“It doesn’t matter who she saved. The point is that she allowed herself, our queen, to be put at risk for others, and that is foolish, and emotional. The time of Elizabeth in armor is long over. Queens have ever ruled far from the battles.”
“News flash, lady. There are no queens anymore,” Shane said. He loaded shells in a shotgun and snapped it shut, then searched for a place to strap it on that didn’t interfere with the flamethrower. “No queens, no kings, no emperors. Not in America. Only CEOs. Same thing, but not so many crowns.”
“Vampires will always have rulers,” Naomi said. “It is the order of things.” She said it like the sky was blue, a plain and obvious fact. Shane shrugged and gave Claire a look; she shrugged back. Vamp politics were so not their business. “Come. We must find the doctor.”
Shane shook his head. “He’s the only one you have?”
“No,” Naomi said, “but he is the best, and the only one we have who has moved somewhat beyond medieval techniques of bleeding and cupping.” She handed Claire a shotgun and gave her a doubtful look. “You can shoot?”
Claire nodded as she loaded the cartridges. “Shane taught me.” Not that it was easy for someone her size; a shotgun packed a hard kick to the shoulder, and she’d always come away from practice bruised and aching. Naomi was even more frail, but Claire was willing to bet that it would be nothing for her.
Shane settled his flamethrower more comfortably on his shoulders. “Ladies? After you.”
“Rude,” Claire said.
“I was being polite!”
“Not when you have a flamethrower.”
CHAPTER TWO
MICHAEL
I miss my guitar.
That sounded stupid in my head, and it probably was stupid, but my fingers ached to be holding the weight of it. Music always stilled the noise inside me, made everything seem orderly, logical, not so out of control and terrifying. From the first time I’d picked up an instrument I’d realized that those sounds that other people made, famous people … those could be mine, mine to control, mine to use to speak without words. And that had been more than magic.
It had been survival.
Now, without my guitar, I felt naked, alone, out of control. But it would be deeply risky to go back to the house to retrieve anything, much less something everybody would see as nonessential. Maybe I could get to the music store where I taught lessons; that was farther uptown, away from where the draug were holed up. Didn’t matter if it was closed. A vampire didn’t have to seriously worry about things like locked doors and steel screens over windows, and entry restrictions didn’t apply to stores.
I still couldn’t quite reconcile that. I was a vampire.
I know, it wasn’t a revelation, exactly …. I had been a vampire for a while now, and before that, I’d been half vampire, half ghost, trapped in my house, put on hold between life and death. But until today, I hadn’t felt so … wrong. So alien.
So not myself.
Naomi, who had taken more interest in me than the others, had warned me this would happen, that I’d start to feel distance between me and the humanity I’d once had; she’d warned me that living as I did, trying to still be what I’d been, would start to hurt me, and hurt the people I cared about.
And she’d been right. I’d proven that, hadn’t I? I’d lost control. I’d bitten Eve.
I’d almost killed her.
The shirt they’d given me to wear, to replace the one soaked with foul water and wet with Eve’s blood … the shirt itched. It felt wrong. I ripped it off over my head and threw it on the floor as I paced. When I looked down, my skin was too white, the veins too blue. I looked like living marble, and I felt as cold as that, too.
And inside, I was shaking. My whole world was shaking. It wasn’t just the draug, though we all were afraid of them …. I was afraid of me, of what I was, what I was capable of doing to the people I supposedly loved.
Love. Did I even really know what that meant now? Had I ever really known? What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking, risking her life every time I was around her? I’d thought I had it all under control, handled, fixed, and then … then all my illusions of being in charge of the monster broke.
I paced, and tried not to think about how good that had felt. I hadn’t realized how on guard, how tense, how desperately tight my control had been until I’d been forced to let go.
Something went very still inside me, and I paused in my rambling, because Eve was coming.
I heard her walking toward me in the hall, despite the thick carpets; I could smell Eve’s skin, the individual and soft perfume of her.
The door opened and closed behind me. Now I could smell the peach-scented shampoo she’d used, and the soap, and the salty hot blood beneath all of that.
I didn’t turn around.
“Where’s your shirt?” she asked me.
“It itches,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not cold.” But I was. Room temperature, except when her skin warmed me up. Cold as the dead. “I’m going to go look for something else.”
I turned then, but Eve was blocking my path to the door. My heart didn’t beat anymore—not often, anyway—but it still felt like a stab straight into it when I looked at her directly. She was standing there, fearless, chin up, with a white bandage on her neck and a scarf trying to disguise the damage I’d done. That was Eve, all over—hurt, and hiding it. The Goth look had always been armor against her terror of the vampires. The retro polka-dot dress, the shoes, all of it was just another form of armor now. Some kind of shield to hold between the real girl and the world.
And me.
“That’s it?” she asked me. “Your shirt itches, and you’re going to get another one? That’s what you’re going with in this conversation, here.”
I couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, I sat down on a camp bed and sleeping bag—not mine; mine was a shredded pile of fluff. I fiddled with the shirt in my hands, and pulled it over my head again. It wasn’t the clothing that was the problem, anyway. It was me that itched all over, remembering … remembering what it had felt like to utterly surrender myself to hunger. I hadn’t stopped myself. I wouldn’t have stopped myself. Drinking her blood had been … bliss. Heaven. As close as I would ever come to it, now.
I’d thought I understood what being a vampire was all about, until that moment of sheer, red pleasure when I’d grabbed Eve and mindlessly fed. It felt like the floor had broken open under me and all my assumptions, and now I was in free fall, grabbing for a life that was moving away from me at light speed.
If it hadn’t been for Claire somehow—using the strength of desperation, I guessed—pulling me off just long enough for some sanity to return, I’d have killed the woman I loved.
The woman standing in front of me right now, waiting for my answer.
“I can’t do this,” I said. The words felt dull gray in my mouth, like a mouthful of lead, and they landed just as heavily on her. I wasn’t watching her face—I couldn’t—but I had a vivid mental picture of the suffering in her eyes. And the anger. “Let it alone, Eve.”
“You mean, let you alone,” she said, and crouched down, perfectly balanced on those ridiculous prim retro heels, to stare me in the face. Her eyes were big and dark and, yes, they were haunted and full of pain, pain I had caused, was causing her now. “Michael, it wasn’t your fault, but you hurt me, and we have to talk about this before it gets … inside us. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I did. And it was already inside us. Inside me, anyway, eating away like acid, burning and sizzling and toxic. “Talk about it,” I repeated. “You want to talk about it.”