Feast of Fools tmv-4

by Rachel Caine

  Eventually, the tears stopped, and Claire wiped the wet streaks from her cheeks. She felt sore, alone, and utterly to blame for everything. Her dinner held no appeal, and all she wanted to do was curl up under the blankets with the biggest, fluffiest stuffed animal she could find.

  But she couldn’t do that.

  When she opened her door, she found Shane sitting outside, back against the wall. He looked up at her.

  “You done?” he asked. His eyes were red, too. Not exactly tearful, but—something. “Because it’s not like this floor’s real comfortable.”

  She sank down next to him. He put his arm around her, and her head fell against his chest. There was something so soothing about the stroke of his fingers through her hair, the soft rhythm of his breathing. The reassurance of his solid warmth next to her.

  “Don’t let her hurt you,” she whispered. “God, Shane—”

  “No worries. Michael will be there, and I’m pretty sure he’d get into it if she tried. But I want you safe. Promise me that while we’re gone, you’ll go stay with your parents or something. No—” Because she was already trying to protest. “No, promise me. I need to know you’ll be okay.”

  She nodded, still miserable. “I promise,” she said, and took a deep breath to push all that away. “So what dumbass costume are you wearing?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Does it involve leather?”

  “Yeah, actually, I think it might.” He sounded like he dreaded the prospect. She managed a smile, despite everything.

  “I can’t wait.”

  Shane banged his head back against the wall. “Chicks.”

  Her next visit to Myrnin’s lab brought a surprise. When she descended the steps, she saw the glow of lamps, and her first thought was, Oh God, he’s out of his cell. Her second was that she’d better get the dart gun ready, and she was unzipping the backpack to reach for it when she saw that it wasn’t Myrnin at all.

  The overcrowded, dimly lit lab—which was more like a storeroom of outdated equipment, really—held a chair and reading lamp. Seated in the chair, turning pages in one of the fragile, ancient journals, was none other than Oliver.

  Claire put her hand on the butt of the dart gun, just in case, although she wasn’t really sure what good a dose of antidote would do in this situation.

  “Oh, relax, I’m not going to attack you, Claire,” Oliver said in a bored voice. He didn’t even look up. “Besides, we’re on the same side these days. Or haven’t you heard?”

  She came down the remaining steps slowly. “I guess I haven’t. Was there a memo?” Granted, he’d come running when Eve had called about Bishop, but that didn’t necessarily put him in the category of ally in Claire’s books.

  “When outsiders threaten the community, the community pulls together against the outsiders. It’s a rule as old as the tribal system. You and I are in the same community, and we have a common enemy.”

  “Mr. Bishop.”

  Oliver looked up, marking the place in the journal with one finger. “You have questions, I’d assume. I would, in your place.”

  “All right. How long have you known him?”

  “I don’t know him. I doubt anyone does who’s still alive today.”

  Claire slipped into a rickety chair across from him. “But you’ve met him.”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you meet him, then?”

  Oliver tilted his head, eyes narrowed, and she remembered how she’d once thought he was nice, just a normal kind of person. Not so much now.

  Not so much a person, either.

  “I met him in Greece,” he said. “Some time ago. I don’t think the circumstances would be particularly enlightening to you. Or comforting, come to think of it.”

  “Did you try to kill him?”

  “Me?” Oliver smiled slowly. “No.”

  “Did Amelie?”

  He didn’t answer, but he continued to smile. The silence stretched until she wanted to scream, but she knew he wanted her to babble.

  She didn’t.

  “Amelie’s affairs are none of yours,” Oliver said. “I assume you’ve been listening to Myrnin’s chatter.

  I confess, I find it fascinating he’s still with us. I thought him dead and gone, long ago.”

  “Like Bishop?”

  “He’s quite mad, you know. Myrnin. And he has been for as long as I can recall, though it certainly got worse in more recent times.” Oliver’s eyes took on a faraway look. “He did so love the hunt, but he was always such a pathetic weeping idiot after. It doesn’t surprise me he wants to blame his own weakness on some—mythical disease. Some people simply aren’t cut out for this life.”

