Claire was a little bit ashamed to think that it wasn't, but she only said, "One or two."
"You remember Odysseus, lashed to the mast of his ship, screaming to be released while his men rowed on, with wax blocking their ears?"
She did. It had been one of the stories her dad liked, one he'd read to her and they'd discussed when she was still just a girl. All of the great Greek myths, especially the ones about Odysseus. She'd always liked him. He was clever and dangerous, and he didn't have any special godlike powers, either. Just his mind, and his will.
Listening to the sirens' singing had been his own test.
"Odysseus was rarely a fool," Naomi said, "but he was a fool then. That was the draug, singing to him, though the Greeks had a different name for them. He wanted to hear their song, and he did; he was lucky to avoid madness."
Shane slid the back window open and stuck his head in. "Ladies, I'm sure this a fascinating conversation about shoes or whatever, but could we maybe not sit out here like a big old piece of bait? And by we I mean mainly me."
He was right; this probably wasn't the best time to be holding a review of the classics. Claire cleared her throat and put the truck back into gear to ease it straight down the road, in the direction Naomi pointed.
It was odd to realize, looking at her, that Naomi wasn't much older than Claire herself; she must have been frozen at the age of eighteen or nineteen. Of course, at the time she'd been alive, eighteen or nineteen was old enough to rule kingdoms and have multiple children, so Naomi had been considered an adult long before she'd become a vampire. It all felt very new to Claire, still.
Naomi suddenly pointed to the right. The street name sign flashed briefly in the truck's headlights but Claire didn't really see it; everything in Morganville looked strange to her, shrouded by the falling rain and the lack of lights, and life. This was a residential street, and it looked completely deserted. Not even a candle flickering in a window, much less anyone in view outside.
Naomi's hand clenched into a fist, and Claire drifted the truck to the curb and stopped-gently this time, careful of throwing Shane around in the back. He opened the back window again and watched as the vampire pointed straight at one of the houses in the middle of the block. It was just like a hundred other houses in Morganville-plain wooden frame, built probably in the 1940s, small by modern standards. Its pale paint (no telling what color it had originally been, since the sun faded everything to a uniform gray) peeled liberally from the boards, and some of the trim was rotted and falling off. There was a rusted bicycle lying in the weed-tangled yard and a metal swing set that listed so far to the right any child that sat on it would probably be killed in the collapse.
Typical.
The name on the mailbox, written in messy black paint, was SUMMERS, but there was nothing in the box itself when Shane snapped it open. He shrugged and closed it, then unshipped the flexible hose of the flamethrower from behind him.
Claire mouthed, It's a wooden house! She had to try three times before comprehension dawned on him. He looked disappointed, but he put the flammable fun away and got out his silver-loaded shotgun instead. Claire had hers hanging heavy in the crook of her arm, pointed so that if anything happened it would fire into the ground (and probably her foot, but that was better than the alternatives). Hunters would be so disappointed in me, she thought. She didn't even really know how to carry the thing safely.
The front door-plain wood, warped from wind and weather-was tightly closed. Naomi studied it for a moment, then kicked, and the entire door and the frame slammed inside to lie flat on the narrow hallway floor.
Even Shane looked respectfully impressed ... until she stopped at the threshold. She made a sign shooing them inside, and Claire finally understood that there was still some kind of barrier in place on the house itself. Someone-someone human-was still in residence here, and without an invitation Naomi was barred from entry. The rules of ownership were complicated in Morganville-ancestral houses and bloodlines, current occupants, whether vampires lived inside, all factored in, but clearly this was a human house, with a human barrier that kept vampires out, period.
Great. Well, at least she'd opened the door.
Shane must have figured it out, too, because he nodded to Claire, winked, and stepped through the doorway, walking on the unsteady fallen door itself. There was a faint dust of plaster in the air, and Claire sneezed, but she didn't figure they were being particularly stealthy, what with the door blowing in and all. Shane was holding his shotgun easily, pointed at an angle toward the floor, so she imitated him. The wisdom of that became apparent when she tripped; she realized, with a cold start, that if she'd had the shotgun pointed up, near her face, she might have killed herself if she'd hit the trigger.
Shane checked the open room on the left, and she took the room on the right. Whoever had lived here, they hadn't been more concerned with the inside of the house than the outside; it needed work, badly. The ceiling was sagging as if there'd been a bad leak that was dissolving the plaster. In fact, she could see water drops running down the wall from the light fixture, which wouldn't have been safe if the power had been on. Even on its best days, though, this house would have earned a failing score on any of those how-clean-is-your-home reality shows; it smelled of mold and rotten food, and it felt icy cold. The furniture had the off-kilter look of a nightmare, and where there were children's toys, they too had the look of something a serial-killing tot would drag around.
This did not look like a place where one would find Theo Goldman. Not at all.
She and Shane searched the whole house, even the attic, which revealed a bucket-sized hole in the roof through which water continued to drip. No wonder the place was falling apart. But no sign of anyone, human or vampire.
"This place needs housekeeping," Shane said. "With my flamethrower." It was a sign of just how bad things were that Shane thought that.
She looked up to smile at him, and although she heard nothing, she saw the sudden dawning of shock and alarm in his face, and had just enough time to gasp and try to turn around before a heavy, sweaty, muscular arm went around her neck and jerked her off balance. Shane instantly put the shotgun up to a firing position, but then realized what he was doing and put it down again. He set it carefully on the table and held up both hands in an I surrender kind of position.
Claire squeaked for air, went up on her toes, and tried to ease the strain on her throat. She was having a terrifying, white-out flashback of the moment that Magnus had seized her, had twisted until she'd felt and heard the crackle-snap of bones. Her heart was as loud as a jackhammer in her chest, and her pulse was roaring so loudly it sounded like a hurricane in her ears. She couldn't see who held her, but it was a man's body, a man's hairy arm. She clawed at it, but her blunt nails weren't going to do much. Think, Claire. Shane had taught her some basic things to do. Everyone is going to be bigger and stronger than you, he'd said, without being critical about it. You have to learn how to hit them in the weak spots.
The first thing he'd taught her to do was not to do what she was doing now ... standing on her tiptoes, cooperating with her captor. It was terrifying, but it was Shane's calm voice in her head now, telling her exactly what to do. Turn your head toward his elbow. Tuck in your chin. Grab his left wrist in your right hand. Punch down and behind you with your left as you turn and pull. Then don't stop when he lets go, move in, go for his eyes and punch his throat. Never run. Never let him get his momentum again.
She did it, calmly, turning and tucking and punching, and suddenly she was free, and she was facing her attacker. She registered him only as a foot taller than she was, and only for geometry's sake; faces and names didn't matter right now. Her right fist blurred as she went for a fast, hard punch to his exposed throat ...
But she stopped, because Theo Goldman stepped in like a shadow and grabbed her fist before it landed.
Her attacker stumbled back, white-faced with shock; he clearly hadn't expected the little girl to come at him like that, and Claire felt a savage sense of victory before sanity kicked in again.
"Theo? What the hell?" He really hadn't changed, but then, vampires didn't, did they? He just looked ... kind, with warm dark eyes and hair dusted with gray, and lines on his face that most vampires didn't have. Smile lines.
He did, however, look tired.
Shane hadn't moved, except to pick up the shotgun. His eyes were steady and cold on the man with Theo who'd grabbed her, and Claire sensed that he was waiting for the guy to make a second attempt.