THIS MEANS YOU, SHANE. Claire considered knocking, but she was too tired to run away.
Her bedroom was dark. When she’d left in the morning, Eve’s kind-of-friend Miranda had been sleeping here, but she was gone, and the bed was neatly made again. Claire sat down on the edge, staring out the windows, and then pulled out clean underwear and her last pair of blue jeans from the closet, plus a tight black shirt Eve had lent her last week.
The shower felt like heaven. There was even enough hot water for a change. Claire dried off, fussed with her hair a bit, and got dressed. When she came out, she listened at the stairs, but didn’t hear Shane talking anymore. Either he was being quiet, or he’d gone to bed. She paused next to his door, wishing she had the guts to knock, but she went on to her own room instead.
Shane was inside, sitting on her bed. He looked up when she opened the door, and his lips parted, but he was silent for a long few seconds.
“I should go,” he finally said, but he didn’t get up.
Claire settled in next to him. It was all perfectly correct, the two of them sitting fully dressed like this, but somehow she felt like they were on the edge of a cliff, both in danger of falling off.
It was exciting, and terrifying, and all kinds of wrong.
“So what happened to you today?” she asked. “In the Bloodmobile, I mean?”
“Nothing really. We drove to the edge of town and parked outside the border, where we’d be able to see anybody coming. A couple of vamps showed, trying to make a withdrawal, but we sent them packing. Bishop never made an appearance. Once we lost contact with the vampires, we figured we’d cruise around and see what was going on. We nearly got boxed in by a bunch of drunk idiots in pickup trucks, and then the vampires in the Bloodmobile went nuts—that call thing going off, I guess. I dropped them at the grain elevator—that was the biggest, darkest place I could find, and it casts a lot of shadows. I handed off the driving to Cesar Mercado. He’s supposed to drive it all the way to Midland tonight, provided the barriers are down. Best we can do.”
“What about the book? Did you leave it on board?”
In answer, Shane reached into his waistband and pulled out the small leather-bound volume. Amelie had added a lock on it, like a diary lock. Claire tried pressing the small, metal catch. It didn’t open, of course.
“You think you should be fooling with that thing?” Shane asked.
“Probably not.” She tried prying a couple of pages apart to peek at the script. All she could tell was that it was handwritten, and the paper looked relatively old. Oddly, when she sniffed it, the paper smelled like chemicals.
“What are you doing?” Shane looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be repulsed or fascinated.
“I think somebody restored the paper,” she said. “Like they do with really expensive old books and stuff. Comics, sometimes. They put chemicals on the paper to slow down the aging process, make the paper whiter again.”
“Fascinating,” Shane lied. “Gimme.” He plucked the book from her hands and put it aside, on the other side of the bed. When she grabbed for it, he got in her way; they tangled, and somehow, he was lying prone on the bed and she was stretched awkwardly on top of him. His hands steadied her when she started to slide off.
“Oh,” she murmured. “We shouldn’t—”
“Definitely not.”
“Then you should—”
“Yeah, I should.”
But he didn’t move, and neither did she. They just looked at each other, and then, very slowly, she lowered her lips to his.
It was a warm, sweet, wonderful kiss, and it seemed to go on forever. It also felt like it didn’t last nearly long enough. Shane’s hands skimmed up her sides, up her back, and cupped her damp hair as he kissed her more deeply. There were promises in that kiss.
“Okay, red flag,” he said. He hadn’t let her go, but there was about a half an inch of air between their lips. Claire’s whole body felt alive and tingling, pulse pounding in her wrists and temples, warmth pooling like light in the center of her body.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I swear. Trust me.”
“Hey, isn’t that my line?”
“Not now.”
Kissing Shane was the reward for surviving a long, hard, terrifying day. Being enfolded in his warmth felt like going to heaven on moonbeams. She kicked off her shoes, and, still fully dressed, crawled under the blankets. Shane hesitated.
“Trust me,” she said again. “And you can keep your clothes on if you don’t.”
They’d done this before, but somehow it hadn’t felt so . . . intimate. Claire pressed against him, back to front under the covers, and his arms went around her. Instant heat.
She swallowed and tried to remember all those good intentions she’d had as she felt Shane’s breath whisper on the back of her neck, and then his lips brushed her skin. “So wrong,” he murmured. “You’re killing me, you know.”
“Am not.”
“On this, you’ll have to trust
“Oh, come on. You wouldn’t have left her out there, all alone. I know you better than that, Shane. Even as bad as she is—”
“The satanic incarnation of evil?”
“Maybe so, but I can’t see you letting them get her and . . . hurt her.” Claire turned around to face him, a squirming motion that made them wrestle for the covers. “What’s going to happen? Do you know?”
“What am I, Miranda the teen screwed-up psychic? No, I don’t know. All I know is that when we get up tomorrow, either the vampires will be back, or they won’t. And then we’ll have to make a choice about how we’re going to go forward.”
“Maybe we don’t go forward. Maybe we wait.”
“One thing I do know, Claire: you can’t stay in the same place, not even for a day. You keep on moving. Maybe it’s the right direction, maybe not, but you still move. Every second things change, like it or not.”
She studied his face intently. “Is your dad here? Now?”
He grimaced. “Truthfully? No idea. I wouldn’t be surprised. He’d know that it was time to move in and take command, if he could. And Manetti’s a running buddy from way back. This kind of feels like Dad’s behind it.”
“But if he does take over, what happens to Michael? To Myrnin? To any other vampire out there?”
“Do you really need me to tell you?”
Claire shook her head. “He’ll tell people they have to kill all the vampires, and then, he’ll come after the Morrells, and anybody else he thinks is responsible for what happened to your family. Right?”
“Probably,” Shane sighed.
“And you’re going to let all that happen.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say you weren’t, either. Don’t tell me it’s complicated, because it isn’t. Either you stand up for something, or you lie down for it. You said that to me one time, and you were right.” Claire burrowed closer into his arms. “Shane, you were
He touched her face. His fingers traced down her cheek, across her lips, and his eyes—she’d never seen that look in his eyes. In anyone’s, really.
“In this whole screwed-up town, you’re the only thing that’s always been right to me,” he whispered. “I love you, Claire.” She saw something that might have been just a flash of panic go across his expression, but then he steadied again. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I do. I love you.”
He said something else, but the world had narrowed around her. Shane’s lips kept moving, but all she heard were the same words echoing over and over inside her head like the tolling of a giant brass bell:
He sounded like it had taken him completely by surprise—not in a bad way, but more as if he hadn’t really understood what he was feeling until that instant.
She blinked. It was as if she’d never really seen him before, and he was
