"You don't think they'l , ah, find anything, do you? What if they do? What if they get the word out on Morganville?"
"It won't happen," Claire said. "Even if they do find anything-which I really doubt-I don't think they'd be able to get it out of town. Why? Are you worried about their finding out about you?"
"Not-not really." Miranda looked oddly embarrassed. "I just-they must have met other ghosts before. I just wondered if maybe I could talk to them about it. About what's normal."
"I'm not sure there's any such thing as normal, when it comes to ghosts, especially around here," Claire said doubtfully. "Mir, you're not thinking of trying to get them over here, are you?"
"Wel , at night, they wouldn't see anything weird...."
"No. No, definitely no. What if Myrnin comes popping in through a portal in the wal , or some random vamp decides to drop in for a visit? How do we explain that? And Michael? They'd notice something strange about him, wouldn't they?"
"Oh," Miranda said. "Right. I hadn't thought about that. Okay, then. I just-I just wish I could make more friends."
Claire hip-bumped her and grinned. "We're not enough for you?"
She got a smile in response, but it wasn't a very certain one. "Sure," Miranda said softly, and walked away.
Oh dear.
That, Claire thought, might be a problem.
The blood bank in Morganville had odd hours-for instance, they'd instituted twenty-four-hour donations, which meant that Claire was able to shove Shane out of bed and into pants, shoes, and shirt at four a.m., and drag him, half asleep, into the place to drain a pint of blood before he was too awake to protest. She gave a second pint, just to make things even, and took him home to pile back into bed. He refused to go to his own, which was just pure stubbornness, and curled his warm, strong body next to her under the covers for another two hours until she had to rise to go to school. It might have been more sexy, except that he fel asleep within about five minutes, and she held out for only a few ticks more.
Seven a.m. came way too early, but Claire dragged herself yawning through the morning routine: shower, dress, sleepwalk to Common Grounds for a mocha. That was where she picked up the news that Mayor Hannah Moses was "stepping down for personal reasons" and that a write-in election would be held over the weekend.
The col ege students were, of course, oblivious to what that meant, but there was a stack of the flyers about it near the register, and Claire grabbed one. The press release was boring and dry, and there was a write-in form right on the bottom of the flyer, with instructions to drop it off at City Hal in the appropriate bal ot box.
Claire stuffed the flyer in her backpack, grabbed her coffee, and headed out for class. Luckily, she had a different schedule of professors today, ones she actually liked, and sailed through the morning high on caffeine and chal enging discussions on condensed-matter physics, which was the study of exactly how atoms combined and recombined to make liquids, solids, and states that, theoretically, hadn't been seen. Except she had seen them. Myrnin had invented them, and he used them as transportation hubs around the town. He cal ed them doors, whereas Claire called them portals, but it boiled down to one thing: traveling from here to there and skipping the in-between.
So she kind of had a head start on that concept, and calculations.
She had a break at noon, and went to the coffee shop on campus. It was Eve's day to work there, instead of at Common Grounds; she was a good-enough barista that she could work anywhere she wanted, and she liked to see different people on the other side of the counter. Plus, Eve always insisted, she liked these little weekly vacations away from Oliver's scowling.
She didn't look especially happy now, though, Claire thought, as she waited in line. As the guy ahead of her walked away with his coffee, Claire leaned her elbows on the counter and said, "Are you okay?" She put the back of her hand to Eve's forehead. "I think you must have a fever."
"What?" Eve looked tired under the makeup, as if she hadn't slept much. "What are you talking about?"
"Mr. Hottie McGorgeous just walking away. He was way into you, and you didn't even smile at him."
Eve held up her hand and tapped the ring on her finger. "Anti-flirting device," she said. "It works."
"Oh, come on-it wouldn't keep you from smiling!"
"I just wasn't feeling it." But that wasn't it, and Claire knew it. There was a piece of paper on the counter, turned facedown, but the water had soaked through in places, and she saw tombstones drawn on it. Before Eve could stop her, Claire reached over and took it.
They were the same four tombstones as on the flyers that kept appearing at the Glass House, only this one was more personal. It had an arrow pointing at Eve's grave, with the words, Soon, bitch written above it.
Eve shrugged. "It was on the counter when I got here for work."
"Sorry," Claire said. "People are asses."
"Mostly," Eve agreed. "Mocha, then?"
"Just hot cocoa." Claire took the flyer she'd grabbed at Common Grounds out of her bag and put it on the counter, avoiding the drips of spilled drinks. "Did you see this?"
Eve mixed the cocoa and read the paper at the same time, which was pretty impressive. "Write-in candidates. well , that's an easy one. They'll just pick whoever they want and write the bal ots the way they want them to come out. And we bother voting why?"
"We can't let that be the way things go," Claire said earnestly. "We have to get people together to demand a free and fair election, counted by humans."