Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

‘Okay. Here’s the deal: stay right where you are. Don’t touch anything, don’t shut the door, don’t try to solve the mystery yourself. I need to see it just as it is. I’m three minutes out. I’ll alert Irene.’

She hung up, and Claire hesitated a few seconds before sitting down on the steps. She shivered. The house felt cold and empty, and she hated leaving the front door open like that; she half expected to see the creepy face of Derrick, Liz’s stalker, peering in.

No Derrick, though. That was strange. Wasn’t he almost always hanging around waiting for Liz to come and go? And he’d been up on the steps before, Claire had seen him. Could this be Derrick, finally working up his courage to hurt Liz? But would she have ever let him in? Claire’s instincts said no, but maybe there had been some kind of faked emergency, or Derrick had used some other way to gain entrance … Claire’s mind was whirling, and her finger hovered over the emergency call button on her phone while the seconds crawled by with torturous intensity. If she’s more than three minutes, I’ll call the cops , she promised herself. And what if it really had been Jesse, after all? And Jesse was just coming by to clean up the mess and make Claire herself disappear, too?

She was on the verge of pressing the 911 button when suddenly, there was a shape standing in the doorway. Not coming in – just waiting. Oh, God , Claire thought in alarm, and bolted to her feet … and then realised it was Jesse. She had on a hoodie that she’d pulled up over her head, and a baseball cap under the hood that shaded her pale face, and she had her hands in her pockets; it was a normal look for a town like this, nothing that would get a second glance. A lot less obvious a sun-cover than the extravagant leather coats and big hats that Morganville vampires seemed to favour.

A second later, though Jesse didn’t speak, Claire realised what she was waiting for, and said, ‘Come in.’

Jesse didn’t reply, just stepped into the entry hall. She glided with the eerie, silent speed that Claire was accustomed to, but never okay with, and she pushed the hood back, took off the hat, and looked around the entry hall with methodical calm. Her eyes – a muddy, dim red now – swept over Claire, but didn’t pause. She made a fast walking circuit of the limited area, then crossed to the stairs and knelt down to put her face close to one of the steps. Then she came up a few stairs and did it again. Jesse worked her way quickly up to the second-floor landing, examined the blood there, and then went into Liz’s room.

It was all accomplished in eerie silence. Jesse didn’t speak to Claire, or acknowledge her in any way, until she finally stepped out of her friend’s room and looked up the stairs at her. The expression on the vampire woman’s face was blank – blank enough that Claire wasn’t sure if she ought to wait, or run.

Then Jesse said the thing that Claire least expected to hear. ‘It isn’t your roommate’s blood.’

‘What? But – it has to be!’ Unless Liz had fought back, maybe cut one of the intruders … she supposed that could happen, but the idea of Liz actually scoring a hit was pretty far out there. ‘Can you tell whose it is?’

‘Not easily. If I’d already tasted that blood, I’d know it, but from what’s smeared around in here, I’d have to say that it’s a male in his late twenties who drinks too much Red Bull.’ Jesse shrugged when Claire stared silently at her. ‘It has a certain smell to it. So does coffee and strong liquor. But I can definitely tell you that it wasn’t a girl your age who was hurt here. You said the door was open. Maybe she fought with someone, hurt him, and ran for it. That would explain the open door, if he took off in pursuit.’

‘Can you – can you track them?’

‘Not them. Just him. And only if he keeps bleeding. What the hell, we can give it a try, I guess.’ Jesse pushed her cap back on and flipped up the black hood. ‘Come on. We’ve got as good a chance of solving this as the police right now, and I don’t really want the cops involved in anything if it traces back to me, or to Irene.’

‘But – what if Liz—’

‘Trust me,’ Jesse said.

Claire hated it when vampires said that, and she was just about to say so, when someone else darkened the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. Tall, broadly built, and she instantly thought Derrick , and felt a surge of fury.

It wasn’t Derrick.

Shane was standing there on the doorstep, staring up at her. His face was set and pale, and his whole body said that he was braced for a painful impact, but he just nodded to her and said, ‘So, I’ve got no doubt that we’re going to talk about this later, and that will be hard, but for right now, you’re going to need my help.’

Jesse frowned at him. ‘Shane?’

Claire somehow descended a whole flight of stairs without even realising she’d done it. All of a sudden she was on the landing outside of Liz’s door, and her hand was hurting from the strength with which she was clutching the railing. Her knees were trembling, but the rest of her felt … numb. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘ You know him ?’

‘Yeah, of course I do. He’s the dishwasher at Florey’s.’

Claire’s mouth opened and closed, but she couldn’t sort out the whirl of words flying around in her mind. I wasn’t wrong. I did see him there .

That meant that Shane had been here for days. Maybe longer.

Long enough that he’d lied to her about it, and so had Michael. So had Eve.

‘Oh, we’re going to talk,’ she said then, and the chill in her voice surprised her. ‘But for right now, you’d better tell me what you think you know about this.’

‘Outside,’ Shane said. ‘We need to get moving. Now.’

‘Why?’ Jesse asked.

‘Because the people who took Claire’s friend might come back.’

Of all the ways I wanted to come face-to-face with Claire again … this wasn’t the one I’d preferred. I knew that there was a slim chance we might accidentally meet, but this wasn’t any accident; I was showing up on purpose on her doorstep, and there was no way to pretend that I hadn’t been here, hadn’t been interfering in her life, hadn’t been keeping eyes on her.

Because I was about to confess all that.

Jesse’s anti-sun disguise was pretty good; once her oversized sunglasses were on and her hands were in her pockets, most of her pale skin was protected from accidental sun exposure. It helped that today was cloudy and a little rainy. Claire locked the house’s front door and followed Jesse into the street, where I was waiting for them under a tree (that was polite of me, I thought, look at me being all vampire-sensitive). I nodded to both of them and led the way at a brisk walk a couple of blocks, then turned the corner. There was a café there with an awning. I sat down at one of the fragile-looking tables, and Claire and Jesse took seats on the other side of me. Jesse didn’t look pleased.

Claire – actually, I was too scared to look at her directly to tell what she might be feeling. She hadn’t jumped into my arms and declared her eternal love, so I was going to assume that I was in trouble. Big trouble.

Didn’t matter right now, given the situation.

Jesse’s gaze flicked from me to Claire, then back again, and I saw her making the connections. ‘Shane, just to be sure I’ve got this all right: you followed her from Morganville, but didn’t tell her about it. And you, Claire, you didn’t know he was here.’

‘That’s right,’ Claire said. I didn’t say anything, but then again, I didn’t have to; just being here was silent agreement. ‘I didn’t know he was coming.’