Daylighters

defend itself against fire, or wrecking crews. And that made her feel frantic, deep down inside. No, you won’t, she thought fiercely. You won’t destroy our home.

“When did Father Joe come to see you?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.” Miranda, it was true, didn’t pay much attention to days and nights, and certainly not if she’d been hiding out here in Amelie’s safe room with no windows or clocks. “A few days, maybe?”

“When did they come into the house to search it?” Claire asked. “Please, think!”

“Yesterday,” Miranda said. “Yesterday early. I felt the sun coming up.” As ghosts did. Their lives were tied to sunrises and sunsets.

“Why didn’t you come down and tell us?”

Miranda looked away, and her voice got very small. “Because you left me,” she said. “You all left me here. Alone.”

It was hard to remember sometimes how young she was, until she said something like that. “You were sulking.”

“No, I wasn’t!”

“Mir.”

Her shoulders rose and fell, just a little. “Maybe.”

“Miranda, if the Daylighters decide to tear the house down . . .”

“I go with it,” Miranda said, and met Claire’s eyes again. “You think I don’t know that? But the vampires aren’t here to help you do anything now. How are you going to stop them?”

“I don’t know yet, but we will,” Claire said. She heard the strength in her voice, and it surprised her. “We will, and that means you, too. No more sulking. We’re going to need your help.”

Miranda nodded. “Just tell me what I can do.”

“We’re having a house meeting downstairs, right now. And I guess we have to tell Eve her suicide mission’s off, if she wants to have a house to come back to later.”

“She’s not going to be happy,” Miranda observed.

Man, was she right about that.

FOUR

Eve was, to put it mildly, pissed off, to the point that Claire thought for a second she was going to slug someone—probably Claire herself—and charge out the door. But she was also a Glass House resident, and she knew what Miranda was saying. She knew the danger.

“You’re not just making this up to keep me here?” she demanded, still standing at the back door with her backpack on her shoulder. Miranda shifted and looked scared, but Claire put a hand on her shoulder to keep her steady. “Oh, relax, kid, I’m not going to bite. She’s really serious? They might try to tear down our house?” That last was directed at Claire, and at Shane, standing on the other side of the room. Shane, arms folded, just shrugged.

“Can we afford to think she isn’t?” he asked. “Look, Claire was all ready to go. Crossbow packed and everything. But you know this is more important. This house—” He fell silent for a second, looking down at his feet. “This house is our home. And we have a responsibility to keep it safe, for Michael. If they’re coming back here, then we have to make sure they get a fight when they do. You know that’s true, Eve. We fight for each other, and we fight for this house. Against vampires, humans, anybody and everybody. That’s how it’s always been.”

Eve let out a long, slow breath, closed her eyes, and nodded. Her shoulders sagged, and she let the backpack slip off to clunk heavily on the floor. “Michael would never forgive me if I dragged you all off to rescue him and we came back to a smoking hole in the ground,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“You wouldn’t be Eve if you did,” Shane assured her. “C’mon, a little perimeter defense planning will cheer you right up, I promise. I’ll even let you hold the flamethrower.”

Claire turned to Miranda and said, “Do you think you’re strong enough now to go out again?”

Miranda nodded eagerly—so eagerly she was almost bouncing in place. “What do you want me to do?”

“I need you to do a little spy work for us,” Claire said. “Since you’re so good at being invisible. The Daylight Foundation seems to be behind all of this urban renewal we’ve got, so they’d be the ones to make a plan for demolition, too, wouldn’t they?”

“I guess.”

“Go to their headquarters and see if there’s something you can find that tells us when they plan to tear down the house.”

That made Miranda take a step back. “I can’t.”

“You just said—”

“I can’t!” Miranda shouted over her, and then her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I’ve tried, okay? I can’t get close to it. It hurts, and I start—I start unraveling. It’s like—it’s like there’s no air in there. I can’t go in.”

She was shaking, just thinking about it, and Claire put her arm around the girl. Her skin felt cold under Claire’s palm, and she grabbed the afghan from the back of the couch to drape over Miranda’s shoulders. I’m trying to warm up a ghost. It did seem silly once she thought about it, but still, the kid was cold, and distressed.

“So, obviously, Miranda’s not going to be able to do our sleuthing for us,” Eve said. “Um, question. Aren’t we overreacting? Didn’t they just finish repainting our house? Why would they decide to tear it down after all that work?”

Miranda raised her hand slowly. “I know that one,” she said. “The people who were here, the ones who did all the painting and stuff . . . they were from the city council. The new mayor lady was with them. It was the Daylighters who got upset because I threw them out of the house when they tried to get inside. And it’s the Daylighters who want to tear the house down. Not the mayor. I think she likes the house.”

“So—we see the mayor,” Eve said. “Get her to stop Fallon.”

“Do you really think she can?” Shane asked. “I like Ramos, but this is Fallon we’re talking about. He wrangled the frickin’ vampires. The Daylighters were killing people in Boston; they won’t mess around here, either. If the mayor goes up against the Daylighters, she won’t live through her term.”

That was depressingly true, Claire thought. “We need to find out if they have real plans to tear down our house,” she said. “For Miranda’s sake, if nothing else—she can’t run. She can’t survive if the Glass House goes away.” That was a nightmare they all felt in their bones. They’d seen it happen to Michael when the house had caught on fire. He would have burned with it.

“I can go to City Hall,” Miranda offered. “Jenna could take me there. I could see if they’ve got anything on file. Maybe there’s a permit? They seem to like permits and things. They even had one to fix up the outside of the house.” By Jenna, she meant Jenna Clark—a newcomer to Morganville, once host of the reality show After Death. A genuine psychic, one who’d stirred the lingering ghosts of Morganville into solid activity with her arrival . . . and had ended up showing Miranda how to survive outside of the Glass House’s restrictions.

“Jenna didn’t leave town?” Claire felt oddly surprised by that; she’d thought that Jenna would have moved on after realizing the danger that Morganville constantly represented. She didn’t have to stay. “Why would she do that?”

“She kind of started dating this guy,” Miranda said. “Rad, the mechanic. And I think she liked it here. She bought a house and everything.”

“Then could you please go to Jenna and see if she’ll take you to City Hall? But be careful. Don’t get caught, whatever you do.” Miranda, after all, could turn invisible . . . but Jenna couldn’t. The plan had the added safety of Jenna driving, so there would be a quick escape handy in case something went wrong. And from Claire’s experience with Morganville, things did go wrong. Frequently.