Daylighters by Rachel Caine Read Free Book Online

if it hurt him. He stopped and looked at them as Claire walked toward him. “What the hell happened?” He didn’t wait for an answer, though; he grabbed Eve’s other arm and helped to hold her up. “Dammit, Eve—”
    “I want to go back,” Eve said. She sounded odd and shaky. “They’re going to kill all of them, I know they are, they’re going to do something terrible to Michael. I have to go
back
.” She tried to pull away, but Shane and Claire held on to her. Hannah opened the back door of the cruiser. She still wasn’t looking at them—looking anywhere
but
at them, in fact. Her face could have been carved from stone. “Please, don’t do this, Shane, please let me go—”
    “You can’t even come close to getting in there again and you know it,” Shane said. “Eve. You
can’t
, and Michael doesn’t want you pulling something crazy like that. Come on.”
    He put her into the car and walked around to block her from sliding out the other door; Claire took the space on one side of Eve as he crowded in on the other. She wasn’t fighting them, but she wasn’t helping, either.
At least she’s not angry,
Claire thought, but she wasn’t sure that was an improvement. No tears, no yelling. Just this . . . silence. And then there was Shane, still acting twitchy on Eve’s left, frowning and rubbing his forearm and snapping, as Hannah took the driver’s seat, “Can we just get the hell out of here already?”
    That made Hannah give him a long glance in the mirror, but she started the engine. Shane’s tense body language seemed to ease up a little as the car pulled away from the blank, brooding exterior of the mall. Bitter Creek was a good name for it, Claire thought. Definitely not a happy kind of place.
    It worried her that she hadn’t seen Myrnin at all.

THREE
    H annah took them home to the Glass House.
    It looked different. And it wasn’t just the time Claire had spent away from it that had made it that way. Someone had painted it. Done a good job, too—the exterior was a neat, sparkling white, instead of the faded, peeling mess that had been there before. The trim was a crisp dark blue. It looked almost respectable. The lawn was even neatly mowed.
    “What the
hell
?” She blurted it out before she meant to, and sent Shane a disbelieving look. He sent it right back, amplified. So, he hadn’t been on the work crew, then.
    Neither had Eve, apparently, because she gulped, sat up straighter, and said, “Um, what is
that
?”
    “The town funded a renewal program for all the remaining Founder Houses,” Hannah said. “To preserve our history. Don’t tell me you’re not pleased. It looks a hell of a lot better than the tumbledown mess it was before.”
    It did. The railings were straight, the warped boards had been replaced on the porch, and the windows actually sparkled. At the top of the peaked roof, a new weather vane in the shape of a sunrise (ugh) creaked and turned in the direction of the breeze, and as Hannah opened her car door, Claire heard the thin, whispering sound of wind chimes. Someone had mounted a set of them at the edge of the porch, along with a large potted plant that looked new and healthy.
    The place was spiffy and pretty and not
theirs
.
    “Tell me you didn’t touch anything inside the house,” Eve said. “Because I swear I’ll cut somebody. We liked the house the way we left it! That is our home!” What she didn’t say, but Claire thought she almost heard, was
It’s Michael’s home.
And her heart ached for him, and for Eve.
    “Nobody went inside the house,” Hannah assured them. “This was an exterior renovation project. I thought you’d be pleased.”
    “You could have asked first,” Eve said, but after the initial shock, some of her dislike was fading. And yeah, the house
did
look fantastic—restored to all its old Victorian glory, neat and sound. Claire realized it only underscored how little they’d taken care of the place . . . but then, they’d had