Daylighters

the mall are still safe. Go!”

Halling headed for the stairs, and Claire scrambled out of the way as the officer’s long legs pushed past. She felt sick and weightless, as if she were falling into an endless black hole. What the hell was going on?

She took out her phone as Simonds moved to inspect the body, and quietly texted Shane not to come home. He sent back a question mark. She replied with an exclamation point, and then quickly put the phone away before Simonds caught sight of it.

“Do you know this man?” he asked her. She shook her head.

“I’ve seen him,” she said. “I saw him at the mall, where they were keeping the vampires. But I don’t know him.”

“Any explanation for why he’d be dead in your basement, Miss Danvers?”

She could only shake her head again. She didn’t have any idea what else to say. Simonds sighed, stood up, and took out his cell phone to make a call. He requested additional units, and a forensic kit—Morganville wasn’t big enough to have an actual forensic team—and then looked up at her. He seemed sorry, she thought. But not very.

“Stand up,” he told her. “Come down to the floor.”

She did stand up, but in that moment she realized that if she let him arrest her, she’d have no chance at all to clear herself. Fallon might well have arranged this—a plot to put them all behind bars and get them out of his way.

She couldn’t take that chance.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached in her pocket and brought out the round shape in her pocket. She yanked the pull ring and tossed the thing down the stairs toward where he stood. “Grenade!”

Shane was right. Nobody waited to see what happened when they heard that word.

She dashed up the steps, and hit the door at the top just as there was a muffled whump below. She looked down to see a cloud of thick white powder spreading over everything, as if she’d thrown a giant bag of flour. Simonds, who’d taken cover at the far end of the basement in a crouch behind an old freezer, coughed and fanned the air as the stuff settled on him.

He was okay.

“Danvers!” he yelled, and drew his pistol from under his coat as he swiped at his face to clear his eyes. “Stop where you are!”

She was committed now, and she ran.

The house slammed and locked the basement door for her; she headed toward the front door, but heard footsteps ahead—one of the other cops. It didn’t really matter which anymore; either one would probably shoot her as a fleeing suspect.

She crashed through the kitchen door, heading straight for the back entrance; it flew open ahead of her, and she felt a giant shove at her back as if the house itself was pushing her out.

She felt the bullet pass by her before she actually heard the shot. It was a tiny shock wave beside her waist, close enough that it left her feeling scorched.

The door slammed behind her and locked tight before the officer—whichever one it was—could draw a bead for a second shot.

She tumbled down the steps and rolled to her feet, then ran for the back fence. She knew it was wobbly at the corner, and she shoved it out, then squeezed through into the narrow, dirty alley. A lady watering plants in another yard gaped at her, and asked her something in a sharp, urgent voice, but Claire didn’t pause.

She just ran.

She made it as far as the end of the alley before a police cruiser blocked her off with a burst of flashing lights and a sharp blare of siren. Claire skidded to a halt, backpedaled, and turned to flee the other way, but it was cut off, too.

A dusty Detective Simonds was squeezing through the hole in the fence, and he had his gun aimed right at her. “Stop,” he said. “Claire, don’t make this ugly. You’ve got nowhere to go.”

He was right. It could only go wrong now.

She put her hands up.

“Walk to the fence. Lean against it, hands above your head.”

She thought she was going to be sick, but she did it, and he at least warned her before he put his hands on her and began patting her down for any weapons. She answered his questions about concealed weapons and sharp objects without really noting what she said; her mind was racing in a blinding blur, and she thought she was probably just a couple of breaths away from passing out. He read her some rights, and she numbly agreed that she understood.

Then he took her wrists down from the prickly wooden fence and clicked on handcuffs, and she caught her breath on a sob.

But I didn’t do anything.

Shane would have warned her that for people who lived in the Glass House, that hardly ever mattered.

FIVE

It took half an hour for her head to clear, and by that time she’d been taken in the back of a squad car from the house to City Hall. The jail was one floor down in the basement of the Gothic castle structure, where they booked her with calm efficiency. She didn’t talk. She didn’t really think she could, honestly. There was no one else in the cells with her, but Simonds posted a uniformed guard outside her bars anyway—as a precaution, he said, though he wasn’t specific about what he was expecting.

“I didn’t do anything,” she finally told him, as he got ready to leave her. “Detective, I didn’t. None of us even knew that man was down there!”

“I’ll take your statement later,” he told her. It wasn’t unkind, just calm and brisk and a little disinterested, as if he’d already written her off as a lost cause. “Tell me where your boyfriend and Eve have gone, and we can talk about how I can help you out.”

“I don’t know where they are.” She didn’t, actually. The police had taken her cell, and she hoped Shane had heeded her text, run for cover, and turned off his phone. She desperately hoped he’d thought to warn Eve, too. Miranda could conceal herself easily, but Eve stood out like a sore thumb, and so did Shane in his muscle car. Both knew Morganville well, so they’d have places to go to ground. But still—she worried.

Simonds said, “I hope you think hard about telling me where they are, because if we can’t find them, you’re on the hook by yourself, Claire. I don’t want to see that happen any more than you do. Fact is, you saw the victim alive, and just a few hours later he was stabbed, moved, and dumped in your own basement. Seems pretty straightforward. Maybe you thought you could smuggle Eve’s husband out of the mall and something went wrong. . . . Look, it’s perfectly okay to want to save your friend. Maybe you thought he was in real danger. Maybe Mr. Thackery—that’s his name, by the way, the dead man in your basement—maybe he tried to stop you. Could have been self-defense, I know that.”

She shut up, because his calm, friendly tone frightened her. He was good at drawing things out of people, even things that they didn’t mean; she knew too many things that implicated her already, and one wrong statement could bring Shane and Eve into it, too. Better to be silent until she could figure out what the hell was going on.

He took her silence well enough, brought her some bottled water, promised some food, and left. The policewoman stationed outside the door—not Halling, thankfully, because Claire honestly couldn’t stand the sight of her—had a Daylighter symbol on her collar, but she didn’t seem inclined to chat or judge. She dragged a chair over and sat down to read a magazine instead.

Claire drank her water without tasting it, then stretched out on the narrow, hard bunk. After a few moments, she wrapped the blanket around her shivering body and finally closed her eyes. Just to think.

She woke up in the dark.

Her breath stopped in her throat, because it was too dark, even if she’d slept through sunset. All the lights were off in the hall beyond her cell, and she heard something metallic scrape just