Lord of Misrule (16 page)

The Morrell home looked like the site of another of Monica’s infamous, unsupervised parties . . . only this one really was unsupervised, and those uninvited guests, they weren’t just there for the free booze.

“What are they doing?” Monica asked, and let out a strangled yell as a couple of guys carried a big plasma television out the front door. “They’re stealing it! They’re stealing our stuff!”

Pretty much everything was being looted—mattresses, furniture, art. Claire even saw people upstairs tossing linens and clothing out the windows to people waiting on the ground.

And then, somebody ran up with a bottle full of liquid, stuffed with a burning rag, and threw it into the front window.

The flames flickered, caught, and gained strength.

“No!” Monica panted and clawed at the door handle, but Eve had locked it up. Claire grabbed Monica’s arms and held them down.

“Get us out of here!” she yelled.

“My parents could be in there!”

“No, they’re not. Richard told me they’re at City Hall.”

Monica kept fighting, even as Eve steered the car away from the burning house, and then suddenly just . . . stopped.

Claire heard her crying. She wanted to think,
Good, you deserve it,
but somehow she just couldn’t force herself to be that cold.

Shane, however, could. “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “At least your little sister isn’t inside.”

Monica caught her breath, then kept crying.

By the time they’d turned on Lot Street, Monica seemed to be pulling herself together, wiping her face with trembling hands and asking for a tissue, which Eve provided out of the glove box in the front.

“What do you think?” Eve asked Shane. Their street seemed quiet. Most of the houses had lights on, including the Glass House, and although there were some folks outside, talking, it didn’t look like mobs were forming. Not here, anyway.

“Looks good. Let’s get inside.”

They agreed that Monica needed to go in the middle, covered by Hannah. Eve went first, racing up the walk to the front door and using her keys to open it up.

They made it in without attracting too much attention or anybody pointing fingers at Monica—but then, Claire thought, Monica definitely didn’t look much like herself right now. More like a bad Monica impersonator. Maybe even one who was a guy.

Shane would laugh himself sick over that if she mentioned it. After seeing the puffy redness around Monica’s eyes, and the shattered expression, Claire kept it to herself.

As Shane slammed, locked, and dead bolted the front door, Claire felt the house come alive around them, almost tingling with warmth and welcome. She heard people in the living room exclaim at the same time, so it wasn’t just her; the house really had reacted, and reacted strongly, to three out of four of its residents coming home.

Claire stretched out against the wall and kissed it. “Glad to see you, too,” she whispered, and pressed her cheek against the smooth surface.

It almost felt like it hugged her back.

“Dude, it’s a
house
,” Shane said from behind her. “Hug somebody who cares.”

She did, throwing herself into his arms. It felt like he’d never let her go, not even for a second, and he lifted her completely off the ground and rested his head on her shoulder for a long, precious moment before setting her gently back on her feet.

“Better see who’s here,” he said, and kissed her very lightly. “Down payment for later, okay?”

Claire let go, but held his hand as they walked down the hallway and into the living room of the Glass House, which was filled with people.

Not vampires.

Just people.

Some of them were familiar, at least by sight—people from town: the owner of the music store where Michael worked; a couple of nurses she’d seen at the hospital, who still wore brightly colored medical scrubs and comfortable shoes. The rest, Claire barely knew at all, but they had one thing in common—they were all scared.

An older, hard-looking woman grabbed Claire by the shoulders. “Thank God you’re home,” she said, and hugged her. Claire, rigid with surprise, cast Shane a what-the-hell look, and he shrugged helplessly. “This damn house won’t do
anything
for us. The lights keep going out, the doors won’t open, food goes bad in the fridge—it’s as if it doesn’t want us here!”

And it probably didn’t. The house could have ejected them at any time, but obviously it had been a bit uncertain about exactly what its residents might want, so it had just made life uncomfortable for the intruders instead.

Claire could now feel the air-conditioning switching on to cool the overheated air, hear doors swinging open upstairs, see lights coming on in darkened areas.

