Midnight Alley

She followed Michael back to the waiting room. Richard Morrell was gone, which was good, and Claire sat in silence, rubbing her hands together, still feeling the phantom slickness of Shane's blood on her skin.

"Hey," Michael said. She didn't know how much time had passed, just that she was stiff and sore and tense. She looked up into his crystal-blue eyes, and saw strength and kindness, but just a little bit of a glitter that didn't seem ... natural. "Rest. I can almost hear the gears grinding in your head." Eve was asleep in his lap, curled up like a cat. He was stroking her dark hair. "Here," he said. "Lean in." And he put his arm around Claire, and she leaned, and despite everything that had happened she felt warm and safe.

It all fell in on her then, all the fear and the pain and the fact that Shane had gotten shot, right in front of her, and she didn't know how to deal with that, didn't know how to feel or what to say or do and it was all just ...

She turned her face into Michael's blue silk shirt and cried, silent heaving sobs that tore up out of her guts in painful jerks. Michael's hand cradled her head, and he let her cry.

She felt him press his cool lips to her temple when she finally relaxed against him, and then she just slid away, into the dark.

###

Claire fought her way, panicked, out of a nightmare, and into another one. Hospital. Shane. Surgery.

Eve was shaking her with both hands on her shoulders, babbling at her, and she couldn't follow the words, but the words didn't matter at first.

Eve was smiling.

"He's okay," Claire said in a whisper, then louder. "He's okay!"

"Yeah," Eve said, the words tumbling out in a confusing bright flood, way too fast. "He's out of surgery, it was touch and go, he had a lot of internal bleeding, he's going to be in ICU for a few days before they let him come home, and he'll have a temporary bracelet, you know, the plastic kind?"

Claire tried to literally shake the sleepy fog out of her head. "Plastic — wait, don't you always get one of those in the hospital? Like an ID tag?"

"Do you? Really? How weird. Oh. Well, in Morganville you leave it on when you leave, and it protects you for up to a month after surgery. Kind of like a temporary vampire restraining order." Eve actually bounced up and down. "He's going to be okay, oh my God, he's going to be okay!"

Claire scrambled out of her seat, grabbed Eve's arms, and the two of them bounced together up and down, then fell into a hug and squealed.

"I'll just — let you guys do that," Michael said. He was sitting in the chairs watching, but he was smiling. He looked tired.

"What time is it?" Claire asked.

"Late. Early." Eve checked her skull watch. "About six in the morning. Michael, you should get home, it'll be dawn soon. I'll stay here with Claire."

"We should all go home," Michael said. "He's not going to wake up for hours yet. You could change clothes."

Claire looked down at herself, and grimaced tiredly. "Yeah, I could," she admitted. Shane's blood had soaked into her patterned tights, and she thought Michael could probably smell it. She could even smell it, a musty, rotten odor that made her gag. "Eve? You want to go too?"

Eve nodded. The three of them walked out of the waiting room and down the long, empty hallway toward the elevators. They passed the front desk, where Nurse Fenton glared at them. When Claire looked back, as they waited for the elevator, Nurse Fenton was dialing the phone.

"Why do I know that name?" she asked, and then realized, duh, she was with two Morganville natives. "Fenton? You guys know anything about her?"

The elevator arrived. Eve stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby, and she and Michael looked at each other for a second.

"The family's been here for generations," Michael said. "Nurse Charming out there's a new arrival. She came to TPU for school, married into the family."

"You met her husband," Eve said. "Officer Fenton, Brad Fenton. He's the one who — "

"The one who showed up when Sam was attacked," Claire blurted. "Of course! I forgot his name." Why did that still leave her vaguely uneasy? She couldn't remember anything that Officer Fenton had done that had made her think he was anti-vamp; he'd acted quickly enough when Sam was in trouble. Not like his wife, who clearly wasn't as open-minded.

She worried about it for a while, but couldn't see any real co

###

A shower helped, but it didn't banish the dull ache between Claire's eyes, or the strange gray cast the world had taken on. Exhaustion, she guessed, and stress. Nothing looked quite right. She changed clothes, grabbed her backpack, and went back to the hospital — this time, taking a cab, despite it being broad daylight — to wait for visiting hours to start in ICU. No sign of Jason, but then, she hadn't expected him to be that obvious. Or that stupid. He'd managed to get away with it this long.

But then again ... He really hadn't struck her as all that far-thinking, either. More of a want-take-have kind of guy. So what did that mean? Was Eve right? Was this a giant official cover-up, and Jason had been given free rein to run around town raping and killing and shooting as the mood moved him? She shuddered to think.

Nurse Fenton was, mercifully, off duty when Claire arrived. She checked in with the younger, nicer lady at the desk, whose name was Helen Porter, and went to find the least uncomfortable chair in the waiting area. The building wasn't completely lame; there were laptop co

Of course, the filters restricted where she could go on the internet, and she quickly grew frustrated trying to find out what was happening in the world outside of Morganville ... more of the same, she guessed. War, crime, death, atrocity. Sometimes it hardly seemed that vampires were the bad guys, given the things people did to each other without the excuse of needing a pint of O neg to get through the day.

She wondered if the vampires had made any headway tracking down who could have staked Sam. Surely they'd found out something. Then again, they hadn't had a lot of luck cornering Shane's dad, either ...

Her laptop co

Still, she knew she was overdue to talk to her mom, and the longer she put it off, the more stress it was going to be for both of them.

Claire logged off the laptop, packed it, and opened up her new cool phone. It glowed with a pale blue light when she dialed the number, and she heard faint clicking. That probably meant the call was being recorded, or at least monitored. More reason to be careful about what she said ...

Mom answered the phone on the third ring. "Hello?"

"Hi!" Claire winced at the artificial cheeriness of her tone. Why couldn't she sound natural? "Mom, it's Claire."

"Claire! Honey, I've been worried. You should have called days ago."

"I know, Mom, I'm sorry. I got busy. I got transferred into some advanced classes, they're really great but there's been a lot of homework and reading. I just forgot."