  Of all the things Claire had expected, that one caught her off guard. “You don’t believe there’s a disease?”

  “I don’t believe that because Myrnin and a few others are—defective—that it means we’re all declining, no.”

  “But—you can’t, um—”

  “Reproduce?” Oliver said it without any emotion at all. “Perhaps we don’t wish to.”

  “You tried to turn Michael.”

  Oh, she shouldn’t have said that, she really shouldn’t have; Oliver’s face tensed, and she saw the skull underneath that smooth, pale skin. A flicker of red went through his eyes. “So Michael says.”

  “So Amelie says. You wanted—you wanted your own power base here. Your own converts. But you couldn’t do it. That surprised you, didn’t it? Because all of a sudden you’re—not able to.”

  “Child,” Oliver said, “you should think carefully about the next thing you say to me. Very, very carefully.”

  He followed up with another stretch of silent staring, and this time Claire did look away. She picked at invisible lint on her backpack. “I should get to work,” she said. “And you aren’t supposed to be in here without Amelie knowing about it.”

  “How do you know she doesn’t?”

  “There’d be somebody else here watching you if she did,” Claire pointed out, and got a small, cold smile in response.

  “Clever girl. Yes, very well. Are you going to tell me to leave?”

  “I don’t think I can tell you to do anything, Oliver, but if you want me to call Amelie—” She took her cell phone out, opened it, and scrolled through the address book.

  Oliver thought about killing her. She saw it flash across his face, plain as sunrise, and she almost dialed the phone in sheer reflex.

  Then it was gone, and he was smiling, and he stood up and gave her a nod. “No need to bother the Founder with such nonsense,” he said. “I’ll be leaving. There’s only so many ridiculous mad ravings one can read at a sitting, in any case.”

  He dropped the journal onto a pile scattered near the chair and walked away, moving with effortless grace around the piles of books and barriers of mismatched furniture. He didn’t seem to move quickly, but before she could blink, he was gone, a shadow on the steps.

  Claire let out a shaky breath, got the dart gun from her backpack, and went to see Myrnin.

  “Magnificent,” Myrnin said, staring down at his hands. He flexed them into fists, turned them over, extended his fingers. “I haven’t felt this good in—well, years. I had numbness in my hands—did you know?”

  It was a symptom Myrnin had forgotten to mention, and Claire wrote it down in her notebook. She had the countdown clock—a new addition to the lab, one she’d ordered from the Internet—up on the wall, and the red flickering numbers reminded both of them that Myrnin had a maximum of five hours of sanity from the current formulation of the treatment.

  Myrnin followed her glance at the clock, and the giddy excitement in his expression faded. He still looked like a young man, except for his eyes; it was creepy to think he’d looked exactly that way for generations before she was born, and would long after she was dead and gone. He did so love the hunt, Oliver had said. There was really only one kind of hunt for vampires. Hunting people.

  He smiled at her, and it was the smile t
hat had won her over in the first place—sweet, gentle, inviting her to share in some delightful secret. “Thank you for the clock, Claire. That’s a great help. There’s an alarm feature?”

  “It starts sounding a tone fifteen minutes before the clock runs out,” she said. “And it has tones striking every hour, too.”

  “Very helpful. Well, then. Now that I have use of my fingers—what shall we do?” Myrnin wiggled his thick black eyebrows suggestively, which was actually funny, coming from him. Not that he wasn’t cute—he was—but Claire couldn’t really imagine finding him sexy.

  She wondered if that would hurt his feelings.

  “How about if we start shelving some of these books?” she said. It really was getting to be a hazard; she’d tripped over stacks more than once even when it wasn’t an emergency. Myrnin, however, made a face.

  “I only have a few hours in my right mind, Claire. Housekeeping seems a poor way to spend them.”

  “All right, what do you want to do?”

  “I think we made great progress in this last formulation, ” he said. “Why not see if we can distill the essence further? Strengthen the effects?”