“Hey, Celia,” Shane said, as the woman let go of Claire at last. “So, what brings you here? I figured the Barfly would be doing good business tonight.”

“Well, it would be, except that some jerks came in and said that because I was wearing a bracelet I had to serve them for free, on account of being some kind of sympathizer. What kind of sympathizer, I said, and one of them tried to hit me.”

Shane lifted his eyebrows. Celia wasn’t a young woman. “What did you do?”

“Used the Regulator.” Celia lifted a baseball bat propped against the wall. It was old hardwood, lovingly polished. “Got myself a couple of home runs, too. But I decided maybe I wouldn’t stay for the extra innings, if you know what I mean. I figure they’re drinking me dry over there right now. Makes me want to rip my bracelet off, I’ll tell ya. Where are the damn vampires when you need them, after all that?”

“You didn’t take your bracelet off? Even when they gave you the chance?” Shane seemed surprised. Celia gave him a glare.

“No, I didn’t. I ain’t breaking my word, not unless I have to. Right now, I don’t have to.”

“If you take it off now, you may never need to put it on again.”

Celia leveled a wrinkled finger at him. “Look, Collins, I know all about you and your dad. I don’t hold with any of that. Morganville’s an all-right place. You follow the rules and stay out of trouble—about like anyplace, I guess. You people wanted chaos. Well, this is what it looks like—people getting beaten, shops looted, houses burned. Sure, it’ll settle down sometime, but into what? Maybe no place I’d want to live.”

She turned away from him, shouldered her baseball bat, and marched away to talk with a group of adults her own age.

Shane caught Claire looking at him, and shrugged. “Yeah,” he sighed. “I know. She’s got a point. But how do we know it won’t be better if the vamps just—”

“Just what, Shane?
Die?
What about Michael, have you thought about him? Or Sam?” She stomped off.

“Where are you going?”

“To get a Coke!”

“Would you—”

“No!”

She twisted the cap off the Coke she’d retrieved from the fridge—which was stocked up again, although she knew it hadn’t been when they’d left. Another favor from the house, she guessed, although how it went shopping on its own she had no idea.

The cold syrupy goodness hit her like a brick wall, but instead of energizing her, it made her feel weak and a little sick. Claire sank down in a chair at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands, suddenly overwhelmed.

It was all falling apart.

Amelie was calling the vampires, probably going to fight Bishop to the death. Morganville was ripping itself in pieces. And there was nothing she could
do.

Well, there was one thing.

She retrieved and opened four more bottles of Coke, and delivered them to Hannah, Eve, Shane, and—because it felt mean to leave her out at a time like this—Monica.

Monica stared at the sweating bottle as if she suspected Claire had put rat poison in it. “What’s this?”

“What does it look like? Take or don’t, I don’t really care.” Claire put it down on the table next to where Monica sat, and went to curl up on the couch next to Shane. She checked her cell phone. The network was back up again, at least for the moment, and she had a ton of voice mails. Most were from Shane, so she saved them to listen to later; two more were from Eve, which she deleted, since they were instructions on where to find her.

The last one was from her mother. Claire caught her breath, tears pricking in her eyes at the sound of Mom’s voice. Her mother sounded calm, at least—mostly, anyway.

 

Claire got her breathing back under control, mainly by sternly telling herself that she needed to sound together and completely in control to keep her parents from charging out there into the craziness. She had it more or less managed by the time the phone rang on the other end, and when her mother picked it up, she was able to say, “Hi, Mom,” without making it sound like she was about to burst into tears. “I got your message. Is everything okay there?”

“Here? Claire, don’t you be worrying about us! We’re just fine! Oh, honey, are you okay? Really?”

“Honestly, yes, I’m okay. Everything’s—” She couldn’t say that everything was okay, because of course it wasn’t. It was, at best, kind of temporarily stable. “It’s quiet here. Shane’s here, and Eve.” Claire remembered that Mom had liked Monica Morrell, and rolled her eyes. Anything to calm her fears. “That girl from the dorm, Monica, she’s here, too.”

