Rachel Caine: Last Breath

“If I fight Amelie, I’ll lose.”

“Then go down fighting, you jerk!”

He kissed the top of her head. “I will.” He rested his chin there where he’d kissed, and Claire realized that he was looking at Shane. She glanced up and saw Shane looking back. Whatever communication was going on there, she didn’t have the playbook to read it. Shane’s face was blank, his body language tense.

After a second, he got up and walked out of the room into the kitchen. Claire stuffed the rest of her hot dog in her mouth and followed him.

Shane kept walking, right to the back door, opened it, and went outside. Claire chewed fast, swallowed, and lunged out after him before the screen door flapped shut. She hopped down the concrete steps and caught up with Shane just as he sat down under the shade of the scraggly tree next to the leaning wooden garage.

“What was that look?”

Shane pulled out a pack of breath mints and took two, then passed them over. She took one. “You know what it was.”

“Really don’t.”

“If you don’t know, you don’t want to know, trust me.”

“It could not possibly be as bad as the Pavel story.”

He sighed. “It’s just that I’m not going to stand there while he lies to her. I’m trying to be all nonviolent and shit. And I want to punch him, and he knows it, and out here is better right now until I get myself together.”

Wow. That was a lot of communication going on in a ten-second look. So much for guys not talking; they just did it way, way differently. “Wait. . . . He was lying ?”

“I’m not saying he doesn’t love her. He does. But—” Shane was silent for a moment. “But there’s something else, too.” He shrugged. “Look, it’s between them, okay? We have to let them work it out.”

“No, it’s not between them—she’s my best friend! I can’t let her walk into this if he’s not really serious !”

“She knows,” Shane said. “Girls know, deep down.”

She did, Claire realized. Eve had been focused on all the stuff , the party plans, the invitations, all that, instead of facing her own fears. She already knew something was wrong, and she didn’t know how to fix it. “Well—she can’t go through with it. She just can’t.”

“Hang on—half an hour ago you were saying how the vamps couldn’t tear apart true love.”

“If it is . But what if it’s not, Shane? What if they’re making some awful, awful mistake and they’re both afraid to admit it?”

He put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him, turning her face to bury it in the heavy fabric of his blue jean jacket. It was chilly out here, even in the sun, and she was grateful for the warmth of his body. The feel of his fingers stroking through her hair made some tense, anxious part of her slowly relax inside. “You can’t fix everything,” he told her. “Sometimes you’ve just got to let it fix itself, or wreck itself.”

“Was it Gloriana?” she asked. Her voice was muffled, but she knew he could hear and understand. “Do you think she got to Michael?”

At the sound of the female vampire’s name, Shane’s muscles tightened, then deliberately loosened; it wasn’t quite a flinch, but it definitely was close. Gloriana had been a horrible, manipulative, deceptive (beautiful) witch of a vamp who’d wanted . . . well, human playthings. She had definitely gotten to Shane, who’d become her toy soldier; she’d seduced the part of him that loved to fight.

She’d treated Michael differently. Still a toy, but a completely different kind.

“Maybe she did get to him,” Shane acknowledged quietly. “Yeah, at least a little. She could do that, make you feel—anything she wanted. It’s tough to deal with it, but at least Glory’s gone in that not-coming-back way. Eve’s still here.”

“Is that enough?”

He didn’t answer her, and Claire thought, miserably, that there really was no answer—none that the two of them could get to, anyway. He was right.

It was Eve and Michael’s engagement, and Eve and Michael’s problem.

If they could admit they actually had one.

The shadows got longer, and the wind got colder, and eventually not even Shane’s body heat could keep Claire from freezing, so they went back inside. It was quiet, but not silent; as Claire poured herself a glass of water and grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table, she heard the creak of footsteps overhead. It had to be Eve, because from the living room drifted the quiet, contemplative sound of Michael’s guitar. Talk about “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Claire thought. That was the saddest thing she’d ever heard.

Shane gave her a quick, sweet kiss and went into the living room. She stayed where she was, eating her apple, listening to the quiet, low buzz of their voices over the music (Michael was still playing), and wondering if she ought to go upstairs and see if Eve wanted to spill it out. It was a friend’s duty, right? But Claire felt angry at Michael right now, righteously angry, and she wasn’t sure that wouldn’t boil over and complicate everything even more.

She eased over to the kitchen door and cracked it open. Shane would be kicking Michael’s ass, at least verbally; she just knew it.

But he wasn’t. They weren’t talking about Eve or the engagement party at all.

Michael was saying, “. . . over it, man. If you want us to get back where we were, you have to let that crap go.”

There was a short silence, and then Shane said, “I hurt Claire. Hell, man, I hurt you . I wanted to kill every damn vampire in the entire world, including you, single-handed.” He paused for a second, and then said, very softly, “I was like my dad, only on steroids, and it felt right . I’m not sure that’s ever going away, Mike. That’s my problem. If deep down I’m an abusive, violent ass like my old man, how exactly do I pretend I don’t know that?”

“You’re not him.” Michael kept playing, a slow and soothing tune, and his voice was quiet and deep. “Never were, never will be. You just hang on to that.” He paused a second, and Claire almost heard a smile in his voice. “You still want to kill me?”

“Sometimes, yeah.” Shane, on the other hand, sounded completely serious. “I love you, man, but . . . it takes time for all that stuff to go away. I don’t want to feel it.”

“I know, shithead.”

“If you break Eve’s heart, I will kill you.”

Michael stopped playing. “It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not. Stop screwing around and commit.”

“Oh, so now you’re giving me relationship advice? You can’t commit to a cell phone contract, let alone—”

“I’m committed,” Shane interrupted. “To her. You know I am.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Yeah, I know that. And you know if you screw it up with Claire, I’ll rip your throat out and drink you like a juice box, so you’ve got some incentive.”

Shane laughed. “You know what? I do that, you’ve got permission. And you know how I feel about that whole drinking-me stuff.”

It was a nice moment—one of the best she’d heard between them for a while—and then it all fell apart because there was a knock at the back door, and Claire went to answer it, and standing on the steps was a vampire. Female, wearing a hooded black jacket and gloves, very chic but also very sun-blocking. Claire couldn’t really make her out beneath the giant dark glasses and the smothering garments, so she said, “Can I help you?”

“It’s Claire, isn’t it? Hello. You probably don’t remember me,” the woman said. She smiled, a little tentatively. “My name is Naomi. I met you the day that you freed us from confinement in the cells below town.”