Sorry about this but I just realised that I had two chapter twenty-twos so I'm redoing chapter twenty-three hope you enjoy

Book: Dead Girls Dance: Chapter six

Chapter twenty-three

Oliver's pov:

I can't believe I have to read this ridicules book and more importantly why was I here it was nothing important. But I still read the books.

"Michael came off the couch like somebody had pushed him; he reached down, grabbed Shane by the T-shirt, and yanked him upright. "Don't," he said, and gave him one hard shake. "Your fathers an asshole. Its not a disease. You don't have to catch it."

"Sorry man I just back then I just… well I'm sorry," Shane mumbled he seemed to always be fighting his past like everyone else but he was getting better.

"It's okay man it's forgiven," Michael replied.
"Shane grabbed him in a hug. Michael rocked back a little from the impact, but he closed his eyes and hung on for a moment, then slapped Shanes back. And of course Shane slapped his back, too, and they stepped way apart. Manly. Claire rolled her eyes.
"I thought you were dead," Shane said. His eyes looked suspiciously bright and wet."

"Please I was not crying," Shane said trying to defend himself both Eve and Cruz just shook their heads smiling.

"I saw you die, man."
"I die all the time. It doesn't really take." Michael gave him a half smile that looked more grim than amused. "I figured it was better to let your dad think he'd taken me out. Maybe he wouldn't be so hard on the rest of you." His gaze swept over the bruises on Shanes face. "Brilliant plan. I'm sorry, man. Once I was dead, I couldn't do much until night came around again."
He said it so matter-of-factly that Claire felt a shiver. "Do you remember you know, what they did to you?"
Michael glanced at her. "Yeah," he said. "I remember."
"Oh hell." Shane collapsed back on the sofa and put his head in his hands. "God, man, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Not your fault."
"I called him."

"Bad mistake it's not fair what happened," Eve said she looked at all of us because well it wasn't fair but things changed after too so it wasn't all that bad.
"You called him because it looked like we were all pulling an Alamo. You didn't know
I know my dad," Shane said grimly. "Michael, I want you to know, I wasn't didn't come here to do his dirty work. Not not after the first week or so."
Michael didn't answer him. Maybe there was no answer to that, Claire thought. She scooted closer to Shane and stroked his ragged, shoulder-length fine hair. "Hey," she said. "It's okay. Were all okay."
"No, were not." Shanes voice was muffled by his hands. "Were totally screwed. Right, Mike?"

"Why can't anyone in this house ever agree that everything is all happy?" Cruz grumbled Shane looked at her smiling and kissed her cheek quickly as he hugged her along with their daughter Carrie.
"Pretty much," Michael sighed. "Yeah."
"The cops will find them," Eve said in an undertone to Claire as both girls stood in the kitchen making pasta. Pasta, apparently, was a new thing that Eve wanted to try. She frowned down at the package of spaghetti, then at the not-yet-bubbling pot of water. "Shane's dad and his merry band of assholes, I mean."
"Yeah," Claire agreed, not because she thought they would, but because, well, it seemed like the thing to say. "Want me to warm up the sauce?"
"Do we do that? I mean, it's in a jar, right? Can't you just dump it over the pasta?"

Everyone seemed to find that funny because well it was with all of us laughing at Eve.
"Well, you can, but it tastes better if you warm it up."
"Oh." Eve sighed. "This is complicated. No wonder I never cook."
"You make breakfast!"
"I make two things: bacon and eggs. And sometimes sandwiches. I hate cooking. Cooking reminds me of my mother." Eve took another pot from the rack and banged it down onto the massive stove. "Here."
Claire struggled with the top on the spaghetti sauce jar, and finally got it to release with a pop. "You think they're going to stay mad at each other?" she asked.
"Michael and Shane?"
"Mmm-hmmm." The sauce plopped into the pot, chunky and wet and vaguely nauseating. Claire considered the second jar, decided that if two of the four of them were boys, more was better."

"Always right with that huh mum," Carrie said to Cruz she smiled down at Carrie.

"Yeah baby because well daddy and uncle Mikey they eat along kinda like your other uncles even uncle Chester." Cruz giggled.

"She got it opened and in the pot, as well, then turned on the burner and set it to simmer.
"Who knows?" Eve shrugged. "Boys are idiots. You'd think Shane could just say, Oh man, I'm glad you're alive, but no. Its either guilt or amateur night at the Drama Queen Theatre." She blew out a frustrated breath. "Boys. I'd turn gay if they weren't so sexy."
Claire tried not to laugh, but she couldn't help it, and after a second Eve smiled and chuckled, too. The water started boiling. In went the pasta.
"Can I ask?"
"About what?" Eve was still frowning at the pasta like she suspected it was going to do something clever, like try to escape from the pot."

