Galera, tenho novidades! Talvez não para todos, (
#posso-estar-atrasada)
:S
Mas, enfim... Trabalhando em meu recente vício por Morganville depois de ler
Ghost Town (
THE BEST BOOK EVER!!), acabei visitando o
site da autora e encontrando uma prévia de
Bite Club!!
Infelizmente só será lançado dia 03 de Maio, nos EUA. Mas podemos matar um pouco da saudade/curiosidade com a prévia. Por enquanto, só para quem sabe ler em inglês... sim, está na hora de você aprender outro idioma.
Sorry About That.
Mas, não se desesperem, pois já estou trabalhando na tradução. Disponibilizo em breve.
Looking back on it later, Claire thought she should have known trouble was coming, but really, in Morganville, anything could be trouble. Your college professor doesn’t show for class? Probably got fanged by vampires. Takeout forgets to put onions on your hamburger? The regular onion delivery guy disappeared – again, probably due to vampires. And so on. For a college town, Morganville had a remarkable lot of vampires.
Claire was an authority on all those subjects: Texas Prairie University, and of course, the vampires. And mysterious disappearances. She’d almost been one of those, more often than she wanted to admit.
But this problem wasn’t a disappearance at all. It was an appearance ... something new, something different, and something cool, at least in her boyfriend Shane’s opinion, because as Claire was sorting the mail for their weird little fraternity of four into the “junk” and “keep” piles, Shane grabbed the flyer she’d put in “junk” and read it with the most elated expression she’d ever seen on his face. Scary. Shane didn’t get excited about much; he was guarded about his feelings, mostly, except with her.
Now he looked as delighted as a little kid at Christmas.
“Mike!” he bellowed, and Claire winced and put her hands over her ears. When Shane yelled, he really belted it out. “Yo, Dead Man, get your ass down here!”
Michael, their third housemate here at the Glass House, must have assumed that there was an emergency underway ... not an unreasonable assumption, because hey, Morganville. So he arrived at a run, slamming the door back, looking paler than usual, and more dangerous than normal, too. When he was acting like a regular guy, he seemed quiet and sweet, maybe a little too practical sometimes, but Vampire Michael was a whole different, spicy deal.
Yeah, she was living in a house with a vampire. And strangely, that was not the weirdest part of her life.
Michael blinked the tinges of red away from his blue eyes, ran both hands through his wavy blond hair, and frowned at Shane. “What the hell is your problem?” He didn’t wait to hear, though; he walked over to the counter and got down one of their mismatched, battered coffee mugs. This one was black with purple Gothic lettering that spelled out POISON. It was their fourth housemate Eve’s cup, but she still hadn’t made an appearance this morning.
When you slept later than a vampire, Claire thought, that was probably taking it a little too far.
As he filled the mug with coffee, Michael waited for Shane to make some sense. Which Shane finally did, holding up the cheaply printed white flyer. It curled around the edges from where it had been rolled up to fit in the mailbox. “What have I always wanted in this town?” he asked.
“A strip club that would let in fifteen year olds?” Michael said.
“When I was fifteen. No, seriously, what?”
“Guns ‘R Us?”
Shane made a harsh buzzer sound. “Okay, to be fair, yeah, that’s a good alternate answer. But no. I always wanted a place to seriously train to fight, right? Someplace that didn't think aerobics was a martial art? And look!”
Claire took the paper from Shane’s hand and smoothed it out on the table. She’d only glanced at it when sorting mail, she’d thought it was some kind of gym. Which it was, in a way, but it wasn’t teaching spin and yoga and all that stuff.
This one was a gym and martial arts studio, and it was teaching self defense. Or at least that was what Claire took from the graphic of some guy in a white jacket and pants kicking the crap out of the air, and the words DEFEND YOURSELF in big, bold letters at the bottom.
Michael leaned over her shoulder, slurping coffee. “Huh,” he said. “Weird.”
“Nothing weird about people wanting to learn a few life-preserving skills, man. Especially around here. Not like we’re all looking forward to a peaceful old age,” Shane said.
“I mean it’s weird who’s teaching,” Michael said. “Being that this guy – “ He tapped the name at the bottom of the page. “ – is a vampire.”
Vassily was the name, which Claire made out only when she squinted at it. Small type. “A vampire’s teaching self defense,” she said. “To us. Humans.”
Shane was thrown for just about a minute, and then he said, “Well, who better? Amelie put out a decree that humans were free to learn this stuff, right? Sooner or later, some vamp was bound to make some cash off of it.”
“You mean, off of us,” Claire said. But she could see his point. A vampire martial arts instructor? That would have to be all kinds of scary, or awesome, or both. She wouldn’t have gone for it, personally; she doubted she had half as much muscle or body mass as it was going to require. But Shane ... well, it was a natural for Shane, really. He was competitive, and he didn’t mind taking some punishment as long as he enjoyed the fight. He'd been complaining about the lack of a real gym for a while now.
Claire handed the flyer back to him, and Shane carefully folded it up and put it in his back pocket. “Watch yourself,” she said. “Get out of there if anything’s weird.” Although in Morganville, Texas, home of everything weird, that was a pretty high bar to pass. After all, there was a vampire teaching self defense. That, in itself, was the strangest thing she’d seen in a while.
“Yes, mom,” Shane said, but he whispered it, intimately close to her ear, and then kissed that spot on the neck that always made her blush and shiver, every time. “Eat your breakfast.”
She turned and kissed him full-on, just a sweet, swift brush of lips, because he was already moving ... and then he did a double take, and came back to kiss her again, slower, hotter, better.
Michael, sliding into a seat at the kitchen table with his coffee cup, flipped open the thin four-page Morganville newspaper, and said, “One of you is supposed to be somewhere right about now. I’m just saying that, not in a dad kind of way.”
He was right, and Claire broke off the kiss with a frustrated growl, low in her throat. Shane grinned. “You’re so cute when you do that,” he said. “You sound like a really fierce kitten.”
“Bite me, Collins.”
"Whoops, wrong housemate. I think you meant that for the one who drinks plasma."
Michael gave him a one-fingered salute without looking up from his study of the latest Morganville high school sports disaster. Claire doubted he was actually interested in that, but Michael had to have reading material around; she didn’t think he slept much these days, and reading was how he passed the time. And he probably got something out of it, even if it was just something to impress Eve with on his local knowledge of football.
Claire grabbed her breakfast – a Pop Tart just ringing up out of the toaster – and wrapped it in a napkin so she could take it with her. Book bag acquired, she blew Shane (and Michael) an air kiss as she hit the back door, heading out into a cold Morganville fall.
