“How do they keep people from leaving?” she asked.
“They don’t. Some people leave. I mean, Shane did,” Michael said. “I think the question you’re looking for is, how do they keep them from talking? And that’s where it gets weird.”
“That’s where?” Claire murmured. Eve laughed.
“I don’t know myself, because I never got out of town, but Shane says that once you get about ten miles outside of Morganville, you get this terrible headache, and then you just…start to forget. First you can’t remember what the name of the town was, and then you can’t remember how to get there, and then you don’t remember that the town had vampires. Or the rules. It just—doesn’t exist anymore for you. It comes back if you return to town, but when you’re out, you can’t run around telling all about Morganville because you just don’t remember.”
“I heard rumors,” Eve said. “Some people start remembering, but they get—” She made a graphic throat-cutting gesture. “Hit squads.”
Claire tried to think of things that would cause that kind of memory loss. Drugs, maybe? Or…some kind of local energy field? Or…okay, she had no idea. But it sounded like magic, and magic made her nervous. She supposed vampires were magic, too, when you got right down to it, and that made her even more nervous. Magic didn’t exist. Shouldn’t exist. It was just…wrong. It offended her scientific training.
“So where does all that leave us?” Michael asked. It was a reasonable question.
Claire flipped another page, wrote down memory loss aft. depart, and said, “I’m not sure. I mean, if we’re going to put together any kind of a plan, we have to basically know as much as we can to make sure it’s a good enough approach. So keep talking. What else?”
It went on for hours. The grandfather clock solemnly announced the arrival and departure of nine o’clock, then ten, then eleven. It was nearly midnight, and Claire had scribbled up most of the ledger pages, when she looked at Michael and Eve and asked, “Anything else?” and got negative shakes of their heads in reply. “Okay, then. Tell me about the book.”
“I don’t know a lot,” Eve said. “They just put out a notice about ten years ago that they were looking for it. I heard they have people all over town going through libraries, bookstores, anyplace it could be hidden. But the weird thing is that vamps can’t actually read it.”
“You mean it’s in some other language?”
Michael raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think it’s that easy. I mean, every one of these suckers has got to speak a dozen languages, at least.”
“Dead languages,” Eve said. When they looked at her, she grinned. “What? Come on. Funny!”
“Maybe they can’t read it for the same reason people can’t remember anything outside of town,” Claire said slowly. “Because something doesn’t want them to.”
“That’s kind of a leap, but the Russian judge gave you a nine point five for style, so okay,” Eve said. “The important thing is that we know what it looks like.”
“Which is?” Claire put her pencil to paper.
“A book with a brown leather cover. Some kind of symbol on the front.”
“What kind?” Because brown leather cover didn’t exactly narrow things down when it came to books.
Eve pushed up the sleeve of her skintight black mesh top, and held out her forearm. There, tattooed in plain blue, was a symbol that looked kind of like an omega, only with some extra waves in it. Simple, but definitely nothing Claire could remember seeing before. “They’ve been searching for it. They gave everybody growing up in a Protected family the tattoo so that we remember what to look for.”
Claire stared for a couple of seconds, wanting to ask how old Eve was when she got the tattoo, but she didn’t quite dare. She dutifully marked the symbol down in her notebook. “And nobody’s found it. Are they sure it’s here?”
“They seem to think so. But I’ll bet they’ve got their sources searching all over the world for it. Seems pretty important to them.”
“Any idea why?”
“Nobody knows,” Michael said. “I grew up asking, believe me. Nobody has a clue. Not even the vampires.”
“How can they be looking for something and not even know why?”
“I’m not saying somebody doesn’t know why. But the vampires have ranks, and the only ones I’ve ever really talked to aren’t exactly in charge. Point is, we can’t find out, so we shouldn’t waste time worrying about it.”
“Good to know.” Claire put contents unknown next to the symbol of the book, then valuable!!!!! underneath, underscored with three dark lines. “So if we can find this book, we can trade it to get Monica off my back, and make sure Shane’s deal is called off.”
Michael and Eve looked at each other. “Did you miss the part where the vamps have been turning Morganville upside down trying to find it?” Eve asked.
Claire sighed, flipped back a page, and pointed at a note she’d made. Eve and Michael both craned over to read it.
Vampires can’t read it.
They looked blank.
“I’m going to need to spend some time at the library,” Claire said. “And we’re going to need some supplies.”
“To do what?” Eve still wasn’t catching on, but Michael was.
“Fake the book?” he asked. “You really think that’ll work? What do you think happens when they figure out we cheated?”
“Bad idea,” Eve said. “Very bad idea. Honest.”
“Guys,” Claire said patiently. “If we’re careful, they’ll never suspect we’re smart enough to do something like that. Not to mention brave enough. So we give them a fake—it’s still more than anybody else has. They may be pissed, but they’ll be pissed that somebody faked it. We just found it.”
They were both looking at her now like they’d never seen her before. Michael shook his head.
“Bad idea,” he said.
Maybe so. But she was going to try it anyway.
Chapter 10
S he was too wired to sleep, and besides, her back hurt, and she couldn’t stand the thought of waiting even one more night to get started. Brandon hadn’t seemed like the kind of guy to wait for his revenge, and Shane—Shane wasn’t the kind of guy to not hold up his end of a deal, either.
If he’s stupid enough to want to get bitten, fine, but he’s not using me for an excuse.
Shane hadn’t come out of his room all night. She hadn’t heard a thing when she’d listened—carefully—at his door. Eve had mimed headphones and turning up an invisible stereo. Claire could understand that; she’d spent lots of hours trying to blow out her own eardrums to avoid the world.
Eve lent her a laptop—a retro thing, big and black and clunky, with a biohazard-symbol sticker on the front. When Claire plugged it into the broadband connection and booted it up, the desktop graphic was a cartoon Grim Reaper holding a road sign instead of a scythe—a road sign that read MORGANVILLE, with an arrow pointing down.
Claire clicked on a couple of folders—guiltily, but she was curious—and found they were full of poetry. Eve liked death, or at least, she liked to write about it. Florid romantic stuff, all angst and blood and moonlit marble…and then Claire noticed the dates. The last of the poetry had been done three years ago. Eve would have been, what, fifteen? She’d been starry-eyed about vampires back then, but something had changed. No poetry at all for the past three years…
Eve walked in the open door. “Working okay?” she asked. Claire jumped, guilty, and gave her the thumbs-up as she clicked open the Internet connection. “Okay, I called my cousin in Illinois. She’s going to let us use her PayPal account, but I have to send her cash, like, tomorrow. Here’s the account.” She handed over a slip of paper. “We’re not going to get her killed, right?”