"That would be like those old horror movies right Cruz," Myrnin said he was right though there were similar ones.
"You and Michael."
"Oh." A surge of pink to Eves cheeks. Between that and the fact that she was wearing colours outside of the Goth red and black rainbow, she looked young and very cute. "Well. I don't know if its God, he's just so…"
"Hot?" Claire asked.
"Hot," Eve admitted. "Nuclear hot. Surface of the sun hot. And…"

"No don't stop I'm liking this," Michael whined.
"She stopped, the flush in her cheeks getting darker. Claire picked up a wooden spoon and poked the pasta, which was beginning to loosen up. "And?"
"And I was planning on putting the moves on him before all this happened. Thats why I had on the garters and stuff. Planning ahead."
"Oh, wow."
"Yeah, embarrassing. Did he peek?"
"When you were changing?" Claire asked. "I don't think so. But I think he wanted to."

"Yes I did but then I get to see that all the time now," Michael said gladly.

"Uncle Mikey that's gross," Carrie said laughing.
"Thats okay, then." Eve blinked down at the pasta, which had formed a thick white foam on top. "Is it supposed to be doing that?"
Claire hadn't ever seen it happen at her parents' house. But then again, they hadn't made spaghetti much. "I don't know."
"Oh crap!" The white foam kept growing, like in one of those cheesy science fiction movies. The foam that ate the Glass House it mushroomed up over the top of the pot and down over the sides, and both girls yelped as it hit the burners and began to sizzle and pop. Claire grabbed the pot and moved it. Eve turned down the burner. "Right, pasta makes foam, good to know. Too hot. Way too hot."
"Who? Michael?" Claire asked, and they dissolved in giggles.

"So that was what you were giggling about when I came in," Michael asked. The girls both nodded their heads.
"Which only got worse when Michael walked in, went to the refrigerator, and retrieved the last two beers from his birthday pack. "Ladies," he said. "Did I miss something?"
"Pasta boiled over," Claire gulped, trying not to giggle even harder. Michael looked at them for a second, curious, and then shrugged and left again. "Do you think he's telling Shane right now that were insane?"

"Yeah he did," Shane answered.
"Probably." Eve managed to control herself, and put the pasta back on the burner. "Is this shock? Are we in shock right now?"
"I don't know," Claire said. "Let's see, we've been barricaded in the house, attacked, nearly burned to death. Michael was murdered right in front of us, then came back, and we got interrogated by the big, scary vampire cops? Yeah, maybe shock."
Eve choked on another snort/giggle. "Maybe thats why I decided to cook."
They watched the pasta bubble in silence. The whole room was starting to smell warm with spices and tomato sauce, a comforting and homey sort of smell. Claire stirred the spaghetti sauce, which was looking delicious now that it was simmering.
The kitchen door banged open again. Shane, this time, a beer in one hand. "What's burning?"
"Your brain. So, did you two girls kiss and make up?" Eve asked, stirring the pasta.
He glowered at her, then turned to Claire. "What the hell is she making?"
"Spaghetti." And technically, it was Claire mostly, but she decided not to mention it. "Um, about your dad do you think they're going to catch him?"

"Go right to the big question," Michael laughed.
"No." Shane hip-bumped Eve out of the way at the stove and did some spaghetti maintenance. "Morganville's got a lot of hiding places. Thats mostly for the vamps benefit, but it'll work for him, too. He'll go to ground. I've been sending him maps. He'll know where to go."
"Maybe he'll just leave?" Eve sounded hopeful."

"We were all hoping that," Claire said looking at Shane he seemed upset but she nudged him out of his thoughts and smiled at him.

"Shane dragged a piece of spaghetti out of the tangle in the pot and pressed it against the metal with the spoon. It sliced cleanly.
"No," Shane said again. "He definitely won't leave. He's got no place else to go. He always said that if he crossed the border into Morganville again, he was here until it was done."
"You mean until he's done." Eve crossed her arms, not as if she was angry, more like she was cold. "Shane, if he goes after even one vampire, we are dead. You know that, right?"
He picked up the beer bottle and drank, avoiding an answer. He flipped off the burner under the spaghetti, took the pot to the sink, and drained it with the edge of a lid. Like a real chef or something.
Which, Claire had to admit, was pretty much totally hot,"

"I'll cook more often then," Shane whispered in Cruz's ear she started blushing.

"the way he moved so confidently. She liked to cook, but he had authority. In fact, she was paying a lot more attention to what Shane did today the way he moved, the way his clothes fitor didn't, in his case, because Shane was wearing his jeans loose and just baggy enough to give her fantasies about them sliding down. Which made her blush."

