Eternal Kiss (24 page)

I heard voices. Male voices. They were coming from the field house, which contained the changing rooms for the teams, the gym, the showers, that kind of stuff. One of the windows was open to catch the cool night air. This was probably how they’d gotten into the building in the first place.

I sprinted—as much of a sprint as I could manage in the heels—across the open ground to the shadows on the side of the field house, and slid down the wall toward the window. “Shane,” I whispered into the phone. “Shane, they’re in the field house.”

I heard a screech of tires in the parking lot and retreated to look around the corner. On either side of my big, black sedan, two pickup trucks had pulled in, parking so close that there was no way Shane or Claire could open the doors, much less get out. Another truck parked behind them.

They were trapped in the car.

“Shane?” I whispered into the phone. I could hear the drunk jocks high-fiving and booyahing each other in the trucks from here. A couple rolled out of the back and began to jump around on the hood of my car, rocking it on its springs.

“Well, the good news is you drive a damn tank,” he said, but
I heard the tension in his voice.

“Can you get out of there?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, much more calmly than I would have. “But I think the longer we let them play on the bouncy castle, the fewer of these guys you’ve got to deal with on your end.” He paused. “Bad news, I can’t back you up in person if I do that.”

I swallowed hard and went back to my original position on the side of the field house. “Stay put,” I said. “I’ll yell if I get in trouble. Rescue is more important than moral support.”

If he answered, I didn’t hear him, because just then a big, beefy guy rounded the corner of the field house carrying a case of beer. He dropped it with a noisy crash of glass at the sight of me.

Shane had been right. The costume was not stealthy.

“Look what I found prowling around,” my jock captor announced, and shoved me into the doorway of the field house. My heels skidded on the tile floor, and I lost my balance and fell … into Michael’s arms.

“Oh,” I breathed, and for a second, even given the circumstances, being in his arms felt wonderful. He held me close, then pushed me away from him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

“Saving you?”

“Awesome job so far.”

“Fine, criticize … hey!” Beefy Jock Guy, who’d dumped the
case of empty beer bottles outside, had plucked the phone from my hand, peered at the screen, and shut it off.

He looked tempted to do the macho phone-breaky thing, so I snapped, “Don’t even
think
about hurting my phone, you jackass.” He shrugged and pitched it into the far corner of the room.

“She’s cute,” the jock said to Michael. “Bet she likes to party, right?”

I ignored him, and looked around to see what I’d gotten myself into. Not good. Mr. Ransom’s assessment had been right. Big guys, all wearing Morganville jock jackets. The smallest of them was twice the size of Michael, and my boyfriend wasn’t exactly tiny.

I still couldn’t figure out what Michael was doing here, though. He was just standing there, and he could have wiped the room with these guys, right? But he hadn’t.

“What’s going on?” I asked. Michael slowly shook his head. “Michael?”

“You need to go,” he told me. “Please. This is something I need to do alone.”

“What? Kick jock ass? Shane is going to be very disappointed.” Looking into Michael’s eyes, I saw the red starting to surface. I blinked. “Did you, ah, snack?”

“No,” he said. “I was on my way in when they tried to take Ransom off with them.”

“And you just
had
to get in the middle of that.”

Michael’s eyes were turning an unsettling color, almost a purple, as the red swirled around. It was pretty. From a distance.

“Yes,” he said. “I kind of did. See, they wanted Ransom to come bite somebody.”

My own eyes widened. “Who?”

For the answer, Michael turned, and I saw a frail young girl sitting on a bench at the back of the room, dressed in a cheap-looking Cleopatra costume. I recognized her after a long couple of seconds. “Miranda?” Miranda was sort of a friend, in that uncomfortable not-quite way. She was about ninety pounds of pure crazy, fragile as glass, and I knew from personal experience that sometimes she could see the future. Sometimes. Sometimes she was just plain nuts.

