by Rachel Caine
She grabbed her clothes and jumped in the bathroom just as Shane, still yawning, stumbled out of the hidden room.
“But I called dibs!” he said, and knocked on the door. “Dibs! Damn girls don’t understand the rules….”
“Sorry, but I need to get ready!” She cranked up the shower and skinned out of her old clothes in record time. The jeans really needed washing, and she was down to her last clean pair of underwear, too.
Claire was in and out of the shower fast, trusting that the waterproof bandage they’d put on her back would hold (it did). In under five minutes she was fluffing her wet hair and sliding past Shane in a breathless rush to grab her backpack and stuff it with books.
“Where the hell are you going?” he asked from the doorway. He didn’t sound sleepy now. She zipped the bag shut, hefted it on the shoulder that wasn’t aching and complaining, and turned toward him without answering. He was leaning on the doorframe, arms folded, head cocked. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding. What’ve you got, some kind of death wish? You really want to get knocked down another flight of stairs or something?”
“You made the deal. They won’t come after me.”
“Don’t be dense. Leave that to the experts. You really think they don’t have ways around it?”
She walked up to him, staring up into his face. He looked enormously tall. And he was big, and in her way.
And she didn’t care.
“You made a deal,” she said, “and I’m going to the library. Please get out of the way.”
“Please? Damn, girl, you need to learn how to get mad or—”
She shoved him. It was dumb, and he had the muscle to stay right where he was, but surprise was on her side, and she got him to stumble a couple of steps back. She was already out the door and heading out, shoes in hand. She wasn’t about to stop and give him another chance to keep her nice and safe.
“Hey!” He caught up, grabbed her arm, and spun her around. “I thought you said you wouldn’t—”
“At night,” she said, and turned to go down the stairs. He let go…and she slipped. For a scary second she was off-balance, teetering on the edge of the stairs, and then Shane’s warm hands closed around her shoulders and pulled her back to balance.
He held her there for a few seconds. She didn’t turn around, because if she did, and he was right there, well, she didn’t know…
She didn’t know what would happen.
“See you,” she gulped, and went down the stairs as fast as she dared, on shaking legs.
The heat of the morning was like a toaster oven, only without any yummy food smells; there were a couple of people out on the street. One lady was pushing a baby stroller, and for a second, while Claire was sitting down to put on her battered running shoes, she considered that with a kind of wonder. Having babies in a town like this. What were people thinking? But she guessed they did it anywhere, no matter how horrible it was. And there was a bracelet around the woman’s slender wrist.
The baby was safe, at least until it turned eighteen.
Claire glanced down at her own bare wrist, shivered, and put it out of her mind as she set off for campus.
Now that she was looking, just about every person she passed had something around his or her wrist—bracelets for the women, watchbands for the men. She couldn’t tell what the symbols were. She needed to find some kind of alphabet; maybe somebody had done research and put it somewhere safe…somewhere the vampires wouldn’t look.
She’d always felt safest at the library, anyway. She went straight there, watching over her shoulder for Monica, Gina, Jennifer, or anybody who looked remotely interested in her. Nobody did.
TPU’s library was huge. And dusty. Even the librarians at the front looked like they might have picked up a cobweb or two since her last visit. More proof—if she’d needed it—that TPU was first, and only, a party school.
She checked the map for the shelves, and saw that the Dewey decimal system reigned in Morganville—which was weird, because she’d thought all the universities were on the Library of Congress system. She traced through the listings, looking for references, and found them in the basement.
Great.
As she started to walk away, though, she cocked her head and looked at the list again. There was something strange about it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it….
There wasn’t a fourth floor. Not on the list, anyway, and Mr. Dewey’s system jumped straight from the third floor to the fifth. Maybe it was offices, she thought. Or storage. Or shipping. Or…coffins.
It was definitely weird, though.
She started to take the stairs down to the basement, then stopped and tilted her head back. The stairs were old-school, with massive wooden railings, turning in precise L-shaped angles all the way up.