Fall, in other parts of the world, was a beautiful season, filled with leaves in brown, orange, yellow ... here, the leaves had been brown for a day, and then dropped off the trees to rattle around the streets and yards like bones. Another depressing season, to add to all the others that were depressing in this town. But at least it was cooler than the blazing summer; that was something. Claire had actually dug out a long-sleeved tee and layered another shirt over it, because the wind gusts carried the sharp whip of approaching winter now. Pretty soon, she’d need a coat, and gloves, and a hat, and maybe boots if the snow fell hard enough.
Morganville in summer was dull green at best, but now all the grass was burned dry, and most of the bushes had lost their leaves, leaving black skeletons to shiver in the cold. Not a pretty place, not at all, although a few house-proud people had tried some landscaping, and Mrs. Hennessey on the corner liked those weird concrete animals. This year, she had a gray deer fake-sipping from an empty stone fountain, and a couple of concrete squirrels that looked more menacing than cute.
Claire checked her watch, took a bite of her Pop-Tart, and almost choked as she realized how little time she had. She broke into a jog, which was tough considering the weight of the bag on her shoulder, and then kicked it to a full run as she passed the big iron gates of Texas Prairie University. Fall semester was a busy time; lots of new, stupid freshmen wandering around confused with maps, or still unpacking their cars with boxes. She had two or three near-collisions, but reached the steps of the Science Building without much incident, and with two whole minutes to spare. Good, she needed them to get her breath back.
As she munched the rest of her breakfast, wishing she had a bottle of water, others she knew by sight filtered past her ... Bruce, from Computational Physics, who was almost as out of place here as she felt; Ilaara from one of the math classes she was in, but Claire couldn’t really sort out which one. She didn’t make close friends at TPU, which was a shame, but it wasn’t that sort of a school – especially if you were in the know about the inner workings of Morganville. Most of the just-passing-through students passed the year or two they were here with the usual on-campus partying; except for specific college-friendly stores that were located within a couple of blocks, they hardly ever bothered to leave the gates of the university. And that was probably for the best.
It was dangerous out there, after all.
Claire found her classroom – a small one, nothing at her level of study had big groups – and took her usual seat in the middle of the room, next to a smelly grad student named Doug who apparently hated personal hygiene. She thought about moving, but the fact was there weren’t many other places, and Doug’s aura was tangible at ten feet away anyway. Better to get an intense dose close-up so your nose could adjust quickly.
Doug smiled at her. He seemed to like her, which was scary, but at least he wasn’t a big chatterbox, or one of those guys who came on with the cheesy innuendos – at least, not usually. She’d certainly sat next to worse. Well, maybe not in terms of body odor, though. “Hey,” he said, bending closer. Claire resisted the urge to bend the other way. “I hear he’s springing a new lab experiment on us today. Something mind-blowing.”
Given that she worked for the smartest guy in Morganville, maybe the entire world, and given that he was at least a few hundred years old and drank blood, Claire suspected her scale of mind-blowing might be a little bigger than Doug’s. It wasn’t unusual to go to Myrnin’s secret lair/underground lab (yes, he actually had one) and find he’d invented edible hats, or an iPod that ran on sweat. And considering that her boss built blood-drinking computers that controlled dimensional portals, Claire didn’t really anticipate any problems understanding a mere university professor’s assignments. Half of what Myrnin gave her to read wasn’t even in a living language, anyway. It was amazing what she’d learned – whether she wanted to or not.
“Good luck,” she said to Stinky Doug, trying not to breathe too deeply. She glanced over at him, the way you do, and was startled to see that he was sporting two spectacular black eyes – healing up, she realized after the first shock, but he’d gotten smacked pretty hard. “Wow. Nice bruises. What happened?”
Doug shrugged. “Got in a fight. No big deal.”
Someone, Claire thought, had disliked his body odor a whole lot more than usual. “Did you win?”
He smiled, but it was a private, almost cynical kind of smile – a joke she couldn’t share. “Oh, I will,” he said. “Big time.”
The door banged open at the far end of the room, and the prof stalked in. He was a short, round little man, with mean close-set eyes, and he liked Hawaiian shirts in obnoxiously loud colors -- in fact, she was relatively sure that he and Myrnin might have shopped at the same store. The Obnoxious Store.
“Settle down!” he said, even though they weren’t exactly the rowdiest class at TPU. In fact, they were perfectly quiet. But Prof. Larkin always said that; Claire suspected he was actually deaf, so he just said it to be on the safe side. “Right, I hope you’ve all done your reading, because today you get to do some applications of principles you should already know. Everybody, stand up, shake it off, and follow me. Bring your stuff.”
Claire hadn’t bothered to unpack anything yet, so she just swung her backpack to her shoulder and headed out in Professor Larkin’s wake, happy to be temporarily out of the Doug Fug. Not that Larkin was any treat, either ... he smelled like old sweat and bacon, but at least he’d bathed in recent memory.
She glanced down at his wrist. On it was a braided leather band with a metal plate incised with a symbol – not the Founder symbol that Claire wore as a pin on the collar of her jacket, but another vampire’s symbol. Oliver’s, apparently. That was a little unusual; Oliver didn’t personally oversee a lot of humans. He was above all that. He was the Don in the local Morganville Mafia.
Larkin saw her looking, and sent her a stern frown. “Something to say, Miss Danvers?”
“Nice bracelet,” she said. “I’ve only seen one other like it.” The one she’d seen had been around the wrist of her own personal nemesis, Monica Morrell, crown princess (she wished!) of Morganville. Once the daughter of the mayor, now the sister of the new mayor, she thought she could do whatever she wanted ... and with Oliver’s Protection, she probably could, still, even if her brother Richard wasn’t quite as indulgent as Daddy had been.
Larkin just ... didn’t seem the type Oliver would bother with, unless he wasn’t what he seemed.
Larkin clasped his hands behind his back as they walked down the almost-empty wide hallway, the rest of the class trailing behind. “I ought to give you a pass from today’s experiment,” he said. “Confidentially, I’m pretty sure it’s child’s play for you, given your ... part-time occupation.”
He knew about Myrnin, or at least he’d been told something. There weren’t many people who actually knew Myrnin, and fewer still who’d been to the lab and had any understanding of what went on in there. She’d never seen Larkin, or heard his name mentioned by anybody with clout.
So she was careful with her reply.
“I don’t mind. I like experiments,” she said. “Providing they’re not the kind that try to eat me, or blow me up.” Both of which, unfortunately, she’d come across at her job at the lab.
“Oh, nothing that dramatic,” Larkin said. “But I think you might enjoy it.”
That scared her, a bit.
Arriving at the generic lab room, though, there didn’t seem to be anything worth breaking a sweat over. Some full-spectrum incandescent lights, like you’d use for indoor reptiles; some small ranked vials on each table of what looked like ...
