SIX

The ladder was still in place when she got home. Myrnin, in typical Myrnin fashion, delivered her to the base of the ladder, and by the time she'd climbed three steps and looked back, he was gone. Of course. She pulled herself up the rest of the way,carefully , trying not to notice how the ladder shivered and rocked around as she shifted her weight.

Achieving the open window was a massive relief, and she wriggled through and landed with an unbalancedthump on the floor. It was still dark outside, but not for too much longer--another hour and a half, max, from her glance at the glowing digital clock on the bedside table.

God, this wasterrible. Just when she'd thought things in Morganville might be stabilizing, just a little bit...now Bishop was on the loose again. He'd come so frighteningly close to bringing it all down once; he considered Amelie and everyone in town his rightful property. His playthings.

What he'd do this time now that he was actuallyangry ........ Myrnin was right. Claire wasn't one to yell for anybody to die, but for Bishop, she'd make an exception. He needed killing, quickly.

Why was he still here? Why hadn't he blown out of Morganville first thing?

Revenge. He was the kind who lived for it. And what had Jason said that Bishop had said to Stinky Doug?Did you think you could threaten me?

How could a mere human ever hope to threaten Bishop enough to draw his full, personal attention, in broad daylight, in a public place?

Doug had something. The blood--sure, that was bad enough, but he'd had other things. Papers. Bishop had taken them.

Doug had been blackmailingBishop. Not only Bishop, though--because Bishop couldn't be out on his own. He'd have been caught already.

Claire sank down on the bed, rested her head in her hands for a moment, and then began to untie her shoes.

Then she heard something.

Voices. Low voices, coming from down the hall. Michael, probably, talking to Shane or Eve...but it didn't sound right, somehow.

She took off her shoes and walked to the door in her socks. It wasn't locked; she hardly ever locked it. The knob was cold in her hand but turned easily, and she pulled back until there was a narrow crack of light coming through from the hallway, and she could see......

Nothing. No sign of anybody in the hallway. She opened the door wider, slowly, and edged out.This is stupid. It's my own house. I should be able to just walk right down there.......

Except it didn't feel that way. It was, she realized, the house itself. The Glass House had always been a little bit alive, and just now it felt...anxious. Worried, maybe. And that was making her move quietly and cautiously.

The voices were muffled, but they were coming from down the hall.

From Shane's room.

Maybe he's watching TV.But he didn't usually watch TV. She supposed he could have turned it on and fallen asleep, but...no, she was almost sure that one of those voices was Shane's.

And the other one was a girl's.

And then the girllaughed. And it wasn't a friendly laugh; it was a low-in-the-throat, teasing laugh, a flirting laugh.

Oh,hell , no, that wasn't going to happen.

Seeing red, Claire gritted her teeth and grabbed the handle of the door, staring at the rusted metal of the trespassers will be shot sign that Shane had nailed up on his door.

She was not going to take this lying down. Or at all.

SHANE

I couldn't sleep after Michael and the broken controller and Claire. I felt restless and weird and wired, like I'd drunk about fifteen cups of coffee and chased it with Red Bull. Not a good feeling. I tried the headphones, but blasting speed metal through my skull didn't help, either. I had a heavy bag in the basement, and I could have gone down there to work off some frustration, but it seemed like the wrong thing. Just...wrong.

Finally, I got up and prowled the house. Michael was still up, strumming his guitar downstairs. That was usually cool--I liked his music, always had--but tonight I just wanted him to shut up. I didn't want to be reminded of him, of having a vampire living a few feet away and pretending to pass for human. It hadn't bothered me so much recently, but now all that discomfort was back with a vengeance.

I thought I heard whispers coming from Claire's room, but they were faint and my ears were still buzzing from the headphones. I thought about her, and the next thing I knew I wanted...Well, I'm a guy. You know what I wanted. If she was awake, maybe she felt the same way.

Maybe being so close together would make both of us feel less...trapped.

I knocked, the quiet way I always had, and maybe I had imagined it, because there wasn't any sound at all, nothing.She's asleep,I told myself. Chill out. Go take a cold shower.Or I could work my sore fists against the heavy bag; that would do the same thing--wear me out, drain the adrenaline out of my overactive body.

Instead, I went back to roaming the house.

I don't know when exactly I noticed the ladder; about two hours later, probably. I had wandered down to the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich. Michael had bagged his rehearsal and gone upstairs to bed, so I had the darkness and shadows to myself. I thought about practicing for the rematch onDead Rising,but even that didn't have any appeal.

As I passed the window at the back, I saw a glint of silver outside where it shouldn't have been. I backed up, and, dammit, there was a ladder leaning up against the side of the house. A big silver ladder that didn't belong to us.

