by Rachel Caine
‘The – the device. Vampire Levelling Adjustment Device.’ She realised, belatedly, that Oliver, who was decidedly not in her inner circle of people she trusted, was listening, but he refrained from comment. His attention was fixed on Michael, as if he actually cared.
Which, knowing Oliver, he actually might, though he’d no doubt deny it.
She was almost sure Myrnin would glower at her for naming her pet project after a famous vampire – Vlad Tepes, commonly thought to be the historical inspiration for Count Dracula – but he only shook his head in impatience. ‘We must go, and quickly. We can’t stay here,’ Myrnin said. ‘Oliver and I are being hunted.’
‘By who?’
‘Whom, my dear girl, whom, grammar really has descended to the lowest—’
‘Myrnin!’
‘I have no idea.’ His tone was flat, and there were dangerous embers of red in his eyes. ‘When I do, there will be reckoning for Michael.’
‘He took a blow meant for me,’ Oliver said. ‘Stupid. I could likely have avoided it if he’d given me the chance.’
That made Eve spin around and level him with a white-hot glare. ‘Likely? Likely? You asshole, he saved your life!’
Normally, having a human use that tone with him would have made Oliver snarl, show fangs and ‘teach her a lesson’… but he did none of that. He only looked away, and Eve glared a moment more before kneeling down at Michael’s side and taking his limp, pallid hand in hers.
‘He feels cold,’ she told Jesse. ‘Please, if you’re going to do something—’
‘I’m thinking,’ Jesse snapped. ‘Just quiet, all of you. I’ve only seen this twice before.’
‘What happened?’ Shane asked. ‘The other two times?’
She didn’t answer, which meant, Claire thought with a cold shiver, that the vampires who’d had those stakes in their hearts likely hadn’t survived.
Jesse finally said, ‘Right. There’s no safe way to disarm it. Oliver, I need you.’
He didn’t move until she turned her head, frowning at him, and then moved to Michael’s side. ‘Yes?’
‘You’re faster and stronger than I am,’ Jesse said. She didn’t say it as a compliment, just a simple statement of fact. ‘I need you to pull that stake out, straight and as fast as you can. I will put my hand over the wound in case the silver triggers; I may be able to stop it from entering his bloodstream.’
‘At the cost of your hand,’ he pointed out.
‘No other choice,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m old enough. I can survive. Daylighters haven’t killed me yet.’
Claire held her breath as Oliver nodded, reached down, and took hold of the stake. He locked his gaze with Jesse’s, and she counted down. Three, two, one.
On one, Oliver moved in a blur, faster than the human eye could catch, and Jesse’s hand slapped in place, covering the still-open wound as the wooden stake pulled free. Or at least, that was what Claire presumed happened, because she didn’t actually see it, only Jesse’s hand on Michael’s chest, and the stake moving at bullet speed to hit and shatter on the far brick wall.
It splattered liquid silver all over the wall.
Jesse didn’t move, though she made a sound – a small one, in the back of her throat. And then Claire realised why.
Her hand was covered in silver. Dripping with it. And she couldn’t move until Michael’s wound healed, or he’d be poisoned, and at his young age, likely die quickly.
Her hand was burning. Sizzling. Claire clapped her hand over her mouth to hold in the nausea as she saw skin erode and tendons working beneath, and still Jesse sat very still, unmoving, pale as a marble statue.
‘I think it’s closed,’ Jesse finally whispered, and just … collapsed. Oliver moved, but – surprisingly, Claire thought – Myrnin was already there, grabbing her as she fell backward and easing her to the colourful area rug beneath.
Eve threw herself forward and frantically checked Michael’s pale chest for any sign of damage. ‘He’s okay,’ she said. ‘Michael? Michael!’
He opened his blue eyes, blinked, and said, ‘Eve?’ His voice was shockingly faint, but he was alive.
Myrnin fumbled in the pockets of his oversized coat – there were a lot of pockets, some flapping loose – and brought out a small stoppered vial of powder. He supported Jesse’s head and shoulders on his knees as he pulled the cork with his teeth and emptied the powder over her burning hand.
She cried out and arched up into the air, and he held on to her as she writhed and fought. ‘Easy, dear lady, easy, it will stop, the pain will stop, it will halt the silver and heal your wound, though the scars may take some time – easy, Lady Grey, be easy …’
Lady Grey? He knew Jesse – well, of course, he would, wouldn’t he? Because she’d been sent by Amelie from Morganville in the first place. Still. Claire blinked, because she’d never seen Myrnin act quite so … gentle. Or so formal. And Jesse let out a long, trembling breath and smiled up at him. Whatever he’d given her had worked. The damage was still pretty serious, but from the smile, and the way its wattage increased second by second, the pain was subsiding. Myrnin put his hand on her cheek in a small, comforting caress – something Claire couldn’t remember him doing before. Not quite that way.
‘Well,’ Jesse said, with a lilt in her voice that hadn’t been there before. ‘It’s a rare sweet day that brings you out of your cave, little spider.’
‘And a rarer one that sees you brought low, Lady Grey. A brave act. Very brave.’
‘Foolish, if the boy doesn’t make it,’ she said. ‘Oh, bother it, leave my hand alone. The silver’s still burning, but it’ll pass. I’m too old for it to do much more damage.’
