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. “And then there’s the test results, and the crying. . . .”
“Jesus, Trent, you’re the laugh of the party.”
“That’s life of the party, honeybunches. Oh, wait, you’re right. Not in Morganville, it isn’t.”
“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, as many vans as you’ve bounced around in,” Trent shot back.
“Hey!” 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 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 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 eyelashes. I coveted 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 eyes moved and fixed on me, and I wished they hadn’t. There was something really strange about the girl, all right, even if her rep as the town Cassandra was exaggerated. She’d known about the fire last year that had burned the Collins family out; she’d even known—supposedly—that Alyssa Collins would die in the fire. 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 fingers. I admired the black polish on his nails. “Why’s that, O Madame Doom? Is one of us going to die tonight?” They all made hilariously drunken oooooooooh sounds, and Trent upended the bottle.
“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.