After spending a solid fifteen minutes of glum brooding - which was pretty much her limit - Claire grabbed her headphones and loaded up the latest lecture from Myrnin on string theory. Well, she assumed it was string theory, although Myrnin had a tendency to confuse science with mythology and alchemy and magic and who knew what. Pieces of it still made more sense than anything she'd heard from a tenured professor - and pieces of it were complete gibberish.
The trick was figuring out which were which.
She didn't even know that anyone was in the room until the bed tilted to one side. Claire opened her eyes on near-complete darkness - when had that happened? - and instinctively grabbed for the covers, then remembered she was on top of them, and nearly naked, and panic went nuclear. She yanked off her headphones and slithered off her side of the bed, away from whatever weight had settled on the other side. . . .
The bedside light snapped on, revealing Eve sitting there in all her Gothy glory. Purple was still the color of the day, but she'd gone informal - purple tights, some baggy black shorts, a purple tee with Gothic lettering all over it.
Eve tilted her head to one side, staring at Claire. "Wow," she said. "Respect, girl. That is one hell of a sunburn. I haven't seen one that bad since my cousin fell asleep in a deck chair on the Fourth of July at nine a.m. and nobody woke her up until four."
Claire, still trying to control her racing heartbeat, gulped down breaths and grabbed her bathrobe from the chair in the corner of the room.As she yanked it on, it dragged over the backs of her hands and arms, and she almost yelped, again, from the pain. Her face felt as if it were on fire. Literally, with flames. "It's not a sunburn," she said. "It was some kind of UV bomb. It was meant for Myrnin."
"Ouch. Right, so we should get you some of that sunburn cream crap in the gallon size. Note taken."
Claire belted her robe. "Did you just come to see the freak show?"
"Well . . . entertaining as it is, no. I came to tell you that dinner was ready, but you were all grooved out on tunes."
Claire considered telling her that she'd been listening to lectures, but decided that in Eve's world, that was too much information. "Sorry," she said.
"Hey, I wouldn't have dared come in except that Shane's downstairs setting the table." Eve winked. "And if I'd sent him, well. Dinner would get cold, right?"
Oh God. Shane. Shane was going to see her like this, looking like some exile from Planet Magenta. "I - I don't think I feel well enough to eat," she lied, even as her stomach rumbled at the thought of food. "Maybe you could bring me - "
"It's only going to get worse," Eve broke in with ruthless cheerfulness. "Oh yeah. Big-time worse. First, the red face, then the blisters, then the peeling skin. Trust me, unless you're going to hide for the next week, minimum, you might as well just get on downstairs. We're having tacos."
"Tacos?" Claire repeated wistfully.
"I even made that funky rice stuff you like. Well. I boiled the water and put the funky rice stuff in it, anyway. That's cooking, right?"
"Close enough." Claire sighed. Across the room, a mirror reflected someone standing in her clothes that she refused to believe was really her. "Okay. I'll be right down."
"Better be." Eve kissed her fingers at Claire and scooted out the door, slamming it behind her.
Claire was still trying to decide whether her pink shirt made her look marginally better or marginally worse, when she felt an ice-cold sensation travel through her like a wave. No drafts, nothing like that - this was internal. It was a warning, straight from the semi-self-aware house.
Something was wrong in the house.
Claire grabbed her emergency home defense kit on the way out of her room - a bag of everything from pepper spray to silver-plated stakes - and raced down the hall, then down the stairs, and arrived with a jolt to find everybody else, including Michael, calmly sitting down to dinner.
"What?" Eve asked. Michael rose to his feet, evidently reading the look on Claire's face, if nothing else.
Shane blurted out, "What the hell happened to you?" Under normal circumstances this might have made her feel really bad, but she was off that right now.
"Something's wrong," she said. "Didn't anybody else feel that?"
They exchanged looks. "Feel what?" Michael asked.
"The - cold. It was like a wave . . . of cold?" Her words slowed down, because she wasn't getting any reaction from them. "You didn't feel it. How is that possible? Michael?" Because it was Michael's house, and technically, she didn't even live here anymore. Exactly. The house shouldn't have communicated anything to her before it talked to him.
"I don't know," he said. "Does it feel the same now?"
"Yes." Claire still felt cold, cold enough that she had chills running through her body. She was surprised her breath didn't smoke in the air. "Worse," she managed to say, and Shane got over his shock about her burn and came to take her hands. She winced as the tender skin complained, but she was grateful for the warmth, too.
"You're freezing," he said, and grabbed a fleece blanket from the back of the couch, which he wrapped around her. "Damn, Claire. Maybe it's the sunburn - "
"Not a - sunburn," she said through chattering teeth as he led her to the table and sat her down. "It's the house. It's got to be the house!"
"I - don't think it is," Michael said, and slowly sank back into his chair. "I'd know, Claire; there's no way I wouldn't. This is something else."