Ghost Town

“Claire. Oh, crap, Claire, I’m sorry. That was weird. I think . . . I think I was sleepwalking. I was dreaming it was three years ago, and my parents were still here. This used to be their room. I was thinking how weird it was that their stuff wasn’t here.” He laughed shakily and wiped at his forehead like he was sweating, although Claire didn’t think he was. “Wow. Didn’t like that much. It really felt wrong.”

She still felt afraid, for some reason. “But . . . you’re okay now?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, and gave her that dazzling Michael Glass smile that put girls on the floor from a distance. “Sorry if I scared you. Man, I haven’t sleepwalked in ages. So weird.”

“You knocked on the bathroom door,” Claire said. “You . . . you asked if I was your mom.”

“I did? Sorry; that is supercreepy. You’re much shorter than my mom.”

“Brat,” she said, surprised into a giggle.

“That’s no way to talk to a vampire.”

“Bloodsucking brat.”

“Better,” he said. “I can’t believe I just barged in here. I’m really sorry. Won’t happen again.”

“It’s okay; you couldn’t help it.” But she still watched him all the way down the hall, until they were downstairs. Having a vampire do something that strange, even if it was Michael, gave her a serious case of the chills.

In the kitchen, when they were all together, everything seemed fine. Michael was the same, and Eve and Shane sniped back and forth at each other with the same casual sort of loving cruelty that they always had. Claire found herself doing nothing but watching them, looking for anything odd. Out of place.

“Hey,” Eve said as she set a plate of bacon and eggs down in front of Claire on the table. “Space Ghost. You in there anywhere?”

Claire blinked and focused on her. Well, Eve would never freak her out, because Eve was always . . . Eve. Today’s eyeliner was dark blue, and heavy, and her rice-powder makeup and navy lipstick probably should have looked weird, but instead, they just looked cute. And normal. “Sorry,” Claire said. “Still tired, I guess. That was really, really hard.”

“Spill. Tell me everything.” Eve was going through a phase where she wanted to eat everything with chopsticks. Claire watched her unwrap a set of cheap bamboo ones, scrape them together a few times, and dig into her eggs. “Did you have to do anything gruesome?”

“Not unless you count sleeping in Myrnin’s”—oh, she realized right at the end of that sentence that she really shouldn’t have gone there, because Shane and Michael both turned to look at her—“uh, lab. No, not really.”

Eve stared. “You were totally going to say ‘bed.’”

“Wasn’t!” Claire felt her cheeks flaming. “Anyway, all I had to do was repair something. And then they let me sleep. No big deal.”

“No big deal? You were gone for almost five days without a word, Claire! You got arrested! Even our resident ex-con was impressed.” Meaning Shane, of course, who’d spent his share of time behind Morganville bars. He barely paused in chopping up onions for his eggs to flip her off. “If it hadn’t been for Michael and Myrnin . . .”

“Michael,” Claire said, and looked at him. He was microwaving his sports bottle, which held his morning O negative. “I thought you might help hold Shane down and keep him from doing anything dangerous.”

“Wasn’t easy,” Michael said.

Eve nodded. “He stayed on Amelie until she told him what happened to you, and then he kept Shane from pretending he was a ninja and going to rescue you.”

“Hey, you, too!” Shane protested.

“Yeah, okay, me, too,” Eve said. “Myrnin called, too. I guess he thought it would be reassuring or something to tell us you’d been standing up for forty hours, and not falling down. What a whack job. Oooh, was he wearing the bunny slippers? Tell me he was wearing the bunny slippers!”

“Sometimes,” Claire said, and dug into her breakfast. It was good, really good. Eve was developing a flair for eggs and bacon and morning-type stuff. “You guys were really going to come get me?”

“Let’s just say the boys got their fight on about it, and leave it at that,” Eve said, and winked. “Tell me that doesn’t make you feel all loved.”

Claire did feel loved, and it made her blush. She concentrated on her food as Michael, Shane, and Eve got their own and slid into the other chairs. At some point, Eve called Shane a tool. Shane called Eve a skank. Normal morning.

Michael, though, was quiet. He sipped his sports bottle and watched them all without saying much. There was something odd about him still, like he was standing a few feet outside of his body, observing. Claire got that feeling again, that gut-twisting one. Something’s wrong.

But he seemed fine when they flipped for the washing-up, and fine when he lost the coin toss. In fact, he was whistling as he scrubbed dishes, tossed them up in the air, and caught them with impossible vampire skill.

Show-off.

“Whoa, whoa, speedy, where you going?” Shane asked as Claire headed for the door. “You just got here!”

“I need to talk to Myrnin,” she said.

“Not right now you don’t. You need to go back to bed.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Which made her feel a horrible stab of guilt, because she hadn’t even called her mom and dad, or gone to see them yet. “Ah, about—”

“Yeah, I know, you need to see the ’rents. Okay, but I go with.”

“Shane, you know how that’s going to play out.”

He sighed. “I really do,” he said. “But I’m not letting you run around Morganville today all by yourself.”

She stopped and turned to him. They were alone in the living room, and she took his hands. “You know about the frat guy? Kyle?”

Shane’s face went completely still, but his eyes were hot. “Yeah, I know. They’ve got him in the cage in Founder’s Square. Word gets around, even if us mere mortals aren’t getting tickets to the barbecue. People are angry. This could go bad, Claire. I don’t think Amelie understands how bad.”

“You think someone might try to break him out?”

“I’m pretty sure someone will. Hell, I’d have done it myself, except I was more worried about you.”

“Shane, I heard what happened. He and his frat buddies pounded on a vampire, and then he killed his own Protector when he came after them.”

“Yeah, well, I’d kill any of them if he had his fangs up in my face, too.”

“But you wouldn’t have let your friends kick some stranger’s ass and rob him; I know you wouldn’t. And Kyle was the ring-leader. Truth is, I don’t think it mattered to him who got hurt or killed. And I’m not sure it wasn’t cold-blooded murder, with his Protector.”

“If you’re not sure it was, then he shouldn’t be in the cage,” Shane said. “She’s going too far. People in this town have a taste of freedom now, and they’re not going to give it up that easily.”

“The vampires aren’t going to give up being in charge, either. People are going to get hurt if both sides keep on pulling.”

Shane nodded slowly. His expression didn’t change. “Our people get hurt here every day.”

There was no talking to him about this, Claire realized; Shane had come to terms with a lot of things, but he was never, ever going to believe that what the vampires did to humans for punishment was right. And she couldn’t blame him. She remembered how sick she’d felt, how horrified, when Shane himself had been in that cage, waiting to die.

Now Kyle was in there, and his family, the people who loved him, they were feeling the same awful horror. Even if he was a total tool, this was worse than punishment. It was cruelty.

“Maybe we should try to get him out,” Claire said. “Does that sound crazy?”

“Only all of it. You know what the penalty is for breaking someone out of that cage?”

“Joining them in it?”

“Bingo. And sorry, but I’m not risking it. You’re not exactly escape-artist material.”

She was a little relieved, actually. “Maybe I can talk to Amelie. Get her to change her mind.”

“See, that’s much more you. Reason Girl,” Shane said. “Parents?”

She nodded and grabbed her backpack from the corner—force of habit: she didn’t have school today, but the