Bitter Blood tmv-13

by Rachel Caine

  Carlyle stared at her in silence for a moment, then nodded. Apparently, that was supposed to make her feel insecure. It didn’t. She knew she was right; she knew he’d have to accept it, and she waited for that to happen. Once he’d given her the signal, she put down the chalk and walked back to her desk.

  But Carlyle wasn’t done with her quite yet. “Since you did so well with that, Danvers, why don’t you predict the following for me?” And he scribbled on the board another equation: Kp=Pb/Pa-[B]/[A]. “What happens if T is infinitely large?” T was completely missing from that equation, but it didn’t really matter. T was an implied variable, but that was misleading. It was a trick question, and Claire saw many of the others open their books and begin flipping, but she didn’t bother. She met Carlyle’s eyes and said, “K equals two.”

  “Your reasoning?”

  “If T is infinitely large, all the states of energy are equal and occupied. So there are twice as many states in B as A. K equals two. It’s not really a calculation. It’s just a logic exercise.”

  She was taking advanced thermodynamics purely to help her understand some of what Myrnin had accomplished in building his portal systems in Morganville…. They were doorways that warped space, and she knew there had to be some explanation for it in physics, but so far, she’d found only pieces here and there. Thermodynamics was a necessary component, because the energy produced in the transfer had to go somewhere. She just hadn’t figured out where.

  Carlyle raised his eyebrows and smiled at her thinly. “Someone ate her breakfast this morning,” he said, and turned his laser focus on another hapless student. “Gregory. Explain to me the calculation if T equals zero.”

  “Uh—” Gregory was a page flipper, and Carlyle waited patiently while he looked for the answer. It was blindingly obvious, but Claire bit her tongue.

  It took Gregory an excruciating four minutes to admit defeat. Carlyle went through three other students, then finally, and with a sigh, turned back to Claire. “Go ahead,” he said, clearly irritated now.

  “If there isn’t any T, there isn’t any B,” she said. “So it has to be zero.”

  “Thank you.” Carlyle glared at the others in the class. “I weep for the state of engineering, I truly do, if this is the best you can do with something so obvious. Danvers gets bonus credit. Gregory, Shandall, Schaefer, Reed, you all get failing pop quiz scores. If you’d like to solve extra-credit equations, see me afterward. Now. Chapter six, the residual entropy of imperfect crystals…”

  It was a grim thing, Claire thought, that even when she got the high grade and dirty looks from her fellow students, she still felt bored and underchallenged. She wished she could go talk to Myrnin for a while. Myrnin was always unpredictable, and that was exciting. Granted, sometimes the problem was to just stay alive, but still; he was never boring. She also didn’t have to sit through the incredibly dense (and wrong) explanations from other students when she was at his lab. If he’d ever had assistants that dumb, he’d have eaten them.

  Somehow, she made it through the hour, and the next, and the next, and then it was time to run to the University Center and grab a Coke and a sandwich. It wasn’t Eve’s day to work the counter at the coffee shop, so after gulping down lunch, Claire—done at school for the day—walked to Common Grounds, just to check in on her.

  It was only lightly occupied just now, thanks to the vagaries of college schedules; there were a few Morganville residents in the house, and a group of ten students very seriously arguing the merits of James Joyce. Claire claimed a comfortably battered armchair and dumped her bag in it; the chair and everything else smelled like warm espresso, with a hint of cinnamon. Common Grounds, for all its flaws, still had a homey, welcoming atmosphere.

  But when she turned to the counter, she saw a sullen young man in a tie-dyed apron and red-dyed emo hair, who glared at her as she approached. He yawned.

  “Hi,” she said. “Um, where’s Eve?”

  “Fired,” he said, and yawned again. “They called me in to take her shift. Man, I’m fried. Forty-eight hours without sleep—thank God for coffee. What’s your poison?”

  At Common Grounds, that might be literal, Claire thought. “Bottled water,” she said, and forked over too much cash for it. Nobody drank Morganville’s tap water. Not after the draug invasion. Sure, they’d cleared the pipes and everything, but Claire—like most of the residents—couldn’t shake the idea that something had once been alive in there.

