God, this was terrible. Just when she’d thought things in Morganville might be stabilizing, just a little bit…now Bishop was on the loose again. He’d come so frighteningly close to bringing it all down once; he considered Amelie and everyone in town his rightful property. His playthings.

What he’d do this time now that he was actually angry….…. Myrnin was right. Claire wasn’t one to yell for anybody to die, but for Bishop, she’d make an exception. He needed killing, quickly.

Why was he still here? Why hadn’t he blown out of Morganville first thing?

Revenge. He was the kind who lived for it. And what had Jason said that Bishop had said to Stinky Doug? Did you think you could threaten me?

How could a mere human ever hope to threaten Bishop enough to draw his full, personal attention, in broad daylight, in a public place?

Doug had something. The blood—sure, that was bad enough, but he’d had other things. Papers. Bishop had taken them.

Doug had been blackmailing Bishop. Not only Bishop, though—because Bishop couldn’t be out on his own. He’d have been caught already.

Claire sank down on the bed, rested her head in her hands for a moment, and then began to untie her shoes.

Then she heard something.

Voices. Low voices, coming from down the hall. Michael, probably, talking to Shane or Eve…but it didn’t sound right, somehow.

She took off her shoes and walked to the door in her socks. It wasn’t locked; she hardly ever locked it. The knob was cold in her hand but turned easily, and she pulled back until there was a narrow crack of light coming through from the hallway, and she could see……

Nothing. No sign of anybody in the hallway. She opened the door wider, slowly, and edged out. This is stupid. It’s my own house. I should be able to just walk right down there…….

Except it didn’t feel that way. It was, she realized, the house itself. The Glass House had always been a little bit alive, and just now it felt…anxious. Worried, maybe. And that was making her move quietly and cautiously.

The voices were muffled, but they were coming from down the hall.

From Shane’s room.

Maybe he’s watching TV. But he didn’t usually watch TV. She supposed he could have turned it on and fallen asleep, but…no, she was almost sure that one of those voices was Shane’s.

And the other one was a girl’s.

And then the girl laughed. And it wasn’t a friendly laugh; it was a low-in-the-throat, teasing laugh, a flirting laugh.

Oh, hell, no, that wasn’t going to happen.

Seeing red, Claire gritted her teeth and grabbed the handle of the door, staring at the rusted metal of the trespassers will be shot sign that Shane had nailed up on his door.

She was not going to take this lying down. Or at all.

SHANE

I couldn’t sleep after Michael and the broken controller and Claire. I felt restless and weird and wired, like I’d drunk about fifteen cups of coffee and chased it with Red Bull. Not a good feeling. I tried the headphones, but blasting speed metal through my skull didn’t help, either. I had a heavy bag in the basement, and I could have gone down there to work off some frustration, but it seemed like the wrong thing. Just…wrong.

Finally, I got up and prowled the house. Michael was still up, strumming his guitar downstairs. That was usually cool—I liked his music, always had—but tonight I just wanted him to shut up. I didn’t want to be reminded of him, of having a vampire living a few feet away and pretending to pass for human. It hadn’t bothered me so much recently, but now all that discomfort was back with a vengeance.

I thought I heard whispers coming from Claire’s room, but they were faint and my ears were still buzzing from the headphones. I thought about her, and the next thing I knew I wanted…Well, I’m a guy. You know what I wanted. If she was awake, maybe she felt the same way.

Maybe being so close together would make both of us feel less…trapped.

I knocked, the quiet way I always had, and maybe I had imagined it, because there wasn’t any sound at all, nothing. She’s asleep, I told myself. Chill out. Go take a cold shower. Or I could work my sore fists against the heavy bag; that would do the same thing—wear me out, drain the adrenaline out of my overactive body.

Instead, I went back to roaming the house.

I don’t know when exactly I noticed the ladder; about two hours later, probably. I had wandered down to the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich. Michael had bagged his rehearsal and gone upstairs to bed, so I had the darkness and shadows to myself. I thought about practicing for the rematch on Dead Rising, but even that didn’t have any appeal.

As I passed the window at the back, I saw a glint of silver outside where it shouldn’t have been. I backed up, and, dammit, there was a ladder leaning up against the side of the house. A big silver ladder that didn’t belong to us.

I stared at it for a few seconds, then realized that it was leading up to Claire’s window, and my stomach went cold and twisted and I ran up the stairs, three at a time, down the hall, and threw open her door, ready to attack whatever was in the room with her, ready to kill or die, and……

….. and she wasn’t there. Nobody was there. Her bed was rumpled, but when I touched the mattress it was cold. She’d been gone a while.

Ladder. Open window. I tried to imagine Claire being abducted without making a sound, and I just couldn’t. She’d have found a way to fall off the ladder, if nothing else, or bang it against the house.

It had all happened so quietly that she had to have done it herself, on purpose.

She’d left, and she’d gone without even telling me. Probably with some vamp, I thought; she trusted them way too much. She just didn’t have that instinct that Morganville natives had growing up, to mistrust everybody, always.

If it was that ass hat Myrnin who’d lured her away in the middle of the night, I was going to have to hurt him. Bad enough he acted like he owned her when she was at his lab, but hell if he got to come here, to our house, and haul my girl away in the thick of darkness, for who knew what insane reason.

She didn’t see him that way, but Myrnin was still a guy. An old, lonely guy. I’d seen him looking at her, and maybe it was just fondness, and maybe it was something else—truthfully, from time to time I’ve wondered about that, and him and her. It sometimes made me want to wrap my hands around his neck, but I hadn’t. Yet. I didn’t believe Claire had any idea Myrnin felt anything for her at all.

For Claire’s sake, I’d hidden a lot of what I felt about her boss, but lately it had come leaking out a little. And Myrnin didn’t like me much, either—I’d seen it in his eyes, especially when he’d found us together in his lab. Myrnin was territorial; so was I. Claire wouldn’t like that, but it was a cold fact.

And if Myrnin had taken her somewhere, from my territory…if he did anything to her…Well. I was going to spill some crazy vamp blood. Maybe a lot of it.

I sat in the dark and stared at that ladder for a long, long time before I went back to my room, stuck the headphones back on, turned on the TV to some brainless flickering channel, and zoned out, because there was nothing else to do right now.

When I opened my eyes again, there was a dream girl sitting on my bed.

I knew it was a dream because I felt no sense of alarm at seeing her; it was like she was supposed to be there, so there was no reason to get scared or think it was weird. She was beautiful, too, in a whole different way from Claire: long blond hair that rippled in thick waves around her heart-shaped face, all the way down her back. Small, but with a lot of personality; her smile was like morning sunrise, and she had eyes the color of summer skies. And, yeah, okay, I checked her out. She was worth checking—curves, nice ones, in all the right places. Not fashion-model skinny, but real-girl sexy.