What’s a tinker? Claire wondered. She started to ask, but didn’t want to sound stupid. “Thank you,’” she said, and carefully lowered her backpack to the wooden floor, then slid into one of the two chairs facing the desk. “Ma’am.’”
“So polite,’” Amelie said. “And in a time when manners are forgotten…you do understand what manners are, don’t you, Claire? Behaviors that allow humans to live closely together without killing each other. Most of the time.’”
“Yes, ma’am.’”
Silence. Somewhere behind Claire, a big clock ticked away minutes; she felt a drop of sweat glide down her neck and splash into the fabric of her black knit shirt. Amelie was staring at her without blinking or moving, and that was weird. Wrong. People just didn’t do that.
But then, Amelie wasn’t people. In fact, of all the vampires, in many ways she was the most not-people.
“Sam asked about you,’” Claire blurted, just because it popped into her head and she wanted Amelie to stop staring at her. It worked. Amelie blinked, shifted her weight, and leaned forward to rest her pointed chin on her folded hands, elbows still braced on the arms of the chair.
“Sam,’” she said slowly, and her gaze wandered up and to her right, fixed on nothing. Trying to remember, Claire thought; she’d noticed how people—even vampires, apparently—did that with their eyes when remembering things. “Ah yes. Samuel.’” Her gaze snapped back to Claire with unnerving speed. “And how did you come to chat with dear young Samuel?’”
Claire shrugged. “He wanted to talk to me.’”
“About?’”
“He asked about you. I—think he’s lonely.’”
Amelie smiled. She wasn’t trying to impress Claire with her vampiness—no need for that!—so her teeth looked white and even, perfectly normal. “Of course he’s lonely,’” she said. “Samuel is the youngest. No one older trusts him; no one younger exists. He has no ties to the vampire community, save me, and no ties left to the human world. He is more alone than anyone you will ever meet, Claire.’”
“You say that like you…want him that way. Alone, I mean.’”
“I do,’” Amelie said calmly. “My reasons are my own. However, it is an interesting experiment, to see how someone so alone will react. Samuel has been intriguing; most vampires would have simply turned brutal and un-caring, but he continues to seek comfort. Friendship. He is unusual, I think.’”
“You’re experimenting on him!’” Claire said.
Amelie’s platinum eyebrows slowly rose to form perfect arches over her cold, amused eyes. “Clever of you to think such a thing, but attend: a rat who knows it is running a maze is no longer a useful subject. So you will keep your counsel, and you will keep your distance from dear sweet Samuel. Now. Why did you come to me today?’”
“Why did I…?’” Claire cleared her throat. “I think maybe there’s been a mistake. I was, you know, looking for a bathroom.’”
Amelie stared at her for a frozen second, and then she threw back her head and laughed. It was a full, living sound, warm and full of unexpected joy, and when it passed, Claire could see the traces of it still on her face and in her eyes. Making her look almost…human. “A bathroom,’” she repeated, and shook her head. “Child, I have been told many things, but that may yet prove the most amusing. If you wish a bathroom, please, go through that door. You will find all that you require.’” Her smile faded. “But I think you came to ask me something more.’”
“I didn’t come here at all! I was going to the Morganville Historical Society….’”
“I am the Morganville Historical Society,’” Amelie said. “What do you wish to know?’”
Claire liked books. Books didn’t talk back. They didn’t sit there in their fancy throne chairs and look all queeny and imposing and terrifying, and they didn’t have fangs and bodyguards. Books were fine. “Um…I just wanted to look something up…?’”
Amelie was already losing patience. “Just tell me, girl. Quickly. I am not without duties.’”
Claire cleared her throat nervously, coughed, and said, “I wanted to find out about Eve’s brother, Jason. Jason Rosser.’”
“Done,’” Amelie said, and although she didn’t seem to do anything, not even lift a finger, the side door opened and her cute but deathly pale assistant leaned in. “The Rosser family file,’” she told him. He nodded and was gone. “You would have wasted your time,’” Amelie said to Claire. “There are no personnel files of any kind in the Historical Society building. It is purely for show, and the information there is inaccurate, at best. If you want to know the true history of things, little one, come to someone who has lived it.’”
“But that’s just perspective,’” Claire said. “Not fact.’”
“All fact is perspective. Ah, thank you, Henry.’” Amelie accepted a folder from her assistant, who silently left again. She flipped it open, studied what was inside, and then handed it over to Claire. “An unexceptional family. Curious that it produced young Eve and her brother.’”
It was their whole lives reduced to dry entries in longhand on paper. Dates of births, details of school records…there were handwritten reports from the vampire Brandon, who gave them Protection. Even those were dry.
And then not so dry, because between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, Eve changed. Big-time. The school photograph at fifteen was of a pretty, fragile-looking girl dressed in conservative clothes—something even Claire would have worn.
Eve’s photograph at sixteen was Goth City. She’d dyed her dark hair a flat glossy black, whited her face, raccooned her eyes, and generally adopted a ’tude. By seventeen she’d started getting piercings—one showed in the tongue she stuck out at the camera.
By eighteen, she looked pensive and defiant, and then the photographs stopped, except for some that looked like surveillance photos of Eve in Common Grounds, pulling espresso shots and chatting with customers.
Eve with Oliver.
You’re supposed to be looking up Jason, Claire reminded herself, and flipped the page.
Jason was just the same, only younger; about the time that Eve had turned Goth, so had Jason, although on him it looked less like a fashion choice and more like a serious turn to the dark side. Eve always had a light of humor and mischief in her eyes; Jason had no light in his eyes at all. He looked skinny, strong, and dangerous.
And Claire realized with an icy start that she’d seen him before…. He’d been on the street, staring at her just before she’d gone into Common Grounds and talked to Sam.
Jason Rosser knew who she was.
“Jason likes knives, as I recall,’” Amelie said. “He sometimes fancies himself a vampire. I should be quite careful of him, were I you. He is not likely to be as…polite as my own people.’”
Claire shivered and flipped pages, speed-reading through Jason’s not-very-impressive academic life, and then the police reports.
Eve had been the witness who’d turned him in. She’d seen him abduct this girl and drive away with her—a girl who was later found wandering the streets bleeding from a stab wound. The girl refused to testify, but Eve had gone on record. And Jason had gone away.
The file showed he’d been released from prison the day before yesterday at nine in the morning. Plenty of time for him to have grabbed Karla Gast on campus and…
Out with the bad thoughts, Claire. In with the good.
She flipped pages and looked at Eve’s mother and dad. They looked…normal. Kind of grim, maybe, but with a son like Jason, that probably wasn’t too strange. Still, they didn’t look like the kind of parents who’d just toss their daughter out on her ear and never write or call or visit.
Claire closed the file and slid it back across the desk to Amelie, who put it in a wooden out-box at the corner of her desk. “Did you find what you wished to know?’” Amelie asked.
“I don’t know.’”
“What a wise thing to say,’” Amelie said, and nodded once, like a queen to a subject. “You may go now. Use the door that brought you.’”