She was blushing now as well.
"She concentrated on getting down the bowls from the cupboard. Mismatched bowls, two out of four of them chipped. She put them out on the counter as Shane returned with the spaghetti and began portioning it out. Eve grabbed the sauce and followed him down the line, ladling.
It looked pretty tasty, actually. Claire picked up two bowls and carried them into the living room, where Michael was tuning his guitar as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't been stabbed through the heart and dragged outside and oh my God, she didn't want to finish that thought at all.
She handed him the bowl. He set the guitar carefully back in its case somehow, with all the mayhem that had gone on in the past two days, it had escaped damage and dug in as Eve and Shane trailed in with their own dinner. Eve had two chilled bottles of water under one arm. She tossed one to Claire as she sat down cross-legged on the floor, next to Michaels knee.
Shane settled on the couch, and Claire joined him. For a few minutes nobody said anything. Claire hadn't realized that she was hungry, not really, but the second the sauce hit her tongue and exploded into flavours, she was starving. She couldn't gobble it fast enough.
"Hells put in a skating rink," Shane said. "This is actually edible, Eve."
Again, Claire had the impulse to claim credit and managed not to, mostly because that would have required her to stop shovelling pasta into her mouth.
"Claire," Eve said. "She's the cook, not me. I just, you know, supervised." Which gave Claire a pleasant little spurt of gratitude and surprise.
"See? I knew that."
Eve flipped him off and noisily sucked some spaghetti into her mouth."

"And it went everywhere like always your such a child when you do that," Shane said he nudged Carrie who nudged him back smiling.
"Claire got to the bottom of the bowl first even before Michael or Shane and sat back with a sigh of utter contentment. Nap, she thought. I could take a nap.
"Guys, Michael said. "Were still in trouble. You know that, right?"
"Yeah," Eve said. "But now we have catered trouble."
He ignored her, except for a brief little quirk of a smile, and focused on Shane. "You need to tell me everything," Michael said. "No bullshit, man. Every last thing, from the time you left Morganville."
Shane seemed to lose his appetite."

"I would too," Cruz struggled on the thought.
"Which, for Shane, was not a good sign at all.
The vampires had offered them money. Cash compensation. It was Morganville's version of Allstate, only it wasn't insurance it was blood money for a dead child.
And the Collins family Dad, Mom, and Shane had packed up whatever had survived the fire that had taken Alyssa, and left town in the middle of the night. Running. That probably would have been that, Shane explained; people did leave town from time to time, and it was rarely any trouble. Michaels own parents had taken off. But something went wrong with Molly Collins.
"At first, she'd just space," Shane said. He'd drained his beer, and now he was just rolling the bottle between his palms. "Stare at things, like she was trying to remember something. Dad didn't notice. He was drinking a lot. We ended up in Odessa, and Dad got a job at the recycling plant. He wasn't home much."
"That must have been an improvement," Eve muttered.

"Were sorry about the problems you faced Mr Collins," Amelie said she seemed saddened at what was happening to Shane which seemed strange.
"Hey, let me get through it, okay?"
"Sorry."
Shane took another deep breath. "Mom she kept talking about Alyssa. You have to understand, we didn't couldn't remember anything, except that she'd died. It was all just sort of a blur, but not the kind of blur you worry about, if you know what I mean?"
Claire was fairly certain nobody did, but she remembered her conversation with her own parents. They'd forgotten things, and somehow, they hadn't really cared. So maybe she did understand.
"I started working, too. Mom she just stayed in the motel. Wouldn't do anything except eat, sleep, sometimes take a bath if we yelled at her long enough. I figured, you know, depression but it was more than that. One day, out of nowhere, she grabs me by the arm and she says, Shane, do you remember your sister? So I go, Yeah, Mom, of course I do. And she says the weirdest thing. She says, Do you remember the vampires? I didn't remember, but it felt like something in me was trying to. I got a bad headache, and I felt sick. And Mom she just kept on talking, about how there was something wrong with us, something going wrong in our heads. About the vampires. About Lyssa dying in the fire."
He fell silent, still rolling the beer bottle like some kind of magic talisman. Nobody moved.
"And I remembered." Shanes whisper sounded raw, somehow, vulnerable and exposed. Michael wasn't looking at him. He was looking down, at his own beer bottle, and the label he was peeling off in strips.
"It was like some wall coming down, and then it all just flooded in. I mean, its bad enough to live through it and sort of cope with it, but when it comes back like that" Shane visibly shuddered. "It was like I'd just watched Lyss die all over again."
"Oh," Eve said faintly. "Oh God."
"Mom" He shook his head. "I couldn't handle it. I left her. I had to get away, I couldn't just I had to go. You know? So I left. I ran."
A hollow rattle of a laugh. "Saved my life."
"Shane" Michael cleared his throat. "I was wrong. You don't have to…"
"Shut up, man. Just shut up." Shane tipped the bottle to his lips for the last few drops, then swallowed hard. Claire didn't know what was coming, but she could see from the look on Michaels face that he did, and it twisted her stomach into a knot."

