Morganville - 10 - Bite Club (13 page)

Would that be okay?"

"Oh yes, absolutely. I'm sorry to spring this on you without any warning." He chuckled. "I know how exciting it can be to get this kind of news. I think I yelled my parents' house down when I got my acceptance letter. Most exciting moment of my life. Well, congratulations, Ms. Danvers. Please call me back when you have all your arrangements in hand. I'll need to hear from you within the week, of course."

"Of course," she repeated numbly. "Thank you, sir. Thank you very much."

"No thanks necessary; you were a brilliant candidate, and your scores are extremely impressive. We look forward to having you on the team here."

She must have said something else, something nice and appreciative, but honestly, Claire couldn't think of anything except the giant letters flashing in front of her eyes...one set was MIT, and the other was OMG. She'd expected to feel a tremendous rush, but all she felt was...conflicted. And deeply, deeply scared.

The world had just opened up for her. Doves and angels and choirs singing. And all she could feel about it was...dread. Dread because she didn't think Amelie would release her in the first place, but even if she did...even if she did, what about Shane?

If Shane was even talking to her ever again.

God, it was such a mess.

She took another five minutes, sitting in silence, staring at her turned-off phone.

Wondering who she should call. Her parents would support her no matter what; no help there. She wanted to talk to Shane, suddenly, but...but after last night...

She had nobody she could talk to.

Well, she would have said something to Michael, who was in the living room, getting his stuff, but by the time she got her courage together, he was on his way. He just waved as he put on a sun-blocking black coat and hat and headed out the back door.

She shut her mouth, still trying to figure out how she felt. Mostly she just seemed...confused.

Eve was in the kitchen making pancakes. Alone.

"Morning, girlfriend," Eve said, and dumped some lumpy batter into a hot pan, where it immediately started to sizzle. "You look like you need carbs."

"Totally," Claire said, and sat down to rest her forehead in both hands. "Thanks."

"Yeah, no problem. Here." Eve grabbed a mug, filled it with coffee, and slid it to her on the table.

"Caffeine. Makes the world all bright and sparkly, or maybe that's just me. Look, I gave you the fun mug."

In Eve's world, it was. It was a coffee mug with a dead-guy chalk outline on it, and it said he had decaf.

Claire mixed the coffee with all the things that made coffee drinking possible for her -- milk, sugar, a little cinnamon -- and sat nursing it, staring into the light brown surface but not seeing anything. She couldn't think. All she could do was...feel awful.

She needed to tell Eve, but saying it out loud would make it all real.MIT wants me to go there. Because part of her was so excited it was vibrating apart, and the other part, the practical part...that was crying.

Did she want to go...leave behind Morganville? Well, yes, obviously. But that meant leaving the people, too. Eve. Michael. Myrnin. Shane.

She wanted to talk about that, badly, but she just...couldn't. Not yet.

"Incoming!" Eve said, and as Claire looked up, slid a plate in front of her with two thick, steaming pancakes. A pat of butter melted like lava on top, and Eve thumped down a bottle of syrup. "Everything gets better with pancakes. It's a law of the universe. Bonus for bacon, but we're out."

Eve had a plate, too, and sat down opposite her. Claire hadn't noticed, but Eve was makeup-free this morning, and her Goth-black hair was tied back in a simple ponytail. Even her clothes were subdued, or as much as Eve ever got -- a form-hugging tee with a black-on-black skull design and a pair of black jeans. She picked up her fork and dug into her own plate.

Claire just watched the butter melt and poked at the pancakes a little. She dragged her fork through the syrup and spelled out MIT. Finally, she took a bite. They were good, really good, but as soon as she started to chew, tears came to her eyes and she could hardly swallow. She coughed to cover it, but Eve was watching her with a steady kind of focus that made it unnecessary.

"Hey," Eve said. "You know you can talk to me, right? About anything?"

Not about that. Not yet. But the other thing, yes. "Shane hates me," Claire said in a very small voice, and dragged her fork through the moat of syrup around the fortress of pancakes.

"Seriously?" Eve waited for Claire's nod before eating a bite of pancakes. She chewed and swallowed

before she said, "Sorry, Claire Bear. He doesn't."

