"Stinky Doug? Oh, God. Please tell me you're going to do everyone a public service and deliver him some shower gel. The last time he came in here, I thought I was going to have to call those biohazard guys. Although if this is some weird and inconceivable college-crush thing, I don't want to know. Let me have my fragile illusions."
Claire rolled her eyes. "Trust me, I wouldn't kiss Doug even after the shower gel and decontamination. No, he did something stupid, and I need to convince him not to make it worse -- that's all." She explained about the experiment, the blood, and Doug's boneheaded move. Eve kept steadily drinking her coffee, eyes half closed.
"You considered snitching on him?" she asked. "Because, honestly, wouldn't be the worst idea ever.
Just make sure Larkin knows you didn't take it. Let him draw his own conclusions."
"That's the same thing as throwing Doug under the bus," Claire said. "Look, he's just dumb, that's all.
And he doesn't know about" -- Claire waved vaguely around, indicating Morganville -- "all this." Well, she wasn't one hundred percent sure of that, actually, but he shouldn't know. That counted.
"If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn't be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? Caught dead? I crack myself up." Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn't need. "So you're visiting Stinky Doug and warning him off, without explaining why. Is that your whole plan?"
"Kinda."
"Awesome. Let me know how it goes, Plan Girl."
"You have any better ideas?"
Eve took another delicate swallow of coffee. "Well," she said, "Stinky Doug has a lot of classes. If you've got his dorm room address, how difficult would it be to toss the place, find the stuff, and get rid of it? Nobody has to know."
"Great. And do you actually know a ninja?"
"Yep," Eve said, and gave her a sleepy, luminous smile. "He's my boyfriend."
Hmmm. Claire had to mull that over for a few seconds, because technically vampires were like ninjas -- quiet, sneaky, fast, and deadly. And when they wanted to be, they could be disturbingly invisible.
"Would he do it?" she asked. That wasn't what she wanted to ask, actually; she wanted to ask, Will he tell Oliver?
Because, like it or not, Michael was a vampire in equal measure to being her friend, and even though he tried to stay on the human side, sometimes he had to be a vamp first. Maybe this was one of those times.
Eve jacked up her black eyebrows another half inch in answer.
"Okay," Claire finally said. "I admit, he has significant ninja qualities."
"Booyah. I will summon the ninja. Oh, and take a lunch break while we burgle."
"You're going, too?"
"Am I not ninja enough? Are you saying that I lack ninja?"
"No, I was just thinking you're a little, uh, recognizable, maybe?"
Eve batted her thick eyelashes. "Why, thank you, sweetie. That's the nicest insult I've had today, not counting the jock who said he'd date me but he had a restraining order out for necrophilia. I promise, I'll dowdy up for the occasion. It'll take me five minutes." She took her cell out of her pocket and texted as she spoke. "Promise me you won't leave without me."
"I promise."
"Want me to organize Shane into this posse, too?"
"He's at work." Claire sighed. She would have gladly had Shane added to the mix at this point, but he was already on fragile ground at work, considering he'd ditched twice this month -- once for a legitimate sick day, but the other had been just plain boredom. "Next time we commit crime, we'll make sure to include him."
Eve held up one fist while she kept typing with one thumb, and Claire tapped it. Eve finished with a flurry of keystrokes, snapped the phone shut, and drained her coffee.
"Right. Mikey's on the way. I'll be anti-Eve in five. Enjoy your mocha."
Claire did, drinking fast. It was a good thing she did, because in just about five minutes, Michael was walking through the big UC open hall outside the coffee area, a guitar case slung over his back. He should have drawn attention -- Michael was just plain gorgeous, and girls looked -- but he was walking with his shoulders slumped, hands in his pants pockets, looking down, and the whole aura just projected Don't look at me so strongly that Claire couldn't see a single person other than herself actually taking notice of him.
He slid onto a seat next to her, leaning the guitar case against the table. "So, now we're going to be actual criminals," he said.
"And, see, you brought a guitar."
He gave her alook . "I was on my way to practice."
"Oh. Well, thanks."
"Sounds like I didn't have much of a choice. This guy has vampire blood?"
