“Shane’s not a complicated guy. If he cares about somebody, he fights for them. Simple. Lyssa—Lyssa was a sweet kid. And he had that whole big-brother thing working. He’d have died for her.” Michael slowly shook his head. “Nearly did. Anyway, the point is that Lyssa would have been your age by now, and here you are getting hurt by the same bitches who killed his sister, trying to get him. So yeah. He’d do anything—anything—not to have to live through that again. You may not be Lyssa, but he likes you, and more than that, he hates Monica Morrell. So much he—” Michael couldn’t seem to say it. He stared off into space for a few seconds, then went on. “Making deals with the vampires in this town will keep you alive on the outside, but it eats you on the inside. I watched it happen to my folks, before they got out of here. Eve’s parents, too. Her sisters. If Shane goes through with this, it’ll kill him.”

Claire stood up. “He’s not going through with it,” she said. “I’m not letting him.”

“How exactly are you going to stop him? Hell, I can’t stop him, and he listens to me. Mostly.”

“Look, Eve said—Eve said vampires own this town. Is that true? Really?”

“Yes. They’ve been here as long as anybody can remember. If you live here, you learn to live with them. If you can’t, then you go.”

“They don’t just run around biting people, though.”

“That would be rude,” he said gravely. “They don’t need to. Everybody in town—everybody who’s a resident—pays taxes. Blood tax. Two pints a month, down at the hospital.”

She stared. “I didn’t have to!”

“College kids don’t. They get taxed a different way.” He looked grim, and with a sick, twisting sense of horror she realized what he was going to say right before he made it real. “Vamps have a deal with the school. They get to take two percent a year, right off the top. Used to be more, but I think they got worried. Couple of close calls with the media. There’s nothing TV stations like more than a pretty young college girl gone missing. Claire, what are you thinking?”

She took a deep breath. “If the vamps have this all planned out, then they’ve got, you know, structure. Right? They can’t all just be running their own shows. Not if there are a lot of them. There’s got to be somebody in charge.”

“True. Brandon’s got a boss. And his boss probably has a boss.”

“So all we have to do is make a deal with his boss,” she said. “For something other than Shane getting bit.”

“All?”

“They have to want something. Something more than what they already have. We just need to find out what it is.”