"You read it?" he asked, and took it out again to open it up. The card fel out, again, but he deftly snatched it out of the air without any effort. "Huh. It's shinier than I thought it'd be."
"That's allyou have to say?"
He unfolded the letter. Claire was no good at reading those micro-expressions people on TV were always talking about on crime shows, but she thought he looked guilty as he read it. Guilty as hel .
"It's not what you think," he said, which was exactly the wrong thing to say, because it made Claire (and almost certainly Eve) think about every guy ever caught cheating. Luckily, he didn't stop there. "Eve, allvampires get the hunting privilege; it's just part of living in Morganville-it's always been the rule, even when nobody in the human community knew. Look, I don't want it. I opposed the whole idea at the meetings-"
"Which you didn't tel us about at all, jerk," Eve broke in. "We're community!"
Michael took a deep breath and continued. "I told Amelie and Oliver I wouldn't ever use it, but they didn't care."
"Doesn't matter. You have a free pass for murder."
"No," he said, and took her hands in his, a gesture so quick she couldn't avoid it, but gentle enough that she could have pulled away if she'd wanted. "No, Eve. You know me better than that. I'm trying to change it."
Her eyes filled with tears, suddenly, and she col apsed against his chest. Michael put his arms around her and held her tightly, his head resting against hers. He was whispering. Claire couldn't hear what he was saying, but it really wasn't any of her business.
She took the glass of milk Eve had poured for herself, seeing as how it was sitting there unwanted, and drank it. He still should have told us, she thought, and slit her envelope open with a steak knife to take out her own letter and ID card. It felt weird, seeing her information on there. Even though the vampires had always known what her blood type was, where she lived...it felt different, somehow.
Official.
As if she were some kind of commodity. Worse: with the chip in it, it meant she couldn't hide, couldn't run. She now, as Eve had said, had papers, just as they demanded in those old black-and-white war movies; she had to carry the card or get arrested (today's encounter had proven that), and it meant that they could round her up whenever they wanted...for questioning. Or for sticking her in some kind of prison camp.
Or worse.
One thing was certain: Shane Col ins was not going to like this at all...and just as she thought about that, Shane banged in the swinging door of the kitchen, headed straight for the refrigerator, and snagged himself a cold soft drink, which he popped open and chugged three swal ows of before he stopped, looked at Eve and Michael, and said, "Oh, come on. Don't tel me you guys are fighting again. Seriously, isn't there supposed to be a honeymoon period or something?"
"We're not fighting," Michael said. There was something in his voice that warned this was a bad time for Shane to get snarky. "We're making up.
We'l be upstairs."
Shane actually opened his mouth to say something else, but he suddenly shivered and took a step back. "Hey!" he said, and looked up at the ceiling. "Stop it, Miranda! Brat."
Miranda was...wel , the Glass House teen ghost. A real, official one. She'd died here, in the house-sacrificed herself, in the battle with the draug-and now she was part of it, but invisible during the day.
She could still make herself felt, when she wanted to; the cold spot she'd just formed around Shane was proof of how she felt about his impulse to harass Michael and Eve just now. Miranda couldn't be heard or seen during the daytime, but she could sure make her displeasure known.
And they'd probably hear about it tonight, in detail, when she materialized.
Claire sighed as Michael led Eve out of the room with an arm around her shoulders. "Here," she said, and passed Shane the envelope with his name on it. "You should sit down. You're really not going to like this."
Sitting Shane down to discuss things didn't help, because allit accomplished was an overturned chair, and Shane stalking the kitchen in dangerously black silence. He tried to throw his ID card in the trash, but Claire quietly retrieved it and put it back on the table, along with hers. Eve's still sat abandoned on the counter.
"You're going along with this?" he finally asked. She'd been watching him as he paced; there was a lot to learn about her boyfriend when he wasn't saying anything, just from the tenseness of his muscles, and the way he held himself. How he looked right now was tel ing her that he was on the verge of punching something-preferably something with a set of fangs. Shane had gotten better about control ing his impulses to fight, but they never really went away. They couldn't, she supposed. Now he stopped, put his back to the wal , and used both hands to push his shaggy, longish hair back from his face. His eyes were wide and dark and ful of chal enge as he looked at her.
"No," she said. She felt steady, almost calm, really. "I'm not going along with it. None of us is-we can't. Are you coming with me to talk to Amelie about it?"
"Hellyes, I'm coming with you. Did you think I'd let you go alone?"
"Do you promise to keep your cool?"
"I promise I won't go starting any fights. But I'm taking a little insurance, and you're carrying, too. No arguments. I know you don't think Amelie's exactly on our side anymore, so trusting her's off the table." He pushed off the wal and opened the cabinets under the sink; under there were
several black canvas bags of equipment, allof it damaging to vampires in some way.
Claire wanted to be brave and say that she didn't need any kind of defenses, but she was no longer sure of that. Morganville, since the defeat of the draug, was...different. Different in smal , indefinable ways, but definitely not the same, and she wasn't sure that the rules she'd learned about interacting with Amelie, the vampire Founder, were the same, either. The old Amelie, the one she'd gotten almost comfortable knowing...that woman would not have hurt her just for disagreeing.
But this new, more powerful Amelie seemed different. More remote. More dangerous.
So Claire looked at the contents of the bag he'd opened, and took out two vials of liquid silver nitrate, which she put in the pockets of her blue jeans. She wasn't exactly dressed for vampire fighting-not that there was a real dress code for that-but she was prepared to sacrifice the cute sky blue top she had on, in an emergency. Pity she hadn't picked the black one this morning.
Ah, Morganville. Where dressing to hide bloodstains was just good daily planning.
"We should talk to Hannah first," she said as Shane picked out a thin-bladed knife that had been coated with silver. He checked the edge on it, nodded, and jammed it back in the leather sheath before he stuck it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket.
"If you think that'l help," he said. Hannah Moses was the newly minted mayor of Morganville-she'd been the police chief, but with the death of Richard Morrel , she'd ended up being appointed the First Human of the town. It wasn't a job Hannah wanted, but it was one she'd accepted like the soldier she'd once been. "Though I figure if Hannah could have done anything about this, it would have already been done. She doesn't need us to bring her the news."
That was true enough, but still , Claire couldn't shake the feeling that they needed allies at their side before dropping in on Amelie. Strength in numbers, and allthat; she couldn't ask Michael, not without asking Eve, and Eve was a hot button for the vampires right now. Michael and Eve were married, really, legally married, and that had cheesed off a good portion of the plasma-chal enged in their screwed-up community. Apparently, prejudices didn't die, even when people did.
Not that the humans seemed allthat happy about it, either.
"Stil ," she said aloud, "let's go talk to her and see what she can do. Even if she just comes with us..."
"Yeah, I know-she'd be harder to make disappear." Shane stepped in and bent his head and kissed her, a sudden and warm and sweet thing that made her pul her attention away from her worries and focus utterly on him for a moment. "Mmmm," he murmured, not moving back farther than strictly required for the words to form between their lips. "Been missing that."
"Me, too," she whispered, and leaned into the kiss. It had been a busy few months, rebuilding Morganville, finding their lives and place in things again. Then she'd been focusing on getting caught up at school again-once Texas Prairie University had reopened, she'd been determined not to have to repeat any credit hours she'd missed during the general emergency. Her boyfriend had been through some rough times-more than rough, really-but they'd come out of it okay, she thought. They understood each other. Best of all, they actually liked each other. It wasn't just hormones (though right now, hers were fizzing like a shaken soda; Shane just had that effect on her); it was something else. Something deeper.