Nobody talked. Not even the other humans. Not even Michael. We just concentrated on what was ahead of us.

A fight, a real, genuine, straight-up fight. I was scared on some level, scared in a way I’d never been before, but I was part of something bigger now. Was this what it felt like to be in the army, to put on a uniform and all of a sudden be brothers (and yeah, sisters) with people you might not even like in private life? I imagined it was, because right now, in this moment, I would kill or die for anyone on this bus. Even the vamps. Somehow that felt wrong, but it also felt right. A better version of the life I’d been struggling to lead these past few years.

I would even fight and die for Myrnin, who was sitting up toward the front. He’d changed clothes. I liked him better when he was dressed crazy, but he’d gone black leather now, and that looked damn dangerous. I was glad Claire wasn’t there to see it. Some part of me was always going to worry about how she felt about him, so it was best she didn’t see him looking all tough. That was my job.

As the clouds parted, the vamps snapped the windows back up, and the tinting—why the hell was there vampire-quality tinting on a school bus, anyway? That made no sense …

Wake up, Shane!

The tinting cut off my view of where we were going. Not that it mattered. I had my shotgun, and I was ready to rock. It was so much easier to do something than to just … think.

Because when I stopped to think, everything fell apart. Shattered. Melted.

Wake up.

We pulled to a stop, and the vampires sitting behind me opened the emergency door; those of us nearby piled out through it, and the vampires moved in a blur to the shelter of the nearest shade while the humans took their time sorting out where we were.

It was Morganville High.

The old pile hadn’t improved from the last time I’d been walking the halls and ditching class. It had been ugly when it had been built back in the 1950s, and hadn’t gotten any prettier over the years. Solid, square red brick, with patches where people (including me) had tagged it that had been covered over with white paint (all the damage, none of the art). The sign outside had a picture of the school mascot, the Viper; we’d all known how stupidly ironic that was, but right now I kind of liked how his faded plastic fangs flashed in the sunlight. The lettering on the sign itself read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, but they weren’t renovating. It was just closed, like everything else in Morganville.

With no students running around, it looked and felt eerily dead. Water dripped from the gutters on the roof, but slowly; the gushing rains were long gone now, and the puddles in the yard were dried to a thin crust of wet sand under the sparse, struggling grass. Behind the school was the football field, the single most important thing in any small Texas town, but we weren’t headed there, of course.