Ghost Town mv-9 Read online

  “Hey,” she said. “Where do you get the books? I mean, they’re old. Some of them are really kind of ancient.”

  He shrugged and looked down at the antique register on the counter, and brushed some dust off the keys. “Oh, you know. Around.”

  “From a storage room in the library? Maybe on the fourth floor?” She had him. He looked up at her, eyes narrowing. “I’ve been in there. I was wondering what they were going to do with all that stuff once they were done with it. So, who gives you the books?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dan said, and all the warmth was gone suddenly. He looked uncomfortable and suspicious, and the funny T-shirt suddenly didn’t fit his mood at all. “Let me know if you find anything you want.”

  The fourth floor of the school’s library had been a locked maze of boxes of old books, gathered from who-knew-where by the vampires. At the time Claire had visited—well, broken in—vampires (no doubt reporting to Amelie, the town’s Founder) had been combing through looking for one particular book. She’d wondered what they’d planned to do with all the rest once their quest was finished.

  Naturally, it turned out Amelie was making money off of the extra books. Vampires were nothing if not practical.

  As Claire was thumbing through the dusty stacks, squinting to read faded titles, occasionally sneezing from the smell of old paper, she found a slim, leather-bound volume that was still in pretty good condition. No title on the spine, so she pulled it out and looked at the front. Nothing on the front, either.

  Inside, on the first page under a sheet of old onionskin, was a black-and-white photograph of Amelie. Claire blinked and took her time looking; yes, it really was her. The Founder of Morganville looked young and fragile, with her white-gold hair piled up in a complicated style on top of her head that showed off her very long, elegant neck. She wore a black dress, something from the 1800s, Claire guessed, with lots of sleeve and tons of skirts and petticoats. There was something about her eyes—the photograph had made them even lighter than the icy gray they usually were.

  It was deeply spooky.

  Claire flipped a page and read the title:

  A HISTORY OF MORGANVILLE

  Its Important Citizens and Events

  A Chronicle of Our Times

  She blinked. Surely they hadn’t meant for this to end up in the used bookstore, where anybody could pick it up and find it. She’d never seen anything like it before.

  And, of course, she had to have it. She’d been burning up with curiosity about Amelie ever since she’d met her; the Founder seemed to have so many secrets that it was hard to know where they started and stopped. Even though Amelie had, from time to time, helped her out, and had given her Protection that had saved her life at one time, Claire really didn’t know that much about her, except that she was old, regal, and scary.

  The penciled price on the inside of the cover was only five dollars. She quickly found a few more obscure science titles, buried the history in the stack, and hauled the books up to the front.

  Dan snorted. “You’re never going to cram all that in your backpack.”

  “Yeah, probably not,” she agreed. “Could I have a sack?”

  “What do I look like, Piggly Wiggly? Hang on.” He rooted around behind the counter, sending up choking clouds of dust that made even him cough, and finally handed over a battered old canvas bag. She started counting out money, and he quickly flipped open the books and added up the totals. He wasn’t paying attention, which was good; he just added it up and said, “Twenty-seven fifty.”

  That was an awful lot, pretty much all she had at the moment, but she kept smiling and handed it over. As soon as the cash had left her palm, she grabbed the bag and started stuffing things inside.

  “What’s your hurry?” he asked, counting out the fives and ones. “It’s not close to sundown.”

  “Class,” she said. “Thanks.”

  He nodded, opened the register, and put the cash inside. She felt him watching her all the way to the door. It occurred to her that she didn’t know which vampire owned this business, or how he or she might feel about the sale of the book . . . but she couldn’t worry about that now.

  She really did have class.

  TWO

  It didn’t take long at all to read the book. She stopped in a park on the way home and sat in a sun-faded rubber swing seat and rocked slowly back and forth as she flipped pages.

