Jane brought me a birthday present, which was kind of sweet, especially since it was a brand-new mix CD of songs about dead people. Jane knows what I like.

I was still a mystery to Guy and Trent, though. Granted, Morganville’s a small town, and all us loser outcast freaks had a nodding acquaintance. The pecking order goes something like this: geeks, freaks, nerds, druggies, gays, and Goths. Goths were on the bottom because the undead think wannabes are disgusting if they’re serious about it, or dangerously smart-assed if they aren’t. Which I wasn’t. Mostly.

Oh, I forgot to mention: vampires. Town’s run by them. Full of them. Humans live here on sufferance, heavy on the “suffer.”

See what I mean about the ironic family values?

I could tell that Guy had been trying to think of a way to ask me all night, but thanks to consuming over half a case of beer with his Significantly Wasted Other, he finally just blurted out the question of the day. “So, are you signing or what?” he asked. Yelled, actually, over whatever song was currently making my head hurt. “I mean, tomorrow?”

Was I signing? That was the Big Question, the one all of us faced at eighteen. I looked down at my wrist, because I was still wearing my leather bracelet. The symbol on it wasn’t anything people outside of Morganville would recognize, but it identified the vampire who was the official Protector for my family. However, as of that morning, I was no longer in that select little club of people who had to kiss Brandon’s ass to continue to draw breath.

I also would no longer have any kind of deal or Protection from any vampire in Morganville.

What Guy was asking was whether or not I intended to pick myself a Protector of my very own. It was traditional to sign with your family’s hereditary patron, but no way in hell was I letting Brandon have power over me. So I could either shop around to see if any other vampire could—or would—take me, or go bare…live without a contract.

Which was attractive but seriously risky. See, Morganville vampires don’t generally kill off their own humans, because that would make life difficult for everybody, but free-range, unProtected humans? Nobody worries much what happens to them, because usually they’re alone, and they’re poor, and they disappear without a trace.

Just another job opening at the Chicken Shack fry machine.

They were all looking at me now. Jane, Miranda, Guy, and Trent, all waiting to hear what Eve Rosser, Professional Rebel, was going to do.

I didn’t disappoint them. I tipped back the beer, belched, and said, “Hell, no, I’m not signing. Bareback all the way, baby! Let’s live fast and die young!”

Guy and I did drunken high fives. Trent rolled his eyes and clicked beer bottles with Jane. “They all say that,” he said. “Right up until the AIDS test comes back. Then there’s the wailing and the weeping….”

“Jesus, Trent, you’re the laugh of the party.”

“That’s life of the party, honey bunches. Oh, wait, you’re right. Not in Morganville, it isn’t.” God, Trent was hyper, which was weird for a guy consuming as many brews as he had. Maybe he was just naturally that way. Maybe his Ritalin had worn off. Anyway, it was bugging me.

“Boo-ha-ha. Is that funny at all in other vans in town?” Jane asked. “Because it’s not so funny in here, ass pirate.”

“You should know, princess; you’ve been on your back in every van in town,” Trent shot back.

“Hey, bitch!” Jane tossed an empty bottle at him; Trent caught it and threw it in the plastic bin in the corner. Which, I had to admit, meant that despite the jittering, Trent could hold his liquor, because he led the field in ounces consumed by a wide margin. “Seriously, Eve—what are you going to do?”

I hadn’t thought about it. Or, actually, I had, but in that what if kind of way that was really just bullshit bravado…but now it was down to do-or-don’t, or it would be when the sun came up in the morning. I was going to have to choose, and that choice would rule the rest of my life.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten quite so trashed, given the circumstances.

“Well, I’m not signing with Brandon,” I said slowly. “Maybe I’ll shop around for another patron.”

“You really think anybody else is going to stand up and volunteer if Brandon’s got you marked?” Guy asked. “Girl, you got yourself a death wish.”

“Yeah, like that’s news,” Jane said. “Look how she dresses!”

Nothing wrong with how I was dressed. A skull T-shirt, a spiked belt low on my hips, bike shorts, fishnets, black and red Mary Janes. Oh, maybe she was talking about my makeup. I’d done the Full-On Goth today—white face powder, big black rings around my eyes, blue lips. It was sort of a joke.

And also, sort of not.

“It doesn’t matter,” said a small, quiet voice that somehow cut right through the music.

I’d almost forgotten about Miranda—the kid was sitting in the corner of the van, her knees drawn up, staring off into the distance.

“It speaks,” Trent said, and laughed maniacally. “I was starting to think you’d just brought the kid along to protect your virtue, Jane.” He gave her a comical flutter of his long, lush eyelashes.

Miranda was still talking, or at least her lips were moving, but her words were lost in a particularly loud guitar crunch. “What?” I yelled, and leaned closer. “What do you mean?”

Miranda’s pale blue gaze moved and fixed on me, and I wished it hadn’t. There was something really strange about the girl, all right, even if her rep as the town Cassandra was exaggerated. She’d supposedly known about the fire last year that burned the Collins family out; people even said she predicted that Alyssa Collins would die in the fire. Jane said Miranda made it all up after the fact, but who knew? The girl had a double helping of weird, with creepy little sprinkles on top.

“It doesn’t matter what you decide to do,” she said louder. “Really. It doesn’t.”

“Yeah?” Trent asked, and leaned over to snag another beer from the Coleman cooler in the center of the van floor. He twisted off the cap and turned it over in his black-polished fingers. “Why’s that, o Madame Doom? Is one of us going to die tonight?” They all made hilariously drunken ooooooooo sounds, and Trent upended the bottle and chugged.

“Yes,” Miranda whispered. Nobody else heard her but me.

And then her eyes rolled up in her skull, and she collapsed flat out on the filthy shag carpet on the floor of the van.

“Jesus,” Guy blurted, and crawled over to her. He checked her pulse and breathed a sigh of relief. “I think she’s alive.”

Jane hadn’t moved at all. She looked more annoyed than concerned. “It’s okay,” she said. “She had some kind of vision. It happens. She’ll come out of it.”

Trent said, “Damn, I was starting to get worried it was the beer.”

“She didn’t have any, moron.”

“See? Serious beer deficiency. No wonder she’s out.”

“Shouldn’t we do something?” Guy asked anxiously. He was cradling Miranda in his arms, and she was as limp as a rag doll, her head lolling against his head. Her eyes were closed now, moving frantically behind the lids like she was trying to look all directions at once, in the dark. “Like, take her to the hospital?”

The Morganville hospital was neutral ground—no vampires could hunt there. So it was the safest place for anybody who was, well, not working at full power. But Jane just shook her head.

“I told you, this happens all the time. She’ll be okay in a couple of minutes. It’s like an epileptic seizure or something.” Jane looked at me curiously. “What did she say to you?”

I couldn’t figure out how to tell her, so I just drank my beer and said nothing.

Probably a mistake.

Jane was right, it took a couple of minutes, but Miranda’s eyes fluttered open, blank and unfocused, and she struggled to sit up in Guy’s arms. He held on for a second, then let go. She scrambled away and sat in the far corner of the van, next to the empty bottles, with her hands over her head. Jane sighed, handed me her beer, and crawled over to whisper with her sister and stroke her hair.