Hannah had made notes, but her face had remained impassive; she didn’t give any hints about what she thought about the whole thing, none at all. She asked more questions of Eve than she did of Shane or Claire, and after she’d left, Eve collapsed on the sofa, buried her face in her hands, and said, “They think I did it.”
“No, they don’t,” Michael said. He sat beside her and put his arm around her. “It’s just that you—you were pretty angry about her.”
“They suspect all of us,” Shane said. His voice was flat, his expression so tense that his jaw looked sharp. “Us in particular, I mean. But after us, everybody else with a pulse. Maybe that’s why—” He shut his mouth with a snap, eyes widening, and Claire bit her lip. He’d almost blurted it out.
As it was, Michael said, “Why what?”
“Why they’re nervous,” Claire put in quickly. Probably too quickly. “About the wedding, I mean.”
Michael stared at her, and she suddenly knew he knew she was lying. Her pulse was too fast, for one thing. He’d once told her that he could tell when she was lying, and even if he’d been kidding her, he had an instinct for these things. A killer instinct. “Something’s going on with you two, and don’t tell me I’m imagining it,” he said. “First Shane shows up choked half to death—”
“Dude, it’s not that bad!”
“—and now this. You know something. You’re hiding something.”
Even Eve was looking at Claire now, not quite ready to believe but obviously wondering. “She wouldn’t do that,” she told Michael. “Would you, CB?”
“She’s not hiding anything,” Shane said. That was a relief, because Shane was a much better liar. “She’s just worried. The vamps are acting weird. Trust me, being worried is a survival instinct right about now. Go on, tell me I’m wrong, Mikey.”
Michael was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he admitted. “Something’s going on there, too. What, I don’t know; they don’t exactly keep me in the loop. But whatever it is, they’re closing ranks.” He fidgeted with the end of Eve’s satin belt. “I’m worried, guys. I’m worried about you. I’m worried about us.”
Shane sat down in the armchair Michael had vacated, but he mirrored his best friend’s posture almost exactly—elbows on knees, leaning forward. Intense. “Okay, I need to know something. Seriously.”
Michael raised his eyebrows and nodded.
“I need to know you’re going to stand with us if it comes to a fight. Me and Claire and Eve. I need you to say it, right now, because my feeling is that this is going to go real bad, real fast. I can’t be worrying about whether or not you’ve got our backs.”
Michael stood up. It was a vampire move, sudden and shocking, and in the blink of an eye, he was looming over Shane, and he had Shane’s T-shirt bunched in his fist, lifting him half out of the chair. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Shane! Have I ever not had your back? I had your back when you tried to kill me. I had your back when you were locked in a cage. I’ve had your back every single time. What do I have to do to make you believe I’m on your side, be an asshole like your dad? Well, I can do that. Maybe if I punch you a few times, you’ll be convinced.”
He let Shane drop back down in his chair, and walked out, back stiff. Furious.
Shane sat, stunned, hands clutching at the armrests. He exchanged a look with Eve, and they both stood up at once. “No,” Shane said. “I did it. Let me fix it.”
He went off after Michael. Eve chewed her lip and said, “Well, we’re either going to see half the house destroyed, or their bromance is going to go all the way.” She gave a shaky laugh, one that was dangerously close to hysteria. “God. What is happening? Claire—”
Claire hugged her. It was instinctive, and it was the right thing to do; Eve’s tension slowly relaxed, and she hugged her back, fiercely. “It’s going to be okay,” Claire said, very quietly. “I don’t know how, but it will. Just—trust me. Please. Because Michael’s right—there are things I can’t tell you, but it wouldn’t help if you knew them. You have to trust me.”
Eve pulled back, looked at her, and said, simply, “I always have.”
It was odd, Claire thought, how it was the boys who were full of drama about this, while Eve, the acknowledged Drama Empress of Morganville, was the calmest.
The house didn’t come apart, although they heard raised voices from upstairs, and a few thumps. Finally, Shane appeared at the parlor doorway and said, “We’re okay.”
Eve lifted her chin and said frostily, “Well, of course we are. You’re the only one who doubted it. As always.”
Ouch. Yet, Claire thought, Shane really had that one coming.
And he acknowledged it with a nod. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” he asked. Eve looked at the clock in the corner, made a panicked squeaking sound, and dashed past him, robe fluttering.
“Shouldn’t you?” Claire asked.
“I’m showered,” he said. “Taking my stuff to change. I’m not decorating crap in fancy clothes. And I’m not admitting to decorating at all, by the way.”
She had to laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “I kind of knew that.”
Shane had been granted the keys to Eve’s hearse for the day, to transport all the stuff, so the rest of the morning was occupied with loading, unloading, checking in with the guards at Founder’s Square, setting up the tables in the big, empty ballroom (which still, to Claire’s eyes, had a funeral parlor elegance, but that was mostly because of all her bad experiences), putting on tablecloths, streamers, flowers. . . .
It was a lot of work, and Shane had been right: wearing regular jeans and shirts helped, because it would have been twice as bad in formal wear.
By the time the (human) blood bank attendants arrived with their punch bowls, coolers, and cups (crystal, because vampires didn’t drink out of plastic if they could help it), the tables were decorated in black cloth and silver streamers, and Shane had, at great personal risk, hung the Eve-required disco ball from the majestic crystal chandelier looming over the room. The dj—one of Eve’s friends, apparently, although Claire had never met her—arrived with her own table, her computer, and a massive sound system that she assembled near the open area designated as the dance floor.
Claire put the centerpieces on the tables and checked the time.
Just barely enough.
She grabbed Shane and dragged him off from playing with the remote that turned the disco ball’s motor on and off. “Get dressed,” she said, and pressed the hanger with his clothes on it into his hands. “We have to be ready to greet people!”
“Yeah, that’ll be super fun!” he said, with utterly fake enthusiasm.
“Just go already!”
He kissed her, quickly, and disappeared into the men’s bathroom. Claire took her own dress and shoes into the women’s room, which was really nice but—again—more or less funeral-homey, with all the subdued velvet and gilt. Dressed, she examined herself critically in the mirror. It was a nice, flattering dress of white trimmed in red, and the shoes (Eve had found them) were awesome. Claire finger-fluffed her shoulder-length hair—more red now than brown, thanks again to Eve—and headed out for the ballroom. Shane, of course, was already there, slouching on a straight-backed chair. He stood up when she walked in.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, very spontaneously, which warmed her all over.
“You’re pretty fantastic, too,” she said, and meant it. He’d put on dark pants and a dark turtleneck that almost hid all the bruises, and a really nice jacket. He looked . . . adult.
The dj started up with a song, testing the volume levels, and it broke the moment completely. In fact, it almost shattered the chandelier, considering the loudness. The dj dialed it back, but not before Claire’s ears were ringing as if she’d been in a club. “Wow,” she said. “This is going to rock. Probably in all the wrong ways.”