  Better to pay a ridiculous amount for water bottled out of Midland.

  “So, what happened this morning to get her fired? Because I know she was planning to come in.”

  Counter Guy wasn’t chatty enough to come up with an answer; he just shrugged and grunted as he rang up her purchase and handed over the cold bottle. He had tattoos running up and down his arms, mostly Chinese symbols. Claire considered asking him what they meant, but in her experience he probably didn’t have a clue. He did have one thing in common with Eve: black-painted fingernails.

  “Is Oliver here?”

  “Office,” Counter Guy said. “But I wouldn’t if I was you. Boss ain’t in a good mood.”

  He was probably right, Claire thought, but she knocked anyway, and received a curt, “In,” a command she followed. She shut the door behind her. Counter Guy and the other residents out there wouldn’t come to her rescue if things went badly, and she didn’t want the clueless students involved. They were having enough trouble with James Joyce.

  Oliver didn’t even glance up, but then he didn’t need to, she thought; he’d probably identified her before she’d come anywhere near the office, just by her heartbeat or the smell of her blood or something. Vampires were an endless source of creepy. “Pennyfeather attacked Eve last night,” she said. “Did you tell him to do it?”

  He still didn’t bother to look up from whatever piece of paper he was reading. He picked up a pen and scribbled down a note, then signed the bottom. “Why?”

  “He left a note pinned to the door, ‘Done by Order of the Founder.’”

  “I am not the Founder,” he said. “And Pennyfeather is no longer my creature. He does as he pleases. Though I would say his attitude is an accurate weather vane of public opinion among our kind, if that is what you’re asking.” Oliver didn’t ask how Eve was, or what had happened, and that, Claire thought, was different. He’d kind of grown a bit more human since she’d first met him, but now he was back to the bad old vamp, unfeeling and utterly careless of human lives. He wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt Eve, probably, but he wouldn’t bother to help her, either, if it meant he had to make an effort. “Do you have some valid reason for disturbing me, or are you simply trying to annoy me?”

  “I know what’s happening,” Claire said softly, and his pen stopped moving on the paper. The sudden silence made her feel breathless, as if she were standing at the edge of a bottomless pit full of darkness. “You’ve wanted to rule Morganville ever since you found out it existed. You came here wanting to get Amelie out of power and make yourself king or something. But she didn’t let you, so you had to get…creative.”

  Now he looked up at her, and although his face was human, softened by loose, curling gray hair, the expression and the focus were purely those of a predator. He didn’t say anything.

  Claire plunged ahead. “Amelie trusted you. She let you get close. And now you’re playing her to get what you always wanted. Well…it’s not going to work. She may like you, but she’s not stupid, and when she wakes up—and she will—you’re going to be sorry you tried it.”

  “I don’t see that my relationship with the Founder is any of your business.”

  “You can influence other vampires,” she said. “You told me so before. And you’re subtle about it. Whatever you’re doing to her, stop it before this all goes bad. The humans won’t stand for being cattle, and Amelie won’t let you go as far as you think. Just…back off. Oliver—maybe I’m crazy for saying this, but you’re not like this. Not anymore. I don’t th
ink you really want all this deep down.”

  He stared at her with empty, oddly bright eyes, and then went back to his paperwork.

  “You may leave now,” he said. “And count yourself lucky you are allowed to do so.”

  “Why did you fire Eve?” she asked. It was probably a mistake, but she couldn’t help but ask it. And surprisingly, he answered.

  “She accused me of trying to have her killed,” he said. “Just as you did. Unfortunately, I’m unable to fire you. And my patience is now at an end. Begone.”

  “Not until you tell me—”

  She never even saw him move, but suddenly he was around the desk and slamming the pen into the wood of the door behind her. It was just a simple ballpoint, but it sank an inch deep, vibrating an inch from her head. Claire flinched and came up hard against the barrier at her back. Oliver didn’t move away. This close, he looked like bone and iron, and he smelled—ironically—like coffee. She was forcefully reminded that he’d been a warrior when he was alive, and he wasn’t any less a killer now.

