Rachel Caine: Dead Girls' Dance

Again, Claire had the impulse to claim credit…and managed not to, mostly because that would have required her to stop shoveling pasta into her mouth.

“Claire,’” Eve said. “She’s the cook, not me. I just, you know, supervised.’” Which gave Claire a pleasant little spurt of gratitude and surprise.

“See? I knew that.’”

Eve flipped him off and noisily sucked some spaghetti into her mouth.

Claire got to the bottom of the bowl first—even before Michael or Shane—and sat back with a sigh of utter contentment. Nap, she thought. I could take a nap.

“Guys,’” Michael said. “We’re still in trouble. You know that, right?’”

“Yeah,’” Eve said. “But now we have catered trouble.’”

He ignored her, except for a brief little quirk of a smile, and focused on Shane. “You need to tell me everything,’” Michael said. “No bullshit, man. Every last thing, from the time you left Morganville.’”

Shane seemed to lose his appetite.

Which, for Shane, was not a good sign at all.

The vampires had offered them money. Cash compensation. It was Morganville’s version of Allstate, only it wasn’t insurance—it was blood money for a dead child.

And the Collins family—Dad, Mom, and Shane—had packed up whatever had survived the fire that had taken Alyssa, and left town in the middle of the night. Running. That probably would have been that, Shane explained; people did leave town from time to time, and it was rarely any trouble. Michael’s own parents had taken off. But…something went wrong with Molly Collins.

“At first, she’d just space,’” Shane said. He’d drained his beer, and now he was just rolling the bottle between his palms. “Stare at things, like she was trying to remember something. Dad didn’t notice. He was drinking a lot. We ended up in Odessa, and Dad got a job at the recycling plant. He wasn’t home much.’”

“That must have been an improvement,’” Eve muttered.

“Hey, let me get through it, okay?’”

“Sorry.’”

Shane took another deep breath. “Mom…she kept talking about Alyssa. You have to understand, we didn’t—I couldn’t remember anything, except that she’d died. It was all just sort of a blur, but not the kind of blur you worry about, if you know what I mean…?’”

Claire was fairly certain nobody did, but she remembered her conversation with her own parents. They’d forgotten things, and somehow, they hadn’t really cared. So maybe she did understand.

“I started working, too. Mom…she just stayed in the motel. Wouldn’t do anything except eat, sleep, sometimes take a bath if we yelled at her long enough. I figured, you know, depression…but it was more than that. One day, out of nowhere, she grabs me by the arm and she says, ‘Shane, do you remember your sister?’ So I go, ‘Yeah, Mom, of course I do.’ And she says the weirdest thing. She says, ‘Do you remember the vampires?’ I didn’t remember, but it felt—like something in me was trying to. I got a bad headache, and I felt sick. And Mom…she just kept on talking, about how there was something wrong with us, something going wrong in our heads. About the vampires. About Lyssa dying in the fire.’”

He fell silent, still rolling the beer bottle like some kind of magic talisman. Nobody moved.

“And I remembered.’”

Shane’s whisper sounded raw, somehow, vulnerable and exposed. Michael wasn’t looking at him. He was looking down, at his own beer bottle, and the label he was peeling off in strips.

“It was like some wall coming down, and then it all just flooded in. I mean, it’s bad enough to live through it and sort of cope with it, but when it comes back like that…’” Shane visibly shuddered. “It was like I’d just watched Lyss die all over again.’”

“Oh,’” Eve said faintly. “Oh God.’”

“Mom—’” He shook his head. “I couldn’t handle it. I left her. I had to get away, I couldn’t just—I had to go. You know? So I left. I ran.’” A hollow rattle of a laugh. “Saved my life.’”

“Shane—’” Michael cleared his throat. “I was wrong. You don’t have to—’”

“Shut up, man. Just shut up.’” Shane tipped the bottle to his lips for the last few drops, then swallowed hard. Claire didn’t know what was coming, but she could see from the look on Michael’s face that he did, and it twisted her stomach into a knot. “So anyway, I came back a few hours later and she was in the tub, just floating there, and the water was red—razor blades on the floor—’”

“Oh, honey.’” Eve got up and stood there, hovering next to him, reaching out to touch him and then pulling back in jerky motions without making contact, like he had some force field of grief shielding him. “It wasn’t your fault. You said she was depressed.’”

“Don’t you get it?’” He glared up at her, then at Michael. “She didn’t do it. She wouldn’t. It was them. You know how they work: they close in; they kill; they cover it up. They must have gotten there right after I left. I don’t know—’”

“Shane.’”

“—I don’t know how they got her in the tub. There weren’t any bruises, but the cuts were—’”

“Shane! Christ, man!’” Michael looked outright horrified this time, and Shane stopped. The two of them looked at each other for a long, wordless moment, and then Michael—visibly tense—eased back into his chair. “Shit. I don’t even know what to say.’”

Shane shook his head and looked away. “Nothing to say. It is what it is. I couldn’t—shit. Let me just finish, okay?’”

As if they could stop him. Claire felt cold. She could feel Shane’s body shaking next to her, and if she felt cold, how must he be feeling? Frozen. Numb. She reached out to touch him and, like Eve, just…stopped. There was something about Shane right now that didn’t want to be touched.

“Anyway, my dad came home, eventually. Cops said it was a suicide, but after they were gone I told him. He didn’t exactly want to hear it. Things got…ugly.’” Claire couldn’t imagine how ugly that had been, for Shane to actually admit it. “But I made him remember.’”

Eve sat on the floor, hugging her knees close to her chest. She looked at him with anime-wide eyes. “And?’”

“He got drunk. A lot.’” Bitterness ran black through Shane’s voice, and all of a sudden the beer bottle in his hand seemed to get a whole lot of significance for him, beyond just something to occupy his nervous hands. He set it down on the floor and wiped his palms on his blue jeans. “He started hooking up with these bikers and stuff. I—wasn’t in a real good place; I don’t remember some of that. Couple of weeks later we got a visit from these guys in suits. Not vamps, lawyers. They gave us money, lots of it. Insurance. Except we both knew who it was from, and the point was, they were trying to figure out what we knew and remembered. I was too drugged out to know what was going on, and Dad was drunk, so I guess that saved our lives. They decided we were no threat.’” He wiped his forehead with the heel of his hand and laughed—a bitter, broken sound like glass in a blender.

Shane on drugs. Claire saw that Michael had caught it, too. She wondered if he was going to say something, but maybe it wasn’t the best time to say, Hey, man, you using now? Or something like that.

He didn’t need to ask, as it turned out. Shane answered anyway. “But I kicked it, and Dad sobered up, and we planned this out. Thing is, even though we remembered a lot of stuff, the personal stuff, we couldn’t remember things about how to find vamps, or the layout of the town, or even who we were looking for. So that was my job. Come back, scout it out, find out where the vamps hide during the day. Report back. It wasn’t supposed to take this long, and I wasn’t supposed to—get tangled up.’”