But I didn’t try.
I left him there to die.
Just like he left you. Remember? Left you to be eaten. You need to wake up. NOW.
Nobody had left me behind. I was fine. I was just fine.
It’s you in there. You’re being consumed, Shane. Eaten. Can’t you feel it?
I did, for an agonizing second of utter horror. Felt it stripping me bare. Felt the invasion.
And then the calm settled over me, and it was all okay.
Everything was okay.
Always.
The clock ran faster after that.
The time between the pool and Claire’s eighteenth birthday was a gauzy blur; I didn’t remember much, but nothing much happened to remember, either. Amelie got better. Vampires came back. Morganville got rebuilt. Nothing ever changes, really—that’s how Morganville is. It just … exists.
I was just happy. We were all … happy. Claire cried over Myrnin, but she was happy he had saved us, happy he had died a hero.
The hero of Morganville.
The martyr.
You’re no martyr. You’re a fighter. So fight. NOW. Stop this!
Everything was fine.
One year to the day from their not-so-successful engagement party, Michael and Eve finally tied the knot, in the church with Father Joe presiding. Amelie gave her blessing, and I had to wear a tuxedo and a tie. Eve wore bloodred. Of course she did. Claire was the one who looked like a bride, really; she was wearing some other color, but I didn’t really notice except to see the light in her eyes and the smile on her lips as Michael and Eve kissed under the flower arch. Eve threw the bouquet, and as usual, her throwing arm sucked, especially backward, because somehow she managed to throw it to me. I tossed it back. On the second try she hit Monica Morrell, Bitch Queen, which was so not going to happen; no man in his right mind would go there.
At some point when we were passing around the champagne and cutting the cake and dancing, I remember Eve twirling in my arms, light and damp with sweat, and she looked me in the eye and said, “This is a lie, Shane. It’s all a lie, and you know it deep down. Wake up. You have to wake up.” But then she was gone, dancing away with Michael, and I forgot.
It was so much easier to just … forget. Let go. Drift.
I think it was around this time that I went to see Claire’s family. Her mom and dad had moved out of Morganville, because of his health problems more than anything else, though she’d been happy to have them out of the fray; they sort of remembered Morganville, but not the vampires. I went by myself, with Amelie’s permission, and ended up standing in front of Claire’s parents—her dad looked a whole lot healthier, which was odd—to tell them what was on my mind.
“I want to marry your daughter,” I said. Pretty much just like that … no hello, no buildup, nothing, because I was nervous and it just came out.
And Mr. Danvers smiled and said, “Of course you do.” There was something great about that smile, and also, something … off. It was exactly what I’d hoped to see. And that was … weird.
No, there wasn’t anything weird about getting what I wanted for a change. I deserved to be happy. I needed to be happy.
It’s a lie, Shane. Wake up.
Mrs. Danvers said, “Shane, she couldn’t have a better young man.” And her husband nodded. I looked at them for a few seconds in silence. I was sitting in their living room, which looked a lot like the living room they’d had back in Morganville—but then, they would have kept the same furniture, wouldn’t they? I even recognized all the pictures on the walls. They’d put them back in the same spots.
The last time I’d sat down with them like this, it hadn’t gone nearly so well. Oh, no. Mr. Danvers had been angry, and I hadn’t blamed him, because I’d never intended all this to go so fast with Claire, but I’d said I loved her and I meant it. I still did.
“You’re not angry?” I finally asked. Mr. Danvers chuckled. He sounded just like one of those fathers on an old TV show, I forget which one.
“Of course not,” he said. “Why would we be? You’ve always been there for her, Shane. You’ve always looked after her. And we know she loves you.”
I found myself saying, “What about the stuff you said last time? That she had to wait until after college? About MIT and a career and everything?”
“Well,” Mrs. Danvers said, with that warm, sweet smile that my own mother had never given me, although she’d done her best, “that’s Claire’s decision, of course, but we’ll support whatever she feels is more important.”
It’s all so easy, isn’t it? Like a dream. Exactly like a dream. Wake up.
I didn’t want to wake up. I liked it here.
I found myself shaking Mr. Danvers’s hand, and getting a hug from Claire’s mom, and promising to work with her on the wedding, and all of a sudden I was in my car—when had I gotten the car? I couldn’t remember, but it seemed like I’d had it all along, my own black, shiny, murdered-out car—and driving back to Morganville, with Claire’s grandmother’s wedding ring in my pocket. It was a diamond with rubies on both sides.
No, that was your mother’s ring. Your dad pawned it, remember? To get the money to send you back to Morganville. You didn’t want him to do it. You can’t have it now, can you?
Of course I could.
I was getting married.
The only problem was, none of it seemed real as it sped forward. Not the days that passed in a haze, not when Michael and Eve moved out on their own and left me and Claire the Glass House (and why would they do that, it was Michael’s house, why would he leave it to us?).
Newlyweds needed their own place, Eve told me, and winked. But she didn’t seem like Eve anymore. She was almost … a shadow. Threadbare. A memory of someone I’d known once.
But Claire … Claire was still real. Wasn’t she? I couldn’t tell anymore. It was as if I was watching us, not being us. A voyeur in my own body.
Not that that was a bad thing, sometimes, but there were other times when time just seemed to slip sideways, and the walls seemed to sag, and everything flickered … but it was just the machines in Myrnin’s lab, Claire said. They malfunctioned. She had to fix them. She was in charge of them now. Amelie said she was smarter than Myrnin had ever been. The savior of Morganville.
Wake up! Can’t you see how wrong this is?
Claire and I were married in the church by Father Joe, and Eve and Michael were our maid of honor and best man. Eve wore red, and Michael had on the same tux, and we stood under the flower arch, the same flower arch they’d been married beneath, and when I turned around it seemed like it was the same people, sitting in the same places, wearing the same clothes, and everything was pale and patchwork for a moment and I felt panic tearing at me …
And then Claire took my hand. Her fingers felt cool and gentle, but they stung a little bit, too. She kissed me, and it tasted sweet and salty and it stung, too, like lemon on a cut, but this was Claire and I had to love it, because I loved her. The gold ring with its diamond and rubies winked on her hand, and she was my wife.
My mother’s ring. I can’t have my mother’s ring—it’s gone ….
WAKE UP.
Then the vampires left Morganville. One day they were just … gone. Amelie left a note, saying that she was leaving the town to us and that she trusted us to run it properly. Eve inherited the coffee shop where she’d worked so many years. Michael became a rock star overnight and went on tour, and I never thought to wonder how he was managing that, given the blood drinking and all, much less the sunlight. I was busy, you see. Busy being the new mayor of Morganville. The rule of the Morrell family was over, and Richard owned a used-car lot and Monica worked at a nail salon, until one day she got run over by a bus. Very sad.