Dead Girls' Dance

“Who? Michael?’” Claire asked, and they dissolved in giggles.

Which only got worse when Michael walked in, went to the refrigerator, and retrieved the last two beers from his birthday pack. “Ladies,’” he said. “Did I miss something?’”

“Pasta boiled over,’” Claire gulped, trying not to giggle even harder. Michael looked at them for a second, curious, and then shrugged and left again. “Do you think he’s telling Shane right now that we’re insane?’”

“Probably.’” Eve managed to control herself, and put the pasta back on the burner. “Is this shock? Are we in shock right now?’”

“I don’t know,’” Claire said. “Let’s see, we’ve been barricaded in the house, attacked, nearly burned to death. Michael was murdered right in front of us, then came back, and we got interrogated by the big, scary vampire cops? Yeah, maybe shock.’”

Eve choked on another snort/giggle. “Maybe that’s why I decided to cook.’”

They watched the pasta bubble in silence. The whole room was starting to smell warm with spices and tomato sauce, a comforting and homey sort of smell. Claire stirred the spaghetti sauce, which was looking delicious now that it was simmering.

The kitchen door banged open again. Shane, this time, a beer in one hand. “What’s burning?’”

“Your brain. So, did you two girls kiss and make up?’” Eve asked, stirring the pasta.

He glowered at her, then turned to Claire. “What the hell is she making?’”

“Spaghetti.’” And technically, it was Claire mostly, but she decided not to mention it. “Um, about your dad—do you think they’re going to catch him?’”

“No.’” Shane hip-bumped Eve out of the way at the stove and did some spaghetti maintenance. “Morganville’s got a lot of hiding places. That’s mostly for the vamps’ benefit, but it’ll work for him, too. He’ll go to ground. I’ve been sending him maps. He’ll know where to go.’”

“Maybe he’ll just leave?’” Eve sounded hopeful. Shane dragged a piece of spaghetti out of the tangle in the pot and pressed it against the metal with the spoon. It sliced cleanly.

“No,’” Shane said again. “He definitely won’t leave. He’s got no place else to go. He always said that if he crossed the border into Morganville again, he was here until it was done.’”

“You mean until he’s done.’” Eve crossed her arms, not as if she was angry, more like she was cold. “Shane, if he goes after even one vampire, we are dead. You know that, right?’”

He picked up the beer bottle and drank, avoiding an answer. He flipped off the burner under the spaghetti, took the pot to the sink, and drained it with the edge of a lid. Like a real chef or something.

Which, Claire had to admit, was pretty much totally hot, the way he moved so confidently. She liked to cook, but he had authority. In fact, she was paying a lot more attention to what Shane did today—the way he moved, the way his clothes fit—or didn’t, in his case, because Shane was wearing his jeans loose and just baggy enough to give her fantasies about them sliding down. Which made her blush.

She concentrated on getting down the bowls from the cupboard. Mismatched bowls, two out of four of them chipped. She put them out on the counter as Shane returned with the spaghetti and began portioning it out. Eve grabbed the sauce and followed him down the line, ladling.

It looked pretty tasty, actually. Claire picked up two bowls and carried them into the living room, where Michael was tuning his guitar as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t been stabbed through the heart and dragged outside and—oh my God, she didn’t want to finish that thought at all.

She handed him the bowl. He set the guitar carefully back in its case—somehow, with all the mayhem that had gone on in the past two days, it had escaped damage—and dug in as Eve and Shane trailed in with their own di

Shane settled on the couch, and Claire joined him. For a few minutes nobody said anything. Claire hadn’t realized that she was hungry, not really, but the second the sauce hit her tongue and exploded into flavors, she was starving. She couldn’t gobble it fast enough.

“Hell’s put in a skating rink,’” Shane said. “This is actually edible, Eve.’”

Again, Claire had the impulse to claim credit…and managed not to, mostly because that would have required her to stop shoveling pasta into her mouth.

“Claire,’” Eve said. “She’s the cook, not me. I just, you know, supervised.’” Which gave Claire a pleasant little spurt of gratitude and surprise.

“See? I knew that.’”

Eve flipped him off and noisily sucked some spaghetti into her mouth.

Claire got to the bottom of the bowl first—even before Michael or Shane—and sat back with a sigh of utter contentment. Nap, she thought. I could take a nap.

“Guys,’” Michael said. “We’re still in trouble. You know that, right?’”

“Yeah,’” Eve said. “But now we have catered trouble.’”

He ignored her, except for a brief little quirk of a smile, and focused on Shane. “You need to tell me everything,’” Michael said. “No bullshit, man. Every last thing, from the time you left Morganville.’”

Shane seemed to lose his appetite.

Which, for Shane, was not a good sign at all.

The vampires had offered them money. Cash compensation. It was Morganville’s version of Allstate, only it wasn’t insurance—it was blood money for a dead child.

And the Collins family—Dad, Mom, and Shane—had packed up whatever had survived the fire that had taken Alyssa, and left town in the middle of the night. Ru

“At first, she’d just space,’” Shane said. He’d drained his beer, and now he was just rolling the bottle between his palms. “Stare at things, like she was trying to remember something. Dad didn’t notice. He was drinking a lot. We ended up in Odessa, and Dad got a job at the recycling plant. He wasn’t home much.’”

“That must have been an improvement,’” Eve muttered.

“Hey, let me get through it, okay?’”

“Sorry.’”

Shane took another deep breath. “Mom…she kept talking about Alyssa. You have to understand, we didn’t—I couldn’t remember anything, except that she’d died. It was all just sort of a blur, but not the kind of blur you worry about, if you know what I mean…?’”

Claire was fairly certain nobody did, but she remembered her conversation with her own parents. They’d forgotten things, and somehow, they hadn’t really cared. So maybe she did understand.

“I started working, too. Mom…she just stayed in the motel. Wouldn’t do anything except eat, sleep, sometimes take a bath if we yelled at her long enough. I figured, you know, depression…but it was more than that. One day, out of nowhere, she grabs me by the arm and she says, ‘Shane, do you remember your sister?’ So I go, ‘Yeah, Mom, of course I do.’ And she says the weirdest thing. She says, ‘Do you remember the vampires?’ I didn’t remember, but it felt—like something in me was trying to. I got a bad headache, and I felt sick. And Mom…she just kept on talking, about how there was something wrong with us, something going wrong in our heads. About the vampires. About Lyssa dying in the fire.’”

He fell silent, still rolling the beer bottle like some kind of magic talisman. Nobody moved.

“And I remembered.’”

Shane’s whisper sounded raw, somehow, vulnerable and exposed. Michael wasn’t looking at him. He was looking down, at his own beer bottle, and the label he was peeling off in strips.

“It was like some wall coming down, and then it all just flooded in. I mean, it’s bad enough to live through it and sort of cope with it, but when it comes back like that…’” Shane visibly shuddered. “It was like I’d just watched Lyss die all over again.’”