“Oh, let the girl feel better about it,” Eve said. “It’s not all gloomy. Obviously, they don’t like daytime—”

Claire wrote it down.

“And garlic…silver…um, holy water—”

“You sure about those?” Michael asked. “I always thought they pretended on a lot of that, just in case.”

“Why would they do that?”

Claire answered without looking up. “Because it makes it easier to hide what really can hurt them. I’m writing it down anyway, but it may not be right.”

“Fire is for real,” Michael said. “I saw a vampire die once, when I was just a kid. One of those revenge deals.”

Eve pulled in a deep breath. “Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about it. Tom Sullivan.”

Claire asked, wide-eyed, “The vampire was named—?”

“Not the vampire,” Michael said. “The guy who killed him. Tommy Sullivan. He was kind of a screwup, drank a lot, which isn’t too unusual around here. He had a kid. She died. He blamed the vampires, so he doused one with gas and set him on fire, sitting right in the middle of the restaurant.”

“You saw that?” Claire asked. “How old were you?”

“You grow up fast in Morganville. The point is, there was a trial the next night. Not much chance for Tommy. He was dead before morning. But…fire works. Just don’t get caught.”

Claire wrote down fire. “What about stakes?”

“You’ve seen Brandon,” Eve said. “You want to try to get close enough to stake him? Yeah, me neither.”

“But do they work?”

“Guess so. You have to fill out a form when you buy wood.”

Claire wrote it down. “Crosses?”

“Definitely.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re evil, soulless, bloodsucking fiends?”

“So was my sixth-grade gym teacher, but he wasn’t afraid of a cross.”

“Funny,” Eve said, in the way that meant not. “Because there are hardly any churches, and so far as I know, crosses are impossible to come by unless you make ’em yourself. Also, all these guys grew up—isn’t that weird, thinking of them growing up?—when religion wasn’t just something you did on Sundays. It was something you were, every minute, every day, and God was always up for a little recreational smiting of the wicked.”

“Don’t,” Michael murmured. “God’s scarce enough around here.”

“No offense to the Big Guy, Michael, but he made himself scarce,” Eve shot back. “You know how many nights I spent in bed praying, Dear God, please take away all the bad people? Yeah, that really worked.” Michael opened his mouth to say something. “And please don’t tell me God loves me. If God loved me, he’d drop a bus ticket to Austin in my lap so I could blow this town once and for all.”

Eve sounded—well, angry. Claire tapped her pencil against the pad, not making eye contact.

“How do they keep people from leaving?” she asked.