  “Go,” he said, very softly. “If you’re wise, you will go very, very far from here, Claire. But in any case, go from my presence, now.”

  She opened the door.

  And as she did so, she had the blurred impression of someone standing a few feet away on the other side, of people scrambling and exclaiming, of Counter Guy yelling “Hey!” Then she zeroed in not on the figure standing before her, but on what the tall, dark figure was holding.

  It was a crossbow with a silver bolt.

  And before Claire could take a breath or react, the crossbow was raised and fired.

  Claire felt a burning brush against her cheek as the bolt zipped past, and she clapped a hand to the bleeding scrape as she turned to see what had happened.

  The arrow had slammed home in Oliver’s chest, but it was up and to the right of his heart. Claire stared at it with a feeling of unreality; the silver glint, the slowly spreading crimson circle around the shaft, the bright red feather fletching, and Oliver, pinned in place with surprise as much as pain.

  Then he staggered back against his desk. Claire didn’t think; she just acted, reaching out for the crossbow bolt.

  He swatted her hand away with impatient fury, hard enough that he could have broken bones, and said through gritted teeth, “You can’t pull it out from the front, fool. Take it through my back!”

  He said it as if he had no doubt at all that she’d obey, and for a fraction of a second, Claire was tempted to obey him; that might have been her natural tendency to want to help, or it could have been Oliver exerting his will.

  She paused, though, and looked through the still-open doorway.

  The attacker was calmly loading up another bolt in the bow. She didn’t—and couldn’t—recognize the person; it was just a blank figure in some kind of black opaque mask, a zipped-up black hooded jacket, and plain, well-worn blue jeans. Black boots. Gloves. Nothing to betray any personal identification at all, not even gender.

  The figure looked up and saw her standing there, and she felt a chill, unmistakable and indefinable. Then it pointed to her and jerked a thumb at the door. You. Out.

  “Claire!” Oliver snapped. His voice sounded ragged now, and full of fury. “Pull the bolt out!”

  “Did you have Pennyfeather try to kill Eve?”

  The wound around the silver was starting to smoke and blacken, and it must have hurt a whole lot, even if not immediately fatal, because he tried to snarl at her, but it came out as more of a moan. He collapsed down to a sitting position on the floor, leaning one shoulder against the desk. She almost caved in, almost, because he really looked bad just then…vulnerable and damaged.

  But then his eyes flickered bright red in fury, and he said in a poisonous hiss, “I’ll have him kill you if you don’t do as I say, girl. You’re a pet, not a person.”

  “Funny,” she said, “seeing as I’m the only thing standing between you and a guy with a crossbow.” Literally. The masked figure was still standing behind her, ready to fire. She was just in the way. “Did you?”

  “No!” he roared, and convulsed over on his side. The poison was working on him, and working fast.

  Claire turned to face the would-be assassin, who was pointing the crossbow now at her. Directly.

  Move, the figure gestured once again, impatiently. Claire shook her head.

  “Can’t.” She didn’t try to explain, and she wasn’t sure she actually could; there was not a reason in the world why she shouldn’t walk away from Oliver and leave him to whatever fate was bringing. Clearly the rest of the coffeehouse population had fled, including the students; Counter Guy’s red hair and tats had left the building, too. It was just her, standing between Oliver and death.

  She guessed that she was doing it because it didn’t matter that it was Oliver, after all. She’d have done it for anyone. Even Monica. She hated bullies. She hated anyone being kicked when he or she was down, and Oliver was most definitely down.

  Whoever the figure holding the crossbow was, he or she considered taking her out to get to Oliver. She could see that, even if she couldn’t see a face, and she knew that in this moment she was in as much danger as she’d ever been in Morganville. She was utterly at the mercy of whatever this person decided. No one could, or would, help.

  She smelled the acrid tang of burning flesh behind her. Oliver was bad, and getting rapidly worse.

