. . . She’d be gone along with it.
“Frank Collins! Can you hear me?”
She felt a sudden buzz of power, and Frank’s image formed in front of her, one grayscale pixel at a time. He blinked. “Anybody there?”
Oh. He couldn’t see her. Great. “Frank, can you hear me?” She yelled it, loud as she could, and Frank’s image flickered, as if interference had ripped it apart for a moment.
“Jesus, Claire, turn it down,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Right here!” She was so happy to be communicating she felt like kissing him—only that wouldn’t work, on so many levels. “I’m right here, in front of you. I’m sort of—”
“Dead?” he asked. “I heard the chatter. Guess saying I’m sorry seems a little redundant, since you’re actually talking to me.”
“I need your help.”
“Nothing I can do for you, cupcake. Dead is dead, although I have to admit, pretty big achievement since you’re audible.”
“Not for me,” Claire said. “There’s a gathering at Founder’s Square tomorrow night. Why?”
“Can’t say,” Frank Collins said. His image flickered again. “Move back; you’re screwing up my projection.”
She floated back, just a little. “Can’t say, or won’t say?”
“What did I just tell you?”
“So you’ve been told not to talk about it.” He didn’t answer, which she supposed was answer enough. “Frank . . . Amelie once told me that if she ever decided that the Morganville experiment was over, she would take it all down. Is that what we’re talking about?” More silence. She felt thinner and more faded, as if pieces of her were slowly streaming away into the dark. “Frank! Is she going to destroy the town?”
“She’s setting the humans free, and the vampires are leaving town,” he said. “Upside: Myrnin’s going to turn me off, and I can get on with dying the right way, finally. Downside—well, there’s always a downside.”
Talking to Frank was like talking in circles. “Where’s Myrnin?”
He shrugged. “He tore ass out of here to see you. Hasn’t come back.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. I know you’ve got surveillance everywhere.”
Frank raised his eyebrows, and smiled crookedly. “All right. He’s at Founder’s Square, with the Big Cheese. I don’t have eyes inside her offices, but they frog-marched him straight there and he hasn’t come out.”
That . . . wasn’t good. Myrnin was the only real hope she had. “Frank, when you see him, I need you to tell him that I’m still here. Hanging on. That he wasn’t wrong. Do you understand? He said he might be able to help me. Tell him I really, really need him now.” She swallowed. “Can you call Shane? Tell him . . . tell him I’m still in the house?”
He shook his head. “Can’t, sweetheart. I would if I could, but the comm system is screwed right now. They pulled fuses at the source, cut connections. I can’t activate the speaker on his phone unless he comes here. I’m limited, too.”
She was getting stretched too thin; she could feel the pull from the Glass House getting more tenuous. If it broke, she’d vanish like a puff of smoke on the wind.
“Frank! Please, you have to help me!”
He slowly shook his head. “You haven’t thought this through,” he said. “I guess that’s understandable, all things considered; it’s been a big day for you. Suppose Myrnin gets the message that you’re still around. Suppose he comes and works some kind of crazy magic and makes contact with you. You’re still trapped. Only way Michael got free of that place was to turn vampire.” His rippling image stared through the air, not quite focused on her. “You ready to be a vamp, Claire? Full-on bloodsucking freak? Because I can tell you, it was the worst damn thing that ever happened to me, in a lifetime of bad things. And I don’t want that for you. Or for my son. Better he lose you now. Better he not get false hope.”
“But—” She really, really couldn’t stay. Claire began drifting back to the portal, already worried that the cord connecting her to the Glass House was so thin. Or that Frank just might decide to cut it by slamming the door himself. “It doesn’t have to be that way. . . .”
“I believe it does. Think about it,” he said, as she fell backward into the dark. “Do the right thing.”
“But—please tell Myrnin; tell someone!”
He shook his head, again. “It’s better this way, Claire. Trust me. Just . . . let go.”
Claire snapped out of the portal and into the Glass House’s monochromatic living room, and energy rushed back into her. She felt an overwhelming relief, and a follow-on fear, because she hadn’t realized just how weak she’d let herself become, through the looking glass.
Whether Frank was going to help her or not . . . that was anyone’s guess. He probably didn’t even know himself.
But as last hopes went, it was shaky, at best.
It got late. Eve made sandwiches, which the three living housemates ate in silence—or rather, Michael and Eve ate them. Shane just picked at his, and then left the table without a word. Michael and Eve watched him go, silently asking each other what to do, and then Michael said, “Better let him go.”
Claire wasn’t so sure that was the right thing.
She drifted upstairs—easy, since all she had to do was concentrate on going up, and suddenly she was passing between floors and seeing all the old wood and wiring and rat droppings and spiders hidden in the walls, and ugh, that wasn’t the best trip ever. She was relieved to be floating in the silent upstairs hallway. We need an exterminator, she thought, but that really wasn’t the biggest problem any of them had at the moment, truthfully.
Shane’s door was open, and he wasn’t inside. She looked in, checking the other side of the bed, and even drifting into the closet, but unless he was hiding under the leaning pile of laundry, he hadn’t come here for his solitude.
The bathroom was empty. She didn’t bother with Eve’s room, or Michael’s; she knew where he was, after she thought for a second.
She drifted through the closed door of her own bedroom, the one at the end of the hall, and found herself standing in twilight stillness. Outside, the sun was setting; this side of the house was already facing the night, and the sky beyond the window was a deep, dark blue.
Shane was sitting on the floor with his back against the bedroom door, in the dark. His knees were drawn up to his chest, and his head was back, resting against the hard wood. Somehow, she expected him to be crying, but he wasn’t, not even silently; he was just sitting, eyes open and dry, staring off into the darkness. She hadn’t made her bed, she realized; it was still a mess, sheets and blankets twisted from the last time she’d bounced up from it. Stupid to be embarrassed about that now, or about the laundry sitting in the corner, or about the nightgown she’d left flung on the floor when she’d gotten dressed.
“Shane?” she said. She didn’t try to scream it; she knew that wouldn’t get her anywhere except in Hiram Glass’s bad books, again. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could do something to let you know that I’m here. I didn’t want to leave you like this; it was stupid and—”
She froze, because his head had turned, and he was staring right at her. Joy bolted through her, but then it turned gray and faded as she realized he wasn’t looking at her but through her.
At the nightgown lying on the floor.
He got up and grabbed it. For some bizarre reason she expected him to fold it up, maybe put it on the bed, but instead, he returned to the door, sank down in exactly the same spot, and held her nightgown in both hands.
He put it to his face and drew in a deep, shaking breath. “Help me. Please. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. God, Claire, please.” She’d never heard Shane like this before. He sounded . . . broken. Worse than when his father had died, worse than when he’d discovered what use Myrnin had made Frank into for the lab.