It was deeply spooky.
Claire flipped a page and read the title:
A HISTORY OF MORGANVILLE
Its Important Citizens and Events
A Chronicle of Our Times
She blinked. Surely they hadn't meant for this to end up in the used bookstore, where anybody could pick it up and find it. She'd never seen anything like it before.
And, of course, she had to have it. She'd been burning up with curiosity about Amelie ever since she'd met her; the Founder seemed to have so many secrets that it was hard to know where they started and stopped. Even though Amelie had, from time to time, helped her out, and had given her Protection that had saved her life at one time, Claire really didn't know that much about her, except that she was old, regal, and scary.
The penciled price on the inside of the cover was only five dollars. She quickly found a few more obscure science titles, buried the history in the stack, and hauled the books up to the front.
Dan snorted. "You're never going to cram all that in your backpack."
"Yeah, probably not," she agreed. "Could I have a sack?"
"What do I look like, Piggly Wiggly? Hang on." He rooted around behind the counter, sending up choking clouds of dust that made even him cough, and finally handed over a battered old canvas bag. She started counting out money, and he quickly flipped open the books and added up the totals. He wasn't paying attention, which was good; he just added it up and said, "Twenty-seven fifty."
That was an awful lot, pretty much all she had at the moment, but she kept smiling and handed it over. As soon as the cash had left her palm, she grabbed the bag and started stuffing things inside.
"What's your hurry?" he asked, counting out the fives and ones. "It's not close to sundown."
"Class," she said. "Thanks."
He nodded, opened the register, and put the cash inside. She felt him watching her all the way to the door. It occurred to her that she didn't know which vampire owned this business, or how he or she might feel about the sale of the book . . . but she couldn't worry about that now.
She really did have class.
TWO
It didn't take long at all to read the book. She stopped in a park on the way home and sat in a sun-faded rubber swing seat and rocked slowly back and forth as she flipped pages.
It was about people she'd never heard of . . . and people she knew. Amelie, for one. Amelie's disputes with various vampires. Amelie's decisions to sentence this person for his crimes, spare that one. There were other vampires profiled, too. Some she'd never heard of; she supposed that they'd died, or left, or maybe they were just reclusive. Oliver wasn't in the book, because he was a latecomer to town. Neither, curiously, was Myrnin. She supposed Myrnin had been a closely guarded town secret from the very beginning.
It was weirdly interesting, but overall, she didn't know what good it was going to do her to know that Amelie had once filed a complaint against a man who owned a dry-goods store (what was a dry-goods store?) for cheating the human customers. And that the complaint had gotten his store taken away from him, and he'd opened the town's first movie theater.
Boring.
In the end, Claire dropped the book into her backpack and thought about mailing it anonymously to the library. Maybe that was where it really belonged, anyway. She thought about it on the way home, but she ended up worrying about whether vampires could somehow sense she'd handled it. CSI: Vampire. Not a comforting thought.
"You're late," Michael remarked, as she walked into the Glass House through the kitchen door. He was standing at the sink washing dishes; there was nothing odder to her than seeing her housemate, who was all kinds of smoking-hot, not to mention all kinds of vampire, up to his elbows in suds at the sink. Did rock stars really do their own housework? "Also, it's not my day to do the kitchen. It's yours."
"Is that your passive-aggressive way of trying to get me to pick up your laundry duty?"
"I don't know. Is it working?"
"Maybe." She put her bags down on the table and went to join him at the sink. He washed plates and handed them over, and she rinsed and dried. Very domestic. "I was reading. I forgot what time it was."
"Bookworm." He flicked suds at her. Michael was in a really good mood, no question about that; he had been for the last couple of months. Getting out of Morganville and recording his music with a real, genuine recording company had been good for him. Coming back had been hard, but he'd finally settled into the routine. They all had. It had been a crazy, weird vacation, almost like something they'd dreamed, Claire decided.
But damn, it had felt good to be out there with her friends, on the road, without the shadow of Morganville hanging over them.
Michael abruptly stopped laughing, and just looked at her with those big blue eyes. That made her go momentarily dizzy, and she felt a blush coming on. Not that he was flirting with her--not more than normal--but he was looking at her a lot more deeply than usual, and he didn't blink.
Finally he did, turning his attention back to the sink, and washed another plate before he said, "You're nervous about something. Your heartbeat's faster than normal."
"You can hear--Oh. Of course you can." He hadn't been staring at her so much as the blood moving through her veins, she thought. And that was kind of creepy, except it was Michael. He made creepy adorable, most of the time. "I ran part of the way home; that's probably it."
"Hey, if you don't want to tell me, don't. But I can tell when you lie."
Okay, that was supercreepy. "You can?"
He smiled grimly down at the dirty dishwater. "Nope. But see? You fell for it anyway. Careful, or I'll read your mind with my incredible vampire superpowers."