by Rachel Caine
‘You going to make Eve agree with that, too? With letting Michael be some kind of – of lab rat?’ I demanded. ‘Shit, Claire, you know it’s never going to happen. Maybe you can convince me about the rest of them, but not Michael. He’s our friend. He’s my brother.’
‘I don’t really need four subjects,’ Dr Anderson said then, ready to make the concession at just the right time. My dad would have been proud. ‘Three will do. Michael can be kept safe, but unharmed. Does that answer your concerns?’
What had happened, in the moments since Claire had given up Myrnin, was pretty amazing, because we’d gone from being on the deadly end of the deal to negotiating for favours, and I didn’t think Dr Anderson had even realised she was being played as thoroughly and masterfully as she’d once played Claire. It was impressive. And a little scary. That funky weapon wasn’t pointed at me any more, even vaguely; it was aimed down at the ground. That didn’t mean it couldn’t come right back up again, if I did something stupid, but by focusing my anger on Claire, I’d won some breathing space from the real target. I’d put Claire and Anderson on the same side, and now they were just working out details.
I just hoped Claire wasn’t buying into what I was selling. I couldn’t really tell now. She still looked pallid, shocked, and fragile and I wanted to take her in my arms so bad it hurt … but that wasn’t what would help either of us right now.
‘You’ll have to sell it to Eve, not me,’ I said. ‘But you back off Michael and I might be able to live with the rest of it. Maybe.’
‘There’s no maybe, Shane. Maybe earns you prison. So I suggest you think hard about your next answer, yes?’
I let the moment drag out, and then finally nodded. I was trying not to look at Myrnin, because he was curled in a fetal ball on the floor, whispering to himself, and if I’d ever thought he’d looked crazy before, well, I’d been wrong. He looked wrecked now, and I wasn’t sure any of those pieces were going back together again. Myrnin had been breakable, and now he looked shattered.
Claire had a dull, hard look in her eyes, one I recognised; she was trying to keep everything inside, to just get through to the next moment without feeling the pain. I knew that look because I’d just about invented it.
‘So what do you want me to say?’ I asked, and looked at her directly. ‘Claire, tell me what you want me to say. You know I’ll do anything for you. I always have.’
She pulled in a sharp, shaking breath, and said, ‘Just say you’ll back me up when I have to talk to Amelie. Tell her you never saw any of them, or any of … this. Tell her that as far as you know, everything’s normal here.’
‘What about Jesse? Amelie sent her to watch your boss, here. She’s going to be suspicious when Jesse goes missing too.’
‘Jesse will be handled,’ Anderson said. ‘She has pressure points, and I know how to apply them. She’ll do what I tell her when it counts, and she’s got little love for Amelie anyway.’
I knew all of a sudden exactly what that pressure point was … Myrnin. Jesse had a special little sparkle when she talked to him; she was fine with Oliver, but extra fine with Count Crackula. Dr Anderson would keep Jesse in line by threatening more damage to Myrnin. And it was all okay, because hell, they were just vamps, right? Didn’t matter if they got hurt. Lab rats.
I could feel the ghost of my dad nodding in agreement with that, and it made me feel sick, deep down. ‘Thought you and Jesse had some kind of friendship going,’ I said.
‘We did, once,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘And you of all people should understand that you can’t rely on a vampire for sentimentality. They just don’t have the wiring in their heads to really feel the way we do. It’s counterfeit, a mask they wear to draw their prey in and keep them close. They’re predators, pure and simple. They’re just extremely good at it.’
There were sounds in the hallway, and I heard some kind of vehicles pulling up in the parking lot. The fun was over now; Claire had made her play, I’d supported it, and now … now we’d see if Dr Anderson really believed us.
Patrick Douche Bag Davis appeared in the doorway. ‘We’ve got secured vehicles outside,’ he said. ‘We can manacle the vampires with silver, they won’t go anywhere. What about these two? Are they prisoners?’
