Carpe Corpus

“Hey.” He gravely shook hands with Claire, too; she thought it was a kind of forced, formal thing for him. He seemed a little nervous. “Sorry to bust in on you. I just need a place to go over my notes before my test.” He dug around in his backpack and came up with a battered spiral notebook, which had an elaborate ink-pen drawing of some kind of car doodled all over the front. He saw Claire looking at it, and a faint pink blush worked up over his cheeks. “Core classes. You get bored, right?”

“Right,” she said. She’d skipped core classes—tested out of them—but she understood. She’d gotten so bored that she’d read the entire Shakespeare library of plays, and that had been her freshman year in high school. But she’d never been a doodler. “Nice drawing.”

“Thanks.” He flipped open the notebook, past pages of tight, neat handwriting.

“What class?” Eve asked. “Your test.”

“Um, history. World History 101.”

Claire had easily bypassed that one. “Seems like you’ve got all the notes you need.”

He smiled. It was awkward and nervous, and he quickly looked down at his pages again. “Yeah, I scribble a lot when I’m in class. It’s supposed to help with memory, right?”

“Does it?” Eve asked.

“I’ll tell you after the test, I guess.” He focused on his notes, looking even more uncomfortable. Claire looked at Eve, who gave a tiny little whatever shrug.

“So,” she said. “Plans for today?”

“Apart from . . .” Nothing Claire could say in front of an innocent bystander. “Well, not really. Did you know that Richard Morrell’s gone missing? Monica asked me to find him.”

“Back up. What?”

“Monica asked me to—”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. Now you’re doing favors for the Morrell family? Girlfriend, there’s nice, and then there’s utterly dumb. You don’t need to do Monica any favors. What has she ever done for you?”

“That’s why it’s called a favor,” Claire pointed out. “Not an evening of the score. It’s something you do before they owe you one.”

“You’re just asking for it. Stay out of trouble, okay? Just keep your head down. I know that’s what Michael told you. If Shane was here, that’s what he’d say, too.”

Dean was doing a very good imitation of studying, but the tips of his ears had been turning pink, and now, he looked up and stage-whispered, “Yeah, about that. I kind of know Shane.”

Which brought the conversation to a quick halt. Dean looked around and lowered his voice even more. “I also know his dad.”

“Oh God, please. Tell me you’re not one of Frank Collins’s lame-ass vampire hunters.” Eve sighed. “Because if you are, dude, way to go low-profile. Buy some life insurance today, and please, make me the beneficiary.”

“Not exactly a vampire hunter, but . . . I do work for Frank Collins, sort of.”

Eve looked at Claire. “I think we found a good choice to replace Captain Obvious.” Captain Obvious had been part of the secret vampire-hating underground when Claire had first arrived in Morganville; he’d ended up being a little too obvious toward the end. Obviously dead.

“Because he’d be dead before he got his first sentence out when he came face-to-face with a vampire?” Claire asked, deadpan.

“I was thinking just put him in a custom T-shirt that says, ‘Hello, my name is Dean and I’m here to kill you, evil bloodsucking creatures of the night.’ With an arrow pointing at his neck that says, ‘Bite here.’ ”

Dean was flipping his attention back and forth between them in obvious consternation. “Okay, let me start over. I’ve been trying to find out where Shane and his father are. Do you have any idea?”

“Friend,” Eve said, and pointed toward her skull-graphic-covered self. “Girlfriend.” The black fingernail turned toward Claire. “Housemates.” The finger gestured to include them both. “So yeah, we know. How exactly do you know Shane?”

“I . . . I met him when he and his mom and dad were on the run. Did he tell you about that?”

Both girls nodded. Shane’s sister had been killed in a house fire; the Collins family had done the forbidden in response—they’d packed up and fled Morganville . . . with some kind of vampire help, because that was the only way to get past the barriers if you were wearing a Protection mark. Out in the world, though, things hadn’t gone well. Shane’s parents had each gone crazy in their own special way: his dad had become a cold, hard, vampire- hunting drunk, and his mom had turned into a depressed, possibly suicidal drunk, leaving Shane to make his way as best he could.

“I was there,” Dean said. “When Mrs. Collins died. I mean, I was in the motel court. I saw Shane after he found her. Man, he was totally fucked-up.”

“You were there?” Claire repeated.

“My brother was running with his dad by then, so yeah. I was around. Me and Shane kind of hit it off, because we were both getting dragged around without any say in what was happening.”

“Wait a minute. Shane never said anything about coming back to Morganville with a friend,” Eve said.

“Yeah, he wouldn’t, because he doesn’t know I’m here. Mr. Collins—Shane’s dad—sent me after him. I was supposed to stay to keep an eye on Shane, kind of watch his back.” Dean shook his head. “Except nothing was the way he said it would be. I didn’t know where to hide, so I enrolled at TPU because it gave me an excuse to hang around. Then I kind of lost track of everybody a few weeks ago.” He looked at them hopefully. “So? What do I do now?”

Claire and Eve stared at him in silence for a moment, and then Eve said, very seriously, “Look. We know Frank Collins—know, hate, whatever. And you need to give up on that evil old loser. You seem like kind of a sweet kid. Pack it in and go away. Get out while you still can.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Dean said. “It was supposed to be easy. I mean, the good guys were supposed to win, you know? The vampires were supposed to die.”

“And then what, you guys take over and run the town?” Claire sighed. “Not likely. And I’ve met Mr. Collins. Not a good idea to give him the keys to the city, either.”

Dean looked at her like he thought she was crazy, and that it really was a pity. “At least he’s not a vampire.”

“They’re not all bad,” Claire said.

For a split second, she thought she saw an altogether different Dean watching her—same guy, same emo haircut, but his eyes were weird. Not vampire weird. Odd weird.

Then he blinked, and it was gone, and she thought it was just her imagination. If you couldn’t be paranoid in Morganville, though, where could you?

“Well, that’s new to me,” Dean said. He smiled, and it was a real smile. A warm one, not at all nervous. “I just always thought the whole bloodsucking thing made being bad a lock.”

“What you know about vampires could fit into a mosquito’s ass,” Eve said, irritated. “All you know is what you grew up seeing on TV. You ever actually meet one?”

Dean didn’t answer that, but the tips of his ears grew red and his smile disappeared as he faced Eve directly. “Yeah, well, I’m not some collaborator who’s willing to apologize for what these monsters do. Maybe that’s the point. Anyway—it wasn’t really my choice. I just came because Frank asked, and I didn’t have anyplace else to go. My brother was running with Frank, and he was all I had.”

Eve’s eyes remained watchful. “So where’s Big Scary Bro now?”

“Dead,” Dean said softly. “He got killed in the fighting. I’m all alone.”

Claire stared down at the table, suddenly not interested at all in her mocha, no matter how delicious. The truth was that some of those guys—the foot soldiers, the ones who’d come along to Morganville with Frank Collins as his shock troops—well, some of those guys hadn’t fared well, either in the fight or in jail. She didn’t know who they were, not by name. Up until this moment, they’d just been labeled in her head as Frank Collins’s minions. But they all had names, friends, lives. They all had families. Claire wouldn’t know Dean’s brother from any of his fellow muscle-bound biker dudes, but that didn’t mean Dean didn’t mourn him.

That led Claire to a terrifyingly real waking nightmare—Bishop summoning her, telling her that he’d decided to let Shane go. Shane lying there, not moving . . .

“Hey, Claire?” Eve snapped her fingers under Claire’s nose, and Claire jerked so hard she slopped coffee onto