Blood.
Oh, crap, that was never a good sign, in Morganville (or, Claire thought, anywhere else, either). She came to a sudden stop, and sent Larkin a wide-eyed look. The rest of the class was piling in behind her, talking in low tones; she knew Doug had arrived because of the blanket of body-smog that settled in around her. Of course, Doug took the lab stool beside her. Dammit. That blew, as Shane would have said; Claire covered it by sending him a small, not very enthusiastic smile as she dropped her backpack to the ground, careful of the laptop inside. She hated sitting on lab stools; they only emphasized how short she was. She felt like she was back in second grade again, and unable to touch the floor in her chair.
Larkin assumed his position in the center of the lab tables, and grabbed a small stack of paper from his black bag. He passed out the instructions, and Claire read them, frowning. They were simple enough – place a sample of the “fluid” on a slide, turn on the full spectrum lighting, observe and record results. Once a reaction was observed, mix the identified reactive blood with control blood until a non-reaction was achieved. Then work out the equations explaining the initial reaction, and the non-reaction, to chart the energy release.
No doubt at all what this was about, Claire thought. The vamps were using students to do their research for them. Free worker bees. But why?
Larkin had a smooth patter, she had to admit; he joked around, said that with the popularity of vampires in entertainment it might be fun to apply some physics to the problem. Part of the blood had been “altered” to allow for a reaction, part had not. He made it all seem very scientific and logical, for the benefit of the eight out of ten non-Morganville residents in the room.
Claire caught the eye of Malinda, the other one in the room who was wearing a vampire symbol, and Malinda’s pretty face was set in a worried, haunted expression. She opened her eyes wide and held up her hands in a silent what do we do?
It’ll be okay, Claire mouthed. She hoped she wasn’t lying.
“Cool,” said Stinky Doug, leaning over to look at the paper. Claire’s eyes watered a little, and she felt an urge to sneeze. “Vampires. I vant to drink your bloot!” He made a mock bite at her neck, which creeped her out so much she nearly fell off the stool.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said. Doug looked a little surprised at her reaction. “And by the way, showers. Look into them, Doug!”
That was a little too much snark for Claire’s usual style, but he’d scared her, and it just came out. Doug looked wounded, and Claire immediately felt bad. “I’m sorry,” she said, very sincerely. “It’s just – you don’t smell so great.”
It was his turn now to look ashamed. “Yeah,” he said, looking down at the paper. “I know. Sorry.” He got that look again, that secret, smug look. “Guess I need to get rich enough nobody cares what I smell like.”
“That, or, you know, showering. That works better.”
“Fine. Next time I’ll smell just like a birthday bouquet.”
“No fair just throwing on deodorant and after shave or something. Real washing. It’s a must.”
“You’re a tough sell.” He flashed her a movie-star grin that looked truly strange with the discoloration around his mouth and nose. “Speaking of that, once I take that shower, you interested in going out for dinner?”
“I’m spoken for,” she said. “And we have work to do.”
She prepped the slide, and Doug fired up the lamp. The instant the full-spectrum lighting hit it, there was a noticeable reaction – bubbling under the glass, as if the blood had carbonated. It took about thirty seconds for the reaction to run its course; once it had, all that was left was a black residue of ash.
“So freaking cool,” Doug said. “Seriously. Where do you think they get this stuff? Squeeze real vampires?” There was something odd about the way he said it – as if he actually knew something. Which he shouldn’t, Claire knew. Definitely, he shouldn’t.
“It’s probably just a light-sensitive chemical additive,” Claire said. “Not sure how it works, though.” That was true. As much as she’d studied it, she really didn’t understand the nature of the vampire transformation. It wasn’t a virus – exactly. And it wasn’t a contaminant, either, although it had elements of that. There were things about it she suspected that all of their scientific approaches couldn’t capture, try as they might. Maybe they were just measuring the wrong things.
Doug dropped the uncomfortable speculation. He wasn’t so bad as a lab partner, if you forgot the stinky part; he was a good observer, and not half bad with calculations. She let him do most of the work, because she’d already done most of this with Myrnin; interesting that Doug came up with a slightly different formula, in the end, than she had on her own, because she thought his was a little more elegant. They were the first to come up with a stable mixture of the blood, and the second to come up with calculations – but Doug’s, Claire was confident, were better than the other team’s. You didn’t have to finish first to win, not in science. You just had to be more right than the other guys.
All was going okay until she caught Doug trying to pocket a sample of the blood. “Hey,” she said, and caught his wrist. “Don’t do that.”
“Why not? It would be awesome at parties.”
Again, there was that unsettling tone, a little too smug, a little too knowing. Whatever it was he intended to do with it, she doubted he was going to show off at parties with it.
“Just don’t.” Claire met his eyes. “I mean it. Leave it alone. It might be – toxic.” Fatal, she meant, because if the vamps found out Doug was sneaking out samples ... well. Accidents happened, even on the TPU campus. Stupidity wasn’t covered by the general Protection agreement, and Doug seemed to have caught a little bit too much of a clue.
Doug grudgingly dropped it back to the table. Prof Larkin came around, checked out the sample bottles, and recorded them against a master sheet. As he walked away, and she and Doug packed their bags, Claire said, “See? I told you they’d be auditing.”
“Yeah,” Doug whispered back. “But he already checked us out.”
And before she could stop him, he grabbed a couple of the vials and stuck them in his bag, and took off.
Claire swallowed the impulse to yell, and a second one, to kick the table in frustration. She didn’t dare tell Larkin; he was Protected, and Doug had no idea what he was getting into. She had to get him to give the vial back. Dumbass wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it, anyway.
She hoped.
CHAPTER TWO
Unfortunately, Stinky Doug wasn’t that easy to find. For one thing, she’d never learned his last name. Hacking into Professor Larkin’s class records would be easy enough, but Claire had other classes, one after another, right up through mid-afternoon. Then she was scheduled for the lab – the real one. And an evening of weird science with the weirdest boss ever.
Myrnin, she hoped, wouldn’t notice if she was a little late. He had a pretty flexible concept of time.
Claire stopped off in the University Center, which had wi-fi, and claimed a table in the coffee bar area. Her housemate Eve must have finally dragged herself out of bed, because she was behind the counter, yawning and sipping on a massively large cup of what must have been pure espresso, knowing Eve.
“Hiya, cutie,” Eve said, and leaned on the bar to smile at Claire. “Mornings are hard.”
“It isn’t morning,” Claire said, straight-faced. Eve made a tragic face.
“I stand corrected. Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don’t do them anymore.” She took a gulp from her cup, shuddered, and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. Caffeinate me. – So, Beautiful Brainiac, what can I do for you?”
