Shane and Michael were making steady progress coming up from behind Miranda, and Michael nodded to Claire as she got into position. “Let’s all go in,” he said. Miranda shuffled awkwardly in place, as if her legs didn’t want to move, and turned to look at him over her shoulder. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to you, Mir.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s a little late for that, but I appreciate the thought. Did you know? I can’t tell the future anymore? It’s as if all the power I had went somewhere else.” She gestured down at herself. “Into this.”
That…might make some weird kind of sense, Claire thought, that Miranda’s powerful psychic gifts—the same ones that had led her to die inside the Glass House to save Claire’s life—had become a kind of life-support system for her, after death.
“But it means I don’t know anymore,” Miranda said. Her voice was fainter now, almost like a whisper. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m scared.”
“You don’t have to be,” Claire said, and stretched out her hand.
Miranda hesitated, then reached out.
But the second their skin touched, Miranda’s cracked like the thinnest ice, and an icy fog spilled out, searing Claire’s fingers with chill. She drew back with a cry, and there were cracks all over Miranda’s body now, racing through in lace black lines, and then she just…
She just broke.
For a few seconds the fog held together in a vague girl shape, and Claire heard a cry, a real and surprised and scared cry…
And then she was gone. Just completely gone, except for empty clothes lying in the street.
“Mir!” Claire felt the pressure in her hand vanish, and lunged forward, scissoring the air, hoping for something, anything…but there was nothing—just empty space.
Miranda had vanished completely, and her last word seemed to echo over and over in Claire’s mind.
Scared.
“Oh God,” she said in a whisper, and felt tears sting her eyes. Miranda had been dealt raw deals her whole life, up to and including dying in the Glass House at the hands of the draug, but it had felt like, finally, she was getting something going her way. A place of safety. A life, however limited, that she could call her own.
It was just…very sad—so sad that Claire felt tears choking her, and she fell into Shane’s arms, clinging to his solid warmth for a long few moments before he whispered in her ear, “We have to go back. It’s not safe out here.”
She didn’t want to go, but there wasn’t any point in risking their lives for someone who was already gone. So she let him guide her back toward the Glass House. Michael and Eve were already there. Eve, uncharacteristically, hadn’t shed a tear, from the flawless state of her mascara; she was usually the one prone to bursting into tears, but not this time. She just looked blank and shocked.
“Maybe she’s okay,” Eve said. Michael put his arm around her. “Maybe—oh God, Michael, did we make this happen? We started this, with all the talk about moving. If we hadn’t said that she was bothering us, maybe she wouldn’t have…have…”
“It’s not your fault,” Shane said quietly. “She was bound to try it, sooner or later; once she figured out she could make it out the door, she was going to keep pressing her luck. And anyway, you could be right. She might still be okay. Maybe she’s just not anchored anymore. It could be harder for her to get back or let us know she’s still around. Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow.”
He was trying to put the best face on it, but no matter what, it was grim. They’d lost someone, out here in the dark—a scared little girl, left on her own. Maybe for good.
And from the look in his eyes, even Shane knew they were all to blame.
Claire had been looking forward to spending the night in Shane’s company, in all the shades of meaning that might hold, but Miranda’s disappearance had taken all the joy out of it for them both. Michael and Eve seemed to be just the same. They all ended up sitting on the couch together and watching a DVD that none of them particularly cared about—something about time travel and dinosaurs—just because Eve had mentioned that it had been Miranda’s favorite out of their little store of home videos. Claire closed her eyes for most of it, leaning her head on Shane’s chest, listening to his slow, strong heartbeat, and allowing his steady strokes of her hair to soothe the grief a little. When the movie ended and silence fell, Michael finally asked if anybody wanted to play a game, but nobody seemed willing to take up the controllers—not even Shane, who had, as far as Claire could remember, never turned it down. That split Michael and Eve upstairs to their room, and left Claire and Shane sitting by themselves.
It felt chilly. Claire found herself shivering, but she didn’t want to move away from Shane’s embrace; he solved that by taking the afghan from the back of the couch and wrapping it around them both. “Well,” he finally said, “I guess the issue of moving is off the table, at least for right now.”
“Guess so,” Claire said. Tears threatened again, but she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand in an angry swipe. Enough. She knew she wasn’t really crying for Miranda at the moment; she was just feeling sorry for herself, for losing another brick in the wall of her zone of safety, for more change when she just wanted everything to stay the same. “But the issue’s not going away. And we can’t let our friends just…leave, Shane. It’s not right. It’s not safe.”
“It’s Morganville,” he said, and kissed her gently. “Safety isn’t something we get guaranteed.”
“They do.” She really meant, He does, because Michael was the one with the exemption to human rules, but surely that extended to Eve now that she was his wife. Wife—what a weird word; it still didn’t sound quite real to Claire’s mental ears. Eve was a wife. And Shane had raised the even weirder possibility that someday Eve might be a mother. Maybe that shouldn’t have been quite so strange to her, but she hadn’t had any other friends who’d gotten married; it was still a foreign concept when applied to an actual person, and she didn’t altogether understand why Michael and Eve, who’d been so easy with sharing a house when they were all single-but-committed, would be so weird about it now that there’d been an actual church ceremony.
“Well, you might have a point. The Glass family’s had special consideration for a long time,” Shane agreed. “Probably because as a rule they weren’t douche bags. But Eve’s family…” He hesitated, as though wondering whether this was something he should share. Then he must have decided it was, because he said, “Eve’s family had a bad rep, going back generations.”
“For…?”
“Some people suck up and stomp down, if you know what I mean. Eve’s family was like that: sucking up to the vamps at every opportunity, stomping on the heads of everybody they thought beneath them. Bullies. Kind of like the Morrells, only on a much smaller scale. That didn’t get them respect from the vamps, or the humans; they didn’t have money to buy people off, or the power to make them afraid. So I wouldn’t say Eve was born with the immunity idol or anything. Not like Michael was, when he was human. Everybody liked the Glass family.”
Claire had known Eve’s dad was bad, and her mom was pretty much wallpaper, but the knowledge that it had gone on for generations was revolting. Generation after generation, pandering to the vampires for favors, and giving up their children when the vampires got interested—as Brandon, the Rossers’ Protector, had ordered Eve to be given to him. Eve hadn’t played along, which was part of why she’d ended up in the Glass House with Michael in the beginning. She’d been so willing to rebel that she’d risked death to do it.
“So, you’re saying that Eve could be hit from both sides if she leaves this house.”
“I’m saying I think it’s pretty much certain. She’s got nobody but Michael to look after her, and he can’t be there all the time. She wouldn’t want him to be. It just…makes me worry.” Shane smiled a little and gave her a sideways glance. “Don’t get jealous. You’re still my number one girl.”