Daylighters by Rachel Caine Read Free Book Online Page A

other priorities, like staying alive. And none of them was much on chores.
    “Let’s just get inside,” Shane said. “Hey, Hannah? Tell the Daylighters not to do us any more favors. I don’t want to owe them.”
    Hannah didn’t comment on that. She just opened the back door of the cruiser, and Shane piled out, followed by Eve, and last of all, Claire.
    Walking up the steps was a whole different experience. The paint was still new enough to make her dizzy, and its smell mingled with the aroma of fresh-cut grass and new plants in the warm desert air. “Guess we’ll have to start watering the damn lawn now,” Shane said, and fumbled for his keys. “So much easier to take care of when it was a wreck. Watch the paint on the door. I’m pretty sure it’s still wet.”
    As Claire followed them over the threshold, she felt a shiver of power crawl over her . . . the house, waking up from a sleep, coming alive, welcoming them home. It felt like a fresh blast of cool air, and also, weirdly, like hands stroking her hair. She shut and double-locked the door—ingrained habit, in Morganville—and leaned against the wood to breathe in deeply.
    Inside, it still smelled familiar. Old wood, dust, paper—not a clean smell, but a good one. The interior walls needed painting just as much as those outside had; they were smudged, scratched, and dented from hard use. None of the four of them was much on surface cleaning, and as Claire glanced into the side parlor, she saw that the oval coffee table—replaced relatively recently, after half their furniture had gotten smashed in a fight—had a blurring of dust over its surface. The old Victorian sofa looked as saggy and tired as ever.
    Shane and Eve had already wandered off down the hall, Shane heading for the more modern, overstuffed couch in the living room and Eve’s clunky boots echoing on the stairs that led up to their rooms. Claire went a few steps in, and just . . . stopped. She closed her eyes and felt a peculiar, warm kind of peace sink in.
    Home.
    She felt almost as if the house itself were saying it to her:
This is where you belong.
She remembered leaving here for her brief journey to MIT in the predawn darkness, carrying her bags down and trying not to wake up any of the others to let them know she was leaving. She remembered the feelings of excitement, of worry, of longing, of fear, of anguish . . . and of devastation.
    It felt healing to be back.
    It felt right.
    “Claire?”
    She opened her eyes. Shane was standing at the end of the hall, and his dark eyes were full of concern. She smiled at him and saw the tension ease. “I’m home,” she said, and came into his arms. They closed around her, strong and warm. “I’m home, Shane. We’re
home
.”
    “Yeah,” he said, and let out a long, slow breath. “Home. But it’s not exactly what we left behind, is it?”
    “The house, or Morganville?”
    “Either one.”
    “Seems the same in here.”
    “Not quite,” he said. “Not without Michael.”
    He was right about that.
    •   •   •
    Eve didn’t want to eat, but Shane found enough stuff in the kitchen to pull together a meal of spaghetti and meat sauce, although the meat sauce tasted suspiciously like it had a chili-type origin. Canned chili, at that. Eve forked it mechanically into her mouth, chewed and swallowed, which was about as much as Claire thought they could reasonably expect from her just now. She looked hollow-eyed and exhausted and just . . . empty.
    Shane tried to ask her things that normally would have gotten a snappy Eve-style comeback, but she either ignored them or responded with shrugs, until he finally put down his fork and said, “So, Eve, what’s your plan, then? Sit there and look sad and depressed until someone just feels so bad about your bruised little fee-fees that they give Michael back?”
    “Screw you,” she said. It sounded mechanical, but then a fire came on behind her eyes and started blazing hotter and