Odd. It almost looked like respect, too.

Silence. Claire listened to the breeze, the distant laughter of students coming from beyond the trees, and all of a sudden she couldn’t stay on her feet. She sat down—sprawled—and rested her forehead in her hands.

Miranda crawled over to sit next to her. “Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“Stopping me. But you don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Getting bullied? Kind of do.”

Miranda was looking at her with sadness and a strange kind of pity. “No, you don’t,” she said. “It’s been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet—it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. I think about how to do it, you know. How to kill them. All kinds of elaborate things, like trapping them in pits and burying them alive, or covering them with concrete.”

It was the most sensible thing Claire had ever heard her say—and the most painful, too. She put her arm around Miranda. Close up, she expected Mir to smell bad, but she didn’t; she smelled like lemon shampoo and soap. With a little clothing upgrade and better makeup and hair, she’d be pretty.

Oh, God, she thought, amused. Eve’s rubbed off on me. Because the old Claire, the one she’d been before the Glass House, would have never even thought about Miranda’s appearance.

“Explain to me why you came to find me,” she said. “Was it just that you saw the knife fight?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. And then, immediately, “No. There’s something else.”

“What?”

Miranda looked up at her with those odd, unsettling, luminous eyes. “It’s about Shane. I think he’s in trouble. There’s something wrong in his head. I can almost see it.”

Claire’s phone beeped for attention—a text. She checked it. It was, shockingly, from Myrnin; she didn’t think he even knew how to text. Evidently, he’d found his cell phone again.

It said, Where are you, stupid girl? Run faster!

Claire sighed. “Dammit! Can you tell me about it while we walk?”

Miranda didn’t, of course, have many details. Psychic impressions were the most useless things ever, as far as Claire could tell…it was always feelings and impressions and vague warnings, and half the time it seemed like Miranda made things worse by trying to prevent something bad. Like today. The whole thing with Gina wouldn’t have happened if Miranda hadn’t come along trying to stop it. Well, probably.

Miranda’s cold-blooded violent streak worried Claire almost as much as Gina’s psycho tendencies. She thought about revenge in dangerously graphic terms.

“Let’s try this again,” she said as they walked down the mostly deserted street that led to the cul-de-sac where Myrnin’s lab entrance was located. “So what you see is that Shane’s in trouble because he gets in a fight.”

Miranda nodded, so vigorously her tangled hair bounced. “A bad one,” she said. “And gets hurt. I can’t tell how much, but he gets hurt a lot, I think.”

“Is it day or night?”

Miranda thought about it, frowning. She kicked an empty plastic bottle and flinched when a dog barked in one of the yards they were passing. The houses on this street were run-down, with bars on the windows. Only the Day house at the end of the street—a mirror for the house where Claire lived, the one owned by Michael Glass—looked nicely kept up, and even it needed a new coat of paint. “I can’t tell,” she finally said. “It happens inside. In a room. People are watching. There are bars.”

“Like, with drinks?”

“No, like a cage.”

That was sickly likely, because Shane seemed to end up behind those kinds of bars way too often. “How many people?”

She shrugged. “It’s dark; I can’t tell. Maybe a lot? No—more. More than a lot. From a long ways off. There but not there.”

That was definitely vague and not at all helpful. The fighting—well, that was something that honestly wasn’t all that unusual. Shane was a born fighter. But the getting badly hurt—that was unsettling, all right.

“Is there any way to tell when it’s going to happen?”

Miranda shook her head. “It’s pretty clear, so maybe a few days? A week? But I don’t know. Sometimes it’s tricky. And sometimes it goes away, too. Things aren’t always obvious.”

“Okay, well, thanks. I’ll try to look out for him.” That wasn’t much, because Claire knew she couldn’t spend all her time watching out for him. Warning him would help, but knowing Shane, it wouldn’t solve the problem, either. If he felt like he needed to be in the fight, he’d be in it—whether he got hurt or not.

“You should get home,” Claire said. “I have to go to work. Mir?”

Miranda stopped, looking at her. She was getting taller, Claire realized; still growing. She was taller than Claire was now, and would probably be Eve’s height or better before she was done.

“Tomorrow, meet me at the house,” Claire said. “If Myrnin doesn’t need me, we’ll go shopping. Okay?”

Miranda smiled at her—a sweet, delighted, heartfelt expression that lit up her whole face. No, her whole body. It was like nobody had ever offered before. “Okay!” she said. “I’ve never been shopping.”

Claire blinked. “Never?”

“No. My parents used to buy me things before they died. And now people sometimes bring me things, but I’ve never gone myself. Is it fun? It looks fun.”

“It’s fun,” Claire said. She had a sudden impulse to hug the girl, so she did. Miranda felt all bones and awkward angles, but she hugged back enthusiastically. “You go straight home and stay there. Monica may back off, but Gina’s kind of nuts. I think she’s after me, though.”

“She is,” Miranda said, in that distant, weird kind of voice Claire dreaded. “She’ll be coming. Soon.” She blinked and smiled. “See you tomorrow!”

She practically skipped away. Claire watched her go, shook her head, and headed into the monster’s lair.

The monster himself was standing in the middle of the lab, pacing and shaking his cell phone as if he was trying to get it to work by sheer force. He’d changed clothes again—this time, to a Victorian long-tailed coat in black, a purple vest, no shirt, and black pants. He’d ditched the bunny slippers this time, in favor of real shoes. When she came jogging down the steps, he looked so relieved she almost backed up a step or two.

“There you are!” he cried, and held his phone out to her. “This thing doesn’t work.”

“It does. I got your text.”

“But I’ve been sending it over and over, and then it just stopped working.”

It had stopped working because, evidently, he’d been pushing buttons so hard he’d broken them. Claire shook her head, took the phone, and tossed it in the garbage can in the corner. “I’ll get you another one,” she said. “Well? I’m here. What’s the crisis?”

He stopped and stared at her. “Bishop is on the loose, and you’re asking me what the crisis might be? Really?”

“I…thought the vampires would be taking care of that.”

“Indeed. Oliver’s got half the vampires in Morganville making inquiries of the other half.”

“Only half?”

“The half we can trust interrogating the half we can’t,” Myrnin said. “A sad truth, but there are more than a few who preferred Bishop’s open tyranny to Amelie’s more reasonable approach. There are always a few, Claire, who like being told what to do instead of being required to think. And those are the ones you should fear. That goes equally for humans, I’m afraid. Critical thinking has become a sadly rare skill these days.”

She nodded, because she already knew that. “So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to speak with Frank. We need him to be on the alert for any sign of Bishop. He has control of the monitoring systems, and he should be able to provide us solid leads.”

“Wait, you want me to do it? Why didn’t you?”