by Rachel Caine
Bitter Blood
( The Morganville Vampires - 13 )
Rachel Caine
For years, the human and vampire residents of Morganville, Texas, have managed to co-exist in peace. But now that the threat to the vampires has been defeated, the human residents are learning that the gravest danger they face is the enemy within.
Thanks to the eradication of the parasitic creatures known as the draug, the vampires of Morganville have been freed of their usual constraints. With the vampires indulging their every whim, the town's human population is determined to hold on to their lives by taking up arms. But college student Claire Danvers isn't about to take sides, considering she has ties to both the humans and the vampires.
To make matters worse, a television show comes to Morganville looking for ghosts, just as vampire and human politics collide. Now, Claire and her friends have to figure out how to keep the peace without ending up on the nightly news — or worse.
Bitter Blood
(Book 13 in the Morganville Vampires series)
A novel by Rachel Caine
To Heidi Berthiaume, an exceptional woman
of grace, vision, strength, and passion…I only wish Claire
could be half the hero you are, every day.
To Sarah Brooke, also a hero.
Literally.
In this book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Sarah Weiss, for keeping me as sane and organized as it’s possible for me to get…You seriously rock.
To the lovely crew of the Azamara Journey. There will never be a nicer place to be panicking over a deadline. Thanks for the support, the love, and the cheers.
To you, dear reader, for making Morganville a living place that continues to be (for me!) a joy to visit.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
You’ll be seeing several points of view in this book. Claire’s is our basic story, with Amelie, Oliver, Shane, Michael, and Myrnin adding their own points of view to what’s happening. So be sure to note the chapter headings.
INTRODUCTION
Morganville, Texas, isn’t like other towns. Oh, it’s small, dusty, and ordinary, in most ways, but the thing is, there are these—well, let’s not be shy about it. Vampires. They own the town. They run it. And until recently they were the unquestioned ruling class.
But the vampires’ reputation for invulnerability has taken some hits lately. The troublesome underground human revolt, led by Captain Obvious, never seems to die; even though the Founder of Morganville and her vampire friends defeated their most dire enemies, the water-monster draug, they needed human help to do it.
Now Morganville is rebuilding, and it’s a new day…. But without the threat of the much-feared draug to hold them back, what’s to keep Morganville’s vampires from regaining their iron hold on the town?
One thing’s for sure: there’s going to be trouble.
And where there’s trouble, there’s Claire Danvers.
PROLOGUE
AMELIE
“I have a surprise for you,” Oliver said.
I—not without reason—expected him to perhaps present a velvet box cradling rare jewels, or even a new pet…but instead he held out a piece of expensive, heavy paper marked with the Morganville seal in the corner in thick, still-warm wax.
“Read it.”
He collapsed into one of my brocaded armchairs across from my desk, crossed one leg over the other, and gave me a long, slow smile that made me shiver. Not in dread—oh, no. In something far more complex, and far more terrifying. We had been enemies a long time, uncomfortable allies for the past few years, and now…now, I hesitated to put a name on what we were.
In more-ancient days, the word would have been intimates, which meant everything or nothing, as the situation required.
I lowered my gaze from that knowing expression and read the words inscribed in gorgeous, flowing script—the hand of a trained clerk, obviously, who’d been given proper education in a time when that truly mattered.
WHEREAS the Elders’ Council of Morganville, concerned for the safety and security of all within its borders of influence, has resolved to enact a law requiring the identification of all persons, whether mortal or immortal. Such identification shall further be carried upon the persons of residents at all times. Whereas such proof of identity is vital to the health of our community, we also are resolved that the violation of such requirements shall be considered a direct offense to the council, and as such may be punishable with the First, Second, and Final Actions as written within the codes formulated by the Founder from the earliest foundation of this great community.
In approval of these requirements, and of these punishments, the Founder of Morganville sets her signature hereupon.
I froze, pen at the ready, and frowned. “What’s this?”
“As we discussed,” he said. “The requirement for citizens of Morganville to carry appropriate identification. For the vampires, of course, the requirements are somewhat different, but they’ll still carry a card. It wouldn’t do to appear to be discriminatory.”
“Indeed not,” I said, a ripple of irritation gliding through my tone. “I thought we discussed waiting a year to implement such identification measures, until they could be properly explained.”
“I would have believed it was possible to wait that long had I not heard a rumor that Captain Obvious was once again among us, and agitating against us.” Oliver’s voice carried a bitterly dark undertone now, and his distaste for the nom de guerre of our most bothersome human adversary showed in the expression on his sharp, angular face. Age is of no consequence to vampires, of course, save in what power it brings with it, but Oliver was a rarity—a vampire who had been turned in his later years, and retained that appearance in his immortality, with gray threading his brown hair and lines pinching his skin at the eyes and mouth. He could appear warm and friendly when he chose, but I had long ago learned that Oliver was first, last, and always a warrior.
