“Has Bishop tried to reach you through it?”
“Not recently. Or if he has, I can’t feel it anymore.” That would be excellent, if it really was a bad connection. Maybe she was in a no-magic-signal dead zone. “So what can I do?”
“Go knock on doors,” Hannah said. “We’ve got a list of names that we’re still looking for, for the second bus. You can go with Joe Hess.”
Claire’s eyes widened. “He’s okay?” Because she had an instant sense memory of the feeling of that death warrant in her hands, the one she’d given to him.
“Sure,” Hannah said. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
Claire had no idea what had happened, but she liked Detective Hess, and at least riding around with him would give her a feeling of forward motion, of doing something useful. Everyone else seemed to have a purpose. All she could think about was that her parents were on a bus heading out of town, and she didn’t know what was going to happen to them. Or could happen to them.
She wished she’d said a better good-bye. She wished they hadn’t been so upset with her about Shane. Well, they’re going to have to get used to it, she thought defiantly, but even to herself, it felt weak and a little selfish.
But being with Shane wasn’t a mistake. She knew it wasn’t.
Joe Hess was driving his own car, but it had all the cool cop stuff inside—a radio, one of those magnetic flashing lights to go on the roof, and a shotgun that was locked into a rack in the back. He was a tall, quiet man who just had a way about him that put her at ease. For one thing, he never looked at her like some annoying kid; he just looked at her as a person. A young person, true, but someone to take seriously. She wasn’t quite sure how she’d earned that from him, considering the death warrant delivery.
“I’m locking the doors,” he told her as she climbed into the passenger seat, half a second before the click-thump sound echoed through the car. “Nice to see you, Claire.”
“Thanks. It’s good to see you, too. What about the buses?” she said. “Are they out of town yet?”
“Amelie herself escorted them through the barrier a few minutes ago,” he said. “There was a little bit of trouble at the border, nothing we couldn’t handle. They’re on their way. Nobody was hurt.”
That eased a tight knot in her chest that she hadn’t even known was there. “Where are they going—No, don’t tell me. I probably don’t need to know, right?”
“Probably not,” he agreed, and gave her a sidelong look. “You okay?”
She looked out the car window and shrugged. “My parents are on one of those buses, that’s all. I’m just worried.”
He kept sending her looks as he drove, and there was a frown on his face. “And tired,” he said. “When you left me, did you go back to Bishop? Did he hurt you?”
There really wasn’t an easy answer to that. “He didn’t hurt me,” she finally said. “Not . . . personally.”
“I guess that’s part of what I was asking,” he said. “But that doesn’t answer my question, really.”
“You mean, am I in need of serious therapy because of all this?” Another shrug seemed kind of appropriate. “Yeah, probably. But this is Morganville. That’s not exactly the worst thing that could happen.” She turned her head and looked directly at him. “What was on the scroll I gave you?”
He was quiet for so long she thought he was blowing off the question, but then he said, “It was a death warrant.”
She already knew that. “Not yours, though.”
“No,” he said. “Someone else’s.”
“Whose?”
“Claire—”
“It doesn’t matter. We got it reversed. It’s not an issue anymore.”
“I delivered it. I have a right to know.”
For answer, Joe dug into the pocket of his sports jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, still curling at the edges, with fragments of wax clinging to the outside. He held it out to her.
Claire unfolded it. The paper was stiff and crackly, old paper, with a faintly moldy smell to it. The handwriting—Bishop’s—was spiky and hard to read, but the name was done larger and underlined.
Eve Rosser.
“That’s not happening,” Joe said. “I just wanted you to know that. If he tells you about it, I wanted you to understand that Eve is perfectly safe, all right? Nothing will happen to her. Claire, do you understand me?”
She’d carried an order to him to kill her best friend.
Claire couldn’t think. Couldn’t feel anything except a vast, echoing sense of shock. She tried to read the rest of the paper, but her eyes kept moving back to Eve’s name, going over and over it.
