"Thanks. Tell crazy boy I said hey."
"I will," Claire promised. "Hey, if you don't mind me asking--when did he borrow it from you?"
"He just showed up at my door one night about a week ago, said, 'Hi, nice to meet you. Can I borrow your Crock-Pot?' Which I understand is pretty typical Myrnin."
"Very," Claire agreed. "Well, I should go; the coffee's getting cold--"
"Be safe," Hannah said, and accelerated away. Claire increased her pace, too, walking faster as she passed through a couple of neighborhoods and arrived in the street with the Day House--a mirror of Michael Glass's, because they were both Founder Houses, the original houses built by Amelie and Myrnin. The Founder Houses not only looked the same; they had the same kind of energy to them, Claire had found. In some it was stronger than others, but they all had that slightly unsettling sensation of . . . intelligence. It was strongest in the Glass House, almost a personality of its own.
The Day House was at the end of the cul-de-sac. Hannah's relatives lived there, or at least Gramma Day still did; Claire didn't know where Lisa Day had gone, except that she'd chosen wrong during Morganville's civil uprisings of a few months back, gotten jailed, and been released after a couple of weeks. She'd never come back to the Day House; that was certain. Claire knew Hannah was still looking for her cousin. There were only a few possibilities--Lisa had managed to escape Morganville, or she'd gone into hiding, or she'd never made it out of jail alive. For Gramma Day's sake, Claire hoped Lisa had escaped. She wasn't the friendliest person, but the old lady loved her.
Claire wasn't planning to stop at the Day House, although Gramma Day, an ancient little old woman sitting outside in a big rocking chair, called to her and asked whether she wanted any breakfast rolls. Claire smiled at her and shook her head--Gramma didn't always hear too well--and got a friendly wave in return as she turned right, down the narrow fenced alley between the Day House and the anonymous tract home on its other side. It was too small for a car, this alley, and it got narrower as it went, like a funnel. Or a throat. It was suspiciously clean, too--not a lot of trash blown in, and even the tumbleweeds had stayed away.
And here she was, walking right into the trap-door spider's lair.
The door to the rickety shack at the end of the alley banged open before she could reach it, and the spider himself charged out, grabbed his coffee out of her hand, and dashed back inside at vampire speed before she could say a word. From the glimpse she had of him, he'd been wearing black cargo-style pants that were too big for him, flip-flops with daisies on top, and some kind of satin vest with no shirt, probably because he just forgot to put one on. Myrnin didn't dress for vanity. Completely at random, really, as if he just reached into the closet blindfolded and put on whatever pieces he touched first.
Claire went at human speed into the shack and down the steps, and emerged into the big room that was Myrnin's lab and sometimes his home. (She thought he had a separate one, but she rarely caught him absent from this one, and there was a room in the back with castoff clothes he rummaged through when the mood took him.) Myrnin was bent over a microscope, studying who-knew-what. He had all the lights on, which was nice, and the lab looked clean and cool today, all its steampunky elements gleaming. She wondered whether he had a mad-scientist cleaning service.
"Thank you for the coffee," he said. "Good morning."
"Morning," Claire said, and dumped her backpack on a chair. "How did you know which coffee was yours?"
"I didn't." He shrugged. "You haven't been returning my phone calls. And you know how much I dislike making them in the first place. Telephones are so cold and impersonal."
"I didn't answer because I didn't feel like rerunning the argument again. We're not getting anywhere with it, are we?"
He looked up from the microscope, shoved old-fashioned square spectacles up on top of his long, curling black hair, and looked at her with a devastating smile. Myrnin was--for a vampire who looked about twice her age, but was thousands of years older than that--pretty hot. He could be sweet and affectionate one minute, cold and predatory the next, and that