Feast of Fools

She left before she had to lie any more. She couldn’t stop herself from glancing back at him. He nodded and smiled a good-bye.

She felt bad, but there was only so much truth she was prepared to give, even to somebody who came recommended by Amelie.

“Did you bring the hamburger?”

Claire didn’t even have time to drop her backpack on the hallway floor at home before Eve had buzzed in on her like a dark, caffeine-fueled Tinkerbell, brandishing a wooden spoon.

“Uh—what?”

“Hamburger. I sent you a text.”

Oops. Claire dug her phone out and saw that, sure enough, there was a flashing message icon. “I didn’t get it. Sorry.”

“Crap.” Eve turned away and marched back down the hall, Doc Martens boots clomping with fine disregard for the safety of the wood floor. “Michael! Guess what? You’re ru

Michael was playing guitar—something fast and complicated. He stopped periodically, which was unusual for him, and he ignored Eve, which wasn’t normal, either. As Claire rounded the corner, she saw him standing up at the di

Turned out that he wasn’t ignoring Eve so much as not obeying. “I’m busy,” he said, frowned at the paper, and played the same phrase again, then again. Shook his head in frustration and erased notes on the paper. “You and Shane go.”

“I’m cooking!” Eve rolled her eyes. “Creative people. They think the world stops when they think.”

“I’ll go,” Claire said. The chance to be alone with Shane, even on something as boring as a trip to the all-night grocery, was too good to miss. “Better if I do, anyway. I’ve got the free pass.” She held up the bracelet.

Michael pulled himself away from the music in his head long enough to give her a look. He tapped his pencil in a fast, complicated rhythm on the table. “Thirty minutes,” he said. “There and back. No excuses. If you guys are late, I’m coming after you, and I’m going to be pissed off.”

“Thanks, Dad.” She wished she hadn’t said it—not so much because of the grimace on Michael’s face, but because it made her think of her actual dad. And that the clock was ru

Shane came out of the kitchen sucking on his fingertip. “What’s going on?”

“You have not been sticking your dirty fingers in my sauce,” Eve said, and pointed her wooden spoon at him.

He quickly took the finger out of his mouth. “First off, they’re not dirty. I licked them first. And second— did I hear something about the store? Claire?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

He grabbed Eve’s keys from the hall table. “Then let’s roll."

Shane was a good driver, and he knew Morganville like the back of his hand—of course, Morganville was just about that big, too, and there was only one all-night grocery store, the Food King, locally owned and operated. The parking lot was lit up like a football stadium. There were fifteen or so cars already there, evenly split between human vehicles and vamp-mobiles. Shane parked directly under a blazing set of lights and turned off the car.

“Wait,” he said as Claire reached for the door handle. “It takes us about five minutes to get here, five minutes to get the stuff, five minutes back home. That gives us fifteen whole extra minutes.”

She felt her heart stammer, and race a little faster. Shane was looking at her with fierce intensity.

“So what do you want to do?” she asked, trying to sound casual about it.

“I want to talk,” he said, which was not what she expected. Not at all. “I can’t talk about this back at the house. I never know who could be listening.”

“Meaning Michael?”

Shane shrugged. “It’s just never exactly private.”

He wasn’t wrong, but she still felt horribly disappointed. “Sure,” she said, and knew she sounded stiff and wounded. “Go ahead. Talk.”

His eyes widened. “You thought—”

“Just talk, Shane.”

He cleared his throat. “I’ve been doing some research on Bishop.”

The idea of Shane and research didn’t seem to want to fall into the same sentence. “Where?”

“The town library,” he shrugged. “Special collections. I know Janice, the librarian—she was a friend of my mom’s. She let me into the back to take a look at some of the older stuff, the things they don’t put out for public reading.”

“The vampire collection.”

He nodded. “Anyway, the only thing I could find out was a reference to a Bishop—maybe not the same one—who killed a whole lot of people about five hundred years ago.”

“Doesn’t sound too unusual . . .”

“Except that he wasn’t killing humans,” Shane said. “From the way the thing was written, Bishop was killing off his enemies in the vampire community. Making himself the ruler of the world. And then something happened, and he dropped out of sight.”

“Wow. No wonder Amelie and Oliver were freaked.”

“If he’s been underground all this time, and has a rep for taking out anyone who stands in his way, human or vampire—yeah. I’d be freaked, too. Anyway, I thought you should know. It could be important.”

“Thanks.”

He nodded, gaze fixed on hers.

“Anything else?” she prompted.

“Yeah.”

He leaned forward and kissed her. His weight settled toward her, leaning her back against the door, and she felt all the strength and breath go out of her body, replaced with a quivering, golden vibration. Oh. Shane’s lips were warm and damp, soft but demanding, and she heard herself make a sound like a whimper in response. His hands knew just where to hold her—one at the back of her head, one at the small of her back, pulling her closer. Fitting their bodies together.

It felt so good, it was like swimming in sunlight. Her fingers tangled in his soft, shaggy hair and traced down his back, and for a wild second she imagined what it would be like, right here, right now, in Eve’s big car. It seemed to go on forever, a dreamy eternity of heat. . . .

His hands slipped down her shoulders, traced her collarbone, then moved lower. She heard herself make a sound that was more a whine than anything else, a naked plea, as the heat of his touch reached the top edge of her bra, slid past the edge and down. . . .

Shane broke the kiss with a gasp, leaning his cheek against hers. The sound of his breath in her ear made her shiver again. So close. God, we’re so close. . . .

“We’d—better go inside,” he said. It sounded like he was fighting hard to sound normal, but he was missing by a mile, and when he sat back, all she could see was the hot focus in his eyes, and his damp, reddened, totally kissable lips. She wondered what he was seeing in her, and realized with a shock that it was probably the same thing.

Shared hunger.

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound normal, either. She wasn’t sure she could walk, in fact; her whole body felt like it had melted, especially around the knees. She took in a couple of deep breaths, then stopped when Shane’s eyes focused on the rise and fall of her chest. “We should—go shop.”

Shane checked his watch. “No, we should get the hamburger, throw money at the cashier, and break every speed limit back to the house if we don’t want Michael calling out the SWAT team.”

That sobered them up, enough to get them out of the car and into the store, but they held hands the whole way.

Inside, the place looked too bright, and yet somehow too cold. Aisles of colorful packages. There were a few shoppers pushing carts, and some of them, Claire knew, had to be vampires, but she couldn’t necessarily tell which ones, at a glance. Many of them had perfected their human disguises. Was it the twenty-something girl with the red hair and the long shopping list? Or the elderly lady with her little fluffy dog riding in the child seat of the cart? Not the dad with the two small children and the harassed look—she was sure of that one.