“The usual, I guess.”
“One piping hot mocha, extra large, coming up!” Eve rang it up and took Claire’s money. As she counted out change, she shook her newly-shag-cut black hair back from her pale face, and grinned. The grinning didn’t really go with the whole Goth thing, but that was Eve. She didn’t do labels. “Hey, did you get how excited Shane was about that martial arts thingy? He almost ran me over when I came downstairs. I never saw somebody so thrilled to be invited to an ass kicking.”
“He was pretty stoked,” Claire agreed. “How about you? Are you going?”
“Take classes? That I actually pay for? What do you think I am, a college girl or something? Besides, I defend myself just fine.” She did, actually. Eve not only made her own stakes, she blinged them out with crystal designs. The wooden ones were sort of like stun guns, for vamps; wood couldn’t really kill most of them, just immobilize them, unless the vamps were very young (like Michael).
But Eve also made silver ones, and those were deadly. Claire felt a shiver along her spine as she remembered just how deadly they could be. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d destroyed one vampire that way. Nasty. And even though she’d done it in self defense, she hadn’t really felt good about it.
“Hmmm,” Eve was saying now, in a contemplative kind of way. She tapped her lip with one black fingernail, and smiled. “There could be a use for that gym after all, now that I think about it. You know, there is one martial art I really like.”
“Which is?”
“A surprise, Claire Bear. Yeah, that might definitely be some fun. You might even enjoy it, too.” A tiny, cute frown line slowly appeared between her eyebrows. “You okay? You look kind of spooked.”
“Yeah, coming from someone who looks like an actual ghost ...”
“Respect the awesome look, girlfriend. Okay, if you don’t want to talk, don’t. One mocha, coming up! Sit down, I’ll bring it over, it’s slow anyway.”
It wasn’t just slow; this hour of the day, it was deserted. Claire left Eve to the espresso construction (something Eve was amazingly good at, actually) and flipped open her laptop. It took her exactly seven minutes to hack into Larkin’s class roster and discover that Stinky Doug’s full name was Doug Legrande. Larkin, creepily enough, even had all their addresses, phone numbers, and emails, although Claire was pretty sure she’d never provided him with any of that intel. Either the university was really free with their personal details, or Larkin had connections.
Duh, she already knew that. He had a bracelet, from Oliver. Connections didn’t quite cover it.
“You gonna drink that?”
Claire looked up. Eve was sitting across from her, slumped in the rickety plastic chair, sipping her massive cup of whatever – it was Eve’s own cup, with a cartoony GOT BLOOD? on the side. On campus, it was funny. Off campus ... not so much.
As Claire stared blankly at her, Eve nodded to the magically appearing mocha sitting next to her laptop. “The whipped cream’s getting all melty,” Eve said. “Whipped cream is a terrible thing to waste. Oh, except it’s not real whipped cream, it’s that canned stuff, which is kind of nasty, so there’s that. Maybe a good choice after all. Whatcha doing?”
That was Eve, through and through, even when she was sleepy. Keeping up with her required a healthy gulp of the mocha and a very active brain. “I’m trying to find Stinky Doug,” Claire said. “He lives on campus, in Lansdale House, I guess.”
“Stinky Doug? Oh God, please tell me you’re going to do everyone a public service and deliver him some shower gel; the last time he came in here I thought I was going to have to call those biohazard guys. Although if this is some weird and inconceivable college crush thing, I really don’t want to know. Let me have my fragile illusions.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “Trust me, I wouldn’t kiss Doug even after the shower gel and decontamination. No, he did something stupid, and I need to convince him not to make it worse, that’s all.” She explained about the experiment, the blood, and Doug’s boneheaded move; Eve kept steadily drinking her coffee, eyes half closed.
“You considered snitching him?” she asked. “Because honestly, wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. Just make sure Larkin knows you didn’t take it. Let him draw his own conclusions.”
“That’s the same thing throwing him under the bus,” Claire said. “Look, he’s just dumb, that’s all. And he doesn’t know about – “ Claire waved vaguely around, indicating Morganville. “ – all this.” Well, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that, actually, but he shouldn’t know. That counted.
“If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? Caught dead? I crack myself up.” Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn’t need. “So you’re visiting Stinky Doug and warning him off, without explaining why. Is that your whole plan?”
“Kinda.”
“Awesome. Let me know how it goes, Plan Girl.”
“You have any better ideas?”
Eve took another delicate swallow of coffee. “Well,” she said, “Stinky Doug has a lot of classes. If you’ve got his dorm room address, how hard would it be to toss the place, find the stuff, and get rid of it? Nobody has to know.”
“Great. And do you actually know a ninja?”
“Yep,” Eve said, and gave her a sleepy, luminous smile. “He’s my boyfriend.”
Hmmm. Claire had to mull that over for a few seconds, because technically, vampires were like ninjas .. quiet, sneaky, fast, and deadly. And when they wanted to be, they could be disturbingly invisible. “Would he do it?” she asked. That wasn’t what she wanted to ask, actually; she wanted to ask Will he tell Oliver?
Because like it or not, Michael was a vampire in equal measure to being her friend, and even though he tried to stay on the human side, sometimes he had to be a vamp first. Maybe this was one of those times.
Eve jacked her black eyebrows up another half inch, waiting for an answer.
“Okay,” Claire finally said. “I admit, he has significant ninja qualities.”
“Booyah. I will summon the ninja. Oh, and take a lunch break while we burgle.”
“You’re going too?”
“Am I not ninja enough? Are you saying that I lack ninja?”
“No, I was just thinking you’re a little, uh, recognizable, maybe?”
Eve batted her thick eyelashes. “Why thank you, sweetie, that’s the nicest insult I’ve had today, not counting the jock who said he’d date me but he had a restraining order out for necrophilia. I promise, I’ll dowdy up for the occasion. It’ll take me five minutes.” She took her cell out of her pocket and texted as she spoke. “Promise me you won’t leave without me.”
“I promise.”
“Want me to organize Shane into this posse too?”
“He’s at work,” Claire sighed. She would have gladly had Shane added to the mix, at this point, but he was already on fragile ground at work, considering he’d ditched twice this month – once for a legitimate sick day, but the other had been just plain boredom. “Next time we commit crime, we'll make sure to include him.”
Eve held up one fist while she kept typing with one thumb, and Claire tapped it. Eve finished with a flurry of keystrokes, snapped the phone shut, and drained her coffee. “Right, Mikey’s on the way. I’ll be anti-Eve in five. Enjoy your mocha.”
