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  Kiss of Death

  ( The Morganville Vampires - 8 )

  Rachel Caine

  Vampire musician Michael Glass has attracted the attention of a big-time producer who wants to cut a demo and play some gigs—which means Michael will have to enter the human world. For this, he's been assigned escorts that include both a dangerous immortal as well as Michael's all-too-human friends. And with that mix of personalities, this is going to be a road trip from hell...

  Kiss of Death

  (The eighth book in the Morganville Vampires series)

  A novel by Rachel Caine

  To the wonderful people in Des Moines, Carroll, Fort Dodge, Rockwell City, and Clive for making me welcome in the great state of Iowa! To my wonderful friends at Legacy Books (Dallas), the Mystery Bookstore (LA), Murder by the Book (Houston), and Borders Express (Exton, PA) for all your support and enthusiasm. See you soon, I hope!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Far too many awesome people have made it possible for this book to be in your hands today, but I must send extraspecial thanks to my Sunday Night pals (Pat, Jackie, Bill, Heidi, J.T., and Joanne), who make even the worst weeks bearable. Also, Joe Bonamassa, Lucienne Diver, Anne Sowards, Jim Suhler, Felicia Day, Jim Conrad, and M. Conrad—all of whom make my days a little brighter. Bless.

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO MORGANVILLE. YOU’LL NEVER WANT TO LEAVE.

  So, you’re new to Morganville. Welcome, new resident! There are only a few important rules you need to know to feel comfortable in our quiet little town:

  • Obey the speed limits.

  • Don’t litter.

  • Whatever you do, don’t get on the bad side of the vampires.

  Yeah, we said vampires. Deal with it.

  As a human newcomer, you’ll need to find yourself a vampire Protector—someone willing to sign a contract to keep you and yours safe from harm (especially from the other vampires). In return, you’ll pay taxes ... just like in any other town. Of course, in most other towns those taxes don’t get collected by the Bloodmobile.

  Oh, and if you decide not to get a Protector, you can do that, too ... but you’d better learn how to run fast, stay out of the shadows, and build a network of friends who can help you. Try contacting the residents of the Glass House—Michael, Eve, Shane, and Claire. They know their way around, even if they always end up in the middle of the trouble somehow.

  Welcome to Morganville. You’ll never want to leave.

  And even if you do ... well, you can’t.

  Sorry about that.

  1

  The way the Glass House worked, on a practical level, was that there was a schedule for the stuff that had to be done—cooking, cleaning, fixing things, laundry. Technically, they were all on every housemate’s list. In practice, though, what happened was this: the boys (Michael and Shane) bribed the girls (Eve and Claire) to do the laundry, and the girls bribed the boys to fix things.

  Claire glared at her new iPod—which was actually really nice—and put it on shuffle as she looked at the mess she’d made of her latest laundry effort. And there was the problem: she loved the hot pink iPod, which had been a heck of a good bribe, and she really didn’t deserve it, because the laundry was ... also pink—which would have been almost fine if it had been a load full of girls’ underwear or something.

  But not so much with guy clothes; she could not even imagine what kind of screaming that was going to bring.

  “Yeah.” She sighed, staring at the very definitely pink piles of shirts, socks, and underwear. “Not going to be a good afternoon.” It was amazing what one—one—stupid red sock could do. She’d already tried running it all through the washer again, hoping the problem would just go away. No such luck.

  The basement of the Glass House was big, dark, and creepy, which wasn’t really such a surprise. Most basements were, and this was Morganville. Morganville went in for dark and creepy the way Las Vegas went in for neon. Apart from the area Claire was in, with a battered washer and dryer, a table that had once been painted some kind of industrial green, and some shelves filled with unidentifiable junk, the rest of the basement was dim and quiet. Hence the iPod, which pumped cheery music through the headphones and made the creepy retreat a little less creepy.

  Creepy, she could fight.

  Pink underwear ... apparently not.