"You didn't hear what he said to me last night." That did it -- the tears came now, for real, and she picked up her napkin and tried to wipe them away with shaking hands.

God, what a mess she was.

"I heard what he said this morning before he blew out of here. He was angry at himself, not you -- or, at least, more than at you. He said you'd gotten dragged away by Myrnin last night and he'd acted like a dick about it. Isn't that what happened?"

"Well, sort of. He was right -- I did go off with Myrnin."

"On a job."

"Yeah."

"Not on a date."

"Oh, God, no!"

"Then Shane acted like an ass, and he's got nothing to be jealous about, and he knows it. I saw him, Claire. Believe me, he knows he was wrong. He feels bad."

"Then why -- ?" Why didn't he come talk to me? Why didn't he try? Why did he just...leave?

"He's cooling down. It's a guy thing," Eve said. "He'll be okay when he gets back.

And you? He said you were all angry about him watching sexy commercials on TV, which, frankly, is weird -- you being mad about it, not him watching them, because I'm pretty sure teen boys get a pass on that. They can't help hitting the pause button when the half-naked girls show up."

"No, that wasn't it. It was -- " She replayed it in her mind. A blur, a flutter of curtains.

Whispers and laughter in the dark.

In the end, nothing she could truly say wasn't just a product of her tired mind and of jealousy.

"I thought he was with somebody," she finally said, miserably. "In his room. Some girl."

Eve ate a bite of pancakes, thinking about it, and then said, "And you honestly think he's that big a jerk, that not only does he cheat on you, he brings her back here, to our house? Where, I might add, I would personally open up a ten-gallon drum of whup-ass on him and any skank he dragged in here. Not to mention what Michael would do."

"No, I -- I don't honestly think that. And, uh, thanks?"

"It's what friends do," Eve said graciously. "He didn't bring anybody back here --

you know that. Besides, you were with us last night when he came home. What'd he do, smuggle her in under his coat?"

"I think she was a vampire," Claire said in a rush, without looking at Eve. In her blurry peripheral vision, she could see that Eve had stopped in the act of raising her fork to her mouth. Syrup dripped off, but the plate caught the damage.

Eve slowly put her fork back down.

"You think Shane's getting it from some vampire girl?"

Claire's frustration burned up suddenly, like flash paper. "I don't know! I'm just telling you what it felt like, Eve! There was a woman talking and laughing, and I went in his room, and there was a blur and wind and then he was alone. You fill in the blanks!"

"Oh, sweetie," Eve said. "You know that's totally frickin' insane, right? Because for one thing, Shane hates the hell right out of vampires. For another, he loves you."

"Maybe she's -- I don't know -- making him do it. They can do that, right? Yvette did."

"The last one who tried it didn't get very far, if you remember," Eve said. "And I heard on good authority that Yvette's ashes got sprinkled on the Founder's rose garden, so there's that. Shane's strong, and I don't just mean the muscles. I've never seen any bite marks on him. Have you?"

Claire had to shake her head reluctantly. She definitely hadn't seen any bites.She , on the other hand, had a collection of them, the worst from Myrnin. So maybe she was still, and badly, overreacting. Shane was acting jealous, but maybe he had reason, considering everything that had gone on with Myrnin.

Maybe that was why he was turning antivamp again.

"You're kind of freaking me out, you two," Eve said. "I mean, you're the stable one.

And Shane, he's loyal to the point of stupid. If you two can't keep it together..." She didn't say it, but Claire knew she was thinking, What chance do Michael and I have?

Claire had heard gossip when Eve wasn't around.

Nobody was giving their vampire-and-human Romeo-and-Juliet act anything like good odds to go the distance.

And what was the distance, for a relationship where the vampire wasn't going to get any older, while Eve would? She knew, without even thinking about it, that Eve had spent long nights considering all this, going over and over it. So had Michael, probably.

Maybe love would conquer all. That was a nice thought, even if it wasn't realistic.

God, she wanted to blurt it all out to Eve -- about Jason being held in that room at Founder's Square.

About Bishop out stalking the streets. But she knew that would be a very bad idea.