I felt the weight of Anderson’s stare on me. I was hanging over the fire pit, for sure; she wasn’t kidding about getting Liz to blab that I was the one who’d kidnapped her, and that put me in federal prison, doing long time. I was used to Morganville’s jail cells, but this was something else.
‘I need a show of good faith,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘So, you’re going to show us where you left your friends Michael and Eve. We need to retrieve Pete and Liz, as well. For their own safety.’
That phrase made me grind my teeth, but I tried not to let it show. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you there.’
‘Of course you will,’ she said. ‘Because if you don’t, I’ll find them anyway, and I promise you, the outcome won’t be quite so nice. I want Claire’s cooperation and support, and she’s clearly willing to offer it. But I don’t need yours, Shane. You can go missing just as easily as the vampires, and there are a surprising number of John Does who die in Boston every year. You could be one of them, donating your body to the medical school. Are we clear?’
So clear I could practically see the shine on it. I nodded without bothering to say anything, and when Patrick Davis gestured to me, I followed. Before I got in the blacked-out van, though, I turned around. Dr Anderson was behind me, with Claire next to her.
‘Just one thing,’ I said to Anderson. ‘I owe Dr Davis something.’
She probably knew what was coming, because she didn’t make a move, and I didn’t wait for permission. Sometimes, it’s just better to ask for an apology.
I punched him in the face, and damn, it felt seriously good, all the way down my arm and into my guts. Just a little violence, to let off the steam from the boiling pot.
‘That’s from Liz,’ I said. ‘Asshole.’
Dr Anderson laughed. Davis went down hard, cradling his probably broken nose, and someone made a joke about nosebleeds and vampires, and I didn’t listen because I swung into the passenger seat, buckled in, and rested my head against the glass. For a second or two, the red haze refused to clear. That’s the danger of letting the beast off the chain for a bit; sometimes, he just doesn’t want to come back. But by the time the driver was strapped in and the door had slammed shut, I was my old, cheery self again, and I gave him a smart-assed thumbs up.
‘You’re damn lucky one of us didn’t put a bullet in you,’ he told me.
‘I live a charmed life,’ I agreed. ‘Head out of the lot and turn left. I’ll give you directions.’
Claire and Dr Anderson hadn’t gotten in the van with us. I turned my head and watched the two of them standing there with another set of guys in suits, and I hoped like hell that I was doing the right thing, because if I wasn’t, if somehow I had gotten all this wrong …
Then we were all going to suffer for it.
The warehouse looked as deserted as ever. I made the driver park a block down, just in case Michael had recovered enough to give some kind of warning; I ended up at the head of a column of four guys, including the driver. He was a bland, blank sort of guy, but then you put a dark suit on most men and they start blending together. He was African-American, but that didn’t make him any different from the others, except the usual height and weight and jacket size variations.
‘So what’s your deal?’ I asked him, as we moved down the alley toward the warehouse. ‘You work for some kind of company?’
‘Yeah, kid, I’m a vice president at Van Helsing Incorporated.’
‘Ha, very funny, yeah, I’ve read Dracula, surprise.’ Jackass. ‘What I mean is, are you some kind of true believer or just hired on?’
‘You asking if I’ve lost people to the vampires? Because yeah. We all have. So, shut your mouth and do your job. Let us do ours.’
That answered my quest
ion pretty well, actually. True believers. Not great news, considering that I had a lot of experience with those kinds of people. Much better to be dealing with hired guys who didn’t have an emotional stake in what was happening.
‘I’m Shane,’ I said. Step one, try to form a bond. Any hostage negotiator will tell you that’s important to stay alive.
‘Don’t care what your mommy and daddy called you,’ he said. ‘Now shut up and show us where you left them.’
So much for bonding. I followed instructions, and reached the warehouse’s bent siding where we’d crawled in. I pointed to it and indicated he ought to let me go in first. He nodded. I didn’t take that as any kind of promise he’d wait, though. He might give me a minute, or he might just come in yelling, guns at the ready.