  She had the music cranked up so high that she failed to hear steps coming down the stairs. In fact, she had no clue she wasn’t completely alone until she felt a hand touch her shoulder and hot breath against her neck.

  She reacted as any sensible person living in a town full of vampires would. She screamed. The shriek echoed off the brick and concrete, and Claire whirled, clapped her hands over her mouth, and backed away from Eve, who was collapsing in laughter. The Goth look usually didn’t go well with hysterical giggles, unless they were evil giggles, but somehow Eve managed to pull it off.

  Claire ripped the headphones out of her ears and gasped. “You—you—”

  “Oh, spit it out already,” Eve managed to say. “Bitch. I am. I know. That was evil. But, oh my God, funny.”

  “Bitch,” Claire said, late and not at all meaning it. “You scared me.”

  “Kind of the point,” Eve said, and got herself under control. Her mascara was a little smeared, but Claire supposed that was all part of the Goth thing, anyway. “So, what’s up, pup?”

  “Trouble,” Claire replied with a sigh. Her heart was still pounding from the scare, but she was determined not to let it show. She pointed at the laundry on the table.

  Eve’s eyes went wide, and her black-painted lips parted in horrified fascination. “That’s not trouble; that’s fail. Tell me that isn’t all the whites. Like, Michael’s and Shane’s, too.”

  “All the whites,” Claire said, and held up the guilty red sock. “Yours?”

  “Oh, damn.” Eve snatched it out of Claire’s fingers and shook the sock like a floppy rattle. “Bad sock! Bad! You are never going anywhere fun ever again!”

  “I’m serious. They’re going to kill me.”

  “They’ll never get the chance. I’m going to kill you. Do I look to you like someone who rocks pastel?”

  Well, that was a definite point. “Sorry,” Claire said. “Seriously. I tried washing them again, without the sock, but—”

  Eve shook her head, reached down to the lowest level of the shelf, and pulled out a bottle of bleach, which she thumped down on the table next to the laundry. “You bleach; I’ll supervise, because I’m not taking the chance of getting a drop on this outfit, ‘k? It’s new.”

  The outfit in question was hot pink—it matched Claire’s new iPod, actually—with (of course) black horizontally striped tights, a black pleated miniskirt, and a blazing magenta top with a skull all blinged out in crystal on it. Eve had done up her dyed black hair in a messy pile on top of her head, with stray bits sticking up in all directions.

  She looked creepy/adorable.

  As Claire reloaded the laundry, with a shot of bleach, Eve climbed up on the dryer and kicked her feet idly. “So, you heard the news, right?”

  “What news?” Claire asked. “Do I do hot? Is hot good?”

  “Hot is good,” Eve confirmed. “Michael got another call from that music producer guy. You know, the one from Dallas? The important one, with the daughter at school here. He wants to set Michael up with some club dates in Dallas and a couple of days at a recording studio. I think he’s serious.”

  Eve was trying to sound excited about it, but Claire could follow the road signs. Sign one (shaped like an Exit sign): Michael Glass was Eve’s serious, longtime crush/boyfriend. Sign two (DANGER, CURVES): Michael Glass was hot, talented, and sweet. Sign three (yellow, CAUTION): Michael Glass
was a vampire, which made everything a million times more complicated. Sign four (flashing red): Michael had begun acting more like a vampire than the boy Eve loved, and they’d already had some pretty spectacular fights about it—so bad, in fact, that Claire was not sure Eve wasn’t thinking about breaking up with him.

  All of which led to sign five (STOP).

  “You think he’ll go?” Claire asked, and concentrated on setting the right temperature on the washer. The smell of the detergent and bleach was kind of pleasant, like really sharp flowers, the kind that would cut you if you tried to pick them. “To Dallas, I mean?”

  “I guess.” Eve sounded even less enthusiastic. “I mean, it’s good for him, right? He can’t just hang around playing at coffee shops in Jugular, Texas. He needs to ...” Her voice faded out, and she looked down at her lap with a focus Claire thought the skirt really didn’t deserve. “He needs to be out there.”

