Bitter Blood

Claire hip-bumped her and grinned. “We’re not enough for you?”

She got a smile in response, but it wasn’t a very certain one. “Sure,” Miranda said softly, and walked away.

Oh dear.

That, Claire thought, might be a problem.

The blood bank in Morganville had odd hours—for instance, they’d instituted twenty-four-hour donations, which meant that Claire was able to shove Shane out of bed and into pants, shoes, and shirt at four a.m., and drag him, half asleep, into the place to drain a pint of blood before he was too awake to protest. She gave a second pint, just to make things even, and took him home to pile back into bed. He refused to go to his own, which was just pure stubbornness, and curled his warm, strong body next to her under the covers for another two hours until she had to rise to go to school. It might have been more sexy, except that he fell asleep within about five minutes, and she held out for only a few ticks more.

Seven a.m. came way too early, but Claire dragged herself yawning through the morning routine: shower, dress, sleepwalk to Common Grounds for a mocha. That was where she picked up the news that Mayor Hannah Moses was “stepping down for personal reasons” and that a write-in election would be held over the weekend.

The college students were, of course, oblivious to what that meant, but there was a stack of the flyers about it near the register, and Claire grabbed one. The press release was boring and dry, and there was a write-in form right on the bottom of the flyer, with instructions to drop it off at City Hall in the appropriate ballot box.

Claire stuffed the flyer in her backpack, grabbed her coffee, and headed out for class. Luckily, she had a different schedule of professors today, ones she actually liked, and sailed through the morning high on caffeine and challenging discussions on condensed-matter physics, which was the study of exactly how atoms combined and recombined to make liquids, solids, and states that, theoretically, hadn’t been seen. Except she had seen them. Myrnin had invented them, and he used them as transportation hubs around the town. He called them doors, whereas Claire called them portals, but it boiled down to one thing: traveling from here to there and skipping the in-between.

So she kind of had a head start on that concept, and calculations.

She had a break at noon, and went to the coffee shop on campus. It was Eve’s day to work there, instead of at Common Grounds; she was a good-enough barista that she could work anywhere she wanted, and she liked to see different people on the other side of the counter. Plus, Eve always insisted, she liked these little weekly vacations away from Oliver’s scowling.

She didn’t look especially happy now, though, Claire thought, as she waited in line. As the guy ahead of her walked away with his coffee, Claire leaned her elbows on the counter and said, “Are you okay?” She put the back of her hand to Eve’s forehead. “I think you must have a fever.”

“What?” Eve looked tired under the makeup, as if she hadn’t slept much. “What are you talking about?”

“Mr. Hottie McGorgeous just walking away. He was way into you, and you didn’t even smile at him.”

Eve held up her hand and tapped the ring on her finger. “Anti-flirting device,” she said. “It works.”

“Oh, come on—it wouldn’t keep you from smiling!”

“I just wasn’t feeling it.” But that wasn’t it, and Claire knew it. There was a piece of paper on the counter, turned facedown, but the water had soaked through in places, and she saw tombstones drawn on it. Before Eve could stop her, Claire reached over and took it.

They were the same four tombstones as on the flyers that kept appearing at the Glass House, only this one was more personal. It had an arrow pointing at Eve’s grave, with the words, Soon, bitch written above it.

Eve shrugged. “It was on the counter when I got here for work.”

“Sorry,” Claire said. “People are asses.”

“Mostly,” Eve agreed. “Mocha, then?”

“Just hot cocoa.” Claire took the flyer she’d grabbed at Common Grounds out of her bag and put it on the counter, avoiding the drips of spilled drinks. “Did you see this?”

Eve mixed the cocoa and read the paper at the same time, which was pretty impressive. “Write-in candidates. Well, that’s an easy one. They’ll just pick whoever they want and write the ballots the way they want them to come out. And we bother voting why?”

“We can’t let that be the way things go,” Claire said earnestly. “We have to get people together to demand a free and fair election, counted by humans.”

“You have an impressive amount of crazy in that head. How exactly would you do that? Because I guarantee you, if you set up a Facebook page, they’ll kill it before you can refresh the screen. And don’t even think about Twitter.”

It was true; the vampires had a headlock on the electronic communications in town, and that stumped Claire for a moment. “Old school,” she said finally. “Captain Obvious is still around, right?” Captain Obvious was a little like the Spartacus of Morganville…. He was the guy in charge of organizing and leading the human resistance, in whatever form it took. Captain Obvious as an individual usually didn’t last long, but a new one was always waiting in the wings.

“Well, in theory, I guess,” Eve said. “Last one ran for it before the barriers went back up around town. Last I heard, though, there was nobody in charge of the human underground anymore, so it’s pretty much done for…not that it ever made any difference in the first place. Bunch of disorganized losers, mostly. Well, except for that one time they saved our lives. But if he’s still around, maybe he’s the one sending us the die-already notices, so maybe not an asset.”

Claire blinked and sipped the hot cocoa Eve handed her. Nobody was in line behind her, so she lingered at the counter. “The old Captain Obvious was outed, anyway. Everybody knew who he was. What if there was a new one? A secret one?”

“Sweetie, I’m pretty sure I’d have heard. I hear everything.” But Claire wasn’t listening now; her brain was firing off a chain of brilliant, random flashes, putting things together, planning—until Eve snapped fingers in front of her eyes and she realized Eve was saying something along the lines of Earth to whatever planet you’re circling.

“Sorry,” Claire said. She smiled slowly. “I think I’ve got it.”

“Swine flu? The answer to cold fusion? An aneurysm?”

“How do we get vampires not to ignore the results of the election?”

“You can’t.”

“Unless the results are what they want to see,” Claire said. “Then they’d just announce them, right? They wouldn’t bother to fake anything.”

“True.” Eve was eyeing her doubtfully. Very doubtfully. “What the hell are you thinking, CB?”

“We write in someone who is exactly what they want: a human connected to an old Morganville family. But one who isn’t afraid to get in the faces of the vamps.”

“Okay, maybe we need to walk this backward, because you’re not making any sense at all,” Claire said, and held Eve’s stare for long enough that she saw the light begin to—kind of dreadfully—dawn. “Shane?” her best friend said, and covered her ink blue lips with one pale hand. “You can’t run Shane for mayor. Come on! Shane’s the exact opposite of political!”

“I’m not talking about him,” Claire interrupted. “But there’s somebody else in this town who’s perfectly qualified. And perfectly unqualified at the same time. And if anyone knows about causing chaos in this town, it’s her.”

Silence. Dead, utter silence. Eve blinked, blinked again, and finally said, “What?”

But Claire was already walking away, humming softly under her breath, feeling for the first time in months that she had something actually going the right way in Morganville.

Ironic, really.

FOUR CLAIRE