“You know—dammit!—if you actually got these things changed out before the tread is showing—”
“Zip it right there,” I told him. “Really not the time to lecture me about my car-maintenance habits. Just get it changed.”
“Yeah, working on it,” he said. “Dammit. We’re late already. Michael’s going to freak.”
“Hey, good, because if he shows up, we can have this fixed in thirty seconds,” I said.
Shane sent me a glare from under his rain-drenched hair, which was ratted around his face. He needed a shave, I thought. And a tranquilizer. “I don’t need help,” he snapped. He stood up and stamped on the wrench, and the bolt turned with a horrible metallic shriek. Now that he had it started, he was able to muscle it off and start the next one.
At this rate, we’d be thirty minutes in the freezing downpour. Sitting ducks for any passing vamp with a plasma craving.
Or worse, whatever worse was this week in Morganville. One thing was certain: it was not safe to be out with a flat tire after dark, even on the town’s best day ever. Which this most assuredly wasn’t.
I was trying to be the old Eve. I really was; I’d even zinged Shane a couple of times with wisecracks, but nothing felt the same. I kept seeing flashes in front of me, vivid as camera shots, of how Claire had looked lying there on the floor, her eyes open, head turned to the side.
Of how I’d known, even before I’d touched her, that she was gone.
Nothing was the same now. The rain was all wrong for Morganville; it never poured like this, especially not this time of year. The streets were flooding, again, and even under the hooded jacket I was wearing I felt chilled and soaked. And so many stores were shut—not just closed for the night, closed, with whited-out windows and notices on the doors.
It felt like the whole population was suddenly deciding Morganville was no longer safe.
Which, duh.
I shivered again and stamped my feet, which was a bad idea. I sent splashes of freezing water up my legs.
Shane had moved on from dammit up the cursing food chain as he struggled with the third bolt. Stomping on the wrench wasn’t cutting it, but he was doing it with so much enthusiasm I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a bone break. Finally, the bolt creaked over, and Shane collapsed to his knees again to unscrew it.
Three down, three to go, and we really were very late. Michael would be out looking for us, but in this rain, it’d be hard for him.
A bolt of lightning ripped the sky in half, and a couple of blocks down, I saw someone watching us. The flash gave me only impressions—human-shaped, pale, nothing special. But anybody who would be standing idly around in this weather deserved special alarm.
“Speed it up,” I told Shane. “Seriously. Go faster.”
“Hey, princess, don’t make me break a nail.”
“I’m not kidding.”
He glanced up at me, shook hair out of his eyes, and said, “Yeah, I know. I’m moving it. Get the tire ready.”
I didn’t like the idea of leaving him alone to go to the back of the hearse and drag the spare out of its compartment, but I really didn’t have much of a choice; it would speed things up, and I’d just been ragging on him to count seconds. I waited until the next jagged flash of lightning.
The corner where I’d seen the man standing was empty. Good news? Probably not.
It took thirty seconds to unlatch the compartment, grab the spare, and haul it out. Shane was still unscrewing the last bolt when I rolled it over. He lifted the flat clear and passed it to me, then took the replacement and slotted it on with speed a NAS-CAR pit crew would have envied. “Five minutes,” he shouted.
“Less would be better!”
“Just watch our backs.”
I was, even while I threw the flat tire into the back of the hearse. The street looked deserted. We’d lucked out in being able to pull under an actual working streetlamp to fix the tire, but that also made us about as obvious as the last pork chop at the all-you-can-eat buffet. I had been given watchdog duty over Shane’s precious canvas bag, and now I grabbed out my two favorite weapons—a silver stake, and my slightly upgraded fencing épée, which had a coating of silver on it, too. My coat pockets had two squirt bottles full of silver nitrate.
“Trouble?” he asked me without looking up from screwing on bolts. He was working fast. “Four more minutes.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s just real exposed out here.”
“Yeah.” He tightened bolt two and went on to three. “Believe me, I’m feeling it.”
Lightning stabbed again, so bright it practically sizzled my eyeballs. Close, too, real close. It must have struck a transformer about a block away; I saw something flare up in hot blue sparks.
Our streetlight went dead with a sad little fizzle and zap.
“Shit,” Shane said. “Can’t see a thing! Flashlight!”
I grabbed one from the back, but that meant dropping one of my two weapons. I debated, then left the stake on the seat. The flashlight worked, at least, and I focused it so he could continue bolt three.
By bolt five, I was feeling pretty good. We were almost back on the road. Yes, we were—yikes—half an hour late, but at least we were in one piece....
I felt something brush past me.
The wind was blowing, and rain was thrashing, and the feeling was so subtle, I shouldn’t have been able to pick it out of the general chaos around us, but there was something about that touch. Something very bad.
I spun around, throwing the light all directions, but I didn’t see a thing.
“Sorry,” I said, and turned back toward the car, and Shane, who was—against all character points—waiting patiently for me to stop freaking out.
Only he wasn’t waiting.
He was standing up. The light hit his face, and it was pale, dead pale, his brown eyes almost all pupil.
I yelped and scuttled back, and the light slipped and lit up someone standing behind him.
My mind fried, just like the streetlight, as if it couldn’t make that work, couldn’t process, couldn’t deal. It was like a shadow, but—
“Hey!” I shook it off, mostly by refusing to look at whoever that was behind Shane. “Shane, get out of the way. What the hell are you doing?”
He just stared at me. It was as if he was gone, like Claire had been gone, only he was still standing there.
Then he turned and started to walk away. He passed the shadow, which rippled black like a standing-up puddle of oil, and I felt something horrible and cold well up inside me.
Whatever this thing was, it had Shane, and now it was taking me, too.
Hell with this.
I yelled, closed my eyes, and lunged.
It was a perfect lunge, the fencing move of a lifetime—razor-straight extension, weight balanced, every bit of my reach forward into the silver-coated steel of the sword.
And it caught the thing dead center.
Problem was, it didn’t feel like I’d punctured anything real. It was more as if I’d hit a balloon, one filled with gelatin and water. The give was way too easy, way too wrong, and I snapped my head up to see the thing—because it damn sure wasn’t a man, and wasn’t a vampire—collapsing in on itself.
Whatever was inside it splashed to the wet ground a second before the thin, empty oil-black skin collapsed.
I shrieked and scrambled backward, shaking my sword free of the ick. There was no sign of blood on there, or anything I could see in the dim light from my fallen flashlight.
The black stuff was flooding away in the water.
Shane had fallen face-first to the street, as if he’d just been turned completely off. I gave that dead skin a wide margin of respect as I ran for him and grabbed his arm. “Shane! Shane!” God, flashbacks, I couldn’t lose him, too. I couldn’t. . . .