  It was about people she’d never heard of . . . and people she knew. Amelie, for one. Amelie’s disputes with various vampires. Amelie’s decisions to sentence this person for his crimes, spare that one. There were other vampires profiled, too. Some she’d never heard of; she supposed that they’d died, or left, or maybe they were just reclusive. Oliver wasn’t in the book, because he was a latecomer to town. Neither, curiously, was Myrnin. She supposed Myrnin had been a closely guarded town secret from the very beginning.

  It was weirdly interesting, but overall, she didn’t know what good it was going to do her to know that Amelie had once filed a complaint against a man who owned a dry-goods store (what was a dry-goods store?) for cheating the human customers. And that the complaint had gotten his store taken away from him, and he’d opened the town’s first movie theater.

  Boring.

  In the end, Claire dropped the book into her backpack and thought about mailing it anonymously to the library. Maybe that was where it really belonged, anyway. She thought about it on the way home, but she ended up worrying about whether vampires could somehow sense she’d handled it. CSI: Vampire. Not a comforting thought.

  “You’re late,” Michael remarked, as she walked into the Glass House through the kitchen door. He was standing at the sink washing dishes; there was nothing odder to her than seeing her housemate, who was all kinds of smoking-hot, not to mention all kinds of vampire, up to his elbows in suds at the sink. Did rock stars really do their own housework? “Also, it’s not my day to do the kitchen. It’s yours.”

  “Is that your passive-aggressive way of trying to get me to pick up your laundry duty?”

  “I don’t know. Is it working?”

  “Maybe.” She put her bags down on the table and went to join him at the sink. He washed plates and handed them over, and she rinsed and dried. Very domestic. “I was reading. I forgot what time it was.”

  “Bookworm.” He flicked suds at her. Michael was in a really good mood, no question about that; he had been for the last couple of months. Getting out of Morganville and recording his music with a real, genuine recording company had been good for him. Coming back had been hard, but he’d finally settled into the routine. They all had. It had been a crazy, weird vacation, almost like something they’d dreamed, Claire decided.

  But damn, it had felt good to be out there with her friends, on the road, without the shadow of Morganville hanging over them.

  Michael abruptly stopped laughing, and just looked at her with those big blue eyes. That made her go momentarily dizzy, and she felt a blush coming on. Not that he was flirting with her—not more than normal—but he was looking at her a lot more deeply than usual, and he didn’t blink.

  Finally he did, turning his attention back to the sink, and washed another plate before he said, “You’re nervous about something. Your heartbeat’s faster than normal.”

  “You can hear—Oh. Of course you can.” He hadn’t been staring at her so much as the blood moving through her veins, she thought. And that was kind of creepy, except it was Michael. He made creepy adorable, most of the time. “I ran part of the way home; that’s probably it.”

  “Hey, if you don’t want to tell me, don’t. But I can tell when you lie.”

  Okay, that was supercreepy. “You can?”

  He smiled grimly down at the dirty dishwater. “Nope. But see? You fell for it anyway. Careful, or I’ll read your mind with my incredible vampire superpowers.”

  She sighed and wiped her hands as he pulled the plug on the dishwater and let it swirl away into th
e dark. The kitchen looked like someone actually cared. She really did owe him laundry, probably.

  Claire tossed him the dish towel. “That was a mean trick.”

  “Yeah, still a vampire. Spill it.”

  As he wiped his hands and arms free of suds, she opened up the bag on the table, rooted around to find the slim volume, and handed it over. He sank into a chair. As he looked it over, his eyebrows went up and up. “Where’d you get this?”

  “The used bookstore,” she said. “I don’t think Dan—you know, the guy who runs it—knew it was there. Or if he did, maybe it’s—I don’t know—full of lies? But that’s a picture of Amelie, right?”

  “I didn’t know there were any, but that’s definitely one.” Michael closed the book and handed it back. “Maybe it’s Morganville propaganda. Seems like Amelie’s done that from time to time, in which case, no big deal. But if it’s not—”

  “If it’s the real history of Morganville, then I should take it to Amelie before I get in trouble. Yeah, thanks, Dad. Already figured that one out.”

  He leaned forward on his elbows and grinned. “You are a difficult kid. But a smart one.”

