Glass Houses

“You know the tattoo on Eve’s arm?”

Shane acted like she’d stuck him in the butt with a fork. “We’re looking for the book? Here?”

“I—” She gave up. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s worth a try.”

He just shook his head, his expression something between You’re crazy and You’re amazing. But not in a good way. She pulled up a chair and began leafing through the books, one after another. Nothing…nothing…nothing…

“Claire.” Shane sounded odd. He handed her a black leather-bound book. “Take a look.”

It was too new. They were looking for an old book, right? This was…this was a Holy Bible. With a cross on the front.

“Look inside,” he said. She opened it. The first few gold-leafed pages were standard, the same familiar words she’d grown up with, and still believed. Eve had said they had a few churches in Morganville, right? Maybe they had services. She’d have to check.

Midway through Exodus, the pages went hollow, and there was a tiny little volume hidden inside the Bible. Old. Very old. The cover was water-stained dirty leather, and scratched into it was a symbol.

The symbol.

Claire pulled it out of the Bible and opened it.

“Well?” Shane demanded after a few seconds. “What about it?”

“It’s—” She swallowed hard. “It’s in Latin.”

“So? What does it say?”

“I don’t read Latin!”

“You’re kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn’t that the international language for smart people?”

She picked up a book without looking and threw it at him. He ducked. It flopped to the floor. Claire flipped pages in the small volume. It was handwritten in faded, coppery ink, the kind of beautiful perfect writing from hundreds of years ago.

She was actually holding it in her hands.

And here she’d been intending to just fake it.

“We’d better get going,” Shane said. “Seriously. I don’t want to be here when the cops come calling.”

“You think they will?”

“Well, if dear old Prof Wilson keeled over after stealing the vampires blind, yeah, I think they’ll send a couple of cops over to inventory the goodies. So we’d better move it.”

She stuffed the journal back into the Bible and started to put it into her backpack, then paused in outright despair. Too much stuff. “We need another bag,” she said. “Something small.”

Shane came up with a plastic grocery sack from the kitchen, stuck the Bible inside, and hustled her out. She looked back at Professor Wilson’s lonely living room one last time. A clock ticked on the mantel, and everything waited for a life that would never start up again.

She was right. It was sad.

“Run first,” Shane said. “Mourn later.”

It was the perfect motto for Morganville.

They made it back home with half an hour or so to spare, but as they turned the corner on Lot Street, where the Gothic bulk of the Glass House pretty much dwarfed all of the other, newer houses around it, Claire’s eyes went immediately to the blue SUV sitting at the curb. It looked familiar….

“Oh my God,” she said, and stopped dead in her tracks.

“Okay, stopping? Not a great idea. Come on, Claire, let’s—”

“That’s my parents’ car!” she said. “My parents are here! Oh my God!” She practically squealed that last part, and would have turned around and run away, but Shane grabbed her by the neck of her shirt and hauled her around.

“Better get it over with,” he said. “If they tracked you this far, they’re not going to drive off without saying hello.”

“Oh, man! Let go!” He did. She twitched her shirt down over her shoulders and glared at him, and he did an extravagant bow.

“You first,” he said. “I’m watching your back.”

She was, at least temporarily, more worried about her front.

When she cracked open the door to the house, she could hear Eve’s anxious voice. “I’m sure she’ll be here any time—she’s, you know, at class, and—”

“Young lady, my daughter is not in class. I’ve been to her classes. She hasn’t been to class the entire afternoon. Now, are you going to tell me where she is, or do I have to call the police?”

Dad sounded pissed. Claire swallowed hard, resisted the urge to back up and close the door and run away—mainly because Shane was right behind her, and he was finding this way too fu

“Claire!” She’d know that shriek of relief anywhere. Before she could say Hi, Mom, she was buried in a hug and a wave of L’Oréal perfume. The perfume stayed longer than the hug, which morphed into Claire’s being held at arm’s length and shaken like a rag doll. “Claire, what have you been doing? What are you doing here?”

“Mom—”

“We were so worried about you after that terrible accident, but Les couldn’t get off work until today—”

“It wasn’t that big a deal, Mom—”

“And we just had to come up and see you, but your room is empty in the dorm. You weren’t in classes—Claire, what’s happened to you? I can’t believe you’d do something like this!”

“Like what?” she asked, sighing. “Mom, would you quit shaking me? I’m getting dizzy.”

Mom let go and folded her arms. She wasn’t very tall—just a couple of inches over Claire’s height, even in midheeled shoes—and Dad, who was glowering at Shane in the background, was as tall and twice as broad. “Is it him?” Dad asked. “Did he get you into trouble?”

“Not me,” Shane said. “I’ve just got that kind of face.”

“Shut up!” Claire hissed. She could hear that he thought all this was fu

“Eve?” Her parents looked at each other blankly. “You mean—” As one, they cast horrified glances at Eve, who was standing with her hands folded, trying to look as demure as it was possible to look while wearing an outfit that looked like something a Goth ballerina might wear—all black netting in the skirt and red satin up top. She smiled sweetly, but it was kind of spoiled by the red lipstick (had she borrowed Miranda’s?) and skull earrings.

Mom said faintly, “Claire, you used to have such nice friends. What happened to Elizabeth?”

“She went to Texas A&M, Mom.”

“That’s no reason not to still be friends.”

Mom logic. Claire decided that Shane had been right—there was no getting out of this one. She might as well jump into the pool; the sharks were circling no matter what she did. “Mom, Eve and Shane are two of my roommates. Here. In this house.”

Silence. Mom and Dad looked frozen. “Les?” Mom asked. “Did she say she was living here?”

“Young lady, you are not living here,” Dad said. “You live in the dorm.”

“I’m not. I’m living here, and that’s my decision.”

“That’s illegal! The rules said that you have to live on campus, Claire. You can’t just—”

Outside the windows, night was slipping up on them, stealthy and quick as an assassin. “I can,” Claire said. “I did. I’m not going back there.”

“Well, I’m not paying good money just to have you squat in some old wreck with a bunch of—” Dad was at a loss for words to describe how little he thought of Eve and Shane. “Friends! And are they even in school?”

“I’m currently between majors,” Shane offered.

“Shut up!” Claire was nearly in tears now.

“All right, that’s it. Get your things, Claire. You’re coming with us.”

All the amusement faded out of Shane’s face. “No, she isn’t,” he said. “Not at night. Sorry.”

Dad got red-faced and even more furious, and leveled a finger at her. “Is this why you’re here? Older boys? Living under the same roof?”

“Oh, Claire,” Mom sighed. “You’re too young for this. You—”

“Shane,” Shane supplied.

“Shane, I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice boy”—she didn’t sound especially convinced—“but you have to understand that Claire is a very special girl, and she’s very young.”