Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,108

me a minute, or he might just come in yelling, guns at the ready.

I ducked inside, and immediately was on the business end of a nice, sharp piece of broken bottle at my throat. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, girl, I’m on your side,’ I told Eve. She let out a gasp and stepped back, dropping the glass, and then lunged at me to wrap her arms around me. She smelt like tears and desperation.

‘Oh, God, thank you, I was so scared – Shane, he’s not getting better, we need to get him out of here, we have to—’ Her voice faded out as she pushed back from me. I hadn’t said anything, but I guessed my body language had clued her in that something was off. ‘Where’s Claire?’

‘Trust me,’ I said. It was all I had time for, so I said it fast. ‘Trust me whatever happens. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said, but her voice shook, and from what I could see of her face, she looked terrified. ‘Shane—’

And then the driver edged into the room, nailed her in place with a sudden flare of a flashlight, and as she tried to block out the beam, he stepped aside to let the others inside. ‘Freeze! Down on your knees!’ he yelled, and then it was all over in seconds. Liz was awake but scared out of her mind, and she screamed and tried to hide in a corner; Pete threw a couple of punches, but it was half-hearted, and he went facedown on the dirty concrete in under ten seconds.

Eve, pinned under the driver’s hand, stared at me with coal-black, burning eyes, and said absolutely nothing.

Trust me, I mouthed, and hoped she could read it. If she’d had the broken bottle in that moment, I was pretty sure I’d have been leaking all over the floor, especially when two of the four men went to Michael, grabbed him, and dragged him away.

He wasn’t better. Not even a little bit better. And it scared me to see him shaking and whimpering like that, as if every demon in the world had crammed itself into his head at once.

It scared me a little more to see the black promise in Eve’s eyes as they handcuffed her and pushed her out after him. Then I watched them load up Pete and Liz, too.

The driver came back over to me and nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘You might have some promise after all. If you hate vampires, we can use you. We can always use good men.’

‘I don’t think you understand what that word actually means,’ I said, and walked on my own back to the van. On the way there, I discovered a sudden and urgent need to throw my guts up next to the dumpster. It smelt like rancid Chinese food, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t why I felt so bad.

Betrayal had a bitter, horrible taste all its own, and no matter how much I rinsed my mouth out with bottled water, I couldn’t get rid of it.

I wondered if Claire was tasting it, too. If I was feeling this, what could she be suffering? Because she was the one who felt things too deeply, cared too much.

I hoped she wasn’t just as wrecked as Myrnin, when all this was said and done.

The drive that came after that was surprisingly long, and the sun was already coming up when we arrived … at some kind of a farm, from what I could see of the landscape. We’d made it out of the city and into the country, although there were plenty of little one-Starbucks towns. On the east coast, ‘in the country’ wasn’t the same as it was in West Texas, where you could drive for two hundred miles and hardly glimpse a ruined shack, much less a town square.

The last town I’d been able to spot with any kind of signs had been Meldon, and since I didn’t want to pull out a map and try to figure out our location, I just filed it all away for later.

Not much to learn from my new friends; they continued to be blank slates, and they weren’t chatty. Eve was, but what she was saying was vicious and I was trying not to hear any of it. Boiled down, it meant she blamed me. Guess that wasn’t too surprising. Better me than Claire, anyway. After a while she ran out of ways to tell me I was an evil, backstabbing traitor and she wished