She’d been under Protection by a vampire named Charles, until recently. I didn’t know for sure, but I strongly suspected that Charles had gotten more than just blood out of the kid. I was glad he was dead, and I hoped it had hurt. Miranda didn’t need more screwed-up sprinkles on top of her utterly boned life.

“Mir?” I stepped back from Michael and walked over to her. She was very quiet, and unlike most other times I’d seen her, she wasn’t bruised, or shaking, or otherwise in distress. “Hey. Remember me?”

She gave me an irritated look. “Of course. You’re Eve.” Wow. She sounded completely normal. That was new. “You’re not supposed to be here.” What, according to her visions?

“Well, I am here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“They were supposed to find me a vampire,” Miranda said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. I looked around at the jocks, an entire backfield of muscle, with blank curiosity.

“Why them?” And why, more importantly, would they be willing to do a favor for a kid like Miranda?

She knew what I was thinking, I saw it in the weird smile she flashed. “Because they owe me favors,” she said. “I’ve been making them money.”

Oh God, I could see it now. Morganville had a small, but thriving, betting underworld. What better to put your money on in a Texas town than football? The jocks had used Miranda’s clairvoyant abilities to pick winners, they’d cleaned up, and now she was asking them to pay her price.

A vampire? That was her price? Even for Mir, that was just plain weird.

“Why Michael?” I asked, more slowly. Miranda frowned.

“I didn’t ask for Michael,” she said. “He just came. But it doesn’t matter who it is. I just need to be turned.”

I refused to repeat that because it would taste nasty in my mouth. “Mir. What are you talking about?”

“I need to be a vampire,” she said, “and I want one of them to make it happen. Michael will do fine. I don’t care who turns me. The important thing is that if I change, I’ll be a princess.”

I was wrong. She really
was
crazy.

For about fifty years in Morganville, none of the vampires had been able to create new ones—except Amelie, who’d turned Michael to save his life. Now … well. Things had changed, humans had more rights, and the rules weren’t so clear anymore. Why did people want to be vampires? I didn’t see the appeal.

Miranda obviously did. And she was going about it in a
typically sideways Miranda-ish way.
With my boyfriend.

I wheeled on Michael. “Why didn’t you just say no?”

He glanced over at the football guys. The defensive line was between us and the door, kicked back with a new case of beer but still looking like they’d love the chance to do a little vamp hand-to-hand.

Idiots. He’d absolutely destroy them.

“I was trying to,” he said. “She isn’t listening. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, and I couldn’t walk away and leave her like this. She needs to understand that what she’s asking … isn’t possible.”

“I
know
what I’m asking,” Miranda said. “Everybody thinks I’m stupid because I’m just a kid, but I’m not. I need to be a vampire. Charles promised me I’d be one.” That last line came out like the petulant cry of a first grader who’d had her crayons taken away. I was willing to bet her vampire Protector (in name only—more like vampire Predator) had promised her a lot of things to get what he wanted. It made me feel even more sick.

“Mir, you’re what, fifteen? There are rules about this kind of thing. Michael
can’t
do it, even if he wanted to. No vamps under the age of eighteen. Town rules. You
know
that.”

Miranda’s chin set into a stubborn square. She would have done well in Claire’s fairy costume. Fairies, as Claire had explained to me in the car, weren’t kindly little sprites at all. Right now, Miranda looked like a fey come straight from the old scary stories.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Somebody’s going to do it. I’m going to make sure they do. My
friends
will make sure.”

“Miranda, they can’t make me do anything,” Michael said, and it sounded like an old argument already. “The only reason I haven’t blown out of here already is because of you.”

“Because I’m so screwed up?” Miranda’s voice was dark and bitter. As she moved, I saw scars on her forearms, marching in railroad tracks up toward her elbow. She was a cutter. I wasn’t surprised. “Because I’m so
pathetic
?”