She folded up the paper and held it clutched tightly in one hand. Breathe. She felt light-headed and a little sick.
“Why you?” she asked faintly. “Why give it to you?”
“That’s Bishop’s style. He picks out people least likely to do what he wants, so he can punish them when they refuse to carry out the order. Object lessons for the rest of Morganville. He knew I wouldn’t kill Eve. Not a chance. This was less about his wanting to get rid of Eve than to get rid of me.”
She still felt cold. Sure, Detective Hess wouldn’t have done it, but what if she’d been told to take it to someone else? Monica, maybe?
Eve might be dead right now, and it would have been all her fault.
She felt the death warrant being tugged out of her fingers. When she opened her eyes, fighting back tears, Detective Hess was slipping it back into his pocket. “I just wanted you to understand what we’re up against,” he said. “And to understand that no matter what happens, some of us will never do what he wants.”
Claire realized that she couldn’t count herself in that club. She’d already done what Bishop wanted.
More than once.
God, she really didn’t want to think about how far she’d wandered into that swamp, but she was definitely up to her butt in alligators.
“All right, back to business.” Hess handed her a piece of paper. “These are the people we still need to find,” he said. “I heard about what happened with Frank Collins. You and Shane were there?”
She really wasn’t up to talking about that. “Dr. Mills is with Amelie,” she said. “You can cross him off this list. She isn’t going to send him out of town.”
All around Morganville, as they drove, there were signs things were happening—people gathering in groups, whispering at fences, and pausing to stare hard at the passing car. No vampires in sight, but then Claire wouldn’t expect there to be so close to noon. “What is this?” she asked. Hess shook his head.
“There’s still a pretty strong antivampire movement in town,” he said. “It got stronger these last few months. I’ve been trying to keep them calmed down, because if they start this now, they’ll just get themselves killed. And most of them aren’t looking at Amelie’s side as anything but another target. We can’t afford that until Bishop’s gone.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Nothing. Nothing we can do right now. Bishop’s the one pushing the agenda, not us. If he wants a fight tonight, he’s going to get one. Maybe bigger than he wants.”
The fourth address on the list was an apartment—there weren’t many apartment buildings in Morganville, since most people lived in single-family houses, but there were a few. Like in any small town, the complexes varied from crappy to less crappy; there was no such thing as luxury multifamily housing.
The apartment complex they stopped at was on the crappy end of the short spectrum. It was stucco over brick, painted a sun-faded pink, with two stories of apartments built into an open square on a central . . . well, Claire guessed you could call it a courtyard, if you liked a view that included a dry swimming pool with dark scum at one end, some spiky, untrimmed bushes, and an overflowing trash can.
Joe Hess checked apartment numbers. If the run-down appearance of the place bothered him, he didn’t show it. When they reached number twenty-two, he banged loudly on th
e door. “Police, open up!” he yelled, and pushed Claire out of the way when she tried to stand next to him. He gave her a silent stay there gesture, and listened. She couldn’t hear a thing from inside.
Neither could he, apparently. He shook his head, but as they turned to go, Claire clearly heard someone inside the apartment say, “Help.”
She froze, staring at Detective Hess. He’d heard it, too, and he gestured her even farther back as he pulled his gun from the holster under his jacket. “Willie Combs? You okay in there? It’s Joe Hess. Answer me, Willie!”
“Help,” the voice came again, weaker this time.
Hess tried the door, but it was locked. He took in a deep breath. “Claire, you stay right there. Do not come in. Hear me?”
She nodded. He whirled and kicked into the door, and the cheap hollow wood splintered and flew open on the second try, sending wood and metal flying.
Detective Hess disappeared inside. Claire saw curtains fluttering and blinds tenting as people looked out to see what was going on, but nobody came outside.
Not even in the middle of the day.
It seemed like a very long time until Detective Hess came out with someone held in his arms. It was a girl about Claire’s age, pretty, dressed in a Morganville High T-shirt and sweatpants, like she’d just dropped in from gym class.
