Claire hesitated a long moment, then leaned over and hugged Eve, giving her a gentle and awkward kind of embrace that made her aware of just how fragile the girl was—how fragile they all were.
“Love you,” she said.
“Yeah, whatever, you, too,” Eve said, but she smiled a little. “Go. Give him a call. He’ll listen to you—or at least Shane will.”
And for the love of her, Claire tried, but the phone kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing, straight to voice mail.
And the day slipped away as they anxiously waited.
SIXTEEN
MICHAEL
The anger that had hold of me made me ache all over, especially in my eyeteeth; I’d rarely experienced the urge to bite somebody in pure rage, but damn, I wanted to sink my fangs deep in someone now. Roy Farmer, that little son of a bitch, to start, and then the rest of his murderous little crew.
Eve had looked so broken, lying in that bed. So unlike the bundle of strength and energy I loved. I really hadn’t known, deep down, how much she meant to me until I’d seen her like that, and known, really and deeply known, that I could lose her.
Nobody hurt my girl and got away with it.
Shane was angry, too, but—and this was a reversal of our usual roles as friends—he was the cautious one, the one telling me to play it smart and not let anger drive the bus. He was right, of course, but right didn’t matter so much just now. I wanted blood, and I wanted to taste it and feel the fear spicing it like pepper. I wanted them to know how she’d felt, helpless and terrified and alone.
And yeah, it probably wasn’t fair, but I was angry at Claire for leaving her, even for a moment. I knew she’d done the right thing, drawing off the mob, but that had left Eve lying bleeding on a sidewalk. Alone. And I couldn’t get that image out of my head. She could have died alone.
I understood how Shane felt when he drove his fist through a wall. Some things, only violence could erase.
“Roy lives over on College Street,” Shane said, “but he won’t be there. He lives with his parents. He’s a punk, but not so much of one that he’d run home to his mommy.”
“Where, then?” We were in Eve’s hearse, and Shane was driving; I was sitting in the blacked-out back area. Shane had verbally kicked my ass about risking sunburn when I’d wanted to walk; he’d made me stop off and grab a long coat and hat and gloves, too, just in case. “You know the guy, right?”
“Kinda,” he said. “Roy’s one of those vampire-hunter-wannabe types, came to me a couple of times for pointers on things, and showed me things he was working on as weapons. He hero-worshipped my dad, which tells you a little bit about how screwed-up he is. I never thought he’d do this, though. Not coming out for Eve, or any of us. Didn’t think he’d have the guts.”
“It doesn’t take guts to kick a girl half to death,” I said. Shane said nothing to that, just gave me an uneasy look in the rearview and tightened his grip on the wheel. “Where would he be?”
“Probably at the ’Stro,” Shane said. “He has a sick hand-built Cadillac he likes to show off there. He’s probably getting back-slaps from his buddies about how awesome he is.”
The Astro was an abandoned old drive-in on the outskirts of Morganville, just barely within its borders; it had a graying movie screen that tilted more toward the desert floor every year, and the pavement had cracked and broken in the sun, letting sage and Joshua bushes push up through the gaps. The concession stand had fallen down a couple of years back, and somebody had touched off a bonfire there for high school graduation.
It went without saying that the place was a favorite of the underage drinking and drugging crew.
Shane drove out there. It was close to twilight now, and sunset had stacked itself in bands of color on the horizon; the leaning timbers of the Astro’s screen loomed as the tallest thing around in the flatland, and Shane circled the peeling tin fence until he came to the entrance. The cops made periodic efforts to chain it shut, but that lasted only as long as it took for someone to cut the lock off—and most of those who hung out here had toolboxes built in the beds of their trucks.
Sure enough, the entrance stood gaping, one leaf of it creaking in the fierce, constant wind. Sand rattled the windshield as Shane made the turn, and he slowed down. “Got to watch out for bottles,” he said. “The place is land-mined with them.”
He was right. My eyes were better in the dark, and I could see the drifts of dark brown bottles, some intact, most broken into shards. The fence line was peppered with shotgun blasts, and I got the feeling that a lot of the empties had been used for target practice. Standard drunken-country-teen behavior; I couldn’t say I hadn’t done some of that myself, before I’d been forced to adapt to something different.
I didn’t miss it, though.
Shane’s headlights cut harsh across dusty green sage, the spiked limbs of mesquite pushing up out of the broken pavement, and, in the far corner of the lot, a gleam of metal. Cars, about six of them. Most were pickups, the vehicle of choice out here in Nowhere, Texas, but one was a sharply gleaming Caddy, painted electric blue, with shimmering chrome rims. Shane was right. It was a sick car.
A bunch of kids—about twenty of them—were sitting on the hoods of the vehicles, passing bottles, cigs, pills, whatever else they had to share.
They watched the slow approach of the hearse with the wary attention of people who might have to run for it at any moment. The only reason they hadn’t scurried already was that it wasn’t a standard vampire sedan, or a cop car.
Roy Farmer was sitting on the hood of his Caddy with his arm around a plump blond girl. They were both wearing cowboy hats and boots. She must have been cold in her tank top and torn jeans shorts, but from the looks of her, she was too drunk to care. Roy watched as the hearse pulled to a stop, and he took a long pull out of the brown bottle in his hand.
“Mike,” Shane said as I reached for the door. “Seriously, man, slow your roll. He wouldn’t just be sitting there like this if he didn’t have something up his sleeve. He has to know you’d be coming for him. Let me check it first.”
I didn’t bother to answer. I wasn’t letting Shane, or anyone, do this. If Roy had come after Eve, he’d come after me, and I couldn’t let him see it any other way. Maybe it was loyalty; maybe it was possessiveness. I don’t know; Eve wasn’t there to set me straight on the difference. But I knew that it was my job, not Shane’s, to make Roy regret it.
Maybe that was part of being married. Or maybe it was just me, discovering for the first time that I really, truly wanted Eve to look up to me and believe that I could—and would—protect her. She’d probably laugh and call me a Neanderthal, but secretly, deep down, she’d be pleased.
I got out of the hearse and walked over toward the other cars. The teens fell silent, watching me. Nobody ran, nobody reacted overtly, but they were all ready; I could see it in the tension of their bodies. Even the stoners put down their drugs of choice to pay attention.
I knew how it was. I’d rarely been one to come hang out here, but I was a Morganville kid. We’d all been taught to watch vampires with complete attention when one was in the area.
“You,” I said, and nodded at Roy. He stayed where he was, one arm draped over his girlfriend’s shoulders. “Just you. Everybody else gets a free pass tonight.”
“Hey, look; it’s the big man off campus,” he said. “I’m busy. Screw you.”