by Rachel Caine
Oliver didn’t try hard, but before the man’s gun was halfway up, Oliver brought his own weapon up, leveled, aimed, and fired.
The other man went down.
Oliver held the pose for a long second, watching the man to be sure he wouldn’t get up, and then the tension released and he stumbled sideways. He crashed into another vampire’s bed and grabbed for support, but couldn’t hold himself upright. He slipped to his knees, tangled in sheets, and as Claire watched in horror, he began to convulse.
“Oliver!” She dropped down next to him in a crouch, not sure what to do, whether she could do anything. “Oliver, can you hear me? Oliver!”
It went on a long time, but he finally went limp. “I hear you,” he said. His voice sounded raw and strange, and it sounded . . . afraid. He opened his eyes then, and they weren’t vampire-red anymore. They were a plain, unremarkable brown. His skin had taken on an odd shimmer, as if it was shifting colors. “You must stop them, Claire. Don’t let them destroy everything we—” He stopped and let out a cry of pain, real pain, and flung out his hand. She didn’t think twice, even given what she’d just seen him do. She grabbed his fingers and held them, felt him shaking as if he were flying apart. His hand closed over hers with crushing strength, but it was only human strength now, not vampire strength.
His skin was glowing underneath, as if something was burning inside him. Or, as if something was being burned out of him. Whatever was happening to him, it was painful. The breaths he was pulling in sounded tortured and strangled, and his pulse . . .
His pulse? Breaths?
Claire’s eyes widened.
Oliver was, before her eyes, turning human. And she knew, somehow, that this was the very last thing he would want.
“No,” he said, and it burst up out of him like a growl, a primal and furious snarl. His convulsions jerked his back into a tight bow, and Claire gasped and had to pull her hand free as his grip grew tighter and tighter around hers. “No! I will not!”
It was almost a chant, or a prayer, but she couldn’t imagine God listening to anything that savage, that angry. The rage that fueled it seemed totally beyond the capacity of any human body to create, much less contain.
And suddenly, the glow inside him died, leaving his skin that chalky, translucent white again, as if he was made of milky, empty glass.
He let out a sigh, and his muscles went limp. The brown, suffering eyes drifted shut.
She was terrified to touch him, but she put her fingers on his wrist.
Silent. No pulse. No rise and fall of his chest.
But he didn’t look quite as dead as the corpses in the morgue on the other side of the building. Not yet, anyway. He looked—comatose. Suspended between life and death, vampire and human.
She supposed he would have to fall in one direction or the other.
Claire dragged him to a more comfortable position—more for herself than him, really—and raced to the other side of the lab. There were manuals there, chemicals, ranks of IV bags, checklists and protocols.
She grabbed the protocol manual and feverishly slid her finger down the table of contents. Outcomes.
The section was a dry, clinical table of results. Seventy-three percent average deaths, which Claire already knew. But, strangely, only a flat twenty percent human conversion score.
Which left seven percent . . . REV? The code didn’t mean anything to her, and she scanned the rows of legends until she found it. REV meant reverted.
Seven percent of those treated with the cure reverted to vampire. The line was marked with a footnote symbol, and she scanned down to read it.
Immediate resolution of all REV subjects using Protocol D.
Protocol D, Claire discovered, had an illustration of one of the Daylighters’ special liquid-silver-filled stakes being plunged into a vampire’s chest, then removed to release the liquid.
In other words, they euthanized any vampires who survived their cure and stayed vampire.
Claire let out a slow, shaking breath. She felt numbed, reading it; if she’d wondered before whether she was on the right side, she didn’t now. If Amelie was the devil she knew, Fallon was far, far worse.
As she was closing the book, a word caught her eye, and she flipped back to it.
The last section was labeled Counteragent.
There was a whole chapter, and she skimmed it as fast as possible, raking her gaze down the thick columns of dryly written explanations.