“No, because you’re a kid, and I’m not leaving you here. Not with them.” Michael didn’t even look at the jocks, but they got the point. I saw their beery good humor start to evaporate. Some set down bottles. “You think they’re doing this because they like you, Mir? What do you think they want out of it?”

For a second, she looked honestly surprised, and then she slipped her armor back on. “They got what they wanted already,” she said. “They got their money.”

“Yeah, drunk, bored football types are always fair like that,” I said. “So tell me guys, was this going to be a party night? You and her?”

They didn’t answer me. They weren’t drunk enough to be quite that cold about it. One finally said, “She told us she’d make it worth our while if we got her a vampire.”

“Well, she’s fifteen. Her definition of
worth your while
is probably a whole lot different from yours, you asshole.” Man, I was angry. Angry at Miranda, for getting herself and us into this. Angry at the boys. Angry at Michael, for not already walking away. Okay, I understood now why he hadn’t. He’d already known he’d be throwing her to the wolves (and the bats) if he did.

I was angry at the world.

“We’re leaving,” I declared. I grabbed Miranda by a skinny, scabbed wrist and pulled her to her feet. Her Cleopatra head-dress slipped sideways, and she slapped her other hand up to hold it in place even as she decided to pull back from me. I didn’t let her. I had pounds and muscle on her, and I wasn’t about to let her stay here and throw her own vamptastic pity party, complete with dangerous clowns.

Up to that point, Miranda had been all talk, but I saw the look that came across her face and settled in her eyes when I grabbed onto her. Blank, yet focused. I knew that expression. It meant she was Seeing—as in, seeing the future, or at least something the rest of us couldn’t see.

The hair shivered on the nape of my neck under my Catwoman cowl.

“It’s too late,” she said, in a numbed, dead sort of voice. I drew in my breath and looked at the door. “Oh dear.”

The door slammed open, bowling over a couple of football players along the way, and
three
vampires stood there. One of them was the vague Mr. Ransom.

Another was a particularly unpleasant bit of work named Mr. Vargas, who had the looks of one of those silent film stars and the temperament of a rabid weasel. He’d always been one of the dregs of vampire society. Oliver kept him around, I didn’t know why, but Vargas was one of those you had to watch for, even if you were legally off the menu. He was known to bite first, pay the fine later.

The last one, though, was the one who really scared me. Mr. Pennywell. Pennywell had come to town with Amelie’s father, the scary Mr. Bishop, and he’d stuck around. I knew he’d sworn all those promises to Amelie, but I didn’t believe for a second he really meant them. He was old.
Really
old. And he looked like some androgynous mannequin, with no emotion to him at all.

Pennywell’s cold eyes looked around, dismissed the jocks, and focused in on three things:

Miranda, Michael, and me.

“The boys are yours,” he said to Ransom and Vargas.

Vargas’s teeth flashed in a white grin. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said, and stepped aside, out of the door. “Run,
mijos.
Run while you can.”

The jocks weren’t stupid. They knew the odds had shifted. They were severely in trouble. Not one of them was willing to stand up for Miranda, or for us, and that didn’t shock me at all. What shocked me was that they didn’t take their beer with them when they broke for the door and stampeded out into the night.

Vargas watched them go, and counted it off. “Twenty yard line. Thirty. Forty. Ah, they’ve reached mid-field. Time for the opposing team to enter the game, I think.”

He moved in a blur, gone. I resisted the urge to yell a warning to the football guys. It wouldn’t do any good.

Pennywell said, “You, girl. I hear you want to be turned.” He was looking at Miranda.

“No, she doesn’t,” I said, before my friend could say something idiotic. “Mir, let’s get you home, okay?”

Faced with the alien chill that was Pennywell, even Miranda’s great romantic love of dying had a moment of clarity. She gulped, and instead of pulling free from my grip, she put her hand in mine. “Okay,” she said faintly. I wondered exactly what her vision had shown her. Nothing that she wanted to pursue, clearly. “Home’s good.”