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"Son of a-" Eve tried to lift her hand, but it had tubes coming out of it; she looked at it, then lowered it slowly back down. "Where's Michael?"
"Ah-"
"Please don't tel me he went after them."
"I won't," Claire said. "Look, you just need to rest, okay? Get your strength back after surgery."
"Surgery? For what?" Eve tried to sit up, but she groaned deeply and sank back down in the pil ows. "Oh God, that hurts. What the hell...?"
The nurse came in just then, saw Eve was awake, and came to lift the bed up to help her sit. "You can sit up for a while," the nurse said, "but if you start feeling sick, use this." She pressed a bowl into Eve's hands. "The anesthesia could make you vomit."
"Wow. Cheery," Eve said. "Wait-what kind of surgery did I have?"
The nurse hesitated, glanced at Claire, and said, "Are you sure you want me to tellyou with your visitor present?"
"Claire? Sure. She's like-like a sister." Eve paled a little as she shifted. "It hurts."
"Wel , it wil ," the nurse said, without much sympathy. "They had to remove your appendix. It was bleeding."
"It what?"
"You were kicked in the stomach," the nurse said. "Your appendix was badly damaged. They had to remove it. So it's best if you stay still for a while and let yourself heal. The police are coming to interview you about what happened."
"Good."
The nurse smiled. There was something a little ominous about it, a little disturbing. "I'd advise you to refuse to give a statement. Might be healthier for you, allthings considered. The people who hurt you might have friends. And you don't have very many."
Claire blinked. "What did you just say?" The nurse turned away. "Hey!"
Eve put a hand on her arm as Claire tried to get up. "I understand," she said.
The nurse nodded, checked the readings on a couple of machines, and said, "Don't keep her awake long. I'll tel the police to come back later. Give you some time to think about what you're going to say to them. You're a smart girl. You know what's best."
The message, Claire thought, was chil ing and clear: don't tel the cops the names of the people who attacked you. Or else. And an "or else" from a medical professional was pretty nasty. If Eve wasn't safe here...
Captain Obvious had always been a little bit of a joke, in most Morganville resident circles, but Claire was starting to think that this new, more aggressive Cap was something else entirely. He was inspiring people. And leading them into frightening extremes.
Like the vampires, with their identification cards and hunting licenses.
If both sides kept escalating, nobody could stand in the middle for long without having a price on his head-and it sounded as though that had already happened. Eve was the first, but any one of them could be next.
The nurse left. Eve watched her go, then closed her eyes and sighed. "Figured that would happen," she said. "Humans first, and allthat crap. They've gotten stronger. And now Captain Obvious is back. It's a bad time to be us, Claire. I have to tel Michael to back off...."
Eve tried to sit up, but the effort left her pale and exhausted. "He never should have gone after them. That's what they want; don't you get it? They came after me to get to him. I'm not important. He is. He's Amelie's blood-kind of like her son. If they can hurt him, kil him-Claire, go find him.
Please. I'll be okay here. Just go. The worst thing they're going to do to me is give me crap Jel -O."
Claire hesitated a long moment, then leaned over and hugged Eve, giving her a gentle and awkward kind of embrace that made her aware of just how fragile the girl was-how fragile they allwere.
"Love you," she said.
"Yeah, whatever, you, too," Eve said, but she smiled a little. "Go. Give him a cal . He'l listen to you-or at least Shane will."
And for the love of her, Claire tried, but the phone kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing, straight to voice mail.
And the day slipped away as they anxiously waited.
Chapter SIXTEEN
MICHAEL
The anger that had hold of me made me ache allover, especially in my eyeteeth; I'd rarely experienced the urge to bite somebody in pure rage, but damn, I wanted to sink my fangs deep in someone now. Roy Farmer, that little son of a bitch, to start, and then the rest of his murderous little crew.
Eve had looked so broken, lying in that bed. So unlike the bundle of strength and energy I loved. I really hadn't known, deep down, how much she meant to me until I'd seen her like that, and known, really and deeply known, that I could lose her.
Nobody hurt my girl and got away with it.
Shane was angry, too, but-and this was a reversal of our usual roles as friends-he was the cautious one, the one tel ing me to play it smart and not let anger drive the bus. He was right, of course, but right didn't matter so much just now. I wanted blood, and I wanted to taste it and feel the fear spicing it like pepper. I wanted them to know how she'd felt, helpless and terrified and alone.
And yeah, it probably wasn't fair, but I was angry at Claire for leaving her, even for a moment. I knew she'd done the right thing, drawing off the mob, but that had left Eve lying bleeding on a sidewalk. Alone. And I couldn't get that image out of my head. She could have died alone.
I understood how Shane felt when he drove his fist through a wal . Some things, only violence could erase.
"Roy lives over on Col ege Street," Shane said, "but he won't be there. He lives with his parents. He's a punk, but not so much of one that he'd run home to his mommy."
"Where, then?" We were in Eve's hearse, and Shane was driving; I was sitting in the blacked-out back area. Shane had verbally kicked my ass about risking sunburn when I'd wanted to walk; he'd made me stop off and grab a long coat and hat and gloves, too, just in case. "You know the guy, right?"
"Kinda," he said. "Roy's one of those vampire-hunter-wannabe types, came to me a couple of times for pointers on things, and showed me things he was working on as weapons. He hero-worshipped my dad, which tel s you a little bit about how screwed-up he is. I never thought he'd do this, though. Not coming out for Eve, or any of us. Didn't think he'd have the guts."
"It doesn't take guts to kick a girl half to death," I said. Shane said nothing to that, just gave me an uneasy look in the rearview and tightened his grip on the wheel. "Where would he be?"
"Probably at the 'Stro," Shane said. "He has a sick hand-built Cadil ac he likes to show off there. He's probably getting back-slaps from his buddies about how awesome he is."
The Astro was an abandoned old drive-in on the outskirts of Morganville, just barely within its borders; it had a graying movie screen that tilted more toward the desert floor every year, and the pavement had cracked and broken in the sun, letting sage and Joshua bushes push up through the gaps. The concession stand had fal en down a couple of years back, and somebody had touched off a bonfire there for high school graduation.
It went without saying that the place was a favorite of the underage drinking and drugging crew.
Shane drove out there. It was close to twilight now, and sunset had stacked itself in bands of color on the horizon; the leaning timbers of the Astro's screen loomed as the tal est thing around in the flatland, and Shane circled the peeling tin fence until he came to the entrance. The cops made periodic efforts to chain it shut, but that lasted only as long as it took for someone to cut the lock off-and most of those who hung out here had toolboxes built in the beds of their trucks.
Sure enough, the entrance stood gaping, one leaf of it creaking in the fierce, constant wind. Sand rattled the windshield as Shane made the turn, and he slowed down. "Got to watch out for bottles," he said. "The place is land-mined with them."
He was right. My eyes were better in the dark, and I could see the drifts of dark brown bottles, some intact, most broken into shards. The fence line was peppered with shotgun blasts, and I got the feeling that a lot of the empties had been used for target practice. Standard drunken-country-teen behavior; I couldn't say I hadn't done some of that myself, before I'd been forced to adapt to something different.
I didn't miss it, though.
Shane's headlights cut harsh across dusty green sage, the spiked limbs of mesquite pushing up out of the broken pavement, and, in the far corner of the lot, a gleam of metal. Cars, about six of them. Most were pickups, the vehicle of choice out here in Nowhere, Texas, but one was a sharply gleaming Caddy, painted electric blue, with shimmering chrome rims. Shane was right. It was a sick car.
