Bitter Blood

Toward the sun slipping steadily below the horizon.

“For sunset,” she said, and stepped out from behind the bookcase. Clearly a ghost. Clearly a walking dead girl.

There was a sudden, vivid silence as Michael, Jenna, and Angel all stopped talking, and everyone focused right on Miranda. Claire could even hear the tiny mechanical whir of Tyler adjusting the focus on his camera.

“Hello,” Miranda said. “My name is Miranda. I’m a ghost.”

And then she vanished.

“No!” Jenna screamed. “No, please, come back! I want to help you. We want to help. Don’t run!”

And that was the exact moment the sun completely set outside, and Miranda fell out of the ceiling, going from mist to solid in midair, and thumping flat on her face on the floor in the middle of the rug.

She said, in a muffled voice, “Ow.”

No one said anything else for a moment. And then Jenna said, in a flat, odd voice, “Tyler? Please tell me you got that.”

* * *

For what felt like minutes, nobody seemed able to move. The three ghost hunters looked like wax statues, frozen in their poses, unable to process what they’d just seen. Tyler finally moved the camera away from his eyes and blinked, as if not sure exactly what had gone wrong with his eyes.

“Well, that was awkward,” Shane finally said, and crouched down next to Miranda. “You okay, kid?”

She wasn’t. She stayed facedown for a long moment, shuddering, and Claire remembered with a shock that when Michael had been trapped as a ghost, he’d reexperienced how he’d died, every day. That was particularly awful for Miranda, who’d been killed by the draug—not a pleasant way to go.

Shane helped her sit up, and Miranda gave him a grateful, brave little smile. “Sorry,” she said, “but I needed to get their attention.”

“Well, you’ve got it,” Jenna said, barking out a laugh. “We can’t leave. We have the biggest thing that’s ever been recorded in ghost hunting. Hell, not just ghost hunting. Science. This isn’t just huge, it’s—it’s world-breaking! It changes everything!”

Angel clearly didn’t know what to say. He was staring down at Miranda with a curiously blank expression, as if he really didn’t know how to handle this at all. He was more of an actor than someone who really believed, Claire thought, and unlike Jenna, who saw it as vindication, he saw it as upheaval. When Miranda plunged out of the air, his world had definitely broken, and it looked as if he’d be a while trying to put it all back together again.

Tyler hadn’t said a word. He was still recording, as if too frozen to stop, but Claire heard him muttering under his breath, “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap, what the hell!”

She’d felt the same way, the first time she’d seen Michael coalesce out of thin air. But by then, she’d already known about vampires. Her world had already been spun off its axis; the ghost team was having to make a whole lot of adjustments pretty damn quickly.

Jenna leaned in toward Miranda as she climbed to her feet. “You’ve been speaking to me, haven’t you? Trying to help us?”

“No, I—” Miranda looked tired, and very worried. “I wanted to warn you. You were getting them all upset. It was going to get you hurt.”

“Who?”

“All the ghosts.”

“But that’s why we’re here, to talk to—”

“Morganville isn’t like any other town,” Miranda said, cutting her off, and met her eyes with an intensity that made Jenna blink. “You came here looking for ghosts, and they heard you. And that’s dangerous. There’s—okay, I can’t explain so much of it, but there’s power here. Old power. And sometimes the dead can use it if you give them access. You opened up the tap, I guess. And now we need to shut it off before something worse happens.”

“This is insane,” Angel said, and stood next to Jenna. “Clearly, this is the most sophisticated hoax I’ve ever seen, but…”

“Shut up,” Jenna said. She was staring intently at Miranda, and suddenly she reached out and took the girl’s hand in hers. “You feel real. You look real.”

“I am,” Miranda said. “Half the time. But it’s because I’m like you. I had power, and the house could use that to save me—not all the way, but this way. During the day, though, I’m mostly invisible. It was hard to make you see me just now, even inside the house. I’m getting better, though.”

“You’re—you’re a real spirit.”

“Yes,” she said, and shook Jenna’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Jenna burst out in a delighted laugh and kept shaking Miranda’s hand until the girl finally pulled free.

“It’s a hoax,” Angel said again. “Jenna, you can’t believe any of this. It’s obviously…”

“It’s okay,” Miranda said to him. “It’ll take time to sink in. I know.”

“Shut up!” he growled at her.

“Hey!” Eve said, and took a step forward. “She’s a kid. Watch your mouth. Miranda, you don’t have to talk to them. If that’s going to be their attitude, they can shove that camera up their—”

“Eve,” Michael said, and shook his head. “Not helpful.” He got behind Tyler and tapped him on the shoulder. “I’m going to need that thing.”

Tyler jerked forward, crowding protectively shoulder to shoulder with Angel. “Oh hell no, man. You’re not taking this away.”

“You don’t think so?” Michael’s eyes had little random flickers of red showing. Claire waved at him behind their backs and pointed toward her own eyes, then at him. He caught the message, and she saw him calm down with an effort. “Look, whatever you think you saw, you just didn’t understand. There’s nothing supernatural going on here. It’s a trapdoor. She came from the next floor up.”

Tyler and Angel both craned their necks to look up at the totally smooth ceiling…and Michael, vampire fast, snatched the camera away and backpedaled when Tyler came after him. “Don’t make me crush it,” he said. “It looks expensive.”

“It is, man. Give it back!”

“Sure. Hang on.” Michael looked it over, ignoring Tyler’s attempts to grab it away again, and found the memory chip, which he ejected. He held it up, and handed the camera back. “No problem.”

“You can’t keep that!”

“Not planning to,” Michael agreed. He snapped it in half, then tore the halves into smaller pieces. Then he put the pieces in his jeans pocket. “Done. Sorry, Mir, but you know they can’t walk out of here with that footage.”

She nodded in agreement, but Claire sensed something was wrong, especially when Tyler exchanged a fast glance with Angel and Jenna. “You asshole,” Tyler muttered, but it sounded like something he felt he ought to say, not that he deeply felt. He backed off. “Maybe we should go, guys. Next thing, they’ll be breaking our necks. Angel’s right. This is some hell of a hoax.”

Jenna looked at Miranda again. “You can talk to me,” she said gently. “You really can. I’m not afraid of you.”

“No,” Miranda said. “I know. But I’m afraid of you. And what you can do. You made them hungry, and now they’re dangerous. Don’t you understand that?”

“Maybe,” Jenna said. “My twin sister died, and she stayed with me for the longest time. Not real, like you are, but—there. But she changed. Turned evil. I had to…I had to get rid of her, send her away.”

“You don’t understand,” Miranda said. “It wasn’t something else. It was you. You changed her. You made her see a way back, and that makes them—us…ghosts— desperate. Desperate enough to do anything. It’s you that’s making it happen.”

“You’re not one of them, those lost people. You’re loved here. Loved. Protected. And that’s good; that’s really good. I just want to be sure you’re protected from the things your friends can’t see and fight.” Jenna took in a deep breath and blew it out. “I think that you and I together could—could fix whatever it was I did wrong. You could show me how.”

“You need to leave,” Miranda said. “You need to go before it’s too late and everything goes completely wrong. I’m sorry.”

“But—”