I stared at it for a few seconds, then realized that it was leading up to Claire's window, and my stomach went cold and twisted and I ran up the stairs, three at a time, down the hall, and threw open her door, ready to attack whatever was in the room with her, ready to kill or die, and......

..... and she wasn't there. Nobody was there. Her bed was rumpled, but when I touched the mattress it was cold. She'd been gone a while.

Ladder. Open window. I tried to imagine Claire being abducted without making a sound, and I just couldn't. She'd have found a way to fall off the ladder, if nothing else, or bang it against the house.

It had all happened so quietly that she had to have done it herself, on purpose.

She'd left, and she'd gone without even telling me. Probably with some vamp, I thought; she trusted them way too much. She just didn't have that instinct that Morganville natives had growing up, to mistrust everybody, always.

If it was that ass hat Myrnin who'd lured her away in the middle of the night, I was going to have to hurt him. Bad enough he acted like he owned her when she was at his lab, but hell if he got to come here, to our house, and haul my girl away in the thick of darkness, for who knew what insane reason.

She didn't see him that way, but Myrnin was still a guy. An old, lonely guy. I'd seen him looking at her, and maybe it was just fondness, and maybe it was something else--truthfully, from time to time I've wondered about that, and him and her. It sometimes made me want to wrap my hands around his neck, but I hadn't. Yet. I didn't believe Claire had any idea Myrnin felt anything for her at all.

For Claire's sake, I'd hidden a lot of what I felt about her boss, but lately it had come leaking out a little. And Myrnin didn't like me much, either--I'd seen it in his eyes, especially when he'd found us together in his lab. Myrnin was territorial; so was I. Claire wouldn't like that, but it was a cold fact.

And if Myrnin had taken her somewhere, from my territory...if he did anything to her...Well. I was going to spill some crazy vamp blood. Maybe a lot of it.

I sat in the dark and stared at that ladder for a long, long time before I went back to my room, stuck the headphones back on, turned on the TV to some brainless flickering channel, and zoned out, because there was nothing else to do right now.

When I opened my eyes again, there was a dream girl sitting on my bed.

I knew it was a dream because I felt no sense of alarm at seeing her; it was like she was supposed to be there, so there was no reason to get scared or think it was weird. She was beautiful, too, in a whole different way from Claire: long blond hair that rippled in thick waves around her heart-shaped face, all the way down her back. Small, but with a lot of personality; her smile was like morning sunrise, and she had eyes the color of summer skies. And, yeah, okay, I checked her out. She was worth checking--curves, nice ones, in all the right places. Not fashion-model skinny, but real-girl sexy.

It occurred to me after a few seconds of admiring all that lushness that I shouldn't be feeling quite this attracted to a vampire. Because she was a vamp, of course. One hundred percent. You'd think that if I'd wanted to put a couple of vamps through the wall earlier, including my own best friend, I'd have felt the same way about her, but...I didn't. I liked her.

Just like that.

And I kind of recognized her in a distant way. Like I'd seen her before or known her before. But I didn't feel compelled to reason it out, either.

"You were impressive today," she said. Even her voice sounded like a dream, like one of those voices you hear in whispers that leaves you feeling warm and sweaty when you wake up. "Vassily was surprised, you know. He's never had a human touch him in a fight, let alone put him on the mat. I think he was impressed as well as annoyed."

"Thanks," I said. I was smiling at her, and it felt good. "It felt good, taking him down a peg."

"It was enjoyable to watch. You're so very...solid." She looked at me through lowered eyelashes, and my heart almost stopped. She just had that kind of presence and power. Like a dream. She was a dream, of course. She had to be. Every few minutes, one of those sex-line commercials was coming on TV. She was probably put together in my brain out of that, and the vampire obsession I seemed to be developing. Even the voice sounded like something you'd pay money to hear murmur your name. "Vassily said it earlier, but he wanted me to extend a personal invitation to you to join his exclusive sparring group. But you can't tell anyone, whether you decide to join or not. It's more fun that way. Our secret, you see."

"Fun," I echoed. "Are you in it?"

"Only as a spectator," she said, and smiled again, a slow, wicked stretch of those wet, full lips. "I'm a lover, not a fighter, Shane. Although I'm quite sure you're both."

I felt hot all over, and, yeah, again, I'm a guy--don't judge. I love Claire, I do, but this was a dream. And besides, Claire had just ditched me to run off on her own when I needed her.

I tried to think about Claire, but the perfume in the air was so strong, so sweet, and I could almost feel how good it would be to sink into this dream, let it take me away.......

"I think it's time for me to go," Dream Girl said, and I felt a cool brush of lips on my cheek. It made me shiver all over. She laughed, low in her throat. "Do think about my proposition, sweet boy. I'll talk to you soon."