The counteragent was designed to halt the process of the cure. They’d originally developed it so that they could study the effects while in process—part of their live experiments, and Claire really didn’t want to think too hard about that. She found a handwritten notation to the side.
COMB 733118.
It was a combination, so there had to be a safe. Somewhere, there had to be a safe . . .
She spotted it, finally, half hidden beneath the counter—a small gray thing, digital keypad. She crashed to her knees in front of it and jammed in the numbers. 733118.
The pad beeped, and the door clicked open.
But there was nothing inside it. Nothing at all.
“No!” She screamed it out loud and smashed her palm into it with all the anguish inside her. She could hear the cries coming from the vampires on the other beds now, and she could hear Eve calling her name with frantic desperation.
If the counteragent still existed, they’d moved it. There was nothing here. Nothing to reverse the effects of Fallon’s cure. He’d taken it somewhere she couldn’t find it.
Not in time.
For a moment, Claire thought she just couldn’t do it . . . just couldn’t get up. Couldn’t rise to meet another challenge, face more pain. She just wanted to lie down, curl up, put her hands over her ears, and hide, just this once. She’d faced it all, as directly as she could. She’d fought and planned and tried.
But that open safe, that was the end of all her plans. All her hopes.
And now there was nothing left but to hold on to Eve, and Michael, while everything fell apart.
I need you, she thought. Shane, please, I need you, please be here, please . . .
But she knew in her heart that he couldn’t be here. Not this time.
When she turned to focus on Eve and Michael, she realized that Eve hadn’t gone to Michael’s side. She was standing with her back pressed against the far wall . . . watching the vampires with frantic, horrified eyes. Gagging. Doubling over.
She tried to get closer, but she faltered, and backed up again, covering her face.
“Take it out!” Eve yelled to Claire. “Help him!” She pointed to the IV needle, and Claire yanked it free—but she knew, from the chalky glow of his skin, that it was already too late. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t responding.
Eve was weeping now, and she slammed her palm into the wall hard, over and over. She tried again to come toward him, but whatever they’d loaded into her blood made her sick, physically sick, the closer she got. “Come on, you’re the brain, you’re the smart one, you can fix everything, do something!” The horror and anguish in her friend threatened to knock down Claire’s shocked numbness, and she squeezed her eyes shut to block it out. “Do something, Claire!”
And then Michael screamed. It was a sound that sliced through Claire’s blanket of shock and stabbed her right in the heart, and her eyes flew open of their own accord to fix on his tense, suffering face, his glowing face, on the shimmering, flickering light gliding beneath his skin, tracing veins and arteries, centering in his heart . . .
And regardless of her pain, of the drug, of all that they’d done to make her loathe and fear the sight of a vampire, Eve shoved herself bodily off the wall and lunged forward to grab his hand in hers. She was gagging and shaking, but she grimly held on, even though every fiber of her body was trying to make her run away.
Michael was breathing in deep, agonizing gulps, and Claire could see his pulse pounding hard in the vein at his throat. His eyes were wide open, so blue, b
lue as the Texas sky, and he was staring mutely at Eve, shaking and trembling and staring . . .
“Live,” Claire said. She whispered it under her breath, a chant, a prayer, a desperate plea. “Live, live, live!”
And then the light in him went out, and Michael went completely, utterly still.
TEN
H e’s dead, Claire thought numbly. I killed him. It was an incoherent thought, and it had a sound to it like ashes falling, a taste like bitter acid at the back of her throat. I killed him. She hadn’t, but it felt that way. She should have been faster. Better. Stronger.
She should have stopped all this from happening. But she hadn’t, and now Michael was dead.
Eve was staring at him as if she hadn’t realized the truth, as if somehow it would all still come out okay. “Michael?” she asked. His eyes were still open. “Michael?” The horror weighed her voice down, dragged it to a low, uneven whisper. “Please look at me. I love you, please look at me, please . . .”