  “Hey,” Claire said, and as the washer began chugging away, washing away the stains, she put her hands on Eve’s knees. The kicking stopped, but Eve didn’t look up. “Are you guys breaking up?”

  Eve still didn’t look up. “I cry all the time,” she said. “I hate this. I don’t want to lose him. But it’s like he just keeps getting farther and farther away, you know? And I don’t know how he feels. What he feels. If he feels. It’s awful.”

  Claire swallowed hard. “I think he still loves you.”

  Now she got Eve to look at her—big, vulnerable dark eyes rimmed by all the black. “Really? Because ... I just ...” Eve took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t want to get dumped. It’s going to hurt so bad, and I’m so scared he’ll find somebody else. Somebody, you know, better.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” Claire said. “Not ever.”

  “Easy for you to say. You haven’t seen how the girls throw themselves at him after shows.”

  “Yeah, you’d never do that.”

  Eve looked up sharply, smiled a little, then looked back down. “Yeah, okay, whatever. But it’s different when he’s my Michael and they’re the ones who are all, you know ... Anyway, he’s just always so nice to them.”

  Claire jumped up next to her on the dryer and kicked her feet in rhythm with Eve’s. “He has to be nice, right? That’s his job, kind of. And we were talking about whether you guys were breaking up. Are you?”

  “I ... don’t know. It’s weird right now. It hurts, and I want the hurt to be over, one way or another, you know?” Eve’s shoulders rose and fell in a shrug that somehow managed to be depressed at the same time. “Besides, now he’s running off to Dallas. They won’t let me go, if he does. I’m just, you know. Human.”

  “You’ve got one of the cool frat pins. Nobody would stop you.” The cool frat pins were a gift from Amelie, the town’s Founder, one of the most frighteningly quiet vampires Claire had ever met, and Claire’s boss, technically. They worked like the bracelets most people in town wore, the ones that identified individuals or families as being Protected by a specific vampire, only these were better.... People who wore these pins didn’t have to give blood or take orders. They weren’t owned.

  As far as Claire knew, there were fewer than ten people in all of Morganville who had this kind of status, and it meant freedom—in theory—from a lot of the scarier elements of town.

  This was all because they’d gotten in over their heads, had to fight their way out of it, and done some good for Amelie in the process. It was heroism by accident, in Claire’s opinion, but she definitely wasn’t turning down the pin or what the pin represented.

  “If they decide Michael can go, I’ll still have to file an application for temporary leave,” Eve said. “So would you, or Shane, if you wanted to tag along. And they could turn us down. They probably would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re mostly asshats? Not to mention bloodsucking vampire asshats, which doesn’t exactly make them fair from the beginning.”

  Claire could see her point, actually, which was depressing. The air filled with the smells of laundry, which was homey and didn’t go too well with depressing. Claire remembered her iPod, which was still blaring away at her headphones, and clicked it off. They sat in silence for a while, and then Eve said, “I wish the dryer were running, because man, I could use a good ... tumble dry.”

  Claire burst out laughing and, after a second, Eve joined her, and it was all okay.

  Even in the dark. Even in the basement.

  In the end, the laundry was only a little pink.

  Dinner was taco night, and it was Claire’s turn for that, too, which somehow seemed wrong, but she’d switched with Michael when she’d been staying late at the university library, so she was stuck with Chore Day. Not that she minded making tacos; she liked it, actually.

  Shane blew in the door just as she was chopping the last of the onions, which was typical Shane timing; five minutes earlier, and she’d have made him do the chopping. Instead, he arrived just as she was wiping tears away from her stinging eyes. Perfect.

  He didn’t care that her eyes were red, apparently, because he kicked the kitchen door shut, slammed the dead bolt with a gesture so smooth it looked automatic, set a bag on the counter, and leaned over to kiss her. It was one of those hi-I’m-home kisses, not one of his really good ones, but it still made Claire’s heart flutter a little bit in her chest. Shane looked ... like Shane, she guessed, which was fine with her. Tall, broad, he had sun-streaked slacker hair and a heartbreaker’s smile. He was wearing a Killers T-shirt that smelled like barbecue, from his job.