  “Not a kid,” she said, and shot him the finger, just like Eve or Shane would have done. “Hey, who’s on dinner patro—”

  Before she could finish the last word, the front door banged open, and Eve’s cheery voice echoed down the hall. “Hellooooo, creatures of the night! Put your pants back on! Food’s here, and I don’t mean me!”

  Michael pointed mutely in that direction.

  “Tell me she’s not bringing leftover sandwiches from the University Center,” Claire moaned as Eve burst into the kitchen door with a white paper bag in hand.

  “I heard that,” Eve said, and opened the refrigerator to dump the bag inside. “I got you the bacteria special; I know how much you like that. The UC kitchen staff sends their love. Whassup, dead guy?”

  “Not dead yet,” Michael said, and rose to kiss her. Except for the cool bluish tone to his skin, he looked like any other boy of nineteen; the sharp, pointy teeth were folded up, like a snake’s, and when he was like this Claire actually kind of forgot he was a vamp at all. Although he was wearing a faded T-shirt that had a happy face on it, with vampire fangs. Eve had probably bought it for him.

  Eve herself had to stand just a bit on tiptoe for the kiss, which went on about five seconds too long for it to be just hi-honey-welcome-home, and when they parted, Eve’s cheeks were flushed even under the white Goth makeup. After a hard day of pulling shots at the TPU coffee shop—she alternated now between there and Common Grounds—she still looked cheerful and alert. Maybe it was all that caffeine. It just soaked right into her body without her even having to drink it. She was wearing black tights with orange pumpkins on them—left over from Halloween, Claire assumed, but Halloween was a year-round holiday for Eve—a tight black skirt, and three layers of thin shirts, each a different color. The one on top was sheer black, with a sad-eyed pirate skull printed on it.

  “I like the new earrings,” Claire said. They were silver skulls, and the little eye sockets lit up red whenever Eve turned her head. “They’re you.”

  “I know, right? Couldn’t be cooler.” Eve beamed. “Oh, and actually, they were out of the bacteria special, so I got you the ham and cheese. That’s usually the safest one.”

  Safe being a relative term when it came to UC food. “Thanks,” Claire said. “Tomorrow I’m making spaghetti. Yes, before you ask, with meat sauce. Carnivores.”

  Eve made a chomping sound with her teeth. Michael just smiled. The smile faded as he asked, “You don’t have to go see Amelie tonight, do you?”

  “No, probably not. The book’s been sitting in that shop for who knows how long. It can wait until tomorrow. I have to go to the lab anyway. Amelie will be a nice break, after my mandatory crazy-boss time.”

  Eve got herself a cold Coke from the fridge and popped the top as she dragged Claire’s bag off of a chair and dumped it in the corner. “How is crazy boss man, anyway?”

  “Myrnin’s . . . well, Myrnin, I guess. He’s been getting a little weird.”

  “Sweetie, coming from you, that’s alarming. You have an awfully large scale of weird.”

  “I know.” Claire sighed and sat down, propping her chin on both fists. She debated how much to say, even to her friends, but honestly, there weren’t any secrets. Not in the Glass House. “I think he’s under a lot of pressure to get the machine fixed; you know the one—”

  “Ada?” Eve asked. “Ugh, seriously, he’s not bringing that back to life, is he?”

  “Not . . . exactly, no. But Ada wasn’t all bad, you know. Well, Ada was, the personality, but the machine did all kinds of things that the vamps need, like maintain the borders of the town, give alerts when residents leave, wipe memories when they want it done . . . and run the portals.” The portals were the dimensional doorways that ran through town. Myrnin had discovered some freaky way of accelerating particles and constructing stable tunnels through space-time, something that Claire was still struggling to understand, let alone master. It wasn’t quite magic, but sometimes there didn’t seem to be much of a boundary between magic and Myrnin’s science. “It’s important. We’re just trying to, you know, take the Ada factor out of the equation and get the mechanical piece working without the mind-of-its-own part.”