"I guess so. Larkin was using it for some experiment. I suppose it was authorized."
"Larkin? Had to be. He wouldn't dare do it on the side." Michael nudged her empty mocha cup with a fingertip. "Where's Eve?"
"Right here, Ninja with Fangs." Eve leaned over behind him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him right over the cool blue veins. "Claire said I had to go in disguise as a regular person."
And she had. Eve had scrubbed off every trace of her Goth persona and tied her black hair back in a tight ponytail. She'd changed into a plain black hoodie -- one without skulls or symbols, so Claire could only figure she'd raided someone else's locker for it. The only thing left to indicate she wasn't like every other college-age girl on campus were the thick-soled boots she was wearing. Still, those weren't all that noticeable. She'd even thrown on an old pair of blue jeans.
"Wow. We really are stealthy now," Claire said, and shut her computer. "Can we store stuff in the back?"
"Sure, my locker has an actual lock."
Claire raised her eyebrows and tugged the cord of the black hoodie. "And you keep this in it?"
"I didn't say that the locks couldn't be picked. But actually my good buddy Edie never locks hers, anyway. Come on, let's get the storage taken care of."
In the end, they left Michael's guitar, Claire's backpack (with laptop), and pretty much everything else behind, as Eve set up the lunch break sign on the counter and locked up the register. In a surprisingly short time, they were headed out again.
Michael had brought a leather hat, which looked kind of sloppy-cool and shaded his face and neck. He kept his hands in his pockets.
"You're not as sensitive anymore," Claire said. "To the sun, I mean." Because when Michael had first been venturing out, he'd had to drape himself in a blanket to keep from burning.
"Well, it's cloudy," he pointed out. It was; there were ominous dark masses in the sky, and the sun had disappeared behind the curtain. "And I've got on two layers.
But, yeah, it's better now than it was." He said it as if he wasn't sure how he felt about it, which was strange. Claire supposed that becoming more stable meant he also felt more like a vampire. "I'll be okay unless the sun comes out full strength again."
Which, Claire could tell, it wouldn't. Rain was coming, the kind of torrential desert rain that would drown the streets and create flash floods out in the arroyos outside of town, and would be completely gone tomorrow. There were already flashes of hidden lightning inside the clouds.
Luckily, they weren't far from Stinky Doug's dorm. It housed both male and female students, which was lucky, because it meant the three of them were even less noticeable, and there weren't any sign-ins required. Once they'd made it to the stairwell, Michael took off the hat, stuffed it in his jacket, and ran up the steps with so much ease that Claire, puffing a little in his wake, wondered if maybe this vampire thing might not be okay after all. Eight flights of stairs wasn't her thing.
At the top, she and Eve caught their breath and joined up with Michael as he stepped out to check the hallway. He motioned for them to follow, so it must have been clear.
Claire was surprised to see that this dorm hall was pretty much like her old one, the one she'd first lived in when she'd moved to Morganville -- dingy, battered, smelling like old beer and desperation. Doors were closed all along the hall, except for a couple at the end that blasted music she didn't recognize at top volume in some kind of stereo war.
Stinky Doug's room was the third on the left. Michael paused in front of it, leaned forward and listened, then nodded. He jiggled the knob. Locked.
That was why it was good to have a vampire along, because a simple twist of his wrist, and that lock problem? Solved. Michael pushed open the door and disappeared inside, and Eve and Claire followed, shutting the door behind them.
And Claire choked, because Stinky Doug's personal aroma was nothing compared to the state of his dorm room. Her eyes watered. She couldn't stand to take a full breath, because she was deeply afraid she was going to vomit. Not that it would make the stench any worse.
"Eww," Eve said, pitifully, holding her nose shut. "Oh, my God! What died?"
Michael turned on the lights. For a couple of seconds, they stared in silence, and then Eve said, in a very small, muffled voice, "It was supposed to be a rhetorical question."
Because Doug was lying on the bed, eyes open and staring, and he was definitely, completely dead. Not for long, Claire guessed, because blood still dripped from the wound in his neck.
It wasn't a vampire bite. There was a huge pool of blood soaked into the mattress beneath Doug, staining his T-shirt crimson.