  “Hey!” she protested—not very sincerely—and waved the knife she’d been using to chop onions. “I’m armed!”

  “Yeah, but you’re not very dangerous,” he said, and kissed her again, lightly. “You taste like tacos.”

  “You taste like barbecue.”

  “And that’s a win-win!” He grinned at her, reached over, and rattled the paper bag he’d set on the counter. “How about some brisket tacos?”

  “That is so wrong, you know. Brisket does not go in tacos.”

  “Twisted, yet delicious. I say yes.”

  Claire sighed and dumped the chopped onions into a bowl. “Hand me the brisket.” Secretly, she liked brisket tacos; she just liked giving him a hard time more.

  “You know,” Claire said as she got the barbecue out of the bag, “you really ought to talk to Michael.”

  “About what?”

  “What do you think? About what’s going on with him and Eve!”

  “Oh hell no. Guys don’t talk about that crap.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Really.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  Shane looked at her as if she were insane. “You know. Stuff. We’re not girls. We don’t talk about our feelings. I mean, not to other guys.”

  Claire rolled her eyes and said, “Fine, be emotionally stunted losers; I don’t care.”

  “Good. Thanks. I’ll do that.” The door opened, and Michael shuffled in, rocking the worst bed head Claire had ever seen him with. “Whoa. Dude, you look like crap. You getting enough iron in your diet?”

  “Screw you, and thanks. I just woke up. What’s your excuse?”

  “I work for a living, man. Unlike the nightwalking dead.”

  Michael went straight past them and from the refrigerator took a sports bottle, which he stuck in the microwave for fifteen seconds. Claire was grateful the smell of the onions, brisket, and taco meat covered the smell of what was in the bottle. Well, they all knew what it was, but if she pretended really hard, it didn’t have to be quite as obvious.

  Michael drank from his sports bottle, then wandered over to look at what they were doing. “Cool, tacos. How long?”

  “Depends on whether or not she lets me do the chopping,” Shane said. “Five minutes, maybe?”

  The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” Eve yelled, and there was something in her voice that really didn’t sound quite right. More ..
. desperate than eager, as if she wanted to stop them from getting to it first. Claire glanced over at Shane, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “Either she’s finally dumping you, Mikey, and her new boy’s coming for dinner, or—”

  It was the or, of course. After a short delay, Eve opened the swinging door just wide enough to stick her face inside. She tried for a smile. It almost worked. “Uh—so I invited someone to dinner,”

  “Nice time to tell us,” Shane said.

  “Shut up. You’ve got enough food for the Fifth Armored Division and all of us. We can fill one more plate.” But she was having trouble keeping eye contact, and as Claire watched, Eve bit her lip and looked away completely.

  “Crap,” Michael said. “I’m not going to like this, am I? Who is it?”

  Eve silently opened the door the rest of the way. Behind her, standing with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans jacket, head down, was her brother, Jason Rosser.

  Jason looked—different, Claire thought. For one thing, he usually looked strung out and dirty and violent, and now he looked almost sober, and he was definitely on speaking terms with showers. Still skinny, and she couldn’t say much for the baggy clothes he was wearing, but he looked ... better than she’d ever seen him.

  And even so, something inside her flinched, hard, at the sight of him. Jason was associated with several of her worst, scariest memories, and even if he hadn’t actually hurt her, he hadn’t helped her, either—or any of the girls who’d been hurt, or killed. Jason was a bad, bad kid. He’d been an accomplice to at least three murders and to an attack on Claire.

  And neither Shane nor Michael had forgotten any of that.

  “Get him out of here,” Shane said in a low, dangerous-sounding tone. “Now.”

  “It’s Michael’s house,” Eve said, without looking at any of them directly. “Michael?”