Claire did, drinking fast; it was a good thing she did, because in just about five minutes, Michael was walking through the big UC open hall outside the coffee area, a guitar case slung over his back. He should have drawn attention – Michael was just plain gorgeous, and girls looked – but he was walking with his shoulders slumped, hands in his pants pockets, looking down, and the whole aura just projected don’t look at me so strongly that Claire couldn’t see a single person, other than herself, actually taking notice of him.
He slid into a seat next to her, leaning the guitar case against the table. “So now we’re going to be actual criminals,” he said.
“And look, you brought a guitar.”
He gave her a look. “I was on my way to practice.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
“Sounds like I didn’t have much of a choice. This guy has vampire blood?”
“I guess so. Larkin was using it for some experiment, I suppose it was authorized.”
“Larkin? Had to be. He wouldn’t dare do it on the side.” Michael nudged her empty mocha cup with a fingertip. “Where’s Eve?”
“Right here, Ninja With Fangs.” Eve leaned over behind him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him right over the cool blue veins. “Claire said I had to go in disguise as a regular person.”
And she had. Eve had scrubbed off every trace of her Goth persona, and tied her black hair back in a tight ponytail. She’d changed into a plain black hoodie – one without skulls or symbols, so Claire could only figure she’d raided someone else’s locker for it – and the only thing left to indicate she wasn’t like every other college-age girl on campus were the thick-soled boots she was wearing. Still, those weren’t all that noticeable. She’d even thrown on an old pair of blue jeans.
“Wow. We really are stealthy now,” Claire said, and shut up her computer. “Can we store stuff in the back?”
“Sure, my locker has an actual lock.”
Claire raised her eyebrows and tugged the cord of the black hoodie. “And you keep this in it?”
“I didn’t say that the locks couldn’t be picked, but actually, my good buddy Edie never locks hers anyway. Come on, let’s get the storage taken care of.”
In the end, they left Michael’s guitar, Claire’s backpack (with laptop) and pretty much everything else behind, as Eve set up the LUNCH BREAK sign on the counter and locked up the register. In a surprisingly short time, they were headed out again. Michael had brought a leather hat, which looked kind of sloppy-cool and shaded his face and neck. He kept his hands in his pockets.
“You’re not as sensitive anymore,” Claire said. “To the sun, I mean.” Because when Michael had first been venturing out, he’d had to drape himself in a blanket to keep from burning.
“Well, it’s cloudy,” he pointed out. It was; there were ominous dark masses in the sky, and the sun had disappeared behind the curtain. “And I’ve got on two layers. But yeah, it’s better now than it was.” He said it as if he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, which was strange; Claire supposed that becoming more stable meant he also felt more like a vampire. “I’ll be okay unless the sun comes out full strength again.”
Which, Claire could tell, it wouldn’t. Rain was coming, the kind of torrential desert rain that would drown the streets and create flash floods out in the arroyos outside of town, and would be complete gone tomorrow. There were already flashes of hidden lightning inside the clouds.
Luckily, they weren’t far from Stinky Doug’s dorm. It held both male and female students, which was lucky, because it meant the three of them were even less noticeable, and there weren’t any sign-ins required. Once they’d made it to the stairwell, Michael took the hat off, stuffed it in his jacket, and ran up the steps with so much ease that Claire, puffing a little in his wake, wondered if maybe this vampire thing might not be okay after all. Eight flights of stairs wasn’t her thing.
At the top, she and Eve caught up with Michael, and their breath, as he stepped out to check the hallway. He motioned them to follow, so it must have been clear. Claire was surprised to see that this dorm hall was pretty much like her old one, the one she’d first lived in when she’d moved to Morganville – dingy, battered, smelling like old beer and desperation. Doors were closed all along the hall, except for a couple at the end that blasted music she didn’t recognize at top volume in some kind of stereo war.
Stinky Doug’s room was the third on the left. Michael paused in front of it, leaned forward and listened, then nodded. He jiggled the knob. Locked.
That was why it was good to have a vampire along, because a simple twist of his wrist and that lock problem? Solved. Michael pushed the door open and disappeared inside, and Eve and Claire followed, shutting the door behind them.
And Claire choked, because Stinky Doug’s personal aroma was nothing compared to the state of his dorm room. Her eyes watered. She couldn’t stand to take a full breath, because she was deeply afraid she was going to vomit. Not that it would make the stench any worse.
“Eww,” Eve said, pitifully, holding her nose shut. “Oh my God! What died?”
Michael turned on the lights. For a couple of seconds, they stared in silence, and then Eve said, in a very small, muffled voice, “It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.”
Because Doug was lying on the bed, eyes open and staring, and he was definitely, completely dead. Not for long, Claire guessed, because blood still dripped from the wound in his neck.
It wasn’t a vampire bite. There was a huge pool of blood soaked into the mattress beneath Doug, and staining his tee shirt crimson.
Michael had gone very, very pale, marble-white in fact. He leaned over the body, maybe checking for signs of life, and shook his head. As Claire and Eve stood rooted to the spot in shock, he ransacked Doug’s backpack, then patted down the dead man’s pockets, pulling out keys, a cell phone, breath mints (that made Claire suddenly sad, that he carried those when he was so generally unpleasant on the senses), a wallet, some change.
No vials of blood.
“We have to go,” Michael said. “Now. Right now.”
“Was it – was it the vamps?” Eve asked. “Can you tell?”
“I don't think so.”
“But – “
“The ones I know wouldn’t be that bloody,” Michael said. “We have to go.”
They were heading for the stairs, and Claire was still feeling a strange, distant sense of disconnection, when the reality of what she’d seen actually hit her, like color and sound and smell all snapping into focus at the same instant.
Doug was dead. He’d been murdered.
She stopped, put her back against the hallway wall, and slid down to a crouch. She couldn’t breathe. Her whole body was shaking. She’d seen a lot of unpleasant things since moving to Morganville, but this ... this was worse. This seemed so ... cold.
And the worst part of it was, Michael thought that the monsters hadn’t done it. Not the side of town she usually thought of as monsters, anyway.
Eve was bending over her, pulling on her arm. Despite having lost the Goth makeup, she looked stark right now, washed pale. “Come on, Claire, we need to get the hell out of here. Too many questions.”
“But we can’t – just leave him – “
“We won’t,” Michael said, and took her other arm. He pulled her to her feet and held her there until her knees stopped shaking. “But we’re not staying. Eve’s right.”
Claire clung to the handrail on the way down. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the way Doug’s face had seemed so slack and empty, the way his eyes stared, all pupils. The way the blood had soaked his bed beneath him.
She stopped on the third floor landing and put her head down, breathing hard. Eve and Michael were already halfway down to the next level, but they turned and came back. They were talking, but she couldn’t really hear them.