I ducked inside, and immediately was on the business end of a nice, sharp piece of broken bottle at my throat. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, girl, I’m on your side,’ I told Eve. She let out a gasp and stepped back, dropping the glass, and then lunged at me to wrap her arms around me. She smelt like tears and desperation.
‘Oh, God, thank you, I was so scared – Shane, he’s not getting better, we need to get him out of here, we have to—’ Her voice faded out as she pushed back from me. I hadn’t said anything, but I guessed my body language had clued her in that something was off. ‘Where’s Claire?’
‘Trust me,’ I said. It was all I had time for, so I said it fast. ‘Trust me whatever happens. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she said, but her voice shook, and from what I could see of her face, she looked terrified. ‘Shane—’
And then the driver edged into the room, nailed her in place with a sudden flare of a flashlight, and as she tried to block out the beam, he stepped aside to let the others inside. ‘Freeze! Down on your knees!’ he yelled, and then it was all over in seconds. Liz was awake but scared out of her mind, and she screamed and tried to hide in a corner; Pete threw a couple of punches, but it was half-hearted, and he went facedown on the dirty concrete in under ten seconds.
Eve, pinned under the driver’s hand, stared at me with coal-black, burning eyes, and said absolutely nothing.
Trust me, I mouthed, and hoped she could read it. If she’d had the broken bottle in that moment, I was pretty sure I’d have been leaking all over the floor, especially when two of the four men went to Michael, grabbed him, and dragged him away.
He wasn’t better. Not even a little bit better. And it scared me to see him shaking and whimpering like that, as if every demon in the world had crammed itself into his head at once.
It scared me a little more to see the black promise in Eve’s eyes as they handcuffed her and pushed her out after him. Then I watched them load up Pete and Liz, too.
The driver came back over to me and nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘You might have some promise after all. If you hate vampires, we can use you. We can always use good men.’
‘I don’t think you understand what that word actually means,’ I said, and walked on my own back to the van. On the way there, I discovered a sudden and urgent need to throw my guts up next to the dumpster. It smelt like rancid Chinese food, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t why I felt so bad.
Betrayal had a bitter, horrible taste all its own, and no matter how much I rinsed my mouth out with bottled water, I couldn’t get rid of it.
I wondered if Claire was tasting it, too. If I was feeling this, what could she be suffering? Because she was the one who felt things too deeply, cared too much.
I hoped she wasn’t just as wrecked as Myrnin, when all this was said and done.
The drive that came after that was surprisingly long, and the sun was already coming up when we arrived … at some kind of a farm, from what I could see of the landscape. We’d made it out of the city and into the country, although there were plenty of little one-Starbucks towns. On the east coast, ‘in the country’ wasn’t the same as it was in West Texas, where you could drive for two hundred miles and hardly glimpse a ruined shack, much less a town square.
The last town I’d been able to spot with any kind of signs had been Meldon, and since I didn’t want to pull out a map and try to figure out our location, I just filed it all away for later.
Not much to learn from my new friends; they continued to be blank slates, and they weren’t chatty. Eve was, but what she was saying was vicious and I was trying not to hear any of it. Boiled down, it meant she blamed me. Guess that wasn’t too surprising. Better me than Claire, anyway. After a while she ran out of ways to tell me I was an evil, backstabbing traitor and she wished she’d never met me. But I was afraid of the silence even more, as it turned out, because it had a kind of dense, hot gravity to it.
And it hurt. Bad. I might tease Eve, maybe too much, but I loved her like a sister; I thought she was brilliant and funny and sharp as my best knife. Thinking that she hated me, even if she reconsidered later … yeah, it cut pretty deep.
When the van finally rolled to a stop, I got the hell out of it, fast, hoping to just walk away, but they weren’t going to make it that easy. The driver came around the hood and shoved me back toward the van. ‘You’re in charge of the mouthy one,’ he said. ‘Shut her up or I’ll do it for you, and you won’t like how I do it.’
I felt sick, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I just nodded, grabbed Eve by the arm and pulled her out of the van. She kicked and screamed, and I yanked her close enough that the dawn light got her full in the face and made her blink.