Michael had gone very, very pale -- marble white, in fact. He leaned over the body, maybe checking for signs of life, and shook his head. As Claire and Eve stood rooted to the spot in shock, he ransacked Doug's backpack, then patted down the dead man's pockets, pulling out keys, a cell phone, breath mints (it made Claire suddenly sad that he carried those when he was so generally unpleasant to the senses), a wallet, some change.
No vials of blood.
"We have to go," Michael said. "Now. Right now."
"Was it -- Was it the vamps?" Eve asked. "Can you tell?"
"I don't think so."
"But -- "
"The ones I know wouldn't be that bloody," Michael said. "We have to go."
They were heading for the stairs, and Claire was still feeling a strange, distant sense of disconnection, when the reality of what she'd seen actually hit her, like color and sound and smell all snapping into focus at the same instant.
Doug was dead. He'd been murdered.
She stopped, put her back against the hallway wall, and slid down to a crouch. She couldn't breathe.
Her whole body was shaking. She'd seen a lot of unpleasant things since moving to Morganville, but this...this was worse. This seemed so...cold.
And the worst part of it was, Michael thought that the monsters hadn't done it. Not the side of town she usually thought of as monsters, anyway.
Eve was bending over her, pulling on her arm. Having lost the Goth makeup, she looked stark right now, washed pale. "Come on, Claire, we need to get the hell out of here. Too many questions."
"But we can't...just leave him -- "
"We won't," Michael said, and took her other arm. He pulled her to her feet and held her there until her knees stopped shaking. "But we're not staying. Eve's right."
Claire clung to the handrail on the way down. She couldn't get the image out of her mind, the way Doug's face had seemed so slack and empty, the way his eyes stared, all pupils. The way the blood had soaked his bed beneath him.
She stopped on the third-floor landing and put her head down, breathing fast. Eve and Michael were already halfway down to the next level, but they turned and came back.
They were talking, but she couldn't hear them.
It took forever to get moving again and, once they were out in the dorm lobby, to try to act normal. She held on to Michael's arm, mostly for support. Outside, he put his hat on again and led her to the shade of a tree, where she collapsed in a pathetic heap on the dying grass. Overhead, the dry leaves rattled and hissed. A few broke loose in the freshening breeze.
Michael crouched down beside her, and Eve knelt on the other side. "Claire?" he asked. His eyes were very blue, very clear, and very worried. "Claire, talk to me. You okay?"
"No," she said. Her voice sounded small and fragile and very far away. "He's dead.
Someone killed him."
Eve and Michael exchanged worried looks. Michael shook his head. "I'll get hold of Richard and Hannah," he said. "This needs to be handled quietly. They need to know what happened before it gets out of hand."
And right on cue, the thundering music from the top floor of the dorm cut out, and from an open window came the sound of a girl's scream, long and loud, with razor edged horror in it. That was the scream Claire hadn't voiced, the one that still bubbled inside her. Somehow, hearing someone else do it helped ease the pressure.
She didn't feel quite as faint and sick.
"I think that ship's sailed, Michael," Eve said, staring toward the dorm. Without the makeup, she looked so young -- and so determined. "Better make the call quick. This is going to get crazy fast."
Michael nodded, stood up, and used his cell phone. It wasn't a long conversation, but then he dialed another number, and that was a lot longer. Oliver, Claire figured, from the general tone and Michael's body language. Only Oliver could make him that tense.
He came back as he was ending the call, and looked down at her. "You going to be okay?" he asked.
"You mean now or generally?"
That made him smile a little. "Now."
"I can deal," Claire said. "Generally, that's going to be a little bit tougher. I wasn't born in Morganville. Still getting used to all the..."
"Mayhem," Eve said, for once not laughing or making a joke. "Blood. Death. Yeah, sadly, it is something you get used to. But still, this one caught me off guard, too. I'll call Shane, okay?"
"No, no, don't. He'll take off from work, and I'm all right. I'll be fine." She was lying through her teeth.
She felt cold and shaky and she wished -- oh, God, more than anything -- that Shane were here right now. Or her parents. She'd never missed her mom and dad more than she did right at this moment, which was dumb, because what were they going to do?