There were a lot of rules to Morganville Claire hadn't even thought about. The blood donation, that was one - and she was starting to wonder how Michael was getting away with not paying his taxes. He couldn't, right? If he couldn't leave the house?
She sat down cross-legged on the floor with a ledger notebook, turned to a fresh sheet of paper, and made a heading that read Pluses for Vampires. Under that column, she wrote down blood donation, Protection, favors, deals.
"Oh, put down curfew," Eve said.
"There's a curfew?"
"Well, yeah, of course. Except for the school. They don't care if the students roam around all night, because, you know - " Eve mimed fangs in the neck. Claire swallowed and nodded. "But for locals? Oh yeah."
"How is that a plus for them?"
"They don't have to worry about who's safe to bite and who's not. If you're out running around, you're lunch."
She wrote down curfew. Then she turned the page and wrote down Minuses for Vampires.
"What are they afraid of?" she asked.
"I don't think we were done with the pluses," Michael said. He sat down on the floor next to the two girls - well, closer to Eve, Claire noticed. "Probably a lot you didn't write down."
"Oh, let the girl feel better about it," Eve said. "It's not all gloomy. Obviously, they don't like daytime - "
Claire wrote it down.
"And garlic...silver...um, holy water - "
"You sure about those?" Michael asked. "I always thought they pretended on a lot of that, just in case."
"Why would they do that?"
Claire answered without looking up. "Because it makes it easier to hide what really can hurt them. I'm writing it down anyway, but it may not be right."
"Fire is for real," Michael said. "I saw a vampire die once, when I was just a kid. One of those revenge deals."
Eve pulled in a deep breath. "Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about it. Tom Sullivan."
Claire asked, wide-eyed, "The vampire was named - ?"
"Not the vampire," Michael said. "The guy who killed him. Tommy Sullivan. He was kind of a screwup, drank a lot, which isn't too unusual around here. He had a kid. She died. He blamed the vampires, so he doused one with gas and set him on fire, sitting right in the middle of the restaurant."
"You saw that?" Claire asked. "How old were you?"
"You grow up fast in Morganville. The point is, there was a trial the next night. Not much chance for Tommy. He was dead before morning. But...fire works. Just don't get caught."
Claire wrote down fire. "What about stakes?"
"You've seen Brandon," Eve said. "You want to try to get close enough to stake him? Yeah, me neither."
"But do they work?"
"Guess so. You have to fill out a form when you buy wood."
Claire wrote it down. "Crosses?"
"Definitely."
"Why?"
"Because they're evil, soulless, bloodsucking fiends?"
"So was my sixth-grade gym teacher, but he wasn't afraid of a cross."
"Funny," Eve said, in the way that meant not. "Because there are hardly any churches, and so far as I know, crosses are impossible to come by unless you make 'em yourself. Also, all these guys grew up - isn't that weird, thinking of them growing up? - when religion wasn't just something you did on Sundays. It was something you were, every minute, every day, and God was always up for a little recreational smiting of the wicked."
"Don't," Michael murmured. "God's scarce enough around here."
"No offense to the Big Guy, Michael, but he made himself scarce," Eve shot back. "You know how many nights I spent in bed praying, Dear God, please take away all the bad people? Yeah, that really worked." Michael opened his mouth to say something. "And please don't tell me God loves me. If God loved me, he'd drop a bus ticket to Austin in my lap so I could blow this town once and for all."
Eve sounded - well, angry. Claire tapped her pencil against the pad, not making eye contact.
"How do they keep people from leaving?" she asked.
"They don't. Some people leave. I mean, Shane did," Michael said. "I think the question you're looking for is, how do they keep them from talking? And that's where it gets weird."
"That's where?" Claire murmured. Eve laughed.
"I don't know myself, because I never got out of town, but Shane says that once you get about ten miles outside of Morganville, you get this terrible headache, and then you just...start to forget. First you can't remember what the name of the town was, and then you can't remember how to get there, and then you don't remember that the town had vampires. Or the rules. It just - doesn't exist anymore for you. It comes back if you return to town, but when you're out, you can't run around telling all about Morganville because you just don't remember."
"I heard rumors," Eve said. "Some people start remembering, but they get - " She made a graphic throat-cutting gesture. "Hit squads."
Claire tried to think of things that would cause that kind of memory loss. Drugs, maybe? Or...some kind of local energy field? Or...okay, she had no idea. But it sounded like magic, and magic made her nervous. She supposed vampires were magic, too, when you got right down to it, and that made her even more nervous. Magic didn't exist. Shouldn't exist. It was just...wrong. It offended her scientific training.
"So where does all that leave us?" Michael asked. It was a reasonable question.
Claire flipped another page, wrote down memory loss aft. depart, and said, "I'm not sure. I mean, if we're going to put together any kind of a plan, we have to basically know as much as we can to make sure it's a good enough approach. So keep talking. What else?"
It went on for hours. The grandfather clock solemnly announced the arrival and departure of nine o'clock, then ten, then eleven. It was nearly midnight, and Claire had scribbled up most of the ledger pages, when she looked at Michael and Eve and asked, "Anything else?" and got negative shakes of their heads in reply. "Okay, then. Tell me about the book."
"I don't know a lot," Eve said. "They just put out a notice about ten years ago that they were looking for it. I heard they have people all over town going through libraries, bookstores, anyplace it could be hidden. But the weird thing is that vamps can't actually read it."
"You mean it's in some other language?"
Michael raised his eyebrows. "I don't think it's that easy. I mean, every one of these suckers has got to speak a dozen languages, at least."