"When?"

"When you come to the new group," she whispered, and put her fingertips against my lips. "Quiet now. Someone's here."

Best dreamever.

Right up until the door flew open.

Inside the room, Shane said, "When?" and Claire just couldn't stand it, not at all.

She threw open the door so forcefully it banged into the wall and almost hit her on the backswing.

There was a blur of motion, too fast for her eyes to track, and a flutter of curtains at the window, and when she blinked, Shane was sitting alone on his bed, headphones on, looking dazed. He picked up the remote, flipping channels on the TV, moving like a sleepwalker.

"Shane?"

He looked up at her, face bathed in that pale blue light, and for a second, he didn't look anything like the Shane she knew.

Then he looked straight at the screen again as he shoved his headphones back.

"Hey. I thought you were sleeping," he said. "Then I checked again, and you were gone."

All her righteous indignation fell into confusion. She'd been going to accusehim , not the other way around...but now, she wasn't sure anymore what she'd actually seen. A blur. It could have been the flickering TV light combined with the wind blowing the curtains on the window. And the voices...the voices could have been the TV, too.

But she, on the other hand, had undeniably sneaked away, in the middle of the night, without telling him.

"There was a ladder under your window," he continued. "And unless you were planning to do late-night house painting, I don't know why you'd be out there climbing on a ladder. Front door's perfectly good if you want to leave, far as I know."

"I had to...It was--" This was ridiculous. She hadn't come in here tobe confronted. "Who was in here with you? I heard her talking to you."

Shane raised his eyebrows and looked back at the TV, where a woman was lying around in skimpy lingerie, talking on the phone and winking at the camera. Some kind of phone sex ad. "You mean her? She's been on five times an hour. Sometimes they even run the ads back-to-back."

"No, I mean--" Whatdid she mean? How had this gone so wrong, so fast? "I mean, there was a girl in here. A vampire." It had to be a vampire, to move so fast.

Shane shook his head. "You're kidding, right? You know how I feel about them. And I'm not a fang-banger."

"You said you'd stop saying that." Because of Eve, of course. And Michael.

"Yeah, well, nobody here but us breathers. Or is that something I can't say, either?"

She was losing the thread of all this. It was all slipping away, like a dream at dawn. "Shane, Isaw her. I thought--"

"Yeah," he said. "I thought the same thing when you were gone without saying a word to me. Just be straight with me, okay? Was it Myrnin?"

She was speechless, absolutely speechless. For one thing, she couldn't lie about it--ithad been Myrnin who'd shown up in her room in the middle of the night. And shehad run off with him. And now, inexplicably, she felt guilty about it, too. She could feel a traitorous burn in her cheeks, but the words just wouldn't come to save her.

Shane's face went still and cold. "Yeah. That's what I thought."

"Shane, I--"

"Morganville's changing you," he said. "You used to be scared of them, but the more you're aroundhim , the more you think the vamps can be your friends. They aren't. They can't be. They're ranchers. We're cattle."

Where the hell was all this coming from? She knew how he felt about the vampires, about Morganville, but this seemed--so edgy. So bitter. "We're here," she said. "We have to make the best of it until we can leave. You've said so yourself."

Shane shook his head, still not looking at her. He looked drawn now, and a little bit haunted. "I need to get you out of this place before it's too late. I should have done it before the barriers went back up around town, but now...now it's going to be more difficult. Got to do it, though. You can't be here anymore."

"Shane, what are you talking about? What makes you think I want to go right now?"

Suddenly, his focus shifted, and she felt hot and cold all over at the passion and intensity in his eyes. "Why wouldn't you want to go? Because of him? Myrnin?"

"No!" She felt appalled now, entirely out of control. This hadnot gone anything like she'd thought. "God, Shane, are youjealous ?"

"Do I need to be? 'Cause you're running away in the middle of the night with him, Claire."

"I--But it was--"

He turned away. "Just go, Claire. I can't talk right now."

She felt tears well up in her eyes, tears of anger and sheer, maddening frustration. It didn't matter what she said now. Shane had just shut her out, as effectively as if he'd slammed the door between them.

As she watched, he turned off the TV, pulled up the blanket, and rolled over on his side.

Away from her.

"Shane," she whispered.

No response.

She couldn't take it--shecouldn't . Maybe it would have been better to stay there, tell him everything, but she felt trapped. She felt like she couldn't breathe, and she just wanted...wanted...

She wanted out.

Claire didn't even make the conscious decision to run, but she did--out the door, into her own room, slamming and locking it behind her.

And then she sank down to a crouch against the door, wrapped her arms around herself, and cried like her heart was broken.

Which, in fact, it was.