It took forever to get moving again, and once they were out in the dorm lobby, to try to act normal. She held on to Michael’s arm, mostly for support. Outside, he put his hat on again and led her to the shade of a tree, where she collapsed in a pathetic heap on the dying grass. Overhead, the dry leaves rattled and hissed. A few broke loose in the freshening breeze.
Michael crouched down beside her, and Eve knelt on the other side. “Claire?” he asked. His eyes were very blue, very clear, and very worried. “Claire, talk to me. You okay?”
“No,” she said. Her voice sounded small and fragile and very far away. “He’s dead. Someone killed him.”
Eve and Michael exchanged worried looks. Michael shook his head. “I’ll get hold of Richard and Hannah,” he said. “This needs to be handled quietly. They need to know what happened before it gets out of hand.”
And right on cue, the thundering music from the top floor of the dorm cut out, and from an open window came the sound of a girl’s scream, long and loud, with razor-edged horror in it. That was the scream Claire hadn’t voiced, the one that still bubbled inside her. Somehow, hearing someone else do it helped ease the pressure. She didn’t feel quite as faint and sick.
“I think that ship’s sailed, Michael,” Eve said, staring toward the dorm. Without the makeup, she looked so young – and so determined. “Better make the call fast. This is going to get crazy fast.”
Michael nodded, stood up, and used his cell phone. It wasn’t a long conversation, but then he dialed another number, and that was a lot longer. Oliver, Claire figured, from the general tone and Michael’s body language. Only Oliver could make him that tense.
He came back as he was shutting down the call, and looked down at her. “You going to be okay?” he asked.
“You mean, now, or generally?”
That made him smile, a little. “Now.”
“I can deal,” Claire said. “Generally, that’s going to be a little bit tougher. I wasn’t born in Morganville. Still getting used to all the ...”
“Mayhem,” Eve said, for once not laughing or making a joke. “Blood. Death. Yeah, sadly, it is something you get used to, but still, this one caught me off guard, too. I’ll call Shane, okay?”
“No, no, don’t, he’ll take off from work and I’m all right, really. I’ll be fine.” She was lying through her teeth, she felt cold and shaky and wished, oh God, more than anything, that Shane was here right now. Or her parents. She’d never missed her mom and dad more than she did right at this moment, which was dumb, because really, what were they going to do?
Hug her. Make her feel safe again, just for a little while. Because that was what parents did, or at least, what they were supposed to do. Eve hadn’t had that privilege, because her home life had been crap, and neither had Shane, who’d had the worst dad in the world, but Claire’s family had been great, and she hadn’t even know how much she missed it until – well, now.
While they waited for the sirens to arrive, Claire pulled out her phone and dialed her dad’s cell phone number. He answered on the third ring.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. He sounded better than he had before, almost normal. Strong. Considering that he’d left Morganville in an ambulance, and he’d almost died – not from the vampires, from his own bad heart – it was so good to hear him be more like himself. The connection crackled and hissed. “Sorry for the noise, I’m out walking. It’s getting windy.”
“Here too. Looks like it might rain.”
“We had some rain earlier this morning. Cooled things down quite a bit. How are you, Claire?”
“Good,” Claire said, and swallowed hard. “I – just wanted to see how you were doing, Dad.”
“Doing great. They’ve got me walking a lot, trying to build up the old cardiovascular health again. I have to say, I’m glad I finally got that surgery. I didn’t realize how bad I’d been feeling until I felt better.” He paused, and with that Dad radar she’d always both loved and dreaded, said, “You didn’t just call to say hello, honey. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The concern in his voice turned her all trembly again, and made her want to cry, but she couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t. “It’s pretty much the same here, you know how it is. How’s Mom?”
“She’s joined some kind of scrapbooking club. I never knew you could spend so much time and money on sticking photos in albums, but that’s your Mom. Once she gets excited about something ...”
“I know, she’s a madman,” Claire finished, and smiled a little. She could just see her mother coming home with bags and bags of stuff to hot-glue into memories. “How’s the new house?”
“Embarrassingly large. With a yard, too. I may have to learn how to garden.”
“Grow me something. Irises. I like irises.”
“Purple ones, right?”
“Yeah, purple’s good.”
“Honey, are you sure you’re all right? You sound odd.”
“Just – allergies,” she said, and wiped her leaking eyes. “You take care, Daddy. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, doubtfully. “Call tomorrow. Your mother will hate me if she doesn’t get her turn.”
“I will. Bye.”
Eve was turned away, watching the dorm, but she’d been paying attention. As Claire finished her call, she said, “Feel better?”
“Yeah,” Claire said. She did. Still shaky, but steadier inside, where it counted.
“I wish I could do that,” Eve said. “Call my mom. But – no. Whiny self-absorbed bitching from her probably wouldn’t have the same effect, although it definitely would make me forget about Doug for a second.”
Michael held out his hand, and Eve took it, and their eyes met for a second before Eve looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “Life sucks, we die, or not. Mom is the least of my problems, right?”
“Right at the moment? Yeah,” Michael said. “And now I want to call my parents.”
Claire thought he might be joking, but with Michael, you never could tell. His parents were cool; she’d met them, once, but they didn’t live in Morganville anymore, and they weren’t even nearby. Like Claire’s parents, they’d been given permission to move because of medical problems. Michael didn’t say much about them, but then, Michael was the quiet type.
In any case, he didn’t have time to do anything, because a police car, siren blasting and lights flaring, pulled up in front of the dorm in the parking lot, where a crowd of students was gathering with their cell phones out, busily clicking pictures and taking video. “Worst invention ever,” Claire muttered. Myrnin was already on about how to disable the feature on all cell phones inside of Morganville. Times like this, she kind of saw his point.
Hannah Moses was second to arrive on the scene, looking crisp and starched in her police uniform; she'd tucked her cornrowed hair up under her cap, and apart from the gold bar on the lapel of her blue shirt, she looked exactly like the other police who got busy cordoning off the scene. Two other men got out of a plain gray car that pulled up behind her -- men Claire recognized with a little start, because she hadn't seen them in a while.
"Hey," said Detective Travis Lowe, nodding to her. He'd lost weight, she thought, and he looked a little bit grayer than before. Detective Joe Hess hadn't changed at all, except that his smile was more guarded as he nodded, too. "I heard you found yourself a genuine dead person."
"Travis," Hannah said, frowning at him. "Go easy on the kid."
"Her? Listen, I know her, she's tough. She can take it. Right, Claire?"
She nodded, because what else did you do when someone said something like that? But she didn't feel tough, really. Not right at this moment. As if he sensed that, Detective Hess cut in front of his partner and came to talk to her. He had a soothing sort of manner, and the gentle tone of voice he used made her feel a little less ... lost.
"Someone you knew, right?" Hess said. "Can you tell me what happened?"