  “Killer computers.” Eve sighed. “Like we didn’t have enough trouble in Morganville already. I’m not so sure any of those things you’re talking about are good for us, Claire Bear. You feel me?”

  “If by us you mean the regular humans, yeah, I know. But”— Claire shrugged—“fact is, having those safeguards lets them trust us, at least a little, and trust is all that keeps this town going.”

  Eve didn’t have a comeback to that. She knew Claire was right. Morganville existed on a teetering, dangerous balance between the paranoia and violence of the vampires, and the paranoia and violence of the humans who outnumbered them. Right there, at the balance point, they could all coexist. But it didn’t take much to tilt things to one side or the other, and if that happened, Morganville would burn.

  Claire chewed her lip and continued. “We’re getting it done; really, we are, but he’s got some kind of deadline he’s not telling me about, and I’m worried he’s going to . . . do something crazy.”

  “He lives in a hole in the ground, dresses funny, and occasionally eats his assistants,” Eve said. “Define crazy.”

  Claire closed her eyes. “Okay. I think he wants to put my brain in a jar and wire it into the machine.”

  Dead silence. She opened her eyes. Michael was staring at her, frozen in the act of opening the refrigerator door; Eve had put her Coke down, her eyes as wide as anything ever drawn in animation. Michael finally remembered what he was doing, reached in, grabbed a green sports bottle, which he carried to the table, and sat down. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. “I’m not going to let it happen. Neither will Amelie.”

  Claire wasn’t so sure about that last part, but she was sure Michael meant what he said, and that made her feel a little better. “I don’t think he’s serious about it,” Claire said weakly. “Well, not most of the time. But he keeps going on about how the brain is a much better CPU—”

  “Not going to happen,” Michael repeated flatly. “I’ll kill him first, Claire. I mean it.”

  She didn’t want Myrnin dead, but it did make her feel better to have her friend say it. Michael was a sweetheart most of the time, but the truth was, there was something cold inside him—and it wasn’t just that his heart didn’t beat. It was . . . something else. Something darker. Mostly, it didn’t show.

  Sometimes, she was grateful it did.

  “Shane’s late,” Eve said, changing the subject. “Where’s Mr. Barbecue McStabby?”

  “Working late,” Claire replied. “Somebody canceled on the night shift, so he had to work dinner service. He said it was okay; he could use the overtime. And he doesn’t like you to c
all him Mr. McStabby, you know.”

  “Have you ever seen him cutting up that meat? He is like an artist with slicing. And that knife is as long as my arm. Mr. McStabby it is.”

  They debated it for a while, with Michael staying out of it and sipping his sports bottle of—probably—blood, until Eve got the sandwiches out and they ate a cold, and somewhat mushy, dinner. After that, Claire fidgeted around, too restless to study, missing Shane, until Eve finally snapped at her about pacing and moving stuff, and she went up toward her room.

  On an impulse, she didn’t go there; she stopped in the hallway, reached out, and found the hidden catch to the secret room. The paneling clicked open, and she went in and shut the door behind her. No knob on this side, but that was okay; she knew where the release was. She ran up the narrow flight of stairs and came out in the windowless, dusty room that they’d always figured had been Amelie’s retreat, when she’d once lived in this house. It looked like her, somehow—old Victorian furniture, tapestry hangings, multicolored Tiffany lamps that were probably worth a fortune. It was always a little cold in here, for some reason. Claire stretched out on the old velvet sofa, staring up at the ceiling, and thought about how many times she’d come here with Shane. It was their private place, where they could just get away from everything, and the blanket draped over the back smelled like him. She pulled it over her and smiled, feeling like the ghost of Shane was here with her, snuggling up close.

  She had no idea she’d fallen asleep at first, and then she thought she was dreaming, because someone was touching her. Not molesting her or anything, just a fingertip being drawn down her cheek, across her lips . . . a slow, gentle sort of caress.

  She opened her eyes to see Shane crouched down next to her. His hair was—as usual—mussed, hanging long around his face, and he smelled like barbecue and wood smoke, and his smile was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.