Claire’s eyes were filling with tears now, and her view of his face became a wash of color—palest possible pink for skin, blue for his eyes, gold for his hair. She blinked, and the tears glided hot down her face, hot as blood. She put her hand on his arm.
It shouldn’t feel like that, she thought, so close to her own skin temperature. So much like he was still alive.
And then her fingertips felt a small whisper of a pulse.
No, I imagined that. I couldn’t have . . . it couldn’t . . .
Another beat. Then another. It wasn’t her pulse.
It was his.
“Michael, you have to look at me,” Eve was saying between tears. She looked pale and sick, facing what was, for her, the end of the world. “You can’t leave me, you can’t, you promised me . . .”
He took a breath.
Eve let out a muffled cry, and fell across his chest to kiss him. It was, Claire thought, maybe a little premature for that, because he seemed too dazed to understand what was happening . . . and then all that changed, and he was kissing her back, really kissing her, and his skin was taking on a skin tone that wasn’t too much darker than before but somehow much more alive. He was gasping for breath when they parted, but smiling, and there was color in his cheeks and lips.
It struck Claire that she’d never seen him alive before. Not really one hundred percent alive, anyway. He looked as he had when she’d first met him, but this time . . . this time, he was simply and only human.
It was . . . She didn’t want to call it a miracle, but that’s what it was. A miracle.
It came to her slowly that he was still strapped to the table, and he was straining to break free. Claire wiped her tears, got hold of herself, and quickly sawed through the webbing on his left wrist, and then his left ankle. By the time she’d reached his right hand, she had to gently but firmly force Eve to back up as she freed him completely . . . and then she was the one getting shoved out of the way as Michael lunged for Eve and enveloped her in a hug so complete that it was as if he’d never really hugged her before.
Which, Claire supposed, he hadn’t. Not like this.
“Can you feel it?” he asked Eve. He was crying. Michael was crying, tears flooding his face. He wiped at them, but he couldn’t seem to stem the tide. “My heart. It’s beating.”
“I feel it,” Eve said, and pressed her hand against his chest. “Oh, God, Michael, I—I should probably say something snarky right now, but I—”
He grabbed her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he kissed her again, a long and deep kiss that said more than words ever could about how he felt. How they both felt.
Miracle, Fallon had called it. And in Michael’s case he’d been right, because Michael Glass, who’d been various shades of dead ever since Claire had known him, was now himself again. Human. Vital. Alive.
And, Claire thought with a sudden chill, vulnerable.
She turned away from them, and it hit her with breathtaking horror that most of the vampires struggling against their bonds right now around her, glowing from within as Fallon’s medicine did its work . . . most of them wouldn’t make it.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
Claire channeled her anxious, sick frustration into action. She hustled Michael and Eve out of their own private world and put them to work tying up the lab workers, who were starting to rouse. She dragged the two police officers off to the side and covered up the dead one that Oliver had shot. Halling was spitting with fury, but Claire didn’t listen to what she was saying. It would only make her angry, and she was feeling bad enough.
When there was nothing left to do, she crouched down next to the lab attendant who was waking the fastest, and helped her along by rubbing knuckles across her breastbone. That hurt, Claire remembered. And it roused the woman fast.
It didn’t take the woman long to adapt to the new situation. She realized that she was tied up, and that Claire and Eve and Michael were the only ones standing. Not a stupid woman, either—fear flickered across her face before she concealed it beneath a mask of professional distance. “Untie me,” she ordered.
“Bite me, Miss Mengele,” Eve said. “Not that stupid.”
The woman’s eyes fixed on Michael, and she looked . . . elated. “You made it,” she said. “I knew you would, Michael.”
“You know me?” Michael asked. He wasn’t smiling.
“Of course I do! I’m a big fan of your music. I’m Amanda. I work at the hospital.”
He blinked. “But you stuck poison in my arm.”
“To save you!”