And this…Captain Obvious, as the humans of Morganville now named him, was cut from the same cloth. A fighter, determined to bring us harm. We had killed him a dozen times in the past hundred years, and, mortal lives being what they are, we’d never expected at first for the problem to resurrect itself again, and again, and again; yet as soon as a Captain Obvious fell, another stepped forward, masked and hidden, to take his place.
And now, it seemed, we were forced to endure yet another would-be avenger.
I felt Oliver’s gaze on me, warm and yet challenging; for all the barriers that had fallen between us, his ambition wasn’t one of them. He demanded more of himself, and thus more of me. It was a dangerous dance, and that was part—if not most—of the attraction.
“Yes,” I said. “If they feel confident enough in their own power to openly follow yet another rabble-rouser, then I suppose we must have our own answer.” And I penned my elaborate signature, all loops and swirls and slashes, to the bottom of the formal document. In true modern-age fashion, this would be photographed, digitized, transferred to bland and simple words on a screen…but the effects were the same. The word of a ruler was law.
And I was now the uncontested ruler of Morganville. All my enemies had fallen; the sickness that had crippled vampires for so very long had been conquered at last, thanks to the intervention of humans, most notably that troublesome young Claire, apprentice to my oldest friend, Myrnin. We had likewise dispatched at last my father, Bishop, that blood-maddened beast. And just in the past few months, the cool, cruel draug, who had hunted us to the edge of extinction, had been destroyed and were no more.
Now, nothing stood between my people—the last of the vampires—and the power and status that were rightly due us.
Nothing, that was, but the to
o-confident pride of the humans in this town—humans I had chosen, brought together, allowed to grow and flourish and prosper in cooperation and under strict conditions; humans who had repaid me, in large part, with fear, spite, and resistance that grew stronger each year.
No more.
“No more,” Oliver said aloud, and rose to take the decree from my hand. “No more will these vassals think they can slip away in secrecy from their crimes. It’s our time, my queen. Our time to ensure our final survival.” And he captured my hand in his, bent, and touched his cool lips to my equally cool skin.
I shivered.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I believe it is.”
His lips traveled up my arm, in slow and gentle kisses, and found my neck; he unpinned my hair from its heavy crown and let it fall loose. His strong hands went around me and pulled me to him. He was as irresistible as Newton’s gravity, and I gave up politics and pride and status for the sheer, novel joy of being wanted.
And if there was a part of me, a small and hidden part, that questioned all this and understood that the more power I took for the vampires, the more the humans would rebel…well, I buried it with ruthless efficiency. I was tired of being alone, and what Oliver drew from me was pleasant, and in some measure necessary.
The old ways of Morganville…They were my past.
Oliver was my future.
ONE
CLAIRE
Claire Danvers was in a rare bad mood, and nearly getting arrested didn’t improve it.
First, her university classes hadn’t gone well at all, and then she’d had a humiliating argument with her “adviser” (she usually thought of him that way, in quotes, because he didn’t “advise” her to do anything but take boring core subjects and not challenge herself), and then she’d gotten a completely unfair B on a physics paper she knew had been letter perfect. She would have grudgingly accepted a B on something unimportant, like history, but no, it had to be in her major. And of course Professor Carlyle wasn’t in his office to talk about it.
So she wasn’t fully paying attention when she stepped off the curb. Traffic in Morganville, Texas, wasn’t exactly fast and furious, and here by Texas Prairie University, people were fully used to stopping for oblivious students.
Still, the screech of brakes surprised her and sent her stumbling back to the safety of the sidewalk, and it was only after a couple of fast breaths that she realized she’d nearly been run over by a police cruiser.
And a policeman was getting out of the car, looking grim.
As he stalked over to her she realized he was probably a vampire—he was too pale to be a human, and he had on sunglasses even here in the shade of the building. Glancing at the cruiser to confirm, she saw the extreme tinting job on the windows. Definitely vampire police. The official slogan of the police was to protect and serve, but her boyfriend called the vampire patrol the to protect and serve up for dinner patrol.
It was unusual to see one so close to the university, though. Normally, vampire cops worked at night, and closer to the center of town, where Founder’s Square was located, along with the central vamp population. Only the regular residents would see them there, and not the transient—though pretty oblivious—students.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and swallowed a rusty taste in her mouth that seemed composed of shock and entirely useless anger. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Obviously,” he said. Like most vamps, he had an accent, but she’d long ago given up trying to identify it; if they lived long enough, vampires tended to pick up dozens of accents, and many of them were antique anyway. His facial features seemed…maybe Chinese? “Identification.”
“For walking?”
“Identification.”
Claire swallowed her protest and reached in her backpack for her wallet. She pulled out her student ID card and Texas driver’s license and handed them over. He glanced at them and shoved the cards back.
“Not those,” he said. “Your town identification.”
“My…what?”
“You should have received it in the mail.”
“Well, I haven’t!”
He took off his sunglasses. Behind them, his eyes were very dark, but there were hints of red. He stared at her for a moment, then nodded.
“All right. When you get your card, carry it at all times. And next time, watch your step. You get yourself hit by a car, I’ll consider you roadkill.”
