Fade Out

He kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know.”

She smacked his arm. “Really. You are a jerk!”

“I get that.” He pushed her off a little, to look at her. “You’re okay?”

“No thanks to you. You had to go running off in the middle of the night and not even say boo . . .”

“I should have known you guys wouldn’t stay put.”

“Where’s Detective Hess?” Claire asked. “I thought you were meeting him here.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Where did he go?”

“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Michael seemed preoccupied, as if he were trying to figure out how to tell them something they weren’t going to like at all. “This is Kim’s data vault. At least, most of it. Claire, that’s a router, right? I think this is her receiving station for the signals.”

“She’s using the tower to amplify the signals,” Claire said. “Did you find—?” She didn’t want to get more specific than that. Michael shook his head, and her heart fell. “What about the other ones?”

“She’s been a busy girl,” Michael said. “There are video files there from City Hall, Common Grounds, spots all over town. It will take hours, maybe weeks, to look at everything, but she’s done a rough cut.” He hit some controls, then pointed at the central monitor. “This is the raw file.”

After some old-fashioned leader signals, there was a shot of the Morganville town limits sign, creaking in the wind . . . and then, in special effects, the word Vampires appeared in bloody streaks right below the sign.

“Subtle.” Eve snorted. “She’s got a future in Hollywood.”

Kim’s voice came on, breathlessly narrating. “Welcome to Morganville, the town with bite. If you’ve ever driven across the barren landscape of West Texas, you may wonder why people live out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, wonder no more. It’s because they can’t live anywhere else without people knowing what they are.”

The visuals cut to a montage of Morganville daily life—normal, boring stuff.

And then a night-vision shot of a vampire—Morley, Claire realized with a shock—sucking the blood out of someone’s neck. It was an extreme close-up. His eyes were like silver coins, and the blood looked black.

Cut to Eve, working the counter at the coffee shop in all her Goth glory. Eve sucked in a quick breath, but said nothing. More shots of Morganville, some handheld. Claire saw footage of students, and remembered Kim running around the campus with her digital camera, asking people stupid questions.

It was in there, and so was Claire, saying, “I have two words for you, and the second one is off. Fill in the blank.”

Claire covered her mouth with both hands. God, she looked so angry. And kind of bitchy.

It got worse, with the voice-over. “Even the normal people of Morganville aren’t so normal. Take my friends who live in this house.”

A shot of the Glass House, full daylight. Then some kind of hidden-camera thing of Kim knocking on the door, Eve answering.

A shot of Shane. One of Michael.

“Living in a town full of terror doesn’t mean you can’t find true love—or at least, real sex.”

The video morphed into Claire and Shane in his bedroom.

Oh God no . . .

Claire felt sick and hot and breathless, full of horror at seeing herself there on that screen. She stumbled away and almost threw herself into Shane’s arms. He, lips parted, was staring at the picture, looking just as horrified as she felt. But he couldn’t look away, while she simply couldn’t watch.

“Goodness,” Myrnin said quietly. “I don’t think I should be watching this. I don’t think I’m old enough.”

“Turn it off,” Shane said. “Michael.”

Instead of turning it off, Michael hit FAST FORWARD. He slowed it down as the scene changed. More Kim voyeur porn, this time Michael and Eve. No voice-over. Claire couldn’t imagine what she was intending to say, but it couldn’t have been good.

“I’ll kill her,” Eve said. It sounded calm, but it really wasn’t. “Why are you showing me this?”

Michael looked at her, and Claire’s stomach did a little flip at the grimness in his expression. “Sit down,” he said, and wheeled the chair closer to Eve. She looked at it, then at him, frowning. “Trust me.”

She did, still frowning, as the scene changed on-screen.

It was some dark-paneled room, with a big wooden round table, an ornate flower arrangement in the middle. Of the several people around the table, Claire recognized three immediately, with a shock. “Amelie,” she blurted. Amelie clearly had no idea she was being filmed; the camera was high up, at an angle, but it caught their faces clearly. Next to her at the table was Richard Morrell, the mayor, neat and handsome in a dark suit. At his right sat Oliver, looking—as usual—angry. Several other people around the table were talking at once, arguing, and finally Oliver slammed his hand down on the wood with so much force it silenced them all.

Then came Kim’s voice-over. “Morganville is ruled by a town council, but one not like any other. Nobody elects these people. That’s Amelie, Founder of Morganville. She’s more than a thousand years old, and she’s a ruthless killer. Oliver’s not much younger, and he’s even meaner. The mayor, Richard Morrell, he’s new, but his family has ruled the humans of Morganville for a hundred years. Richard’s the only human on the council. And he gets outvoted . . . constantly.”

She cut back to the sound as Richard was saying, “. . . want to revisit the decision we made earlier, about Jason Rosser.”

“What about him?” Oliver asked irritably. “We’ve heard your arguments. Let’s move on.”

“You can’t execute him. He gave himself up. He tried to save the girl.”

“He did not try to save Claire,” Amelie said. “He left her to die. Granted, he did turn himself in to the police and told us about his accomplice in these murders, but we must be clear: he is far from innocent, and his history tells us he can’t be trusted.”

“He’s still a kid,” Richard said, “and you can’t just arbitrarily decide to execute him. Not without a trial.”

“With a majority vote, we can,” Oliver said. “Two for, one against. I believe that is a majority. It won’t be a public event. He’ll just quietly—disappear.”

Eve’s mouth dropped open. She leaned forward, frantically searching the screen for a clue. “When was this? Michael? When did she record this?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you should know. Your brother’s been sentenced to death.”

“Oliver—he didn’t even—he didn’t say anything.”

“Well,” Myrnin said, “I don’t suppose he felt it was necessary. I expect they were planning to arrange something quiet, perhaps an accident. Or suicide.”

Eve fell into the chair, and blindly reached out for Michael, who took her hand. “They can’t just kill him. Not like some—rat in a cage. Oh God, Michael . . .”

“I told you Detective Hess was here. He left right after we found that. He’s going straight to the jail to be sure Jason’s okay. He’ll put him in protective custody, okay? Don’t worry.”

She gave out a breathless, broken laugh.“Don’t worry? How do I not worry after you show me things like this?”

“Good point,” Shane said. “Michael, Kim bugged the council meeting. How could she possibly do that?”

“She couldn’t,” Myrnin said. “The human parts of town, yes, of course, but not the vampire parts. She has no excuse to be there, and she’d be caught if she’d gone anywhere near the official chambers. Or Amelie’s house.” He held up another black hard drive, which was clearly labeled in silver ink. “Or Oliver’s, for that matter.”

Claire caught her breath. “Your lab?”

“No. Oddly enough, nothing. But the evidence she has here is damning enough, I would say.”

“But nobody would believe it,” Eve said. “I mean, sure, she might get some off-brand cable station to air it, but everybody would think it was some kind of hoax.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Claire said. “Even if nobody does, tourists will come flocking to town, and how long do you think things will hold together once that happens?”

“I’d give it a week,” Myrnin said. He sounded quiet, and not at all amused. “This is our refuge, Claire. Our last safe place in this world. Don’t be fooled; we might be willing to compromise, but we are territorial. Kim has violated