Eve and Shane got home first, while Claire was devouring a peanut butter sandwich. She didn’t tell them about the visit from Amelie and Oliver, and besides, they looked pretty grim. She was sure they wouldn’t really care.
“What?” she asked. Shane snagged half her sandwich from her plate as he passed. “Hey!”
“Worked up an appetite, watching Miss Bad Attitude’s back,” he said around a mouthful of bread. “She goes to the most interesting places. I mean interestingin terms of scary as hell.”
“Do nottell Claire about that club,” Eve said, and took off her metallic sunglasses. Behind them, her mascara was smeared, and her eyes were red—not vampire red, but more like an overdose of tears. “Besides, it’s not like I just randomly decided to go there. It’s where Kim liked to hang out.”
“What kind of club?” Claire whispered to Shane.
“Leather,” he whispered back. “She’s right; you really don’t want to know.”
“Kim hasn’t been there in a couple of days,” Eve said. “But we found a few vampires who did interviews with her recently, for her history project.”
From the expression on Shane’s face, there was more to the story. Claire said, doubtfully, “And they just told you? Just like that?”
“I had to make some deals to get the details.” Eve avoided making eye contact on that. She shed her black leather jacket, the one with all the buckles, and snagged a corner of Claire’s leftover half sandwich. “Hmm, this is good; did you put honey on it?”
“You did what?” Making any kind of deal with any kind of vampire in Morganville was crazy. Making deals with the kind of vampires hanging out in a leather bar was . . . suicidal. Claire rounded on Shane. “You let her do that?”
“Seriously, you can’t even think about blaming me when she gets like this. I’m the bodyguard. Unless you wanted me to tie her up and gag her . . .”
“They’d probably have gotten into it there,” Eve said. “Look, I can get out of the deals. Amelie’s our get-out-of-deals-free card. But I needed to find Kim, and to do that, we needed information. Unless you waved your magic techno-wand and . . . ?”
Claire had to shake her head.
“Okay then, quit looking at me like I broke house training or something.” Eve, Claire realized, was really uncomfortable about this. She’d probably had to force herself to talk to these vamps, and the last thing she needed was the postgame analysis on what she’d done wrong.
Claire cleared her throat. “What did you get?”
“I found four vamps that Kim either talked to on camera, or set up interviews with in the next week or so, which means she wasn’t planning on leaving town just yet. And a couple of human guys who, ah, visited Kim at her place.”
“Hookups,” Shane confirmed. “Which is Kim’s style. Although I can’t say much for her taste. It’s kind of gone downhill.”
“So, wait—what does that tell us that we didn’t already know? And what did you promise these vamps, anyway?”
“Things,” Eve said, without adding any details. Shane looked away. “Not important right now. The point is, two of the vamps she interviewed she filmed at Common Grounds, but the other vamps said she took them to a kind of studio.”
“A studio,” Claire repeated. “That sounds promising.”
“Thought so. It wasn’t knee-deep in crap, so it couldn’t have been her apartment, right?”
“Did they tell you where?”
“No,” Shane said, leaning over Eve’s shoulder. “They wanted more for that little gem. And I told them to stuff it sideways.”
Claire blinked. Vampires. Leather bar. “And they just thought that was okay?”
“Honestly? Not so much. They mostly decided we’d make good chew toys.”
“Shane!” Claire looked at him with pleading eyes. “You didn’t—”
“Fight? Didn’t have to,” he said. Before he could explain, the front door opened and closed, and Claire heard the locks clicking shut again. Eve stiffened and looked down, burying her black-painted fingernails in her palms as she made fists.
Michael looked—like he’d been through a rough night in a bad bar, Claire guessed. Mussed, clothes torn at the seams. Something dark on his shirt that could have been blood.
“Are you okay?” Claire came to her feet, staring at him. He wasn’t bruised or anything, but he looked tired. There was a little flush of red in his eyes, and his hands were shaking.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I just need—something to drink. Be right back.”
He disappeared into the kitchen. The silence in the room was sharp and uncomfortable, and Claire looked at Eve, who folded her arms across her chest.
“I didn’t ask him to come rescue us,” she said, and looked down. “I didn’t want him to come at all.”
Michael came back carrying a black sports bottle. They all knew what he had in it, but nobody mentioned it as he sipped through the built-in straw.
“I had my reasons for going,” Michael said. And didn’t look at Eve. And Eve didn’t look at him. “Thanks for getting her out of there when you did, Shane.”
Shane nodded. “No problem. What happened?”
That was a question Michael wasn’t going to answer, evidently, because he just shrugged. “Fight.” One hell of one, from the state of his clothes and his hunger for blood. “It was worth it. One of them told me where Kim took him to interview, and it wasn’t any of the places you already had.”
Eve slowly raised her head, and her eyes narrowed. “You followed us. You thought we couldn’t handle it.”
“I knew where you were going. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
“No, you were notright! Michael—”
He put the bottle down, stepped forward, and caught her hands in his. Eve started to try to pull free, but he held on, willing her to look at him. It seemed really personal, somehow.
“I’m a vampire,” he said. “I’m never going to be anything else. You need to decide if you’re okay with that, Eve. I am.”
“What if I’m not?” Her voice sounded really small and wounded. “What if I just want you to be Michael, not—not Vampire Michael of the Clan, or whatever?”
“I can’t,” he said. “Because I’m not just Michael anymore. I haven’t been since before you moved in. You just didn’t know it.”
He let go of her hands, uncapped the sports bottle, and drank the blood down in long, thirsty gulps, making sure she was watching. His eyes turned ruby red, and he licked the drops from his lips. He put the empty bottle down, watching her.
She crossed her arms and turned away from him, and Michael closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them again, they were just human, and sad.
Claire wondered if she’d actually just witnessed a breakup. She hoped not.
Shane cleared his throat. “So. You turned up at a place where Kim goes, right? Let’s talk about that. Please.”
Michael walked over to the chair, where his guitar lay across the seat. He picked it up and cradled it in his arms, still watching Eve. After a few seconds, he began to softly play a series of chords. It was an aching kind of sound, gentle and full of emotion, and Claire saw Eve’s shoulders tense and shake as she suppressed tears.
“Kim used to work at KVVV,” Michael said. “She was an intern there before it shut down. The vampire said she interviewed him in a booth there at the old studios at the edge of town, by the transmission tower.”
Claire couldn’t help feeling a little spike of excitement. “That’s it. That’s got to be it, right? You said it was shut down?”
“Yeah, Amelie shut it down a few years back after—there was an incident,” Michael said. “The town council decided we didn’t need another radio station. It’s been locked up since then.”
“We need to go look!” Claire bounced to her feet, but Shane caught her shoulder and guided her back into the chair.
“Cool it. Not at night, we don’t. The last thing we need to do is go poking around an abandoned building in the middle of the night in a town full of vampires.”