Glass Houses

“But Professor Wilson sent me to get something from his house, but he didn’t give me the address. Please—”

She slapped the magazine closed. “Oh, for God’s sake. I’m going to wring his neck when he gets back here. Here.” She grabbed a card from the holder on her desk and pitched it at Claire, glaring. “If you’re some nutcase, it’s not my problem. You tell His Highness that if he wants to roll around with undergrads, he can damn well remember to tell them his own damn address from now on. Got it?”

“Got it,” Claire said in a very small voice. Roll around with… She wasn’t going to think about that. Not at all. “Thank you.”

The Dragon Lady puffed a cloud of smoke out of both nostrils and raised eyebrows plucked into more of a suggestion than an actual form. “You’re a polite one. Go on, get out of here before I remember I’m supposed to be off today.”

Claire escaped, clutching the card in her sweaty fingers.

Chapter 13

“Y ou know,” Shane said twenty minutes later, “I’d feel a whole lot better about the two of us if you didn’t think I was the go-to guy for breaking and entering.”

They were standing on the professor’s back porch, and Claire was peering through a murky window into an equally murky living room. She felt a flash of guilt about the breaking-and-entering part—but she had called him—just before her heart did a funny little painful flip and she heard him say again in her head the two of us.

She didn’t dare look at him. Surely he didn’t mean that, exactly. That meant, you know, friendship or something. He treated her like a kid. Like his sister. He didn’t—he couldn’t—

But what if he could?

And she couldn’t believe she was thinking this now, on the doorstep of a dead man. The memory of Professor Wilson’s limp, rubbery body steadied her, and she was able to finally stand back from the window and meet Shane’s eyes without fluttering like some scared sparrow. “Well, I couldn’t ask Eve,” she said reasonably. “She’s at work.”

“Makes sense. Hey, look, what’s that?” Shane pointed. She whirled to stare. There was a sound of tinkling glass behind her, and when she turned back he was opening the back door. “There. Now you can say you didn’t know I was going to do it. Crime free.”

Well, not exactly. She was still carrying the metal cylinder over her shoulder. She wondered if the vampires had recovered yet, and if anybody had thought to question the TA at the chem lab. She hoped not. He was nice, and in his own way he was brave, but she had no illusions that he wouldn’t sell her out in a hot second. There weren’t a whole lot of heroes left in Morganville.

One of the last of them turned in the doorway and said, “In or out, kid, daylight’s burning.”

She followed Shane over the threshold into Professor Wilson’s house.

It was kind of weird, really—she could see that he’d been here hours ago, living his life, and now the house seemed like it was waiting for him. Maybe not so much weird as sad. They came in through the kitchen, and there was a cereal bowl, a glass, and a coffee cup in the dish strainer. The professor had eaten breakfast, at least. When she touched the towel underneath the strainer, it was still damp.

“Hey,” Shane said. “So what are we looking for in here?”

“Bookshelves,” she said.

“Yo. Found ’em.” He sounded odd. She followed him into the next room—the living room—and felt her stomach sink a little. Why hadn’t she thought about this? He was a professor. Of course he’d have a jazillion books…and there were, floor to ceiling, all the way around the room. Crammed in together. Stacked on the floor in places. Stacked on tables. She’d thought the Glass House was a reader’s paradise, but this…

“We have two hours,” Shane said. “Then we’re gone. I don’t want to risk you out on the street after dark.”

She nodded numbly and went to the first set of shelves. “He said it had a black cover. Maybe that will help.”

But it didn’t. She began pulling out all the black-bound books and piling them on the table; Shane did the same. By the time they’d met in the middle of the shelves, an hour had passed, and the pile was huge. “What the hell are we looking for?” he asked, staring at it. She didn’t suppose I don’t know would be an answer that would get any respect.

“You know the tattoo on Eve’s arm?”

Shane acted like she’d stuck him in the butt with a fork. “We’re looking for the book? Here?”

“I—” She gave up. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s worth a try.”

He just shook his head, his expression something between You’re crazy and You’re amazing. But not in a good way. She pulled up a chair and began leafing through the books, one after another. Nothing…nothing…nothing…

“Claire.” Shane sounded odd. He handed her a black leather-bound book. “Take a look.”

It was too new. They were looking for an old book, right? This was…this was a Holy Bible. With a cross on the front.

“Look inside,” he said. She opened it. The first few gold-leafed pages were standard, the same familiar words she’d grown up with, and still believed. Eve had said they had a few churches in Morganville, right? Maybe they had services. She’d have to check.

Midway through Exodus, the pages went hollow, and there was a tiny little volume hidden inside the Bible. Old. Very old. The cover was water-stained dirty leather, and scratched into it was a symbol.

The symbol.

Claire pulled it out of the Bible and opened it.

“Well?” Shane demanded after a few seconds. “What about it?”

“It’s—” She swallowed hard. “It’s in Latin.”

“So? What does it say?”

“I don’t read Latin!”

“You’re kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn’t that the international language for smart people?”

She picked up a book without looking and threw it at him. He ducked. It flopped to the floor. Claire flipped pages in the small volume. It was handwritten in faded, coppery ink, the kind of beautiful perfect writing from hundreds of years ago.

She was actually holding it in her hands.

And here she’d been intending to just fake it.

“We’d better get going,” Shane said. “Seriously. I don’t want to be here when the cops come calling.”

“You think they will?”

“Well, if dear old Prof Wilson keeled over after stealing the vampires blind, yeah, I think they’ll send a couple of cops over to inventory the goodies. So we’d better move it.”

She stuffed the journal back into the Bible and started to put it into her backpack, then paused in outright despair. Too much stuff. “We need another bag,” she said. “Something small.”

Shane came up with a plastic grocery sack from the kitchen, stuck the Bible inside, and hustled her out. She looked back at Professor Wilson’s lonely living room one last time. A clock ticked on the mantel, and everything waited for a life that would never start up again.

She was right. It was sad.

“Run first,” Shane said. “Mourn later.”

It was the perfect motto for Morganville.