He opened his mouth, then looked confused and weirdly embarrassed, and Claire realized he was trying to show fangs he no longer had. Well, that was awkward. “What about them?” He pointed to the others. Some had gone still. Some were still struggling.
Her eyes flickered toward them, then came back quickly to focus on him. “Better they die than live on in that hell,” she said. “We’re saving people. People. Not monsters.”
“The counteragent,” Claire said. “Tell me where it is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, but her round face wasn’t made for lying. “What counteragent?”
“The one that used to be locked in the safe and isn’t there anymore,” Claire said. “Where is it now?”
“No idea.”
“Don’t play poker, Mandy,” Eve said, “because you suck at it. Who has it?”
Amanda set her mouth into a flat, stubborn line and glared back. Oh, she didn’t like Eve at all. Which was sharply contrasted with the worshipful way she looked at Michael.
Claire stood up and grabbed her friends. She dragged them off a bit and lowered her voice. “She’s got a crush on you, Michael. Eve, she’s jealous of you. So back off and let Michael charm the info out of her.”
Michael looked a little bit ill. “Do I have to?”
“People are dying. Do you?”
He winced, nodded, and said, “Go do something else. I don’t need you guys staring at me. I feel bad enough already.” Claire knew he was thinking of the fact that he’d survived the process and so many . . . so many weren’t going to. Or maybe he was hating the slimy necessity of charming someone who didn’t see anything wrong with killing to cure.
But she took Eve’s arm and said, “Check Oliver.”
Eve’s eyes went wide. “Claire—I—I can’t. I can’t even go near him.”
“You just went to Michael—”
“That’s different. And—he was changing.”
“So was Oliver,” Claire shot back. “Just go!”
Claire went to check the others. Half were already gone, their light extinguished, their skin left chalky pale and bizarrely hard to the touch, as if it had turned to ash. Those were, unquestionably, dead.
Two others besides Michael had made the transition back to human and were gulping in convulsive breaths, looking panicked and wild, as if they were drowning in a sea of air. One was weeping, and it looked lik
e tears of joy. The other two, though . . . they looked lost and horrified. Claire supposed that after so many years—hundreds, maybe—of existence as a vampire, being plunged back into mortality must have felt a lot more like a punishment than a salvation.
One woman had settled into the state that Oliver had been in—more of a coma than either a recovery or a decline. Her skin had turned chalky, but it was still pliable to the touch, and she didn’t have the fallen-in look of those who’d failed the process completely. The REVs, Claire thought. The ones Miss Amanda would have been happy to euthanize, for their own good. The thought made her ill, thinking of Oliver and this unnamed woman lying there helpless, trapped, unable to defend themselves.
Eve came back to her, looking flushed and scared. “He’s not breathing, but he’s not dead, either,” she said. “I can’t get too close, Claire, it makes me—” She swallowed hard. “I’m hoping this is just the doped blood they gave me, right? It’s not—not permanent?”
“I don’t think so,” Claire said. “Anderson said the treatment needed to be repeated a bunch of times, so I think you’ll be okay.” She hugged Eve, impulsively, and Eve took in a shuddering breath
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t—”
“None of that. We save each other, right? It’s what we do.”
“It’s what we do.” Eve stepped back and offered a fist bump, which they exploded and brought back, just because.
The moment of peace faded, though, as Claire looked again at the still, silent woman lying on the slab. “I don’t know her, do you?”
“Ayesha,” Eve said. “She’s okay. I think she was a lawyer. I used to make a lot of bloodsucking attorney jokes. Not so funny now, I guess.”
The woman was very small—maybe five feet tall—and had a rounded figure perfectly proportioned for her height. Pretty, too, under the unhealthy color of her skin; in human life she must have been of African descent, and she wore her hair in an abundant Afro cut held back with a colorful band. A real person, Claire thought. A real person, caught between life and death. They were all real people. That was what Fallon and his crew couldn’t seem to grasp . . . the cost of what they were doing. The history they were destroying.