“He—Wait, can he do that?”
“Damn straight I can.” Frank’s gravelly voice came from her cell phone speaker, muffled by her pocket, but still clearly audible. “I can do what I want, and I don’t want to hear anything from that jackass anymore.”
“Frank—” Claire sighed. “Fine. I hate this, you know. I hate that you’re all fangs-out at each other when one of you doesn’t even have any fangs anymore. But we don’t have time for your girl fight, okay? Will you please look for Bishop, so he doesn’t get us all killed horribly?”
“Well,” Frank said, “you’ve got a point about that.”
Claire turned to Myrnin. “Anybody else you want monitored?”
“Well, there’s Gloriana,” Myrnin said. “I would definitely look out for Gloriana, since she’s the newest in town, and, well, you’ve met her, haven’t you?”
Claire frowned. Gloriana…oh. She’d met her once, briefly, at a party about a month ago. Gloriana—or Glory, for cutesy-short—was beautiful, in an antique kind of way; she had waves of long blond hair and bright blue eyes and a smile that made men melt like ice cream in the sun. Vampire, of course. Charming. But she’d taken a special interest in Michael, and that hadn’t sat very well with Eve at all. “Glory’s a Bishop girl?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Myrnin said, “but Gloriana has a history of betting with the winners, and she was Bishop’s pet for a short time, about three hundred years ago, I believe. She may still have some fond memories of him, as difficult as that is to understand. Old loyalties die hard among our kind. So do old enemies, and she never was Amelie’s friend, though they’re polite enough in public.”
“Is she your friend?” Claire hesitated, then said, “Or, you know, friend?”
He raised his eyebrows and air quoted. “Friend?”
“You know what I mean. Oliver practically admitted he’d had a fling with her once.”
“I don’t have flings.” Again with the air quotes. “And, no, Gloriana is not my friend. Nor my enemy, particularly; I rarely had anything to do with her at all. She’s agreed to abide by the laws of Morganville, but if a situation arises where she might sidestep them…well. I would not like to stand between her and her desires. She can be quite cold-blooded.”
Claire felt a stab of dread. “Uh, she could be after Shane, then?”
“Shane?” Myrnin rolled his eyes. “Why in the world would you leap to such a conclusion? Definitely not. She doesn’t do humans. She finds them commonplace. And, strangely enough, not everyone is as fascinated by your beau as you are.”
“Well, then, would she be after you?”
That made him stop for a second, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “No,” he finally said. “No, I don’t believe she would be at all interested. I’m not…suitable. By which I mean, sane. She can’t show me off in public, which is very important to her; she likes to be seen with her conquests. Also, I’m not sure that she could affect me in any significant way. My patterns of thought are quite…different, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Frank, are you getting this?”
“Bishop, check. It’s not like I’m going to forget that the bastard who ripped out my throat and made me the walking dead is out there. Gloriana, yeah, I know her. Gloriana’s on my radar. She just left the gym about ten minutes ago, and she’s arriving at Common Grounds right now.”
Myrnin nodded. “She does like it there. Claire, perhaps you should make friends. You’re quite a friendly person.”
“Be your spy, you mean.”
“Inelegantly put, but accurate. I have things to do. Frank, please stay in touch with Claire via her communicator.”
“Cell phone,” she said. “Star Trek had communicators.”
He flapped a hand. “I hardly see the difference.”
“I’m still not listening to him,” Frank said. “But, yeah. I’ll stay in touch, kid. You got some kind of headphones? Bluetooth?”
“Earbuds,” she said. “Why?”
“So I don’t broadcast all over the place when I talk to you, kid. I thought you were smart.”
“It’s been a bad day,” she said. “I almost got stabbed.”
Myrnin stopped pacing, looked at her for a moment as if trying to see any possible wounds, and then said, “Almost doesn’t count, now, does it? Hurry onward. And, Claire?”
“Yes?”
“Do be careful and watch out for Bishop; he was dangerous before, but I don’t know what he is now, except much less stable. Also, I don’t trust Gloriana. I don’t know why on earth she’s here in Morganville. Or why she’s decided to come here now. As I said, she and Amelie never got along, despite their exquisitely polite manners toward each other. So I do believe we have to assume that there can’t be a coincidence between Gloriana’s arrival and Bishop’s escape.” He hesitated, then added, “Do be careful. I can’t replace you as easily as all that.”
That was Myrnin’s idea of a compliment. Nice.
SHANE
Claire went to school, and I had a day off, and I felt kind of…lost. I shouldn’t have gone back to the gym, but I did. Don’t know why, except that I was out and it seemed like the right thing to do. The jackass who manned the front desk gave me the same “you are a bug and I will crush you” look as before, but then he looked down at a list and nodded to me. “Go on in,” he said. “You’re taken care of.”
“Taken care of how, exactly?”
“Paid for,” he said. “No charge to use the gym.”
Well, crap. Tough to justify walking out on that, so I went in the door and breathed in the scent of sweat, effort, old leather, metal, desperation. Gyms smelled like home to me, especially after my mom and Alyssa died; life with Dad had been boiled down to gyms, bars, cheap motel soap, and blood.
It smelled like…home? If that isn’t too sick.
I tried the sauna, which was superhot and damp, and changed into an old pair of sweatpants. Bare feet, because I fear no athlete’s foot fungus, and besides, I was planning on kicking the crap out of a heavy bag, anyway.
I didn’t get the chance. I walked out, towel around my neck, hair damp and sticking to my face, and there, sitting on the railing on the second floor like a very beautiful bird on a wire was the girl I’d dreamed about.
The vampire I’d dreamed about.
I hadn’t lied to Claire, not actually. I’d honestly figured that it had been a dream, because it hadn’t seemed like me at all—what I’d been doing, saying, thinking. It’s like that in dreams, right? You don’t have to be yourself.
But there she was, just as curvy and fresh and gorgeous as she’d been last night, in the dream/not dream/maybe possibly dream.
And she was smiling down on me like we had a secret. I wanted to be angry, to feel that rush of adrenaline I almost always got in the presence of a vamp, but it seemed like whatever my brain thought, my body reacted to her like it did to a pretty girl.
A pretty girl smiling at me.
“Hey, Shane,” she said. She had a lovely voice, low and sweet, and it sounded like she was the only thing in the room when she spoke. “Nice to see you here. Did you think about my offer?”
Oh, man. It took me a minute to sort out what kind of offer she was talking about; that smile made a bunch of offers that had nothing to do with the gym. “The advanced sparring group,” I said. “Right?”
“Yes.” Her smile took on a mischievous, knowing curl. “Whatever else could you possibly be thinking of?”
Stop this. Stop it now. Some part of me was angry, trying to shake me out of it, but it was a very small part, and the rest of me felt…calm. Right. Like all this was inevitable—fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it.
