“Guys,” Claire said patiently. “If we’re careful, they’ll never suspect we’re smart enough to do something like that. Not to mention brave enough. So we give them a fake—it’s still more than anybody else has. They may be pissed, but they’ll be pissed that somebody faked it. We just found it.”

They were both looking at her now like they’d never seen her before. Michael shook his head.

“Bad idea,” he said.

Maybe so. But she was going to try it anyway.

10

She was too wired to sleep, and besides, her back hurt, and she couldn’t stand the thought of waiting even one more night to get started. Brandon hadn’t seemed like the kind of guy to wait for his revenge, and Shane—Shane wasn’t the kind of guy to not hold up his end of a deal, either.

If he’s stupid enough to want to get bitten, fine, but he’s not using me for an excuse.

Shane hadn’t come out of his room all night. She hadn’t heard a thing when she’d listened—carefully—at his door. Eve had mimed headphones and turning up an invisible stereo. Claire could understand that; she’d spent lots of hours trying to blow out her own eardrums to avoid the world.

Eve lent her a laptop—a retro thing, big and black and clunky, with a biohazard-symbol sticker on the front. When Claire plugged it into the broadband connection and booted it up, the desktop graphic was a cartoon Grim Reaper holding a road sign instead of a scythe—a road sign that read MORGANVILLE, with an arrow pointing down.

Claire clicked on a couple of folders—guiltily, but she was curious—and found they were full of poetry. Eve liked death, or at least, she liked to write about it. Florid romantic stuff, all angst and blood and moonlit marble…and then Claire noticed the dates. The last of the poetry had been done three years ago. Eve would have been, what, fifteen? She’d been starry-eyed about vampires back then, but something had changed. No poetry at all for the past three years…

Eve walked in the open door. “Working okay?” she asked. Claire jumped, guilty, and gave her the thumbs-up as she clicked open the Internet connection. “Okay, I called my cousin in Illinois. She’s going to let us use her PayPal account, but I have to send her cash, like, tomorrow. Here’s the account.” She handed over a slip of paper. “We’re not going to get her killed, right?”

“Nope. I’m not buying much from any one place. A lot of people buy leather and tools and stuff. And paper—how old is this book supposed to be?”

“Old.”

“Was it on vellum?”

“Is that paper?”

“Vellum is the oldest kind of paper they used in books,” Claire said. “It’s sheepskin.”