She wasn’t moving, and he was holding a towel on her neck.
“Call an ambulance,” he ordered Claire. “Tell them it’s a rush, and bring the bite kit.”
“Is she—”
“She’s alive,” he said, and stretched her out on the concrete, still holding the towel in place. Hess looked up at her with fury shining in his eyes. “Her name is Theresa. Theresa Combs. She’s the oldest of the three kids.”
Claire went cold, and looked at the doorway of the apartment. “They’re not—”
“Let’s focus on the living,” he said. “Hold this on her throat, just like this.” She knelt beside him and pressed her small fingers where his larger ones were. It felt like she was pressing too hard, but he nodded. “Good. Keep doing that. I’m going to make one more sweep inside, just to be sure.”
As he stepped over the girl and back into the apartment, Theresa’s eyes fluttered, and she looked at Claire. Big, dark eyes. Desperate. “Help,” she whispered. “Help Jimmy. He’s only twelve.”
Claire took her hand. “Shhhh. Just rest.”
Theresa’s eyes filled up with tears. “I tried,” she said. “I really tried. Why is this happening to us? We didn’t do anything wrong. We followed all the rules.”
Claire couldn’t do anything to help her, except hold her hand and keep the towel over her throat, just like Detective Hess said. When he came back to the doorway, drawn by the distant howl of an approaching siren, she looked up at him in miserable hope.
He shook his head.
They didn’t speak at all until the paramedics took Theresa away. Claire stayed where she was, on her knees, staring at the blood speckling her trembling fingers. Detective Hess crouched down and handed her a moist wipe, with the attitude of somebody who’d done that sort of thing a lot. He patted her gently on the shoulder. “Deep breaths,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Good job taking care of Theresa. You probably saved her life.”
“Who did that to them?” Once she started wiping her hands, she really couldn’t stop. “Why?”
“It’s been happening all over town,” Hess said. “People whose Protectors went over to Bishop. People who lost their Protectors in the fight. People whose Protectors never cared enough in the first place. Half of this town is nothing but a mobile blood supply right now.” The look on his face, when she glanced up, was enough to make her shiver. “Maybe the crazies are right. Maybe we should kill all the vampires.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, very softly. “Because people never kill people, right?”
He had Eve’s death warrant in his pocket.
He didn’t argue about it.
They found another five people on Hannah’s list, all safe and alive—well, one of them was drunk off his butt at the Barfly, one of the scarier local watering holes, but he was still breathing and unfanged. One by one, they were put on the bus.
By four p.m., the last bus was motoring out of Morganville, heading for parts unknown (to Claire, at least), and she was left standing with those who were left. Richard Morrell. Hannah Moses. Shane and Eve, standing there together, whispering. Joe Hess, talking on the police car radio. There were other people around, but they stayed in the shadows, and Claire had the strong suspicion that they were vampires. Amelie’s vampires, getting organized for something big.
Without warning, Claire felt a burning sensation on her arm.
When she pulled back her sleeve, she saw the tattoo was swirling, like a pot of stirred ink under her skin. Bishop was trying to pull her in. She could feel the impulse to walk out of the warehouse and head for Founder’s Square, but she resisted.
When she was afraid she couldn’t hold back anymore, she told Shane. He put his arms around her. “I’m not letting you go anywhere,” he promised. “Not without me.”
The impulse felt like a string tied around her guts, pulling relentlessly. It was annoying at first. Then it hurt. Finally, she pulled free of Shane’s embrace and walked in circles around the open space of the warehouse they’d used for the bus staging area, making wider and wider arcs. He intercepted her when she came close to the door, and she looked at him in silent misery. “I hate this!” she blurted. “I want this thing out!” And she burst into tears, because it felt overwhelming to her, this feeling of despair and anguish, of not being where she was supposed to be. This time, even Shane’s presence couldn’t help. The misery just came in waves, crushing her underneath. She heard Shane yelling at Richard Morrell, and then Hannah was there, saying something about helping.
