Glass Houses

scooping up the next bite before she knew what she was doing. Shane needed to go into the chili business.

Michael slipped into the leather armchair to the left and picked up the guitar he’d laid aside. He started tuning it as if the whole scene with Shane hadn’t even happened. She ate, stealing glances at him as he bent over the instrument, drawing soft, resonant notes. “You’re not mad?” she finally asked, or mumbled.

“Mad?” He didn’t raise his curly blond head. “Mad is what you get when somebody flips you the finger on the freeway, Claire. No. I’m scared. And I’m trying to think what to do about it.”

She stopped chewing for a few seconds, then realized that choking on her food wasn’t likely to make things any better.

“Shane’s hotheaded,” Michael said. “He’s a good guy, but he doesn’t think. I should have thought for him, before I brought you in here.”

Claire swallowed. The food had suddenly gone a little sour in her mouth, so she put the spoon down. “Me?”

Michael’s fingers stilled on the guitar strings. “You know about his sister, right?”

Alyssa. That was the name Michael had thrown out. The one that had hurt Shane. “She’s dead.”

“Shane’s not a complicated guy. If he cares about somebody, he fights for them. Simple. Lyssa—Lyssa was a sweet kid. And he had that whole big-brother thing working. He’d have died for her.” Michael slowly shook his head. “Nearly did. Anyway, the point is that Lyssa would have been your age by now, and here you are getting hurt by the same bitches who killed his sister, trying to get him. So yeah. He’d do anything—anything— not to have to live through that again. You may not be Lyssa, but he likes you, and more than that, he hates Monica Morrell. So much he—” Michael couldn’t seem to say it. He stared off into space for a few seconds, then went on. “Making deals with the vampires in this town will keep you alive on the outside, but it eats you on the inside. I watched it happen to my folks, before they got out of here. Eve’s parents, too. Her sisters. If Shane goes through with this, it’ll kill him.”

Claire stood up. “He’s not going through with it,” she said. “I’m not letting him.”

“How exactly are you going to stop him? Hell, I can’t stop him, and he listens to me. Mostly.”

“Look, Eve said—Eve said vampires own this town. Is that true? Really?”

“Yes. They’ve been here as long as anybody can remember. If you live here, you learn to live with them. If you can’t, then you go.”

“They don’t just run around biting people, though.”

“That would be rude,” he said gravely. “They don’t need to. Everybody in town—everybody who’s a resident —pays taxes. Blood tax. Two pints a month, down at the hospital.”

She stared. “I didn’t have to!”

“College kids don’t. They get taxed a different way.” He looked grim, and with a sick, twisting sense of horror she realized what he was going to say right before he made it real. “Vamps have a deal with the school. They get to take two percent a year, right off the top. Used to be more, but I think they got worried. Couple of close calls with the media. There’s nothing TV stations like more than a pretty young college girl gone missing. Claire, what are you thinking?”

She took a deep breath. “If the vamps have this all planned out, then they’ve got, you know, structure. Right? They can’t all just be running their own shows. Not if there are a lot of them. There’s got to be somebody in charge.”

“True. Brandon’s got a boss. And his boss probably has a boss.”

“So all we have to do is make a deal with his boss,” she said. “For something other than Shane getting bit.”

“All?”

“They have to want something. Something more than what they already have. We just need to find out what it is.”

There was a creak on the stairs. Michael turned to look, and so did Claire. Eve was standing there.

“Didn’t hear you coming,” Michael said. She shrugged and padded down the steps; she’d taken off her shoes. Even her black-and-white hose had little skulls on the toes.

“I know what they want,” she said. “Not that we’re going to be able to find it.”

Michael looked at her for a long time. Eve didn’t look away; she walked right up to him, and Claire suddenly felt like she was in the middle of something personal. Maybe it was the way he was looking at her, or how she was smiling at him, but it made Claire fidget and closely examine a stack of books on the end table.

“I don’t want you in this,” Michael said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him reach out and take Eve’s hand.

“Shane’s in it. Claire’s in it. Hey, even you’re in it.” Eve shrugged. “You know how much I hate being left out. Besides, if there’s a way to stick it to Brandon, I’m all for it. That guy needs a poke in the eye with a nice, sharp stake.”

They were still holding hands. Claire cleared her throat, and Michael let go first. “What is it? What do they want?”

Eve grinned. “Oh, you’re gonna love this,” she said. “They want a book. And I can’t think of anybody who’d have a better shot at finding it than you, book girl.”

There were a lot of rules to Morganville Claire hadn’t even thought about. The blood donation, that was one —and she was starting to wonder how Michael was getting away with not paying his taxes. He couldn’t, right? If he couldn’t leave the house?

She sat down cross-legged on the floor with a ledger notebook, turned to a fresh sheet of paper, and made a heading that read Pluses for Vampires. Under that column, she wrote down blood donation, Protection, favors, deals.

“Oh, put down curfew,” Eve said.

“There’s a curfew?”

“Well, yeah, of course. Except for the school. They don’t care if the students roam around all night, because, you know—” Eve mimed fangs in the neck. Claire swallowed and nodded. “But for locals? Oh yeah.”

“How is that a plus for them?”

“They don’t have to worry about who’s safe to bite and who’s not. If you’re out running around, you’re lunch.”

She wrote down curfew. Then she turned the page and wrote down Minuses for Vampires.

“What are they afraid of?” she asked.

“I don’t think we were done with the pluses,” Michael said. He sat down on the floor next to the two girls— well, closer to Eve, Claire noticed. “Probably a lot you didn’t write down.”

“Oh, let the girl feel better about it,” Eve said. “It’s not all gloomy. Obviously, they don’t like daytime—”

Claire wrote it down.

“And garlic…silver…um, holy water—”

“You sure about those?” Michael asked. “I always thought they pretended on a lot of that, just in case.”

“Why would they do that?”

Claire answered without looking up. “Because it makes it easier to hide what really can hurt them. I’m writing it down anyway, but it may not be right.”

“Fire is for real,” Michael said. “I saw a vampire die once, when I was just a kid. One of those revenge deals.”

Eve pulled in a deep breath. “Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about it. Tom Sullivan.”

Claire asked, wide-eyed, “The vampire was named—?”

“Not the vampire,” Michael said. “The guy who killed him. Tommy Sullivan. He was kind of a screwup, drank a lot, which isn’t too unusual around here. He had a kid. She died. He blamed the vampires, so he doused one with gas and set him on fire, sitting right in the middle of the restaurant.”

“You saw that?” Claire asked. “How old were you?”

“You grow up fast in Morganville. The point is, there was a trial the next night. Not much chance for Tommy. He was dead before morning. But…fire works. Just don’t get caught.”