Glass Houses

into the hard plastic steering wheel, over and over. “I hate this town! I hate them!”

Claire got that. She was starting to really hate them, too.

Chapter 11

S hane was in the doorway, ready for action, when Eve screeched the car to a stop; if he was still mad, at least he wasn’t letting it get in the way of a good fight. Eve frantically signaled for him to stay where he was, on safe ground, and checked the street on all sides.

“Do you see anything?” she asked Claire anxiously. Claire shook her head, still sick. “Damn. Damn! Okay…but you know the drill, right? Asses and elbows. Bail!”

Claire fumbled open the lock, bolted out of the car, and hit the sidewalk running. She heard Eve’s door slam and running footsteps. Déjà vu, she thought. Now all they needed was for Brandon to show up and act like a total asshole….

She nearly ran into Shane as she pelted across the threshold; he stepped out of the way in time, just far enough to let her pass, and grabbed Eve to pull her inside as he slammed the door and locked it.

“You have got to get a better job,” he said. Eve wiped at her ruined makeup with the back of one hand and threw him a filthy look.

“At least I have a job!”

“What, professional blood donor? Because that’s all you’re going to be if you—”

Claire turned, ran into a vampire, and screamed her lungs out.

Okay, so she wasn’t a vampire. That was established in about thirty more seconds by a combination of Shane doubling over with laughter, the vampire screaming in fright and cowering, and—last of all—Eve saying, in blank surprise, “Miranda! Honey, what the hell are you doing here?”

The vamp—she looked like a vamp, Claire amended, but now that her heart rate was going down below race-car speeds she saw that it was makeup and drama, not nature—slowly lowered her arms, peered at Claire uncertainly through thick black mascaraed eyelashes, and made a little O with her ruby red lips. “I had to come,” she said. She had a breathy, floaty voice, full of drama. “Oh, Eve! I had such a terrible vision! There was blood and death, and it was all about you!”

Eve didn’t seem impressed. She sighed, turned to Shane, and said, “You let her in? I thought you hated her!”

“Couldn’t leave her out there, could I? I mean, she’s got a pulse. Besides, she’s your friend.”

From the look Eve gave him, friend might have been stretching things.

Miranda gave Shane a loopy smile. Great, Claire thought, annoyed and disgusted and still trying to contain the aftermath of a nuclear terror explosion. The girl was tall and most of her was thin, storklike legs revealed by a black leather miniskirt. She had lots of makeup, the standard dyed-black hair, shag cut around a long white face. Ragged Magic Marker crosses drawn on her wrists and around her neck.

Miranda suddenly swung around and looked up at the ceiling. She raised her hands to her mouth in dread, but, Claire noticed, didn’t smudge her lipstick. “This house,” she said. “Oh my. It’s so…strange. Don’t you feel it?”

“Mir, if you wanted to warn me about something, you could have called,” Eve said, and steered her into the living room. “Now we’ve got to figure out how to get you home. Honestly, don’t you have any sense? You know better than this!”

As Miranda sat down on the couch, Claire caught sight of something else on her neck…bruises. And in the center of the bruises, two raw, red holes. Eve saw it, too, and blinked, looked at Shane, and then at Claire. “Mir?” she asked gently, and turned the girl’s chin to one side. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” Miranda said. “Everything. You’ve really got to try it. It’s everything I dreamed it would be, and for a second I could see, I could really see—”

Eve let go of her like she’d caught on fire. “You let somebody bite you?”

“Just Charles,” Miranda said. “He loves me. But Eve, you have to listen—this is serious! I tried to call, but I couldn’t get anyone, and I had this terrible dream—”

“Thought you said it was a vision,” Shane said. He’d followed Claire into the room and was standing near her, arms folded. She felt a little bit of the tight knot of anger and tension unravel at his closeness, even if he wasn’t looking at her. Yeah, Claire, way to go. He treats you like the furniture. Maybe you need some hooker lipstick and Kleenex in your bra, too.

“Don’t, Shane, she’s been through hell—” Eve evidently remembered, too late, that whatever Miranda had been through, it waited for Shane, too, unless they could somehow negate his deal with Brandon. “Um, right. Vision. What did you see, Mir?”

“Death.” Miranda said it with hushed relish, leaning forward and rocking gently back and forth. “Oh, he fought, he didn’t want it, didn’t want the gift, but…and there was blood. Lots of blood. And he died…right…here.” She put out a hand and pointed to a spot on the floor covered by a throw rug.

Claire realized, with a sinking sense of horror, that she was probably talking about Michael.

“Is it—is it Shane? Are you seeing Shane’s future?” Eve asked. She sounded spooked, but then, they’d had a spooky night all around. And worrying about Shane made sense.

“She can’t see the future,” Shane said flatly. “She makes crap up. Right, Mir?”

Miranda didn’t answer. She craned her neck up and looked at the ceiling again. Claire realized, with a strange creepy sensation, that she was looking exactly at where the secret room would be. Did Miranda know? How?

“This house,” she said again. “This house is so strange. It doesn’t make sense, you know.”

There was a creak on the stairs, and Claire looked over to see Michael padding down to join them, barefoot as usual. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not the only one. Eve, what the hell is she doing here?”

“Don’t ask me! Shane let her in!”

“Hello, Michael,” Miranda said absently. She was still staring at the ceiling. “This one’s new.” She waved at Claire.

“Yeah. That’s Claire.” He hadn’t exactly come bounding to the rescue when Claire had screamed, and she wondered why. Maybe he’d been trying to stay away from Miranda; she understood why he’d want to. Talk about freaky weird…even Eve seemed not quite sure what to do with her.

She realized he hadn’t heard Miranda’s eerie description of his death. Maybe that was for the best.

“Claire,” Miranda whispered, and suddenly looked directly at her. She had pale blue eyes, really strange. They seemed to look right through her. “No, it’s not her, not her. Something else. Something strange in this house. Something not right. I need to read the cards.”

“The hell?” Shane asked. Miranda grabbed Eve’s hand and jumped up, and practically dragged her to the stairs. “Okay, now this is just too much. Eve?”

“Um…right, it’s okay!” Eve called back, as Miranda practically yanked her arm out of its socket. “She just wants to do some tarot or something. It’s okay! I’ll bring her back down! Just a sec!”

Shane, Michael, and Claire just looked at one another for a few seconds, and then Shane made a loopy gesture at his temple and whistled.

Michael nodded. “She didn’t use to be that bad,” he said.

“I guess it’s this Charles guy she was talking about,” Shane said grimly. “Should have known that if anybody would hook up with a bloodsucker for troo wuv”—Shane made it sound ridiculous—“it’d be some ditz like Miranda. I should have made her walk home. She’d probably get off on another bite.”

“She’s a kid, Shane,” Michael said. “But the sooner we get her out of here, the better I’ll feel. She gets Eve a little—nervous.”

Eve? But Eve didn’t really believe all that crap, did she? Claire had become convinced that it was just costuming, that underneath, Eve was just a normal girl after all, all the Goth stuff just posturing. But did she really believe in visions and crystals and tarot cards? Magic was just science misunderstood, she reminded herself. Or, on the other hand, just crazy talk.