And then Liz came home, too drunk to make it up the steps on her own, and vomited all over the bathroom, and Claire had to clean it up and put her to bed and deal with the pitiful hangover that came later … but all the time, what she was really thinking was, who’s after me? Why?

And, from time to time, why hasn’t Shane called?

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHANE

Claire saw me.

For a split second, all I could think was there she is, and I froze, because I’d wanted so badly to catch another glimpse of her … and then reality set in, because she was across the room from me, in Florey’s, and she was staring right at me.

I didn’t think about what I was going to do, I just did it: I moved, fast, and blocked her view with a bunch of noisy, clamouring patrons bellied up to the bar. Then I dumped the load of glasses on the ledge where the bartenders could easily grab them, and yelled in Jesse’s ear, ‘My girlfriend Claire is in the bar. Don’t let on that I’m here, okay? I’m not supposed to be in Cambridge!’

She sent me a wide-eyed, disbelieving glance, but she hardly had time to argue; she was popping the top on a beer with one hand (without a bottle opener, she had some kind of crazy thumb technique that was much faster) and mixing a rum and Coke with the other. The two other servers behind the bar were equally busy. They’d go through the load of glasses I’d delivered in about an hour, and I already had two industrial-sized dishwashers running and was doing the overflow by hand. It was definitely the busiest day Florey’s had seen since I’d arrived.

I grabbed the tub with the dirty glasses in it, hoisted it on my left shoulder, and used it to mask myself as I headed back into the kitchen. My arm – the one that had been bitten and healed up – twinged when I did that, but there was nothing wrong with it that a little exercise wouldn’t cure. It still burned, from time to time. And yeah, it worried me. I’d been bitten by a devil dog, after all. There could be side effects. But I wasn’t running a fever, or feeling sick or anything like that, and I knew that going to a traditional doctor wasn’t going to reveal anything.

The last thing I wanted to be was at the mercy of the vampires, even their resident doc, who was a pretty good guy as bloodsuckers went. I shuddered at the thought.