“Oh, yes, Monica. I liked her.” It really did seem to help, which was not exactly an endorsement of Mom’s character-judging ability. “Her brother came by here to check on us about an hour ago. He’s a nice boy.”

Claire couldn’t quite imagine referring to Richard Morrell as a
boy
, but she let it go. “He’s kind of in charge of the town right now,” she said. “You have the radio, right? The one we dropped off earlier?”

“Yes. We’ve been doing everything they say, of course. But honey, I’d really like it if you could come here. We want to have you home, with us.”

“I know. I know, Mom. But I think I’d better stay here. It’s important. I’ll try to come by tomorrow, okay?”

They talked a little more, about nothing much, just chatter to make life seem kind of normal for a change. Mom was holding it together, but only barely; Claire could hear the manic quaver in her voice, could almost see the bright tears in her eyes. She was going on about how they’d had to move most of the boxes into the basement to make room for all the company—
company?
—and how she was afraid that Claire’s stuff would get damp, and then she talked about all the toys in the boxes and how much Claire had enjoyed them when she was younger.

Normal Mom stuff.

Claire didn’t interrupt, except to make soothing noises and acknowledgments when Mom paused. It helped, hearing Mom’s voice, and she knew it was helping her to talk. But finally, when her mother ran down like a spring-wound clock, Claire agreed to all the parental requirements to be careful and watch out and wear warm clothes.

Good-bye seemed very final, and once Claire hung up, she sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the screen of her cell phone.

On impulse, she tried to call Amelie. It rang and rang. No voice mail.

In the living room, Shane was organizing some kind of sentry duty. A lot of people had already crashed out in piles of pillows, blankets, sometimes just on a spare rug. Claire edged around the prone bodies and motioned to Shane that she was going upstairs. He nodded and kept talking to the two guys he was with, but his gaze followed her all the way.

Eve was in her bedroom, and there was a note on the door that said DO NOT KNOCK OR I WILL KILL YOU. THIS MEANS YOU, SHANE. Claire considered knocking, but she was too tired to run away.

Her bedroom was dark. When she’d left in the morning, Eve’s kind-of-friend Miranda had been sleeping here, but she was gone, and the bed was neatly made again. Claire sat down on the edge, staring out the windows, and then pulled out clean underwear and her last pair of blue jeans from the closet, plus a tight black shirt Eve had lent her last week.

The shower felt like heaven. There was even enough hot water for a change. Claire dried off, fussed with her hair a bit, and got dressed. When she came out, she listened at the stairs, but didn’t hear Shane talking anymore. Either he was being quiet, or he’d gone to bed. She paused next to his door, wishing she had the guts to knock, but she went on to her own room instead.

Shane was inside, sitting on her bed. He looked up when she opened the door, and his lips parted, but he was silent for a long few seconds.

“I should go,” he finally said, but he didn’t get up.

Claire settled in next to him. It was all perfectly correct, the two of them sitting fully dressed like this, but somehow she felt like they were on the edge of a cliff, both in danger of falling off.

It was exciting, and terrifying, and all kinds of wrong.

“So what happened to you today?” she asked. “In the Bloodmobile, I mean?”

“Nothing really. We drove to the edge of town and parked outside the border, where we’d be able to see anybody coming. A couple of vamps showed, trying to make a withdrawal, but we sent them packing. Bishop never made an appearance. Once we lost contact with the vampires, we figured we’d cruise around and see what was going on. We nearly got boxed in by a bunch of drunk idiots in pickup trucks, and then the vampires in the Bloodmobile went nuts—that call thing going off, I guess. I dropped them at the grain elevator—that was the biggest, darkest place I could find, and it casts a lot of shadows. I handed off the driving to Cesar Mercado. He’s supposed to drive it all the way to Midland tonight, provided the barriers are down. Best we can do.”