What the hell, she thought. It was only a couple of flights of stairs. She could always pretend she’d gotten lost.
She couldn’t hear anything or anybody once she’d left the first floor. It was silent as—she hated to think it—the grave. She tried to go quietly on the stairs, and quit gripping the banister when she realized that she was leaving sweaty, betraying handprints behind. She passed the second-floor wooden door, and then the third. Nobody visible through the clear glass window.
The fourth floor didn’t even have a door. Claire stopped, puzzled, and touched the wall. Nope, no door, no secrets she could see. Just a blank wall. Was it possible there was no fourth floor?
She went up to the fifth floor, made her way through the silent, dusty stacks to the other set of stairs, and went down. On this side, there was a door, but it was locked, and there weren’t any windows.
Definitely not offices, she guessed.
But coffins weren’t out of the question. Dammit, she resented being scared in a library! Books weren’t supposed to be scary. They were supposed to…help.
If she were some kick-ass superhero chick, she’d probably be able to pick the lock with a fingernail clipping or something. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a superhero, and she bit her fingernails.
No, she wasn’t a superhero, but she was something else. She was…resourceful.
Standing there, staring at the lock, she began to smile.
“Applied science,” she said, and ran down the stairs to the first floor.
She had a stop to make in chem lab.
Her TA was in his office. “Well,” he said, “if you really want to shatter a lock, you need something good, like liquid helium. But liquid helium isn’t all that portable.”
“What about Freon?” Claire asked.
“No, you can’t get your hands on the stuff without a license. What you can buy is a different formulation, doesn’t get as cold but it’s more environmentally friendly. But it probably wouldn’t do the job.”
“Liquid nitrogen?”
“Same problem as helium. Too bulky.”
Claire sighed. “Too bad. It was a cool idea.”
The TA smiled. “Yes, it was. You know, I have a portable liquid-nitrogen tank I keep for school demonstrations, but they’re hard to get. Pretty expensive. Not the kind of thing you’d find lying around. Sorry.” He wandered off, intent on some postgrad experiment of his own, and he promptly forgot all about her. She bit her lip, stared at his back for a while, and then slowly…very slowly, moved back to the door that led to the supply room. It was unlocked so that the TA could easily move in and out if he needed to. Red and yellow signs on it warned that she was going to get cancer, suffocate, or die other horrible deaths if she opened the door…but she did it anyway.
It squeaked. The TA had to have heard it, and she froze like a mouse in front of an oncoming bird. Guilty.
He didn’t turn around. In fact, he deliberately kept his back to her.
She let out a shaky breath, eased into the room, and looked around. The place was neatly kept, all its chemicals labeled and stored with the safety information for each hanging below it. He stored in alphabetical order. She found the LIQUID NITROGEN sign a
nd saw a bulky, very obvious tank…and a small one next to it, like a giant thermos, with a shoulder strap. She grabbed it, then read the sign. USE PROTECTIVE GLOVES, the sign said. The gloves were right there, too. She shoved a pair in her backpack, slung the canister over her shoulder, and got the hell out of there.
The librarians didn’t even give her a second look. She waved and smiled and went into the stacks, all the way to the back stairs.
The door was just as she’d left it. She fumbled on the gloves, opened the top of the canister, and found that there was a kind of steel pipette that fit into a nozzle. She made sure it was in place, then opened the valve, held her breath, and began pouring supercooled liquid into the lock. She wasn’t sure how much to use—too much was better than not enough, she guessed—and kept pouring until the outside of the lock was completely frosted. Then she cranked the valve shut, and—reminding herself to keep the gloves on—yanked on the doorknob.
Crack! It sounded like a gunshot. She jumped, looked around, and realized the knob had moved in her hand.
She’d opened the door.
Nothing to do now but go inside…but somehow, that didn’t seem like such a great idea, now that she was actually able to do it.
