She didn’t look up. He came a step closer, and his bare feet and sweatpants came into her vision. “Claire. You’ve got to promise me.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m not some little kid. And I’m not your sister.”

He laughed, low in his throat. “Oh, yeah. That, I know. But I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

His hand cupped her chin in warmth, and tilted her face up.

The whole world hushed, one perfect second of stillness. Claire didn’t even think her heart beat.

His lips were warm and soft and sweet, and the sensation just blinded her, made her feel awkward and scared. I’ve never…nobody ever…I’m not doing it right…. She hated herself, hated that she didn’t know how to kiss him back, knew he was measuring her against all those other girls, those better girls he’d kissed.

It stopped. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like a bird fluttering in her chest. She was flushed and hot and warm, so warm….

Shane pressed his forehead to hers and sighed. His breath warmed her face, and this time she kissed him, letting her instincts guide her, letting him pull her to her feet. Their hands were clasped, fingers laced, and parts of her—parts she’d only ever warmed up alone—were going full blast.

This time, when they came up for air, he pulled completely back. His face was flushed; his eyes were bright. Claire’s lips felt swollen, warm, utterly deliciously damp. Oh, she thought. I guess I should have done the tongue thing. Putting theory into practice was hard when her brain kept wanting to short out entirely.

“Okay,” Shane said. “That—that shouldn’t have happened.”

“Probably not,” she admitted. “But I’m leaving in two days. It’d be stupid if I never even kissed you.”

She wasn’t absolutely sure who kissed whom this time. Maybe it was gravity tilting, stars exploding. It felt like it. His hands were free this time, and they cupped her face, stroked her hair, her neck, down to her shoulders….

She gasped into his open mouth, and he moaned. Moaned. She had no idea a sensation could go through her like that, traveling through her skin and nerves like lightning.

His hands stopped right there, at her waist.

When their tongues touched, gentle and tentative and wet, it made her knees weak. Made her whole spine rattle like dry bones. Shane put his right arm around her waist, holding her close, and cupped the back of her head with his left.

Okay, this was kissing. Serious kissing. Not just a kiss before moving out, not a good-bye, this was Hello, sexy, and wow, she’d never even suspected that it could feel this way.

When he let go, she fell back to sit on the bed, utterly weak, and she thought that if he followed her, she’d fall back and…

Shane took two giant-sized steps backward, then turned and walked out into the hall. Facing away from her. In a kind of dreamlike trance she watched the strong, broad muscles of his back moving under his shirt as he took deep breaths.

“Okay,” he said finally, and turned around. But staying well out in the hall. “Okay, that really shouldn’t have happened. And we’re not going to talk about that, right? Ever?”

“Right,” she said. She felt like there was light dripping from her fingertips. Spilling out of her toes. She felt full of light, in fact, warm buttery sunlight. “Never happened.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, and closed his eyes. “Claire—”

“I know.”

“Lock the door,” he said.

She got up and swung it mostly closed. One last look at him through the gap, and then she clicked it shut and flipped the dead bolt.

She heard a thump against it. Shane was slumped on the other side; she just knew it.

“I am so dead,” he muttered.

She went back to bed and lay there, full of light, until morning.

Chapter 14

N o sign of Shane on Monday morning, but she got up way early—just after Michael would have evaporated into mist, in fact. She showered and grabbed a Pop-Tart from the cabinet for breakfast, washed the dishes that had been dumped in the sink from last night’s disaster of Parental Dinner—hadn’t that been Michael’s job? — and emptied out her backpack to stuff in the metal canister (to return to the chem lab, which made it borrowing, not stealing) and the Bible with its concealed secret.

And then she thought, It won’t do any good if they just steal it from me, and took it out again and put it on the shelves, wedged in between an old volume 10 of the World Encyclopedia and some novel she’d never heard of. Then she stepped out, locked the door, and began walking toward the school.

The chem lab was busy when she arrived between classes, and she had no trouble slipping into the supply room to put the canister back in place, after carefully wiping her fingerprints from everything she could think of. That moral duty done, she hustled to the admissions office to put in her paperwork to withdraw from school. Nobody seemed surprised. She supposed that there were a lot of withdrawals. Or disappearances.

It was noon when she walked down to Common Grounds. Eve was just arriving, yawning and bleary-eyed; she looked surprised to see Claire as she handed over the cup of tea. “I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house,” she said. “Michael and Shane said—”

“I need to talk to Oliver,” Claire said.

“He’s in the back.” Eve pointed. “In the office. Claire? Is there anything wrong?”

“No,” she said. “I think something’s about to be right for a change.”

The door marked OFFICE was closed. She knocked, heard Oliver’s warm voice telling her to enter, and came in. He was sitting behind a small desk in a very small room, windowless, with a computer running in front of him. He smiled at her and stood up to shake her hand. “Claire,” he said. “Good to see you’re safe. I heard there had been some…unpleasantness.”

Oliver was wearing a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and blue jeans with faded patches on the knees—not so much style as wear, she figured. He looked tired and concerned, and she thought suddenly that there was something about him a lot like Michael. Except that he was here in the daytime, of course, and at night, so he couldn’t be a ghost. Could he?

“Brandon is very unhappy,” he said. “I’m afraid that there’s going to be retaliation. Brandon likes striking from an angle, not straight on, so you’d better watch out for your friends, as well. That would include Eve, of course. I’ve asked her to be extra careful.”

She nodded, heart in her throat. “Um…what if I have something to trade?”

Oliver sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Trade for what? And to whom?”

“I—something important. I don’t want to be more specific than that.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be, if you want me to act as any kind of go-between for you. I can’t trade if I don’t know what I’m offering.”

She realized she was still holding her teacup, and put it down on the corner of the desk. “Um…I’d rather do it myself. But I don’t know who to go to. Whoever can order Brandon around, I guess. Or even higher than that.”

“There is a social order to the vampire community,” Oliver agreed. “Brandon’s hardly at the top. There are two factions, you know. Brandon is part of one—the darker side, I suppose you could say. It depends on your viewpoint. Certainly, from a human standpoint, neither faction is exactly lily-white.” He shrugged. “I can help you, if you’ll let me. Believe me, you don’t want to try to contact these people on your own. And I’m not sure they’d even allow you to do so.”

She bit her lip, thinking about what Michael had said about the deals in Morganville. She wasn’t good at it; she knew that. And she didn’t know the rules.

Oliver did, or he’d have been dead a long time ago. Besides, he was Eve’s boss, and she liked him. Plus, he’d been able to keep Brandon from biting her at least twice. That had to count for something.