  The masked head nodded, just a little, as if in acknowledgment of what she hadn’t said. The figure lowered the crossbow, stowed it in a black canvas bag, and backed away toward the front of the store. She lost sight of it in the glare of daylight silhouetting the form, though she had the impression that the attacker had stripped off the mask before running out into the street.

  Claire didn’t try to follow. She stood there for a few seconds, then turned and looked at Oliver.

  “If I do this for you,” she said, “you’re going to owe me. And I’m going to collect.”

  He was beyond making a bitter comeback. He just nodded, as if he couldn’t summon up the strength to do more, and managed to roll a little farther over onto his stomach. The sharp, barbed end of the bolt was sticking out of his chest about three inches below his shoulder blade. The edges were wicked, like razors. That might actually be a good thing; it wouldn’t have done quite as much damage that way.

  But she needed to get it out before the silver poisoning got much worse—either that, or leave it in for good—which she could just hear Shane saying was still a perfectly valid option.

  With gritted teeth, she wrapped the loose fabric of her shirt around the razor-sharp arrowhead, grabbed the shaft just below that, and pulled, hard and fast. She almost stopped when Oliver convulsed again, and his mouth opened wide in a silent scream—silent because he couldn’t draw in breath to fuel it—but she didn’t dare quit. Better it was painful now than deadly later.

  It seemed to take forever, but it must have been just a few seconds before she yanked it completely free. She dropped the arrow to the floor with a ringing clang and tried not to think about the blood staining her shirt where she’d pulled it out of his body. Or whose blood it might have been, because it wasn’t really Oliver’s blood, was it? It was borrowed, or stolen, from others.

  She stood up, breathing heavily and trying not to feel nauseated by what she’d just done—not just the blood, or the pain she’d caused, but the fact that she’d just saved Oliver’s life. Shane would have been so angry with her, she realized; he’d have walked away and called it karma. Or justice, at least.

  But right now, that wasn’t the smart play. If Amelie was out to get them—if she really had sent Pennyfeather, and Oliver hadn’t—then she needed Oliver on their side.

  For now.

  Oliver rolled over on his back, eyes tightly shut. The wound in his chest was still smoking, and clearly he was in pain, but he’d heal. Vampires always healed.

  “You’d better not have lied to me,” she said. “And remember, if y
ou come after Eve, you come after all of us. That’s going to be a lot more dangerous for you than some random dude with a mask and a crossbow.”

  He didn’t move, and didn’t speak, but his eyes flicked open and studied her with odd intensity. She couldn’t really decide what he was feeling, but she did decide that she really, truly didn’t care.

  She shut the office door on her way out.

  TEN

  CLAIRE

  “Well?” Shane demanded. “Who was it?” Claire was on the phone with him as she headed home. Wherever he was, it was machine-shop noisy, metal grinding and whining, and he had to shout to make himself heard. “Who tried to hit Oliver?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, Claire. Take a guess.”

  “No, really, I don’t. Whoever it was had a mask and jacket and gloves and everything. Kind of tall, maybe a little on the skinny side. Good with a crossbow, though. Seriously good.” She remembered the cut on her cheek and touched it with tentative fingers. It didn’t really hurt, and the bleeding had stopped, but there was a definite slice. For the first time, she actually wondered how bad it looked, and whether it might leave a scar. “Um, anyway, I didn’t get a look at him without the mask. It wasn’t you, was it?” That last was teasing. She knew better; Shane wouldn’t have fired with her in the way, not unless he had no choice. This was someone who wasn’t quite as…involved.

  “Hell, girl, if it had been me, he’d be dead on the floor right now, because I wouldn’t have missed. Make my day. Tell me he’s hurting.”

  “Oh yeah, he’s definitely hurting,” she said. “And I don’t think he was behind Pennyfeather last night. But there’s something weird about him, Shane.”

  “When isn’t he weird?”

  “No, I mean—” She couldn’t put her finger on it, really. “Did Eve tell you what happened this morning?”

  “What?” Shane instantly sounded on guard again, braced for the bad news. “What now? Damn, hang on…” He retreated from what sounded like a car being crushed in the background, until he found a relatively calm space. “Go on.”