Claire felt a hot sting in her arm, and then calm spread like ice through her veins. It was a relief, but it didn’t touch the burning on her arm, or the anxiety boiling in her stomach. Her body still wasn’t her own.
“She’ll sleep for a while,” Hannah said, from a long way off. “Shane, I need you.”
Claire couldn’t open her eyes, or tell them that she wasn’t really asleep at all. She seemed to be—she got that—but she was desperately awake underneath. Painfully awake.
Shane kissed her, warm and gentle, and she felt his hand smooth her hair and trace down her cheek. Don’t leave me, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t make herself move or speak.
Her heartbeat thudded, slow and calm, even though she felt the panic building inside her.
She felt herself carried somewhere, tucked into a warm bed and piled with blankets.
Then silence.
Her eyes opened, as if someone else was controlling them, and as she sat up, she saw someone standing in the corner of the darkened room where they’d left her.
Ada.
The ghost put a pale, flickering finger to her lips and motioned for Claire to sit up. She did, although she had no idea why.
Ada drifted closer. Once again, she wasn’t three-dimensional at all, just a flat projection on the air, like a TV character without the screen. She didn’t really look human; in fact, she looked more like a game character, all smoothness and manufactured detail.
Somewhere in the dark, a cell phone rang. Claire walked over to a pile of boxes labeled EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION EQUIPMENT and ripped away tape to retrieve a cell phone. Fully charged, from the battery icon on the display. She lifted it to her ear.
“Bishop is trying to pull you to him,” Ada’s tinny, artificial voice said. “But I need you elsewhere.”
“You need me.”
“Of course. With Myrnin deactivated, I require someone to assist me. Take the portal to reach me.”
“There’s a portal?” Claire felt slow and stupid, and she didn’t think it was the drugs that Hannah had given her. Ada’s ghostly representation gave her a scorching look of contempt.
&n
bsp; “I have made a portal,” she said. “That’s what I do, you silly fool. Take it, now. Six steps forward, four to your right. Go!”
The connection died on Claire’s borrowed phone with a lost-signal beep. She folded the clamshell and slid it back in her pocket, and realized that someone—Shane, she guessed—had taken her shoes off for her. She put them on and walked six paces forward into the dark, then four steps to the right.
Her fourth step sent her falling through freezing-cold blackness, and then her foot touched ground, and she was someplace she recognized.
She came out in the cells where Myrnin and Amelie had confined the vampires who had become too sick to function on their own. It was an old prison, dark and damp, built out of solid stone and steel. The tornado that had raged through Morganville a few months back had damaged part of the building; Claire hadn’t been involved in tracking down the escaped patients, but she knew it had been done, and the place repaired. Not that Bishop had cared, of course. Amelie had done that.
But all the cells were empty now.
Claire stumbled to a halt and wrapped her arms around her stomach, where the tug from Bishop’s will felt like a white-hot wire being pulled through her skin. She braced herself against the wall, breathing hard. “I’m here,” she said to the empty air. “What do you want me to do, Ada?”
Ada’s ghost glided down the corridor ahead of her—still two-dimensional, but this time the view was from the back. Her stiff belled skirts drifted inches above the stone floor, and she looked back over her shoulder toward Claire in unmistakable command. Great, Claire thought. It’s not bad enough that Bishop has his hooks in me; now it’s Myrnin’s nutty computer, too. I have way too many bosses.
Eve would have told her she needed a better job, which would include sewage treatment.
“Where are we going?” she asked Ada, not that she expected an answer. She wasn’t disappointed. The prison was laid out in long hallways, and the last time Claire had been here, most of the cells had been filled with plague victims. She’d delivered their food—well, blood—to them to make sure they hadn’t starved. Some had been violent; most had just been lying very still, unable to do much at all.
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