Feast of Fools

“For now. But he could get to them, right? Anytime he wants.”

“Maybe. But he could get to us just as easily. Look, you can’t help them right now, but he’s got no good reason to hurt them. It’ll be okay.”

Shane was the optimist. That was how you knew things were really bad. . . . Claire forced a smile, opened her eyes, and tried to be a brave little toaster. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it’ll be fine. No problem.”

His dark eyes searched hers, and she knew that he could see she was lying. But he didn’t call her on it, probably all too familiar with the concept of denial. “So,” he said. “Care for a nice, civilized game of chess?”

A thump, and the unmistakable sound of a muffled giggle, drifted through the ceiling from the second floor. Approximately where Eve’s room would be.

“Hey!” Shane yelled up. “Turn down the porn soundtrack! Trying to concentrate here!”

More laughter, quickly stifled. Shane focused back on Claire, and Claire felt her lips curling into a more genuine kind of smile.

“Chess,” she said. “Your move, tough guy.”

Another thump from upstairs. Shane shook his head and tipped over his king. “What the hell. I surrender. Let’s hook up a video game and kill some zombies.”

Chapter 3

In the morning, it was ... the morning. For a precious few seconds when Claire woke up, nothing was wrong, nothing at all. Her body hummed with energy, and the birds were singing outside, and the sun burned in warm stripes across her bed.

She squinted at the alarm clock. Seven thirty. Time to get up if she intended to make it to her first class and still have any margin for coffee.

It wasn’t until she was in the shower, and the hot water was pounding sense back into her head, that she realized that all was not well. Her parents were in town. Her parents were on the radar screen of the monsters.

And her parents wanted her to move back in with them.

That put an end to her good mood, and by the time she padded down the steps, dragging her textbook-loaded backpack and carrying her shoes, she was frowning. The house was a mess. Nobody had done the chores, including her. The kitchen was still a wreck, with breakfast congealing in the pans. She muttered to herself as the coffee brewed, dumped filthy dishes and pans in the sink to soak in hot water, and left a snarky note for her housemates. Especially Shane, who’d slacked even more than was normal.

Then she put on her shoes and walked to school.

Morganville looked just like any other dusty, sleepy town in the daylight: people out driving to work, jogging, pushing strollers, walking dogs. College students with backpacks as she got closer to the campus. The casual visitor never knew, at least during the daytime, that this place was so vastly screwed up.

Claire supposed that was the point.

She spotted some trucks delivering to local businesses; did those drivers know? Did they just come and go without incident? Was there some off-limits rule for the vamps about whom they could hunt and whom they couldn’t? There would have to be. Having the state police descend on Morganville wouldn’t be helpful for the vamps. . . .

“Hey.”

Claire blinked. A car was idling next to her, barely keeping pace as she walked. A red convertible, harsh and shiny as fresh blood in the sun. In it, three girls with identically false smiles.

The driver was Monica Morrell, the daughter of the town’s mayor. Claire’s worst human enemy from day one of her tenure in Morganville. Monica had mostly recovered from her recent brush with death by drugs, or at least she looked that way—glossy as the car, and just as hard. Her blond hair was shiny and casually styled, her makeup perfect, and if she looked just a shade more pale than usual, it was hard to tell.

“Hey,” Claire said, and made sure to drift farther over on the sidewalk, out of easy grabbing range. “How are you feeling, Monica?”

“Me? Great. Couldn’t be better,” Monica said brightly. There was something way darker in her eyes than in her tone. “You tried to kill me, freak.”

Claire stopped dead in her tracks. “No,” she said. “I didn’t do that.”

“You gave me that drug. It almost killed me.”

“You took it from me!” The red crystals, the ones that she’d stolen from Myrnin. The ones that, however briefly, had seemed like a good idea. Not so much once she’d seen their effect on Monica, and her own face in the mirror after taking them. They hadn’t hurt her, but their effect on Monica had been shocking.

“Don’t give me that. You nearly killed me,” Monica said. “I’d file charges, but with you being the Founder’s pet and all, that won’t do any good. So we’ll just have to find some other way to make sure you pay. Just wanted to give you a heads-up, bitch—this isn’t done. It isn’t even started. It is on.”

She gave Claire a cold, hard smile, and accelerated away with a screech of rubber on pavement.

Claire shifted her backpack nervously and looked around. Nobody had paid attention, of course. It didn’t pay, in Morganville, to get into anybody else’s business.

She was on her own out here. Eve worked on campus, but Claire didn’t want to drag her friends into this. They had enough problems already, and Monica was all her own.

Like it or not.

But as she passed the recessed doorway of a boarded-up shop, she sensed someone watching her.

She tried to dismiss it as imagination, but there really was someone watching her. She couldn’t make him out for a few seconds, and then she did, with another unpleasant shock. Heroin-addict-ski

“Jason,” she said, and involuntarily looked around for help. Nobody there, nobody she could turn to. Not even a passing police car—and the police definitely wanted to talk to Jason, after his run-in with Shane.

It hit her again: He’d stabbed her boyfriend. Tried to kill him. The cops said it was self-defense, but she knew better.

Jason took his hands out of his coat pockets and held them up. “Don’t scream,” he said. “Unless you really feel like it. I’m not going to hurt you. Not in broad daylight on a busy street, anyway.”

He sounded . . . different. Odder than usual, and that was a pretty high standard of odd.

“What do you want?” She clutched the strap of her backpack in a white-knuckled fist. In an emergency, it would make a respectable blunt object. She might knock him down with it, or at least trip him. It was only about a block to Common Grounds—Oliver owed her Protection once she was inside the building, even from human enemies.

“Stop freaking, genius. I’m not here to hurt you.” He put his hands back in his jacket pockets. “How’s Shane?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because—” He frowned and shrugged. “Look, that was self-defense, okay?”

“You baited him. You threatened me and Eve. You wanted him to come after you.”

“Yeah, well, granted, I was tweaking, but the guy took a home-run swing at my head, in case you missed it.”

Uncomfortably, that was true. “What about the other people you’ve killed? Were those all self-defense, too?”

“Who says I’ve killed people?”

“You did. Remember? You left a dead girl in our basement for Shane to find. You tried to put him in prison.”

Jason didn’t say a word to that. He just stared at her, and in the shadows his dark eyes were like holes in his still, pale face. He looked . . . dead. Deader than most vampires.

“I need to talk to my sister,” he said.

“Eve doesn’t want to talk to you, you psycho. Leave us alone!”

“It’s about our dad,” he said, and even though Claire was walking away, leaving him and all his psycho problems behind, she slowed to look back. “I need to talk to Eve. Tell her I’ll call. Tell her not to hang up.”

Claire nodded, once. She didn’t hate him any less, but there was something different about him right now—something that asked for a truce, but didn’t get down on its knees and beg for it, either. “No promises, ” she said.