, that what she was doing in helping the vampires . . . might all be wrong. But what was right? Fallon? The Daylighters? She couldn’t believe that. She wouldn’t.
Fallon was shaking his head. “Refuse to accept the facts, cling to this fantasy of loving a creature that cannot love you in return. . . . Well, then you’ll end up in a cell, and we’ll have to treat you for this mental illness you suffer from until you’re cured of it.”
“Listen to yourself. You’re going to put me in an asylum?” Eve said. “For loving someone?”
“You don’t love Michael. Michael died. You love a thing that once was him, and loving a corpse has always been a thing of hor- ror to anyone with a shred of decency in them. So, yes. Call it an asylum if you wish, but that’s what faces you if you won’t renounce him. I’m not unkind; I’m giving you a chance to avoid that fate.
Take off the ring and throw it away. Show them that you stand with me. With humanity. Become a Daylighter, Eve.”
Eve took a step forward, right into his face, and looked him straight in the eyes to say, “Screw you, Fallon. If you want my wedding ring, I’ll mash it into your face deep enough to leave a permanent tattoo.”
Fallon didn’t flinch. He just . . . smiled.
“Take her,” he said, and one of the Daylighters grabbed Eve by the shoulder.
She spun into it, moving with limber grace, and slammed the heel of her right hand into his nose, jammed her shoulder into his chest, and knocked him right off his feet into a sprawl on the dirty tile. She still looked dazed and vulnerable, and she might have wavered a little on her feet, but Claire’s heart swelled to about twice its normal size, because in that moment she was so proud of Eve she wanted to let out a war cry. “Who’s next?” Eve yelled it for her, and pointed at another of the Daylighter guards. “You. Come on, sunshine, let’s do it!”
At Fallon’s nod, that guard stepped forward— but he wasn’t caught by surprise, and he was more than a match for Eve, who landed a couple of punches but ended up off balance, which was all the man needed to sweep her feet out from under her and send her crashing to the floor facedown. In the next second he had his knee in the small of her back and was twisting her hands behind her.
Eve was screaming, but not in pain. That was pure rage boiling out of her, and now Claire tried to move forward, to help— but Myrnin put a heavy, strong hand on her shoulder to keep her in place, and she couldn’t twist free.
“Get her ring off,” Fallon said to the guard, and the man nod- ded, wrenched Eve’s left hand up and slid her wedding band off to hold it up for Fallon’s inspection. “Now throw it away.”
“No!” Eve screamed, but it was too late. The man pitched it through the air, and for a second it caught the diffused light from above and a red glint shone from the ruby in its center, and then it was heading for the shadows.
A pale hand caught it.
Michael Glass stepped out of the crowd and into the open space.
“No, you fool.” It was just a soft, angry whisper from Oliver, but Claire felt Myrnin’s fingers close tight on her skin, and she knew things had just shifted in a way she couldn’t really define.
Michael stood there, staring at Fallon with the ring in his hand, and said, “Let her go. It isn’t her you want. It’s me.”
“Amelie’s child,” Fallon agreed. “Yes. It’s you I need, Michael, because you’re a symbol. You’re Amelie’s weakness. And I know you need this girl just as much as she needs you. I can give her back to you— and you to her, in ways that neither of you have ever imagined possible. All you need do is agree to take the cure.”
The cure. Of course. Fallon’s salvation hadn’t been some religious allegory; he’d been offering the vampires humanity . A change back to a regular, breathing, mortal life. And isn’t that a good thing?
Shouldn’t it be?
He’d needed a volunteer, and here was Michael, standing in front of him with Eve’s wedding ring clutched in his fist, looking at his wife with so much love and desperation that Claire felt a little faint from it. There was a kind of restless whisper that moved through the vampires . . . something beneath her hearing, beneath even her vision, but a sensation like nothing she’d ever felt before.
“No,” Oliver whispered again. There was anger in that word, and there was also fear. If there was ever a moment when events were turning, when something monumental was happening, this was it. She could feel it, and so could they.
From the look on Fallon’s face, he knew it, too. He was waiting for his triumph.