Glass Houses

The librarians didn’t even give her a second look. She waved and smiled and went into the stacks, all the way to the back stairs.

The door was just as she’d left it. She fumbled on the gloves, opened the top of the canister, and found that there was a kind of steel pipette that fit into a nozzle. She made sure it was in place, then opened the valve, held her breath, and began pouring supercooled liquid into the lock. She wasn’t sure how much to use—too much was better than not enough, she guessed—and kept pouring until the outside of the lock was completely frosted. Then she cranked the valve shut, and—reminding herself to keep the gloves on—yanked on the doorknob.

Crack! It sounded like a gunshot. She jumped, looked around, and realized the knob had moved in her hand.

She’d opened the door.

Nothing to do now but go inside…but somehow, that didn’t seem like such a great idea, now that she was actually able to do it.

Because…coffins. Or worse.

Claire sucked in a steadying breath, opened the door, and carefully looked around the edge.

It looked like a storeroom. Files. Stacks of cartons and wooden crates. No one in sight. Great, she thought. Maybe I did just break into the file room. That would be disappointing. Still, she stuffed the gloves in her backpack, just in case.

The cartons looked new, but the contents—when she unwrapped the string tying one closed—appeared old. Crumbling books, badly preserved. Ancient letters and papers in languages she couldn’t read, some of which looked like ancestors of English. She tried the next box. More of the same. The room was vast, and it was full of this kind of stuff.

The book, she thought. They’re looking for the book. Every old book they find comes here and gets examined. Now that she looked, she saw that the crates had small red X marks on them—meaning they’d been gone through? Initials, too. Somebody was being held accountable.

Which meant…somebody was working here.

She had just enough time to form the thought when two people walked out of the maze of boxes ahead of her. They weren’t hurrying, and they weren’t alarmed. Vampires. She didn’t know how she knew—they weren’t exactly dressed for the part—but the way they moved, loose and sure, screamed predator to her fragile-prey brain.

“Well,” said the short blond girl, “we don’t get many visitors here.” Except for the pallor of her face and the glitter in her eyes, she looked like a hundred other girls out on the Quad. She was wearing pink. It seemed wrong for a vampire to be wearing pink.

“Did you take a wrong turn, honey?” The man was taller, darker, and he looked really odd…really dead. It was because of his skin tone, she realized. He was black. Being a vampire bleached him, not to white, but to the color of ashes. He had on a TPU purple T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and ru

They split up, coming at her from two different sides.

“Whose little one are you?” purred the pink girl, and before Claire could engage her brain to run, the girl had taken her left hand, examining her bare wrist. Then examining her right one. “Oh, my, you really are lost, sweetie. John, what should we do?”

“Well,” John said, and put a friendly hand on Claire’s shoulder. It felt colder than the liquid-nitrogen bottle hanging across her back. “We could sit down and have a nice cup of coffee. Tell you all about what we do in here. That’s what you want to know, right? Children like you are just so darn curious.” He was steering her forward, and Claire knew—just knew—that any attempt to pull free would result in pain. Probably broken bones.

Pink Girl still had hold of her other wrist, too. Her cool fingers were pressed against Claire’s pulse point.

I need to get out of this. Fast.

“I know what you do here,” she said. “You’re looking for the book. But I thought vampires couldn’t read it.”

John stopped and looked at his companion, who raised pale eyebrows back at him. “Angela?” he asked.

“We can’t,” she said. “We’re just here as…observers. And you seem very knowledgeable, for a free-range child. Under eighteen, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be under someone’s Protection? Your family’s?”

She seemed honestly concerned. That was weird. “I’m a student,” Claire said. “Advanced placement.”

“Ah,” Angela said, and looked kind of regretful. “Well, then, I guess you’re on your own. Too bad, really.”

“Because you’re going to kill me?” Claire heard herself say it in a kind of dreamlike state, and remembered what Eve had told her. Don’t look in their eyes. Too late. Angela’s were a soft turquoise, very pretty. Claire felt a deliciously warm edge-of-sleep sensation wash over her.

“Probably,” Angela admitted. “But first you should have some tea.”

“Coffee,” John said. “I still like the caffeine.”

“It spoils the taste!”

“Gives it that zip.” John smacked his lips.

“Why don’t you let me look through boxes?” Claire asked, desperately bringing herself back from the edge of whatever that was. The vampires were leading her through a maze of boxes and crates, all marked with red Xs and initials. “You’ve got to let humans do it, right? If you can’t read the book?”

“What makes you think you could read it, little one?” Angela asked. She had a buttery sort of accent, not quite California, not quite Midwest, not quite anything. Old. It sounded old. “Are you a scholar of languages, as well?”

“N-no, but I know what the symbol is that you’re looking for. I can recognize it.”

Angela reached down and drew her fingernails lightly over the skin of Claire’s i

“No, I don’t have the tattoo. But I’ve seen it.” She was absolutely shaking all over, terrified in a distant sort of way, but her brain was racing, looking for escape. “I can recognize it. You can’t, can you? You can’t even draw it.”

Angela’s fingernails dug in just a bit, in warning. “Don’t be smart, little girl. We’re not the kind of people you should mock.”

“I’m not mocking. You can’t see it. That’s why you haven’t found it. It’s not just that you can’t read it—right?”

Angela and John exchanged looks again, silent and meaningful. Claire swallowed hard, tried to think of anything that might be a good argument for keeping her unbitten (Maybe if I don’t drink any tea or coffee?) and spared a thought for just how pissed off Shane was going to be if she went and got herself killed. On campus. In the middle of the day.

The vampires turned a corner of boxes, and there, in an open space, was a door that didn’t lead out onto any stairwell she’d seen, an elevator with a DOWN button, a battered school-issue desk and chair, and…

“Professor Wilson?” she blurted. He looked up, blinking behind his glasses. He was her Classics of English Literature professor (Tuesdays and Thursdays at two) and although he was boring, he seemed to know his stuff. He was a faded-looking man, all grays—thin gray hair, faded gray eyes—with a tendency to dress in colors that bleached him out even more. Today it was a white shirt and gray jacket.

“Ah. You’re”—he snapped his fingers two or three times—“in my Intro to Shakespeare—”

“Classics of English Lit.”

“Right, exactly. They change the title occasionally, just to fool the students into taking it again. Neuberg, isn’t it?” Fright in his eyes. “You weren’t assigned here to help me, were you?”

“I—” Light dawned. Maybe letting mistaken impressions lie was a good idea right now. “Yes. I was. By…Miss Samson.” Miss Samson was the dragon lady of the English department; everyone knew that. Nobody questioned her. As excuses went, this one was thi