"I -- " Claire suddenly realized that she had a decision to make; tell about the whole reason she and Eve and Michael had come over, or lie and pretend like it was just another of those wacky Morganville coincidences. She didn't feel like lying, though. Not to Detective Hess. "It's Doug, Doug Legrande. He was my lab partner in Professor Larkin's class. He took something he shouldn't have, and I came to ask him to give it back."
Detective Hess was a hell of a lot sharper than most people in Morganville, and he gave her a sideways look as he said, very casually, "Would that thing be something that some people in town wouldn't want to get out?"
"Blood," she said, keeping her voice in a whisper. "You know what kind of blood."
"I do. So tell me what happened when you got here." And he slowly walked her through it, step by step, from the beginning. He'd also walked her off a little from her friends, and Claire saw that Detective Lowe was talking to Eve, while Michael had Hannah as a conversational partner. Double checking facts, Claire guessed. The low-key way it was done made her feel a lot less nervous. By the time she was finished, Detective Lowe had finished up with Eve and was sitting on the back bumper of the gray car, making notes with a pad and pen as he talked to Chief Moses. Hannah had notes, too.
"Did we do anything wrong?" Claire finally asked, as Hess jotted down something as well. "I mean, we tried to do the right thing. For Doug."
"You probably would have been better off reporting it immediately," Hess said. That was one thing she liked about him a lot -- he was kind about it, but he told her the truth. No matter how difficult it was to hear it. "I can't say this wouldn't have still happened, because we can't jump to the conclusion that his theft had anything to do with his murder, but you need to understand that if it did, Doug didn't have to die. He might have been in jail, but he would have been safer. Understand?"
She did, and she felt miserable ... but, oddly, also more centered. It was what he'd been thinking anyway. Hearing him say it didn't make her feel any worse; it made it real enough that she could move on, accept it as a mistake, and plan to never let it happen again.
"I'm sorry," she said. She wasn't sure if Hess understood, but she thought he probably did.
"You're learning," he said. "Sometimes those lessons come harder than others. I'm glad you're all right."
"Thank you." She cleared her throat. "Um, how have you been? I haven't seen you since, you know ..." She didn’t know how to put it. They all avoided really talking about Mr. Bishop, definitely the coldest vampire she’d ever met; he’d been cruel, calculating, and way too powerful. The fact that they’d survived his attempt to take over Morganville had been amazing ... but nobody wanted to risk going through that again.
"Yeah, since that," Hess said. "We've been working. Travis took a vacation for six months, out of town. Other than that, the usual. This is the first outright murder we've had in a while, though."
He didn't sound either bothered or excited about it. Just businesslike. Claire didn't know what to say to that, but it didn't seem to matter. He walked her back over to the police cars and went to consult with Hannah and his partner.
"You take me the most interesting places," Eve was saying Michael when she rejoined them. "Murder scenes, interrogations ..."
He hugged her silently. Overhead, thunder boomed, and the first drops of rain began to fall.
Claire reached in her backpack and brought out the collapsible umbrella she'd put in, and the three of them stood in its shelter as the rain poured down and the police started their investigation. By the time it let up, Hannah said they could leave.
Claire said goodbye to her friends, and went straight to Myrnin.
###
“It’s possible,” Myrnin was muttering to himself, as he paced the floor of the lab. “Entirely possible. Likely, even.”
Claire, coming down the steps from the entrance, dumped her book bag at the usual strategic location – meaning, equally accessible if she needed to defend herself or make a quit exit, was used to coming into the middle of Myrnin’s conversations with himself. “What’s possible?” she asked.
“Anything,” he said absently. “But that’s not what I was talking about. Oh, hello, Claire, you’re in good time. I need an extra pair of hands.”
“As long as I keep them attached,” she said, which earned her a startled stare.
“The things you say to me, you'd think I was some sort of monster. Oh, here, help me with this.” He gestured to one of the lab tables, which held some gleaming new device, with brass fittings and – as always, with Myrnin – pipes, wires, and some kind of strange-looking vacuum tubes. “I need it over there.” He pointed to an empty table across the room. And then he kept on pacing, his white lab coat (a recent discovery of his, he thought it made him look more official) flaring around him. It was somewhat spoiled by the flopping bunny slippers, their fangs showing with every step.
Oh. He wasn’t going to help her move it. Well, of course he wasn’t. Myrnin could have picked it up with one hand and carried it easily from one spot to another, but he was busy thinking. Carrying things was her job. Today, anyway.
Claire picked up the engine – if that was what it was – and staggered with it over to the other table. It felt like he’d packed it with lead, and knowing Myrnin that wasn’t much of a stretch. It smelled like blood and flowers, and she hesitated to even guess what its purpose might have been.
“What’s possible?” she asked again, leaning against the table and trying to work the kinks out of her arms after stretching them about six inches with the weight of that stupid thing, whatever it was.
Myrnin was muttering under his breath, but he paused and glanced at her, even though he kept pacing. “That your friend was murdered by someone who believed he had a drug. Perhaps he was trying to sell the blood.”
"How did you hear about that already?" She was surprised, because she'd meant to tell him all about it. Myrnin waved that away.
"Interesting news travels quickly in a town as boring as this," he said. "Also, I tend to monitor police broadcasts. Your name was mentioned in connection with the investigation. I made a few calls to find out the rest. So, do you think he was trying to develop some sort of drug?"
“Myrnin, Doug as stinky, but he wasn’t crazy. There may be people in Morganville who will just take any old thing to see if it gets them high, but he just saw that blood boil under the lights. He’s not going to try to sell it as a drug.”
“You’d be very surprised what people get up to. But in any case, it’s possible someone else understood the potential of it, and Doug was simply collateral damage.” Myrnin sighed. “I understand it was quite bloody. What a terrible waste.”
He didn’t mean of Doug, of course. He didn’t know Doug, and Claire doubted he would have really cared. No, Myrnin was talking about the waste of plasma. Which made Claire shiver, and reminded her, again, that no matter how cute and cuddly Myrnin could sometimes be, there was something about him that just ... wasn’t quite right.
Not for a human, anyway.
“Frank!” Myrnin yelled, making her jump. “Do you have any insights to share? At all?”
Frank Collins’s voice came out of every speaker in the room – the old radio set in the corner, the newer TV mounted on the wall, the computer on the antique desk, and Claire’s own cell phone in her pocket. “You don’t have to yell. Believe me, I can hear you. Wish to hell I could shut you off.”
“Well, you can’t, and I need your particular expertise,” Myrnin said. He sounded smug, and a little bit vindictive; Myrnin didn’t like Frank, Frank didn’t like anybody who drank plasma, and the whole thing was just plain weird.
