He collapsed. Michael caught him under the shoulders.
He and Shane carried Oliver out to the couch, while Eve anxiously followed along, making little shooing motions.
Claire started to follow, then heard something scrape across the wood behind her, in the shadows.
Oliver hadn't come here alone.
A black shadow lunged out, grabbed her, and something hard hit her head.
She must have made some sound, knocked something over, because she heard Shane call her name sharply, and saw his shadow in the doorway before darkness took all of it away.
Then she was falling away.
Then she was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Claire came awake feeling sick, wretched, and cold. Someone was pounding on the back of her head with a croquet mallet, or at least that was how it felt, and when she tried to move, the whole world spun around.
"Shut up and stop moaning," somebody said from a few feet away. "Don't you dare throw up or I'll make you eat it."
It sounded like Jason Rosser, Eve's crazy brother. Claire swallowed hard and squinted, trying to make out the shadow next to her. Yeah, it looked like Jason--skanky, greasy, and insane. She tried to squirm away from him, but ran into a wall at her back. It felt like wood, but she didn't think it was the Glass House attic.
He'd taken her somewhere, probably using the portal. And now none of her friends could follow, because none of them knew how.
Her hands and feet were tied. Claire blinked, trying to clear her head. That was a little unfortunate, because with clarity came the awareness of just how bad this was. Jason Rosser really was crazy. He'd stalked Eve. He'd--at least allegedly--killed girls in town. He'd definitely stabbed Shane, and he'd staked Amelie at the feast when she'd tried to help him.
And none of her friends back at the Glass House would know how to find her. To their eyes, she would have just . . . vanished.
"What do you want?" she asked. Her voice sounded rusty and scared. Jason reached out and moved hair back from her face, which creeped her out. She didn't like him touching her.
"Relax, shortcake, you're not my type," he said. "I do what I'm told, that's all. You were wanted. So I brought you."
"Wanted?"
A low, silky laugh floated on the silence, dark as smoke, and Jason looked over his shoulder as the hidden observer rose and stepped into what little light there was.
Ysandre, Bishop's pale little girlfriend. Beautiful, sure. Delicate as jasmine flowers, with big, liquid eyes and a sweetly rounded face.
She was poison in a pretty bottle.
"Well," she said, and crouched down next to Claire. "Look at what the cat dragged in. Meeow." Her sharp nail dragged over Claire's cheek, and judging from the sting, it drew blood. "Where's your pretty boyfriend, Miss Claire? I really wasn't done with him, you know. I hadn't even properly started."
Claire felt an ugly lurch of anger mix with the fear already churning her stomach. "He's probably not done with you, either," she said, and managed to smile. She hoped it was a cold kind of smile, the sort that Amelie used--or Oliver. "Maybe you should go looking. I'll bet he'd be so happy to see you."
"I'll show that boy a real good time, when we do meet up again," Ysandre purred, and put her face very close to Claire's. "Now, then, let's talk, just us girls. Won't that be fun?"
Not. Claire was struggling against the ropes, but Jason had done his job pretty well; she was hurting herself more than accomplishing anything else. Ysandre grabbed Claire's shoulder and wrenched her upright against the wooden wall, hard enough to bang Claire's injured head. For a dazed second, it looked like Ysandre's ripe, red smile floated in midair, like some undead Cheshire cat.
"Now," Ysandre said, "ain't this nice, sweetie? It's too bad we couldn't get Mr. Shane to join us, but my little helper here, he's a bit worried about tackling Shane. Bad blood and all." She laughed softly. "Well, we'll make do. Amelie likes you, I hear, and you've got on that pretty little gold bracelet. So you'll do just fine."
"For what?"
"I ain't telling you, sweetie." Ysandre's smile was truly scary. "This town's going to have a wild night, though. Real wild. And you're going to get to see the whole thing, up close. You must be all atingle."
Eve would have had a quip at the ready. Claire just glared, and wished her head would stop aching and spinning. What had he hit her with? It felt like the front end of a bus. She hadn't thought Jason could hit that hard, truthfully.
Don't try to find me, Shane. Don't. The last thing she wanted was Shane racing to the rescue and taking on a guy who'd stabbed him, and a vampire who'd led him around by a leash.
No, she had to find her own way out of this.
Step one: figure out where she was. Claire let Ysandre ramble on, describing all kinds of lurid things that Claire thought it was better not to imagine, considering they were things Ysandre was thinking of doing to her. Instead, she tried to identify her surroundings. It didn't look familiar, but that was no help; she was still relatively new to Morganville. Plenty of places she'd never been.
Wait.
Claire focused on the crate that Jason was sitting on. There was stenciling on it. It was hard to make it out in the dim light, but she thought it said BRICKS BULK COFFEE. And now that she thought about it, it smelled like coffee in here, too. A warm, morning kind of smell, floating over dust and damp wood. And she remembered Eve laughing about how Oliver bought his coffee from a place called Bricks. As in, tastes like groundup bricks, Eve had said. If you order flavored, they add in the mortar.
There were only two coffee shops in town: Oliver's place, and the University Center coffee bar. This didn't look like the UC, which wasn't that old and was mostly built of concrete, not wood.
That meant . . . she was at Common Grounds? But Common Grounds didn't make any sense; there wasn't any kind of portal leading to it.
Maybe Oliver has a warehouse. That sounded right, because the vampires seemed to own a lot of the warehouse district that bordered Founder's Square. Brandon, Oliver's secondinvampirecommand, had been found dead in a warehouse.
Maybe she was close to Founder's Square.
Ysandre's cold fingers closed around Claire's chin and jerked it up. "Are you listening, honey?"
"Truthfully, no," Claire said. "You're kind of boring."
Jason actually laughed, and turned it into a fake cough. "I'm going outside," he said. "Since this is going to get all personal now." Claire wanted to yell to him not to go, but she bit her tongue and turned it into a subsonic whine in the back of her throat as she watched him walk away. His footsteps receded into the dark, and then finally a small square of light opened a long way off.