Michael threw the bag back at him, hard, but Shane got it before it attached itself to his face. Had to give it to him, the boy was quick, for somebody who wasn’t vampire-enhanced. “Don’t you have to go sort some underwear or something? Because if I have to do the kitchen, you’re up in my way. Get your chip-eating ass out of the chair.”
“File the attitude, bro. I’m going.” Shane ate more chips as he stood up, then froze in midchomp. Michael was way ahead of him, turning toward the door as he put his sports bottle carefully down on the counter. Shane’s tone, when it came, was way different this time. “Guests?” he asked.
Michael nodded. “I heard. Maybe you ought to let me take the lead.”
Shane didn’t say anything. On this, at least, they didn’t argue much anymore. . . . Michael was better equipped to take the hits, if the hits were coming, and Shane was a wicked backup for anyone, vampire or not. They were both natives of Morganville, Texas, and had grown up with stress, trauma, and vampires . . . not necessarily in that order.
Shane was right behind him on the way to the front door, and Michael had his hand on the doorknob just before the brisk knock hit the wood.
He knew, before he opened it, that there was a vampire standing on the other side of the door. That vamp was wearing a hat, a coat, a muffler, gloves—he wouldn’t have been out of place in Chicago in the winter. The problem was that it was a million degrees of heat outside in Texas, but to a vampire, that didn’t much matter. Not as much as experiencing fatal sun combustion, anyway. Michael had never met a vampire who’d thought the Texas sun was actually too hot.
Maybe, he thought, because at heart, inside, vampires were always cold. Always. He felt the same brittle chill inside himself, all the time; chill, and silence. Silence where his heartbeat used to be. Blood still moved through his body, slow and thick, but he wasn’t sure how that happened; he wasn’t science-minded like Claire, and he just accepted that it worked, against all natural laws that he’d ever understood. Being a vampire, he’d learned almost immediately, wasn’t about science. It was about something less measurable. Souls, maybe.
But the important thing was that the vampire was staring out at him from under the shrouding muffler and hat, and those icy blue eyes seemed familiar. Not Amelie; the Founder of Morganville didn’t bow to anyone, including the sun.
“May I?” the vampire asked. The two words were tinted with a musical foreign accent.
Shane was looking at him for a clue, and Michael finally shrugged. “Come on inside,” he said, and stepped back. The vampire entered, and the vampire pulled off his hat and muffler and handed them to Shane with the thoughtless arrogance of someone who’d lived his entire life with servants around him.
Michael stifled a laugh at Shane’s expression, but he couldn’t help the smile as Shane dropped the items to the floor and kicked them into a dusty corner.
“Sorry,” Shane said. “I’m all out of hat racks.”
The vamp took off his coat and—with a pretty good-humored display of cooperation—tossed it to the same corner, and then added the gloves. Michael knew him by sight, because the Morganville vampires were a small community, and he likely knew the name, but didn’t know how to match them up. He was blond, short haired, and blue eyed, with an unexceptional round face. In fact, nothing about him, except the eyes, would make him stand out in a crowd.
He directed his attention to Michael, which felt like a laser between the eyes. “I am Kiril Rozhkov. Hello.” He offered a slight nod of his head, and a calm smile. His accent held a strong hint of cold Russian winters.
“Hello,” Michael said, because he felt like one of the Glass House residents ought to be polite, and it damn sure wasn’t likely to be Shane.
“Excuse me,” Rozhkov said, “but I have a matter to discuss with you in privacy, Mr. Glass.”
Mr.? It was a weird sound, and disconnected from the way Michael thought about himself; he saw Shane give him a look that threatened to make it all way too funny. Laughing in the face of a visiting strange vampire wasn’t generally a good idea.
Michael surrendered. “Follow me.”
He led the vamp into the parlor. It was an old-fashioned name for an old-fashioned room; when the house had originally been built, it was an age when neighbors dropped around for tea and lemonade, stiffly formal visits conducted in a room set aside just for that purpose. He and his housemates never used it except to pile boxes and coats and bags in it. The boxes had been shifted out recently, but Claire’s backpack leaned against the leg of one wing chair where she’d abandoned it, and one of Eve’s skull-themed umbrellas flopped on the floor, dusty and dispirited. Not much call for umbrellas out here in West Texas, unless you were using them for sun relief. Rain was rare.
Kiril Rozhkov took in the layers of dust and disuse, and then sat on the broken-down Victorian sofa with an ease and a grace Michael recognized as weirdly foreign. A lot of vampires moved that way—as if they’d been trained from an early age to be graceful and correct. Not a skill people learned anymore.