Because…coffins. Or worse.
Claire sucked in a steadying breath, opened the door, and carefully looked around the edge.
It looked like a storeroom. Files. Stacks of cartons and wooden crates. No one in sight. Great, she thought. Maybe I did just break into the file room. That would be disappointing. Still, she stuffed the gloves in her backpack, just in case.
The cartons looked new, but the contents—when she unwrapped the string tying one closed—appeared old. Crumbling books, badly preserved. Ancient letters and papers in languages she couldn’t read, some of which looked like ancestors of English. She tried the next box. More of the same. The room was vast, and it was full of this kind of stuff.
The book, she thought. They’re looking for the book. Every old book they find comes here and gets examined. Now that she looked, she saw that the crates had small red X marks on them—meaning they’d been gone through? Initials, too. Somebody was being held accountable.
Which meant…somebody was working here.
She had just enough time to form the thought when two people walked out of the maze of boxes ahead of her. They weren’t hurrying, and they weren’t alarmed. Vampires. She didn’t know how she knew—they weren’t exactly dressed for the part—but the way they moved, loose and sure, screamed predator to her fragile-prey brain.
“Well,” said the short blond girl, “we don’t get many visitors here.” Except for the pallor of her face and the glitter in her eyes, she looked like a hundred other girls out on the Quad. She was wearing pink. It seemed wrong for a vampire to be wearing pink.
“Did you take a wrong turn, honey?” The man was taller, darker, and he looked really odd…really dead. It was because of his skin tone, she realized. He was black. Being a vampire bleached him, not to white, but to the color of ashes. He had on a TPU purple T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and running shoes. If he’d been human, she’d have thought he was old—old enough to be a professor, at least.
They split up, coming at her from two different sides.
“Whose little one are you?” purred the pink girl, and before Claire could engage her brain to run, the girl had taken her left hand, examining her bare wrist. Then examining her right one. “Oh, my, you really are lost, sweetie. John, what should we do?”
“Well,” John said, and put a friendly hand on Claire’s shoulder. It felt colder than the liquid-nitrogen bottle hanging across her back. “We could sit down and have a nice cup of coffee. Tell you all about what we do in here. That’s what you want to know, right? Children like you are just so darn curious.” He was steering her forward, and Claire knew—just knew—that any attempt to pull free would result in pain. Probably broken bones.
Pink Girl still had hold of her other wrist, too. Her cool fingers were pressed against Claire’s pulse point.
I need to get out of this. Fast.
“I know what you do here,” she said. “You’re looking for the book. But I thought vampires couldn’t read it.”
John stopped and looked at his companion, who raised pale eyebrows back at him. “Angela?” he asked.
“We can’t,” she said. “We’re just here as…observers. And you seem very knowledgeable, for a free-range child. Under eighteen, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be under someone’s Protection? Your family’s?”
She seemed honestly concerned. That was weird. “I’m a student,” Claire said. “Advanced placement.”
“Ah,” Angela said, and looked kind of regretful. “Well, then, I guess you’re on your own. Too bad, really.”
“Because you’re going to kill me?” Claire heard herself say it in a kind of dreamlike state, and remembered what Eve had told her. Don’t look in their eyes. Too late. Angela’s were a soft turquoise, very pretty. Claire felt a deliciously warm edge-of-sleep sensation wash over her.
“Probably,” Angela admitted. “But first you should have some tea.”
“Coffee,” John said. “I still like the caffeine.”
“It spoils the taste!”
“Gives it that zip.” John smacked his lips.
“Why don’t you let me look through boxes?” Claire asked, desperately bringing herself back from the edge of whatever that was. The vampires were leading her through a maze of boxes and crates, all marked with red Xs and initials. “You’ve got to let humans do it, right? If you can’t read the book?”
“What makes you think you could read it, little one?” Angela asked. She had a buttery sort of accent, not quite California, not quite Midwest, not quite anything. Old. It sounded old. “Are you a scholar of languages, as well?”