  “I think we’d better do some chemical analysis on what happens in your blood before we do that.”

  Before she could stop him, he strode over to a table, picked up a rusty knife, and slashed open his arm. She was just opening her mouth to scream when he grabbed a clean beaker from the rack on the table and caught the drizzling blood. The wound healed before he’d lost more than a few teaspoons.

  “There are—easier ways to do that,” she said weakly. Myrnin held the beaker out to her. The blood looked darker than regular human blood, and thicker, but then she supposed it would—he wasn’t as warm. She tried not to think about all those people donating blood, but she couldn’t help it. Was Shane’s blood going to end up in Myrnin’s veins? And how did that work, anyway? . . . Did vampires digest the blood, or just somehow pass it whole into their circulatory systems? Did blood types matter? Conflicting Rh factors? What about bloodborne diseases, like malaria and Ebola and AIDS?

  There were a lot of questions to answer. She thought Dr. Mills would be in heaven over the prospect.

  “Pain doesn’t matter much,” Myrnin said, and yanked his sleeve down over his pale, unmarked arm after wiping away the trickles of blood that were left. “One learns to ignore it, eventually.”

  Claire doubted that, but she didn’t argue. “I’m going to take part of this back to the hospital,” she said. “Dr. Mills wanted blood samples. They’ve got a lot of cool equipment there, he can give us detailed information we can’t get here.”

  Myrnin shrugged, clearly uninterested in Dr. Mills or any human beyond Claire. “Do as you like,” he said. “What kind of equipment?”

  “Oh, all kinds. Mass spectrometers, blood-chemistry analyzers—you know.”

  “We should get those things.”

  “Why?”

  “How can we possibly operate as we should if we don’t have the most current equipment?”

  Claire blinked at him. “Myrnin, you don’t exactly have room down here. And I don’t think your current dinky little power situation is going to let you plug in an electron microscope. That’s not the way scientists work anymore, anyway. The equipment’s too expensive, too delicate. The big hospitals and universities buy the equipment. We just rent time on it.”

  Myrnin looked surprised, then thoughtful. “Rent time? But how can you schedule such a thing when you don’t know what you’re looking for or how long it will take?”

  “You have to learn to schedule your epiphanies. And be patient.”

  That got a laugh out of him. “Claire, I am a vampire. We aren’t known for patience, you know. Your Dr. Mills—maybe we should pay him a visit. I’d like to meet him.”

  “He’d—probably like to meet you, too,” she said slowly. She wasn’t at all sure how Amelie was going to feel about that, but she could tell that Myrnin had it in his head to do it whether she went along or not. “Next time, okay?”

  They both glanced at the countdown clock. “Yes,” Myrnin said. “Next time. Ah! I meant to ask you. What did you hear about Bishop and the welcome feast?”

  “Not much. I think Michael and Eve are going. Shane—Shane says he has to go.”

  “With Ysandre?”

  Claire nodded. Myrnin turned away from her, shoved over a stack of books with restless enthusiasm, then another. He gave a raw cry of delight and scrambled over the piled volumes to retrieve one that, to Claire’s eyes, looked just like any other.

  He threw it to her. Claire managed to grab it before it smacked into her chest. “Ow!” she complained. “Not so hard, please.”

  “Sorry.” He wasn’t, really. There was a subversive, dark streak in him today.

  “What is this, anyway?”

  Myrnin came back to her side, took the book, opened it, and flipped pages. He paused around the middle and handed it back.

  “Ysandre,” he said.

  The book was written in English, but it was from the eighteenth century, and not easy to make out, considering the stains on the pages.

  She was of a beauty so unusual and so marvelous that her grandfather was fascinated by the dazzling sight, and mistook her for an angel that God had sent to console him on his deathbed. The pure lines of her fine profile, her great black liquid eyes, her noble brow uncovered, her hair shining like the raven’s wing, her delicate mouth, the whole effect of this beautiful face on the mind of those who beheld her was that of a deep melancholy and sweetness, impressing itself once and for ever. Tall and slender, but without the excessive thinness of some young girls, her movements had that careless supple grace that recalls the waving of a flower stalk in the breeze.

