He stopped in midstep. “Dad? Oh, damn, it’s the machine—Dad, listen, if you get this, it’s Shane, I’m at Michael Glass’s house in Morganville, and I need shock and awe, man—come running. You know why.”

He flipped the phone shut and threw it to Eve. “Upstairs, both of you. Get in the secret room. Michael? Are you with us?”

Claire shivered in a sudden cold draft. “He’s here.”

“Watch out for them,” Shane said. “I—I kind of have a plan.” He said it as if he was half surprised. “Girls. Upstairs. Now.”

“But—”

“Go!” He’d learned how to yell orders from Michael, and it seemed to work, because Claire was moving for the stairs without any conscious decision to do it. The cold chill stayed around her, and she saw Eve shivering, too.

The upstairs was quiet, as well, except for the distant knocking sound of Miranda hammering on her door. “I don’t like this,” Claire said. “Oliver knows Michael can’t do anything after dawn, right?”

“I don’t know,” Eve said, and chewed at her bottom lip. Most of her makeup had sweated off or gotten wiped away; even her lips were normal lip color now, for nearly the first time Claire could remember. “You’re right. It’s weird. Why would they just give up now?”

“They haven’t,” said a voice that Claire’s tingling spine recognized before her brain. Michael’s bedroom door opened, and standing there, smiling, was Monica Morrell. Gina and Jennifer were behind her.

They were all holding knives, and that was a hell of a lot scarier than Miranda, no matter how crazy she might be.

Eve got in between Claire and Monica and began backing her away, down the hallway. “Get in your room,” Eve said. “Lock the door.”

“Won’t do you any good,” Monica said, leaning around Eve. “Ask me why. Go on, ask me.”

She didn’t have to. She heard the door open behind her, and whipped around to see a man in a police uniform stepping out into the hallway with his gun drawn.

“Meet my brother, Richard,” she giggled. “Isn’t he cute?” He might have been, but Claire couldn’t look anywhere but at the gun, which was big and shiny and black. She’d never had a gun pointed at her before, and it scared her in ways that even knives didn’t.

“Shut up, Monica,” he said, and nodded toward the far end of the hall. “Ladies. Downstairs, please. We don’t have to make this bloody.” He sounded harassed more than anything else, like mass home invasion was just something standing between him and morning coffee.

Claire backed up, touched Eve, and whispered, “What do we do?” She was asking Michael, too, for all the good it would do.

“I guess we go downstairs,” Eve said. She sounded defeated.