Bitter Blood (Morganville Book #2)

Chapter 10

The decaying Victorian glory of the Glass House stretched up into the night. Live oaks fluttered their stiff little leaves in the breeze, and in the distance black, shiny grackles set up a loud racket of shrieks and rattles in a neighbor's tree. Grackles loved dusk, I remembered. It was their noisiest time of the day. The whole neighborhood sounded like broken glass in a blender.

I got Justin out of the car and opened the front gate. As we moved up the steps, the front door opened, and there stood Eve - not in black tonight, but in purple, with red leggings and clunky black platform shoes. She had a stake in one hand and a silver knife in the other, but as she saw us coming up the steps, she dropped both to the floor and lunged to throw herself on Justin.

He caught her in midair, out of self-defense.

"You're out!" she cried, and gave him an extra-hard squeeze before jumping back to the top of the steps and doing a victory dance that was a cross between something found in an end zone and a chorus line. "I knew you'd beat the rap, Bieber! I just knew it! High five . . . "

She held up her hand for him to smack, but he just looked at her. Eve's smile and upraised palm faltered, and she looked quickly at me, then Michael.

"Oh God," she said, and lowered her hand. "What is it? What happened?"

"Not out here. Let's get inside," Michael said. "Now."

Justin didn't make it very far. In fact, five steps down the hallway, he gave up and just . . . stopped. He put his back to the wall, slid down to a sitting position, and sat there, staring down at his hands.

I didn't know what I ought to do, other than stay with him. Before I could sit down next to him, though, Eve grabbed me by the elbow and shook me hard. "Hey! What happened? You called the house but you got cut off. I've been out looking for you ever since, calling everybody I could think of. Hannah's out looking for you, too. What is it?"

"It's Justin's dad," I said. Eve let go and covered her mouth with one hand, eyes wide. She already had a sense of what was coming. "Bishop . . . he . . . he turned him into a vampire. Right in front of us." I looked down at Justin. "Right in front of him."

Eve didn't know what to say. She just looked at us, and finally at Michael. "You couldn't do anything about it?"

He kept his head down. "No."

"Nothing? Nothing at all?"

Michael turned and slammed his fist into the wall with so much violence the whole house seemed to shake. Eve yelped and jumped back, and almost tripped over Justin in her stacked heels.

"No," Michael said, with a kind of forced calm that made me ache inside. "Nothing at all. If I had, Bishop would have known he didn't have me anymore, and that was what he was waiting for. This wasn't about Justin and Ana, or about Justin's dad. This was more about finding out if I was still his bitch."

Justin slowly raised his head, and the two boys stared at each other for a long, quiet moment.

Michael crouched down. "I'd have killed him if I could have," he said. "I'm not strong enough, and he knows it. That's why he likes to keep me right there, because he knows that deep down I want to rip his head off. It's fun for him."

"So my dad was just your object lesson," Justin said. "Is that it?"

Michael reached out and put his hand on Justin's knee. He'd split the skin over his knuckles, and there was plaster dust all over his skin.

It wasn't bleeding.

"We're going to get him, Justin. We will."

"Who's we?" Justin asked wearily, and let his head fall back against the wall as he shut his eyes. "Just leave me alone, man. I'm tired. I just can't . . . I'm tired."