  “Oh,” Claire said, surprised. That was Ysandre; he was right. “She was—”

  “A very famous murderess. She helped her husband and cousins kill a king shortly after her grandfather’s death. She was hanged, in the end, but that was after she’d been made a vampire. Lucky timing, for her.”

  The book contained a gruesome account of the king’s murder, and a whole lot of others. Claire shivered and closed the book. “Why did you show me this?”

  “I don’t want you to do what her grandfather did— underestimate her because she has the look of an angel. Ysandre has destroyed more lives than you can begin to imagine, starting with her own.” Myrnin’s eyes were dark and very, very serious. “If she wants Shane, let her have him. She’ll be done with him soon enough. Amelie won’t allow her to kill him.”

  “I think she wants other things,” Claire said.

  “Ah. Sexual, then. Or some version of it. Ysandre has always been a bit—odd.”

  “How do I stop her?”

  Myrnin slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. My only suggestion—which I’m quite certain you won’t like—is to let him deal with this in his own way. She’ll leave him alive, and largely intact, unless he resists her.”

  “You’re right. I don’t like it.”

  “Complain to the management, my dear.” His fit of seriousness passed off, like a cloud from the sun. “How about a game of chess, then?”

  “How about we just analyze your blood, because you’ve only got a few more minutes before I have to put you back in your, ah, room?”

  “Cell,” he corrected. “Perfectly all right to say so. And you work too hard for someone so young.”

  She worked too hard, Claire thought in frustration, because somebody had to. Myrnin certainly didn’t.

  By Thursday, the upcoming masked ball was the buzz of Morganville. Claire couldn’t avoid hearing about it. At the university coffee shop, that was inevitable; people said the weirdest, most private things right out in public, like there was some invisible privacy wall around them. She’d heard way too much about her fellow students’ sexual adventures over the past few weeks; apparently, it was mating season, now that everybody was settling in for the semester. Girls rated guys.
Guys rated girls. Both wanted what they couldn’t have, or had what they didn’t really want.

  But as Claire sipped her coffee and wrote out her physics essay on mechanics, heat, and fields—which didn’t have to do with auto shops, weather, or farming—she heard something that made her pen come to a stuttering stop on the page.

  “—invitation,” someone was saying. The someone was sitting behind her. “Can you believe it! My God, I actually got one! They say there are only three hundred invitations being sent out, you know. It’s really going to be amazing. I was thinking of going as Marie Antoinette—what do you think?”

  They had to be talking about the masked ball. Claire shifted in her chair. That didn’t help—she still couldn’t see who was speaking.

  “Well, I think somebody might have actually known her, back in the day,” the other girl said. “So you might want to go with something safe, like Catwoman. I’ll bet none of them know Catwoman.”

  “Catwoman’s good,” the first girl agreed. “Tight black leather is never out of style. I would look totally hot as Catwoman.”

  Claire spilled her coffee, more or less deliberately, and jumped up to gather handfuls of napkins from the common dispenser at the creamer station. On the way back, she got a look at the two who were talking.

  Gina and Jennifer, Monica’s ever-present friends. Only, this time, no Monica to be seen. Interesting.

  Jennifer glared at her. “What are you looking at, klutz?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Claire said, deadpan. She wasn’t afraid of them, not anymore. “I wouldn’t go as Catwoman. Not with those thighs.”

  “Oh, mee-yow.”

  She gathered up books and coffee, and retreated to a table closer to the actual coffee bar. Eve was working. She looked perky today, bright-eyed and smiling; she had on red, and it totally worked for her. Goth, but somehow cheerful. She still grieved for her dad—Claire saw it in odd moments, when she thought nobody was watching—but Eve had pulled herself together, and was holding it together despite all the odds.

  She had a break in the coffee line, so she flashed her coworker a hand signal of five—a five-minute break, Claire guessed as Eve stripped off the apron and ducked under the bar to slip into the chair opposite her.