Because Frank Collins, Shane’s dad, had once been a bad-ass vampire hunter criminal, and then Mr. Bishop had made him a self-loathing vampire, and now, he was ... dead. She was listening to a dead man, speaking over the radio.
Well, not dead, really, exactly. After Frank had died saving Claire and Shane, Myrnin had scooped out his still-sort-of-living brain, stuck it in a plasma-bath, and hooked it up to a computer. Frank Collins was now the brain that ran Morganville, and thankfully, Shane didn’t know.
Claire could honestly not imagine how that conversation was going to go when he found out. It made her ill to even try to imagine it.
“This would go easier if you’d show your face,” Myrnin said. “Please. You may be assured that by please, I mean do it or I’ll put an injection of something nasty in your plasma.”
“Myrnin!” Claire blurted, wide-eyed. He shrugged.
“You have no idea how difficult he’s been lately. I thought Ada was a problem, but she was positively the model of decorum next to this one,” he said. “Well? I’m waiting, Frank.”
In the corner, a faint shadow appeared, a blur of static that resolved into a flat image on the three-dimensional background. He wasn’t bothering with a color image; maybe Frank thought shades of gray made him look more badass.
If so, he was right.
His computer image looked years younger than Claire had last seen him; he had grungy good looks, though his hair was long and messy, and he still had a wicked bad scar on his face. He was dressed in black leather, including a jacket with lots of silver buckles, and big stomping boots. “Better?” his voice asked. The image’s mouth moved, but his voice still came in surround from the speakers. “And if you mess with me, I’ll hit you back, you bloodsucking geek. Don’t think I can’t.”
Myrnin smiled, fangs down. “Well, you can try,” he almost purred. “Now. Let’s have a chat about the criminal elements of Morganville, since you have such a fine and intimate acquaintance with them.”
Frank’s 2-D avatar didn’t have much in the way of facial expression, but then, Frank in 3-D form hadn’t been big on emoting, either. His voice, however, was full of sarcasm. “Always glad to be of help to the vampire community,” he said. “We all know there is no crime in Morganville. And the humans are all just happy to be here. It’s paradise on earth. Ain’t that what it says in the brochure?”
Myrnin lost his smile, and his dark eyes got that dangerously hot look that made Claire nervous. “I suppose you think that you’re irreplaceable in your current position,” he said. “You’re a brain in a jar, Frank. By definition, you are eminently replaceable.”
Now Frank’s avatar smiled. It seemed just as artificial as the rest of him. “Then pull the plug if you think you can do better.”
Myrnin’s gaze slid to Claire, and she felt that chill again, the one that rushed up from the bottom of her spine right up to the top of her head. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She knew he’d always thought she was a better candidate for the brain in a jar thing – which meant he thought she’d be easier to control. Frank had just been at the right, or wrong, place at the right time to take her place.
That could always change.
Frank must have figured that out, too, because he said, “You touch my kid’s girl and I’ll end this miserable town. You know I can.”
“Ada couldn’t pull that off, and she had much longer to think about it than you have,” Myrnin said, suddenly back to his old self. “So let’s abandon the empty threats, shall we? And get back to the subject? I need to understand who in this town might be willing to kill for a sample of vampire blood.”
Frank’s laugh was dry and scratchy and full of contempt. “You want me to print out a phone directory? Between the people who want to figure out how to kill you better, the ones who want to protect you because they have money riding on it, and the ones who just dig the whole undead look, could be anybody.”
“A list of anyone who is known to be making anti-vampire weapons, then,” Myrnin said, with icy precision. “And anyone who might possibly be researching how to use vampire blood as a drug.”
“That ship sailed last century,” Frank said. “Everybody knows it makes a crap drug. No real high to it. Makes you stronger for a while, but it’s got no bump, and the fall’s worse than steroids. They tried combining it with other stuff, but there’s nothing you can add it to that vampire blood won’t break down in a hurry.”
Silence. Myrnin was surprised, Claire realized; he hadn’t known humans had even thought about any of this. And it bothered him. If it bothered Myrnin, it would make the other vampires crazy. “How far back does this go?”
“It was already old news when I was in high school,” Frank shrugged. “People kept on trying, but nothing ever worked. So I think you can write off the drug angle. Now, the killing your kind better motive ... that, I can believe. It would have been at the top of my Christmas list.”
Frank was still identifying vampires as “you,” not “us,” which was interesting. He’d been a vampire a relatively short time, and Claire knew he’d been forced into it ... not something he would have ever chosen for himself. He took a special delight in seeing the vamps one-upped.
“Then I’ll need a list of those people,” Myrnin said. “We’ll need to interview them.”
“No.”
The word came out flat, and final. And it rang on the cold stone of the lab’s walls and floors, until Myrnin repeated it, very softly. “No?”
“No. I was one of them, and I’m not going to put their names on a piece of paper for you and yours to go out and hunt down.”
“Maybe your son knows,” Myrnin said. He said it in a very offhand way, and without looking at Claire. He was staring at hard at Frank’s flickering image. “Maybe I should ask him instead. Forcefully.”
Frank’s image shifted, and Claire could actually feel the menace coming off of it now, like an icy wind. “Maybe you shouldn’t even think about going there.”
“Oh, I do,” Myrnin said, and raised his eyebrows. “I think about it quite a lot.” There was something fey coming out in him, in response to Frank’s defiance; it was something Claire hardly ever saw. Maybe it was a guy thing.
She picked up the first pointy thing that came to hand – a pair of scissors – and jammed them hard against Myrnin’s back – not into his back, stabby-wise, but enough to make an impression.
“Ow,” he said absently, and looked over his shoulder at her. “What?”
“Leave Shane out of it,” she said, very quietly. That was all. No explanations, no threats.
Myrnin turned, very slowly, to face her. That strange, uncomfortable light in his eyes was still glittering, but as he stared at her, it faded, like someone turned down a dimmer switch. “All right,” he said. “Since you ask so nicely.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“I’m aware of that. The sharp point in my back did make it clear.” He caught her wrist in one of those lightning-quick vampire motions, and took the scissors away from her. He put them in the pocket of his lab coat. “Wouldn’t want you hurting yourself.”
“No,” Claire said. “You think that’s your job.”
A quick flash of a smile, not a very nice one, and Myrnin turned back to Frank. “All right, my unpleasant friend, we’ll have done with threats, both yours and mine. Please, for the sake of young Claire, here, will you be so kind as to provide me with a few places where I might look for a murderer?”
“The mirror’s a great place to start,” Frank said. “But if you’re talking humans ... I can give you maybe two names. We’d be better off if they were off the streets anyway.”
“Detente,” Myrnin said. “How lovely.”