‘Let me go, you asshole!’ she said, and shoved at me with her bound hands. ‘Swear to God if you touch me again I’ll chew your fingers off!’
‘Eve, chill it. I told you to trust me, didn’t I?’ I kept it low, almost a whisper, but I yanked her arm extra hard so that the driver, who was watching closely, witnessed the pain that burned across her face. ‘I’m trying to keep you alive, you and me and Michael and Claire and everybody else. So just – dial it down. Hate me all you want; in fact, that helps. But just do it at a lower volume, would you? Or he’ll hurt you.’
She glared at me, but I saw her nod, just a little. Not that she was on board with the whole trusting thing; I could see from the fire in her eyes that she wasn’t. She was just giving me some rope, the better to choke me with later. Hanging, she would have said, was too good for me.
‘If anything happens to him, or to Claire, I’ll skin you and use your hide for a throw rug,’ she said.
The place smelt like a working farm; there was a drifting stench of fertiliser coming off the fields, and I could hear the low mooing of cows somewhere out in the distance, hidden by thick layers of mist. I hoped they weren’t vampire cows. I didn’t want to get eaten by a steak. There was a large two-storey farmhouse with an old-fashioned wrap-around porch on it, complete with white-painted rocking chairs and little ceramic statues of ducks on the steps leading up to it. Adorkable, as Eve would have said if she was in a better mood. In the mist I could see the dim outlines of a barn of some kind. Could have been red, it was hard to tell.
‘Inside,’ the driver ordered me, and I hustled Eve up the steps and into the house.
It was like time had stopped in the eighties, with all the pastel fabrics and ruffles and white wood. If this was Douche Bag Davis’s house, his wife had definitely decorated it. Then she’d probably divorced him, and he hadn’t bothered to change it up; the layers of dust on those balloony curtain tops and on the decorations scattered around proved me right.
We didn’t have much time to admire the decor. There was a kitchen off to the right, with the divine possibility of all kinds of sharp objects and explodable chemicals, but the driver was right behind us with his gun. Pete was behind him, but he had Liz over his shoulder, and it looked to me like all the fight was out of him. Behind him came another, unburdened guy, and two more dragged Michael, who was still convulsed into a shuddering ball.
Beyond the front room with its dusty ceramic ducks and floral wallpaper, though, things changed. The next room had been renovated with
a steel door, a vinyl floor, white walls, and embedded fluorescent fixtures above. A lab. I knew what they looked like, though I wasn’t one to spend a lot of time in chem classes. This one had a variety of cages up against the wall, from ones small enough to hold rats up to big ones that could have safely contained a tiger.
They put Michael in that one.
‘No, relax, it’s okay,’ I said, as Eve tried to pull free of me. I kept my voice low and gentle, because I could feel the desperation in her now, and knew she was on the verge of breaking. ‘He’s safe. Nothing’s going to happen to him. I’m more worried about us.’
‘Us?’ She frowned at me, still distracted; I got that. If it had been Claire in the cage, I couldn’t have concentrated, either. ‘What do they need us for?’
‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘Which is why I’m worried.’
The driver, right on cue, turned to the four of us – me, Eve, Pete and the limp form of Liz – and said, ‘In there.’ He emphasised it with a flick of the gun toward another doorway. Steel. With a prominent lock on it.
‘Hey,’ I said, and held up my hands. ‘I’m on your side, remember?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, kid, sure you are. Inside. Don’t worry, you’re not in any danger. We need you, to keep your smart little girlfriend in line.’
‘Wait,’ Eve said. I thought she was going to go ballistic again, but she stared the guy down, calmly, and when he nodded, continued, ‘Could we maybe have a bathroom break first? Because I personally need to pee like mad.’
He looked irritated, but it wasn’t like bad guys didn’t understand the need to pee. Everybody got that. Not everybody cared, though, and I held my breath a second hoping he wouldn’t just toss a bucket into the room or something, but then he nodded, reluctantly. ‘Go with him,’ he said, and pointed to one of the other guys who’d been holding Michael. ‘Door stays open.’