With that, he put the sunglasses back on, turned, and got back in his car. Before Claire could think about any way to respond, he’d put the cruiser in gear and whipped around the corner.
It did not improve her mood.
Before she could even think about going home, Claire had a mandatory stop to make, at her part-time job. She dreaded it today, because she knew she was in no shape to deal with the incredibly inconsistent moods of Myrnin, her vampire mad-scientist boss. He might be laser focused and super-rational; he might be talking to crockery and quoting Alice in Wonderland (that had been the scene during her last visit). But whatever he was doing, he’d have work for her, and probably too much of it.
But at least he was never, ever boring.
She’d made the walk so often that she did it on autopilot, hardly even noticing the streets and houses and the alley down which she had to pass; she checked her phone and read texts as she jogged down the long marble steps that led into the darkness of his lab, or lair, whichever mood he was in today. The lights were on, which was nice. As she put her phone away, she saw that Myrnin was bent over a microscope—an ancient thing that she’d tried to put away a dozen times in favor of a newer electronic model, but he kept unearthing the thing. He stepped away from the eyepiece to scribble numbers frantically on a chalkboard. The board was covered in numbers, and to Claire’s eyes they looked completely random—not just in terms of their numerical values, but in the way they’d been written, at all angles and in all areas of the available space. Some were even upside down. It wasn’t a formula or an analysis. It was complete gibberish.
So. It was going to be one of those days. Lovely.
“Hey,” Claire said with fatalistic resignation as she dumped her backpack on the floor and opened up a drawer to retrieve her lab coat. It was a good thing she looked first; Myrnin had dumped an assortment of scalpels in on top of the fabric. Any one of them could have sliced her to the bone. “What are you doing?”
“Did you know that certain types of coral qualify as immortal? The definition of scientific immortality is that if the mortality rate of a species doesn’t increase after it reaches maturity, there is no such thing as aging…black coral, for instance. Or the Great Basin bristlecone pine. I’m trying to determine if there is any resemblance between the development of those cellular colonies with the replacement of human cells that takes place in a conversion to vampirism….” He was talking a mile a minute, with a fever pitch that Claire always dreaded. It meant he was in need of medication, which he wouldn’t take; she’d need to be stealthy about adding it to his blood supply, again, to bring him down a little into the rational zone. “Did you bring me a hamburger?”
“Did I— No, Myrnin, I didn’t bring you a hamburger.” Bizarre. He’d never asked for that before.
“Coffee?”
“It’s late.”
“Doughnuts?”
“No.”
“What good are you, then?” He finally looked up from the microscope, made another note or two on the board, and stepped back to consider the chaos of chalk marks. “Oh dear. That’s not very—is this where I started? Claire?” He pointed at a number somewhere near the top right corner.
“I wasn’t here,” Claire said, and buttoned up her lab coat. “Do you want me to keep working on the machine?”
“The what? Oh, yes, that thing. Do, please.” He crossed his arms and stared at the board, frowning now. It was not a personal-grooming highlight day for him, either. His long, dark hair was in tangles and needed a wash; she was sure the oversized somewha
t-white shirt he was wearing had been used as a rag to wipe up chemical spills at sometime in its long life. He’d had the presence of mind to put on some kind of pants, though she wasn’t sure the baggy walking shorts were what she’d have chosen. At least the flip-flops kind of matched. “How was school?”
“Bad,” she said.
“Good,” he said absently, “very good…Ah, I think this is where I started…. Fibonacci sequence—I see what I did….” He began drawing a spiral through the numbers, starting somewhere at the center. Of course, he’d be noting down results in a spiral. Why not?
Claire felt a headache coming on. The place was dirty again, grit on the floor that was a combination of sand blown in from the desert winds, and whatever Myrnin had been working with that he’d spilled liberally all over the place. She only hoped it wasn’t too toxic. She’d have to schedule a day to get him out of here so she could get reorganized, sweep up the debris, stack the books back in some kind of order, shelve the lab equipment…. No, that wouldn’t be a day. More like a week.
She gave up thinking about it, then went to the lab table on the right side of the room, which was covered by a dusty sheet. She pulled the cover off, coughed at the billows of grit that flew up, and looked at the machine she was building. It was definitely her own creation, this thing: it lacked most of the eccentric design elements that Myrnin would have put into it, though he’d sneaked in a few flywheels and glowing liquids along the way. It was oblong, practical, bell-shaped, and had oscillation controls along the sides. She thought it looked a bit like an old-fashioned science fiction ray gun, but it had a very different use…if it had ever worked.
Claire hooked up the device to the plug-in analyzing programs, and began to run simulations. It was a project Myrnin had proposed months ago, and it had taken her this long to get even close to a solution…. The vampires had an ability, so far mysterious and decidedly unscientific, to influence the minds and emotions of others—humans, mostly, but sometimes other vampires. Every vampire had a different set of strengths and weaknesses, but most shared some kind of emotional-control mechanism; it helped them calm their prey, or convince them to surrender their blood voluntarily.