Cruz held onto Shane tightly as he heard this,

"So anyway, I came back a few hours later and she was in the tub, just floating there, and the water was red razor blades on the floor"
"Oh, honey." Eve got up and stood there, hovering next to him, reaching out to touch him and then pulling back in jerky motions without making contact, like he had some force field of grief shielding him. "It wasn't your fault. You said she was depressed."
"Don't you get it?" He glared up at her, then at Michael. "She didn't do it. She wouldn't. It was them. You know how they work: they close in; they kill; they cover it up. They must have gotten there right after I left. I don't know"

"They did it didn't they Amelie?" Shane asked Amelie she looked at Cruz and so did Shane she nodded her head and a tear escaped her left eye.
"Shane."
"I don't know how they got her in the tub. There weren't any bruises, but the cuts were"
"Shane! Christ, man!" Michael looked outright horrified this time, and Shane stopped. The two of them looked at each other for a long, wordless moment, and then Michael visibly tense eased back into his chair. "Shit. I don't even know what to say."
Shane shook his head and looked away. "Nothing to say. It is what it is. I couldn't shit. Let me just finish, okay?"
As if they could stop him. Claire felt cold. She could feel Shane's body shaking next to her, and if she felt cold, how must he be feeling? Frozen. Numb. She reached out to touch him and, like Eve, just stopped. There was something about Shane right now that didn't want to be touched.
"Anyway, my dad came home, eventually. Cops said it was a suicide, but after they were gone I told him. He didn't exactly want to hear it. Things got ugly." Claire couldn't imagine how ugly that had been, for Shane to actually admit it. "But I made him remember."
Eve sat on the floor, hugging her knees close to her chest. She looked at him with anime-wide eyes. "And?"
"He got drunk. A lot."

"Nothing new there," Shane muttered.

"Bitterness ran black through Shanes voice, and all of a sudden the beer bottle in his hand seemed to get a whole lot of significance for him, beyond just something to occupy his nervous hands. He set it down on the floor and wiped his palms on his blue jeans. "He started hooking up with these bikers and stuff. Wasn't in a real good place; I don't remember some of that. Couple of weeks later we got a visit from these guys in suits. Not vamps, lawyers. They gave us money, lots of it. Insurance. Except we both knew who it was from, and the point was, they were trying to figure out what we knew and remembered. I was too drugged out to know what was going on, and Dad was drunk, so I guess that saved our lives. They decided we were no threat." He wiped his forehead with the heel of his hand and laughed a bitter, broken sound like glass in a blender.
Shane on drugs."

"Dad you took drugs?" Carrie squeaked

"Honey mummy use to as well but we don't do it anymore and never will okay," Cruz said her friends and family looked at her funny but to hide it I started reading again.

"Claire saw that Michael had caught it, too. She wondered if he was going to say something, but maybe it wasn't the best time to say, Hey, man, you using now? Or something like that.
He didn't need to ask, as it turned out. Shane answered anyway. "But I kicked it, and Dad sobered up, and we planned this out. Thing is, even though we remembered a lot of stuff, the personal stuff, we couldn't remember things about how to find vamps, or the layout of the town, or even who we were looking for. So that was my job. Come back, scout it out, find out where the vamps hide during the day. Report back. It wasn't supposed to take this long, and I wasn't supposed to get tangled up."
"With us," Eve supplied softly. "Right? He didn't want you to have any friends."
"Friends get you killed in Morganville."
"No." Eve put a pale hand on his knee. "Shane, honey, in Morganville, friends are the only things that keep you alive." I finished.

The some of the girls all got up and went into the kitchen they were getting all the food ready a few minutes later only Eve, Carrie and one of Cruz's sisters came out and the door to the kitchen locked all the vampires and the two werewolves heard it we raced to the door trying to open it.

Claire's pov: just before the door locks

We finished making the food for everyone and then I thought of something about Shane how I had my whole family here but he didn't so I tried remembering a spell that would only get them back and started speaking the words over and over again. Blood started to pour out of my skin and the kitchen door locked itself the spell was almost finished and I was losing a lot of blood I soon lost conciseness and I hardly heard the kitchen door open and people come into the room and heard Shane whisper "Alyssa, mum, dad?" before blackness took me over.

The end