Amelie had been clear enough, and she wasn't in any mood to be forgiving.

She could tell her about MIT, but...no. That was private. She didn't want Eve to think she didn't care about her, because she did. She loved her.

But it was MIT.

Eve ate a couple of bites of pancake, and so did Claire, even though she couldn't taste it at all.

"CB," Eve said, and made her look up. "It's okay. Whatever it was, Shane's not that guy you're thinking about. He's your guy, and he's always going to be. Trust me. I know Shane, and he can be a jerk, but he can also be the best man I've ever met. And you, you make him better every day he's with you. Okay?"

"Okay," Claire said. She felt a little better, and also a lot worse, because that made leaving for Boston much harder. Maybe she had been tired and made a lot out of nothing. "I should get going. I'm going to be late for class."

"Whatcha learning?"

"Probably nothing, considering how sleepy I am. But in theory, it's about multidimensional analysis and waveforms." Like she'd be studying at MIT. Only that would be a thousand times better, somehow.

"I have no idea what that is, but yawn, anyway, just on principle. Eat up. Pancakes is brain food."

"Apparently not grammar food."

"Wow. You college girls are mean."

Claire had a pleasant enough morning.... The class ended up short one professor, so after ten minutes, they were free to wander off. Her next class was a lab, which she loved (and always aced). Then lunch, and a free afternoon to think things over.

As she sat outside under a tree, listening as the cool wind rustled the leaves overhead, she kept pulling out her phone. Kept pulling up the caller list and looking at the number. Finally, she typed in the contact info. Mr. Radamon, MIT.

Her finger kept hovering over the call button, but she didn't push it.

Yet.

It scared her when her cell phone vibrated. The picture that came up was a close-up of Myrnin's vampire bunny slippers. She sighed and answered, a little too sharply.

"What?"

His voice sounded metallic and impatient over the tiny speaker. "Is that any way to speak to someone who employs you? And, I might add, could kill you at any time?"

"But won't," she said. "Has something happened? You know, with him? The old guy?"

"Him," Myrnin repeated. "No, he is still safely obscure at the moment, although there is an unprecedented effort to locate him going on, of course. But I need you for something else. Here, in the lab. Now."

"I thought you didn't need me today."

"In fact, I didn't. And now I do. Please."

"Thanks for saying please."

"I do try to be polite. Now, do get a move on."

She hung up and, just for the sake of being stubborn, finished her Coke before getting up, dusting off, and grabbing her book bag.

She got a text message before she could take more than a few steps, and stopped in the shade of a tree to read it from the tiny screen. It was from Shane, and it said, Sry abt last night luv u.

She smiled in relief, and texted back, OMG luv u 2 so sry . She almost added I need to talk, but that might make things worse. She'd talk later. Tell him. Ask him what to do about...about everything.

Claire closed the phone and held it to her heart for a few seconds, then slipped it back into her pocket.

She felt about a thousand times better, no matter what was waiting for her at the lab; in fact, she hadn't realized how down she was until suddenly she was up again.

She was humming her new favorite song when she walked around the corner, heading for a shortcut to the lab, and ran into a crying girl who was running blindly for the shelter of the trees.

The girl went down. She looked terrified. It took Claire a second to recognize her, because she was expecting a student...but Miranda was far too young to be a student, maybe fifteen years old, and also Miranda was way, way too crazy.

Miranda was -- or had been, anyway -- Eve's friend, mostly because Eve took up strays and the vulnerable, and Miranda was both. Eve had also believed the girl was psychic, and Claire was inclined to believe it, too, because Miranda's guesses on things she shouldn't have known had always been too close for comfort. She was certainly weird enough, too.

Miranda had come into Claire's life early on in her Morganville experience, and she'd been vague and dreamy and sported vampire bites from her so-called Protector, whom Claire had considered a lot more predator than anything else. Since his death, Miranda had improved, but she'd stayed vague. Her clothes looked completely random and mismatched. Same for her makeup; she had some on, but it looked more like she'd forgotten to wipe off what she'd put on yesterday and just added to it. It was smudged and smeared, and not at all attractive.

She looked like a thin, starving rabbit of a girl.