Ghost Town

“And good morning to you, too, grumpy. Nice bedhead.” He flipped her off. “No coffee for you.” Eve turned back to Claire and hugged her one more time. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Claire said, and yawned again. “I will be once I get clean.”

“Yeah, big endorsement of that. I’ll have breakfast ready for you!”

Shane grabbed Claire’s hand. She smiled at him, oddly shy, because the glow in his eyes meant he was up to something, or thinking about being up to something. But he finally shook his head and said, “Go on, before I do something I probably shouldn’t.”

That sounded interesting. She wasn’t that tired. But yuck, getting clean sounded even better. So she kissed him quickly and ran up the steps toward the bathroom.

“See?” she heard Shane yell at the kitchen. “She doesn’t stomp around like a cattle stampede!”

“Bite me, Collins! No bacon for you, either!”

Things were back to normal. Claire breathed a huge sigh of relief, and felt something that had been completely knotted up in her gut start to relax.

The shower felt so good it was hard to actually get out again, but the creaky hot-water heater finally convinced her by spritzing in ice-cold bursts when it was about to give up altogether. The bathroom was wreathed in so much steam it was like a sauna, and Claire enjoyed the feel of it against her skin as she shaved her legs and underarms and applied lotion and generally felt human again.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Yeah, just a minute!” she called. “I’m almost done!”

“Mom?”

Claire stopped in the act of finger-fluffing her hair and turned toward the door. All of a sudden, the heat of the bathroom faded away, and the knot in her stomach came back. “What? Michael, is that you?”

Whoever it was, the voice didn’t call out again, and when she went to the door and pressed her ear against it, she didn’t hear anything at all. Weird. Really weird.

Claire put on her new, clean clothes—jeans, an orange camisole, and a pretty flowered sheer top that she’d scored at the resale shop. She unlocked the door and peeked out into the hallway.

Deserted.

She opened the door all the way and stepped out, accompanied by clouds of escaping steam. All the doors were shut, including Michael’s at the end of the hall. She didn’t see any sign of life up here, but Eve and Shane were still yelling back and forth downstairs.

Weird.

Claire left the door open and went to her room for her shoes. As she opened it, she found Michael standing in there with his back to her.

“Michael?” Finding him in her room was more than a little shocking. He was really good about giving her privacy, even if it was technically his house; he always knocked and waited for permission before coming in, which he rarely did anyway. “Something you wanted?”

He turned slowly to face her. She was blindly afraid for a second that something awful had happened to him, some kind of accident, but he looked . . . normal.

Just kind of dazed.

“What’s happened here?” he asked her. “It shouldn’t be like this. Why is it like this?”

“I—I don’t understand. It looks okay to me. I mean, sorry about the bed. I meant to make it up. What are you—”

“Who are you?” Michael interrupted her, and took a step back when she came toward him. “Whoa. Stay right there. Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?”

Claire’s mouth opened and closed, because she had no idea what to say to that. Was he kidding? No, she didn’t think so—there was real confusion in his face, real panic in his blue eyes. “I—I’m Claire,” she finally said. “Claire, remember? What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t—” He pulled in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and clenched his fists tight. She saw something strange pass over his face, and then he looked at her again, and he was back to being the same Michael she knew. “Claire. Oh, crap, Claire, I’m sorry. That was weird. I think . . . I think I was sleepwalking. I was dreaming it was three years ago, and my parents were still here. This used to be their room. I was thinking how weird it was that their stuff wasn’t here.” He laughed shakily and wiped at his forehead like he was sweating, although Claire didn’t think he was. “Wow. Didn’t like that much. It really felt wrong.”

She still felt afraid, for some reason. “But . . . you’re okay now?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, and gave her that dazzling Michael Glass smile that put girls on the floor from a distance. “Sorry if I scared you. Man, I haven’t sleepwalked in ages. So weird.”

“You knocked on the bathroom door,” Claire said. “You . . . you asked if I was your mom.”

“I did? Sorry; that is supercreepy. You’re much shorter than my mom.”

“Brat,” she said, surprised into a giggle.

“That’s no way to talk to a vampire.”

“Bloodsucking brat.”

“Better,” he said. “I can’t believe I just barged in here. I’m really sorry. Won’t happen again.”

“It’s okay; you couldn’t help it.” But she still watched him all the way down the hall, until they were downstairs. Having a vampire do something that strange, even if it was Michael, gave her a serious case of the chills.

In the kitchen, when they were all together, everything seemed fine. Michael was the same, and Eve and Shane sniped back and forth at each other with the same casual sort of loving cruelty that they always had. Claire found herself doing nothing but watching them, looking for anything odd. Out of place.

“Hey,” Eve said as she set a plate of bacon and eggs down in front of Claire on the table. “Space Ghost. You in there anywhere?”

Claire blinked and focused on her. Well, Eve would never freak her out, because Eve was always . . . Eve. Today’s eyeliner was dark blue, and heavy, and her rice-powder makeup and navy lipstick probably should have looked weird, but instead, they just looked cute. And normal. “Sorry,” Claire said. “Still tired, I guess. That was really, really hard.”

“Spill. Tell me everything.” Eve was going through a phase where she wanted to eat everything with chopsticks. Claire watched her unwrap a set of cheap bamboo ones, scrape them together a few times, and dig into her eggs. “Did you have to do anything gruesome?”

“Not unless you count sleeping in Myrnin’s”—oh, she realized right at the end of that sentence that she really shouldn’t have gone there, because Shane and Michael both turned to look at her—“uh, lab. No, not really.”

Eve stared. “You were totally going to say ‘bed.’”

“Wasn’t!” Claire felt her cheeks flaming. “Anyway, all I had to do was repair something. And then they let me sleep. No big deal.”

“No big deal? You were gone for almost five days without a word, Claire! You got arrested! Even our resident ex-con was impressed.” Meaning Shane, of course, who’d spent his share of time behind Morganville bars. He barely paused in chopping up onions for his eggs to flip her off. “If it hadn’t been for Michael and Myrnin . . .”

“Michael,” Claire said, and looked at him. He was microwaving his sports bottle, which held his morning O negative. “I thought you might help hold Shane down and keep him from doing anything dangerous.”

“Wasn’t easy,” Michael said.

Eve nodded. “He stayed on Amelie until she told him what happened to you, and then he kept Shane from pretending he was a ninja and going to rescue you.”

“Hey, you, too!” Shane protested.

“Yeah, okay, me, too,” Eve said. “Myrnin called, too. I guess he thought it would be reassuring or something to tell us you’d been standing up for forty hours, and not falling down. What a whack job. Oooh, was he wearing the bu

“Sometimes,” Claire said, and dug into her breakfast. It was good, really good. Eve was developing a flair for eggs and bacon and morning-type stuff. “You guys were really going to come get me?”