Kiss of Death

She grinned. “Slacker.”

“Well, yeah, obviously.”

In a few moments, the computer’s power light finally came on, and she booted up and started looking into the computer problem. It took her thirty minutes of diagnostics before she located the problem and got the operating system booted up.

Shane, poor thing, kept pedaling. He stopped wasting his breath with quips after a while. When the power strip’s battery finally clicked over to green, he stopped, gasping for breath, slumped over the handlebars. “Okay,” he panted, “let’s not screw it up, shall we? Because I do not want to do that again. Next time, get a vamp. They don’t need to breathe.”

Claire looked over at Oliver, who was ignoring them and jotting down notes on a map of Blacke.

But he was smiling a little.

“It’s booting up,” she said, watching the lines scroll by. “Here goes....”

The Windows tones sounded, and it felt like everybody in the library jumped. Mrs. Grant and Morley abandoned their security sweep and came back to stand by Claire’s elbow as the operating system load finished, and the desktop finally appeared. She let it finish, then double-clicked the Internet icon.

“Four oh four.” She sighed.

“What?” Morley peered over her shoulder. “What does that mean?”

“Page not found,” she said. “It’s a four oh four error. Let me try something else.” She tried for Google. Then Wikipedia. Then Twitter. Nothing. “The ISP must be down. There’s no Internet service.”

“What about e-mail? It is e-mail, yes?” Morley asked, leaning even closer. “E-mail is a kind of electronic letter. It travels through the air.” He seemed very smug that he knew that.

“Well, not exactly, and would you please either back off or go find a shower? Thanks. And to send e-mail you have to have Internet service. So that doesn’t work.”

“I pedaled for nothing,” Shane said mournfully. “That deeply bites.”

“Does anyone else think it’s too quiet?” Oliver asked, and looked up from the map.

There was a moment of silence, and then Mrs. Grant said, “Sometimes they don’t come at us for a few hours. But they always come. Every night. We’re all there is for them.”

Oliver nodded, stood up, and gestured to Morley. The two vampires stalked off into the dark, talking in tones too quiet for human ears to catch at all.

Mrs. Grant stared after them, eyes narrowed. “They’ll turn on us,” she said. “Sooner or later, your vampires will turn on us. Count on it.”

“We’re still alive,” Claire said, and pointed to herself, Shane, Jason, and Eve. Eve was sitting a few feet away, curled in Michael’s arms. “And we’ve been at this a whole lot longer than you.”

“Then you’re deluded,” Mrs. Grant said. “How can you possibly trust these— people?” She acted as if that wasn’t the word she wanted to use.

“Because they gave you back your guns,” Claire said. “And because they could have killed you in the first couple of minutes if they’d really wanted to. I know it’s hard. It’s hard for all of us, sometimes. But right now, you need to believe what they’re telling you.”

Mrs. Grant frowned at her. “And when exactly do I stop believing them?”

Claire smiled. “We’ll let you know.”

There weren’t a lot of kids in the library, but there were a few—seven total, according to Claire’s count, ranging from babies who were still being bottle-fed to a couple of trying-to-be-adult kids of maybe twelve. Nobody was too close to Claire’s own age, though. She was kind of glad; it would have been just too creepy to see the kind of blank fear in their faces that she saw in the younger kids. Too much like seeing herself, in the beginning of her Morganville experience.

She wound up thinking about the kids because Eve had brought over a lantern, gotten them in a circle, and started reading to them. It was something familiar, from the few words Claire could hear; it finally clicked in. Eve was reading Where the Wild Things Are. All the kids, even the ones who would probably have said they were too old for it, were sitting quietly, listening, with the fear easing away from their expressions.

“She’s got the touch, doesn’t she?” That was Michael, standing behind Claire. He was watching Eve read, too. “With kids.” There was something quietly sad in his voice.

“Yeah, I guess.” Claire glanced over at him, then away. “Everything okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? Just another day for us Morganville brats.” Now the smile was quietly sad, too. “I wish I could take her away from all this. Make it all—different.”

“But you can’t.”

“No. I can’t. Because I am who I am, and she is who she is. And that’s it.” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug so small it almost didn’t even qualify. “She keeps asking me where we’re going.”

“Yeah,” another voice said. It was Shane, pulling up a chair beside Claire. “Girls do that. They’ve always got to be taking the relationship somewhere.”

“That’s not true!”

“It is,” he said. “I get it; somebody’s got to be looking ahead. But it makes guys think they’re—”

“Closed in,” Michael said.

“Trapped,” Shane added.

“Idiots,” Claire finished. “Okay, I didn’t really mean that. But jeez, guys. It’s just a question.”

“Yeah?” Michael’s blue eyes were steady on Eve, watching her read, watching her smile, watching how she was with the kids clustered around her. “Is it?”

Claire didn’t answer. Suddenly, she was the one who felt closed in. Trapped. And she understood why Michael was feeling so ... strange.

He was watching Eve with kids, and he was never going to have kids with Eve. At least, she didn’t think vampires could.... She’d never really asked. But she was pretty sure she was right about that one. He looked like someone seeing the future, and not liking his place in it one bit.

“Hey,” Shane said, and nudged Claire’s shoulder. “You noticed what’s going on?”

She blinked as she realized that Shane wasn’t figuring out Michael—that he hadn’t even really noticed all the personal stuff at all. He was, instead, looking out into the shadows, where there had been vampires patrolling at the edges.

“What?” she asked. She couldn’t see anyone.

“They’re gone.”

“What?”

“The vampires. As in, no longer in the building. Unless there’s a big line for the bathroom, all of a sudden. Even Jason’s gone.”

“No way.” Claire slid off her chair and went to the desk. There was no sign of Oliver, or Morley. The map of Blacke was still spread out on the table, anchored with weights on the corners, marked in colored pencils with things she didn’t understand. She grabbed the lantern and went to the library doors, where Jacob Goldman had been standing.

He wasn’t there.

“See?” Shane said. “They’ve bailed. All of them.”

“That’s impossible. Why would they just leave us?”

“You have to ask?” Shane shook his head. “Claire, sometimes I think your head’s not really in the survival game. Think: why would they leave us? Because they can. Because as much as you want to believe the best about everybody, they’re not the good guys.”

“No,” she blurted. “No, they wouldn’t. Oliver wouldn’t.”

“The hell he wouldn’t. Oliver is a rock-solid bastard, and you know it. If he added up the numbers and it looked like it might benefit him by adding even a second or two to his life, he’d be out of here, making up some sad story. It’s how he survives, Claire.” Shane hesitated for a second, then plunged on. “And maybe this is a good thing. Maybe if he’s taken off, we should, too. Just—run. Get as far away, as fast as we can.”

“What are you saying?”