“N-no, but I know what the symbol is that you’re looking for. I can recognize it.”
Angela reached down and drew her fingernails lightly over the skin of Claire’s inner arm, looking thoughtful.
“No, I don’t have the tattoo. But I’ve seen it.” She was absolutely shaking all over, terrified in a distant sort of way, but her brain was racing, looking for escape. “I can recognize it. You can’t, can you? You can’t even draw it.”
Angela’s fingernails dug in just a bit, in warning. “Don’t be smart, little girl. We’re not the kind of people you should mock.”
“I’m not mocking. You can’t see it. That’s why you haven’t found it. It’s not just that you can’t read it—right?”
Angela and John exchanged looks again, silent and meaningful. Claire swallowed hard, tried to think of anything that might be a good argument for keeping her unbitten (Maybe if I don’t drink any tea or coffee?) and spared a thought for just how pissed off Shane was going to be if she went and got herself killed. On campus. In the middle of the day.
The vampires turned a corner of boxes, and there, in an open space, was a door that didn’t lead out onto any stairwell she’d seen, an elevator with a DOWN button, a battered school-issue desk and chair, and…
“Professor Wilson?” she blurted. He looked up, blinking behind his glasses. He was her Classics of English Literature professor (Tuesdays and Thursdays at two) and although he was boring, he seemed to know his stuff. He was a faded-looking man, all grays—thin gray hair, faded gray eyes—with a tendency to dress in colors that bleached him out even more. Today it was a white shirt and gray jacket.
“Ah. You’re”—he snapped his fingers two or three times—“in my Intro to Shakespeare—”
“Classics of English Lit.”
“Right, exactly. They change the title occasionally, just to fool the students into taking it again. Neuberg, isn’t it?” Fright in his eyes. “You weren’t assigned here to help me, were you?”
“I—” Light dawned. Maybe letting mistaken impressions lie was a good idea right now. “Yes. I was. By…Miss Samson.” Miss Samson was the dragon lady of the English department; everyone knew that. No
body questioned her. As excuses went, this one was thinner than paper, but it was all she had. “I was looking for you.”
“And the door was open?” John asked, looking down at her. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on Professor Wilson, who wasn’t likely to hypnotize her into not lying.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “It was open.” The only good thing about the canister on her back was that at least it looked like something a college student might carry around, with soup or coffee or something in it. And it didn’t exactly look like something to break locks. By now, the liquid nitrogen in the lock would have sublimated into the air, and all evidence was gone.
She hoped.
“Well then,” Wilson said, and frowned at her, “better sit down and get to work, Neuberg. We have a lot to do. You know what you’re looking for?”
“Yes, sir.” John let go of her shoulder. After a reluctant second, Angela released her, too, and Claire went to the desk, dragged up a wooden chair, and carefully placed her backpack and canister on the floor.
“Coffee?” John asked hopefully.
“No, thank you,” she said politely, and pulled the first stacked volume toward her.
It was interesting work, which was weird, and the vampires became less and less frightening the more she was in their company. Angela was a fidgeter, always tapping her foot or restlessly braiding her hair or straightening stacks of books. The vampires seemed assigned only as observers; as Professor Wilson and Claire finished each mountain of books, they took them away, boxed them, and brought new volumes to check.
“Where do these come from?” Claire wondered out loud, and sneezed as she opened the cover of something called Land Register of Atascosa County, which was filled with antique, neat handwriting. Names, dates, measurements. Nothing like what they were looking for.
“Everywhere,” Professor Wilson said, and closed the book he’d flipped through. “Secondhand stores. Antique shops. Book dealers. They have a network around the world, and everything comes here for inspection. If it isn’t what they’re looking for, it goes out again. They even make a profit on it, I’m told.” He cleared his throat and held up the book he’d been looking at. “John? This one is a first-edition Lewis Carroll. I believe you should put it aside.”