Bitter Blood

“Home,” she said, and slipped her arm through his. The only weight now was the stapler dragging down her backpack (and the anti-vamp knife and extra stakes that she rarely left behind) but it still felt like a ton. Shane took it from her and slipped it on one shoulder, and she envied those muscles—and admired them, too. They felt so warm and firm beneath her fingers, and it made her a bit light-headed, never mind the exhaustion. “What do you think Monica’s doing right now?”

“Bullying someone to make her a crappy Web site and some buttons?”

Claire groaned, because he was almost certainly right. “We created a monster.”

“Well, no. But we’re enabling one.”

By common unspoken consent, they avoided the street Common Grounds was on, which put them on a different, less traveled avenue; it was one that held some bad memories, Claire realized, and wished they’d risked Oliver’s wrath one more time.

This was the street where Shane’s house had once stood. There was nothing in the spot now except a bare, weed-choked lot, a cracked foundation, and the crumbling remains of what would have once been a fireplace. Even the mailbox, which had been leaning before, had given up the ghost and fallen to pieces of random, rusted metal.

“We don’t—maybe we should—” She couldn’t think how to say it, or even if she should, but Shane just kept walking, eyes fixed on the pavement ahead.

“It’s okay,” he said. She might have even believed him, a little, except for the slight hunch to his shoulders, and the way he’d lowered his head to let his shaggy hair veil his expression. “It’s just an empty lot.”

It wasn’t. It was full—full of grief and anger, anguish and terror. She could almost feel it like needles on her skin, an irresistible urge to slow down, to stop, to look. She wondered if Shane felt it, too. Maybe he did. He wasn’t walking quite as quickly as they approached the silent empty spot, which was choked with trash, scattered fire-blackened bricks, and the snarled balls of tumbleweeds.

It was the spot where Shane’s family home had once stood, before it had burned down, taking his sister away with it.

Just as they took their first steps in front of it, Shane stopped. Just…stopped, not moving at all, head still down, hands in his pockets. He slowly looked up, right into Claire’s startled eyes, and said, “Did you hear that?”

She shook her head, confused. All she heard was the normal, constant background noise of daily life—TV sets whispering from distant houses, radios in passing cars, the rattle of blown tumbleweeds against chain-link fences.

And then she heard something that sounded like a very soft, but clear, whisper. She couldn’t have said what it meant, couldn’t make out the word, but it didn’t sound like distant conversation, or TV dialogue, or anything like that. It sounded very…specific. And very close.

“Maybe…a cat?” she guessed. It could have been a cat. But she didn’t see anything as she glanced over the ruins of Shane’s childhood. The only things still recognizable about it having been a home was the foundation— cracked in places, but still there where it wasn’t hidden by weeds—and the jumbled outline of what must have once been a brick fireplace.

Shane didn’t look toward the lot at all. He kept looking at her, and she saw his eyes widen just as she, too, heard what he was hearing.

A voice. A clear girl’s voice, very, very soft, saying, Shane.

His face drained completely of color, and Claire thought for a second he was going to hit the pavement, but he managed to hold on, somehow, and turned toward the lot to say, “Lyss?” He took a tentative step toward it, but stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. “Alyssa?”

Shane.

It was very clear, and it did not sound like a real person’s voice—there was something eerie and cold and distant about it. Claire remembered the draug, the vampires’ enemies who lurked in water and lured with song; this held something of that quality to it—something just not right.

She grabbed Shane’s sleeve as he started to step onto the lot’s dirt. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

He stared at the tumbled wreckage of his house, and said, “I have to. She’s here, Claire. It’s Alyssa.”

His sister, Claire knew, had died in the fire that had wrecked this house—and he hadn’t been able to save her. It was the first, and maybe the biggest, trauma in a life that had since had way too many.

She didn’t even try to argue that it was impossible for his sister to be here, talking to him. There were far crazier things in Morganville than that. Ghosts? Those were no more unusual than drunken frat boys on a Friday night.

But she was scared. Very scared. Because there was a vast difference between ghosts who manifested themselves in the Founder Houses—like the Glass House, in which they lived—and one who could talk from thin air, powered by nothing at all. The first kind she could explain, theoretically at least. This?

Not so much.

“I have to do this,” Shane said again, and pulled free of her. He stepped into the weeds, into what had once been the carefully tended front lawn of a relatively stable family, and walked steadily forward. The broken remains of a sidewalk were hidden under those weeds, Claire realized; it was buckled and broken into raw chunks, but it was recognizable when she looked for it. Shane kept going forward, then stopped and said, “This used to be the front door.”

Claire devoutly did not want to do it, but she couldn’t leave him alone, not here, not like this. So she stepped forward, and instantly felt a chill close in over her—something that didn’t want her here. The pins-and-needles feeling swept over her again, and she almost stopped and backed up…but she wasn’t going to let it stop her.

Shane needed her.

She slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it hard. His face was set, jawline tight, and whatever he was looking at, it was not the rubble in front of them. “She died upstairs,” Shane said. “Lyss? Can you hear me?”

“I really don’t know if this is a good—” Claire caught her breath as the pins and needles poked again, deeply. Painfully. She could almost see the tiny little stab marks on her arms, the beads of blood, though she knew there was no physical damage at all.

“Lyss?” Shane stepped forward, over the nonexistent threshold, into what would have been the house. “Alyssa—”

He got an answer. Shane. It was a sigh, full of something Claire couldn’t really comprehend—maybe a sadness, maybe longing, maybe something darker. You came back.

He sucked in a deep, shaking breath, and let go of Claire’s hand to reach forward, into empty air. “Oh God, Lyss, I thought—how can you still be—”

Always here, the whisper said. So much sadness; Claire could hear it now. The resentment she felt was that of a baby sister hating that someone else had taken her brother from her; it might be dangerous, but it was understandable, and the sadness brought a lump into Claire’s throat. Can’t go. Help.

“I can’t,” Shane whispered. “I can’t help you. I couldn’t then and I can’t now, Lyss…. I don’t know how, okay? I don’t know what you need!”

Home.

There were tears shining in his eyes now, and he was shaking. “I can’t,” he said again. “Home’s gone, Lyss. You have to—you have to move on. I have.”

No.

There was a wisp of movement at the edge of Claire’s vision, and then she felt a shove, a distinct shove, that made her take a step back toward the sidewalk. When she tried to move toward Shane again, the pins and needles came back, but it felt more like a pinch now, sudden and vicious. She hissed and grabbed her arm, and this time when she looked down, she saw she had a red mark, just as if someone had physically hurt her.

Alyssa really didn’t care for the idea that her brother had found a girlfriend, and Claire found herself skipping backward, pushed and bullied back all the way to the sidewalk.

Shane stayed where he was. “Please, can I—can I see you?”

There was that faint hint of movement again, mists at the corners of her vision, and Claire thought that for a