‘You don’t look a day over a thousand,’ Myrnin said. My God, Claire thought. Was he actually flirting? Well, if he was, she couldn’t really blame him. Jesse was … kind of a stunner.
Michael was trying to sit up on the sofa, something Shane and Eve were trying to prevent; Claire joined them, and when it became clear that ‘no’ was not a viable option, she helped prop him upright. ‘Hey,’ she said to him, ‘weren’t you supposed to stop trouble, and not be so much in the middle of it?’
‘Best laid plans,’ Michael said, and coughed. It had an alarmingly wet sound. Eve grabbed a handful of tissues from a box on the coffee table, and when he stopped coughing and took them away from his mouth, they were soaked in fresh, red blood. But he seemed to be feeling better. ‘I think that might have been about as close as I could have come to dead.’
‘Just about,’ Shane agreed. ‘You ever heard of someone putting a silver injector inside a stake before?’
‘Never,’ Michael said, ‘but it seems like a damn great idea, except when it’s in my chest.’
‘Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking.’ Shane squeezed his shoulder and crouched down to eye level. ‘You good, bro?’
‘I’m good. And it’s good to see you’ve kept up the tradition of getting the holy shit beat out of you, even when you’re in a nice, civilised place.’
‘It was not my fault.’
Michael just shook his head. He still looked very pale, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He was holding Eve’s hand, and he tugged on it, bringing her down to whisper in her ear. She nodded and turned to Pete – who was still standing exactly where he’d been, looking utterly overtaken by what had crashed in on them. As well he might, Claire thought. He’d been worried about sexed-up sheets, and suddenly there were wounded vampires and a big splash of silver dripping down his brick wall. Even for someone who’d known Jesse, this sudden onslaught of the undead might be a little tough to handle.
‘Excuse me,’ Eve said to him. ‘Do you have any, ah, plasma? In bags?’
Pete gave her a blank look, and finally just turned around and walked to the armchair. He sat down, put his head in his hands and checked out of the current reality.
‘Guess that’s a no,’ Eve said. ‘All right. Sorry, you guys, but he needs to feed, and I’m going to volunteer a vein. So if you’re squeamis
h, turn around.’
Claire did, not so much because she was faint at the sight of blood, but because it seemed uncomfortably intimate to her. Shane turned, too, and took a look around the room. Oliver was examining the remains of the wooden stake, though he was being very careful not to touch any of the remaining silver leaking out of it. Myrnin and Jesse seemed to be very cosy. ‘Well,’ Shane said, ‘at least we’re not alone on the run any more. Apparently, the cops may be the least of our worries right now.’ He put his arm around her waist and pulled her closer, and she willingly went. ‘You all right?’
‘Fine,’ she said, and shivered. ‘That was sudden. And intense.’
‘I think Pete’s having a migraine. And I’m not sure the silver’s coming out of his rug, either.’
Jesse had climbed to her feet before he’d finished the sentence, and she walked to the small bathroom and came back in a moment with a thick roll of gauze bandage. She carried it to Myrnin and held it out with her eyebrows raised. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked him.
He bowed a little, took the gauze, and held her hand steady as he wrapped the bandages. He was good at it, Claire realised; he’d definitely had lots of practice at treating injuries, and for this one, it didn’t matter whether it was a vampire or human. The bandages were all the same. He ripped one end of the gauze in two, wrapped it snugly, and tied it off; that, Claire was sure, came from experience in eras where such things as sticky tape had yet to be invented. Once he was done, he smoothed the bandages down, and his hand lingered on hers.
Jesse gave him a slow, bright smile, and Myrnin’s pale cheeks reddened, just a touch. He let go. ‘All better,’ he said. ‘My lady.’
‘My lord,’ she said, and did a pretty fair curtsy, considering she was wearing blue jeans and a low-cut black knit shirt. Her dark red braid swung forward over her shoulder in a thick rope, and as she looked up through her eyelashes at him, Claire thought that Jesse had probably practised the art of flirting for at least a few hundred years. Poor Myrnin.
He was definitely outclassed, and way out of practice, because he cleared his throat and turned his back on her – not the most graceful end to that conversation – and said, ‘Claire. With me.’
She automatically moved to follow him as he headed for the kitchen, but Shane didn’t let go of her; his strong grip pulled her to a halt, and Claire looked up at him, frowning.
‘I’ll be okay,’ she said. What she saw in his face was not jealousy, or worry, or anything like that; it was caution, pure and simple. This was all wildly strange, today. She understood exactly how he felt, wanting to slow it down and make things a little more understandable. ‘Let me talk to him and see if I can make sense of any of this.’
‘You’re talking to Myrnin,’ Shane said. ‘I think that might be a little too much to ask.’ But he let her go, and she followed her friend, her boss and her headache into the little kitchen area. She glanced over at Michael and Eve as she did so; he’d finished drinking from Eve’s wrist, and was using the leftover gauze from Jesse to put a neat bandage around the small wound. The look in his eyes as he watched Eve’s face was vulnerable, grateful and more than a little heartbreaking.
Anybody who believed vampires couldn’t feel things like living people did had never met Michael Glass.
They got as far from the others as it was possible to be, within the walls of Pete’s small apartment, and Claire tried to put at least a few feet between her and Myrnin. Ugh. Where had he been hanging out, the city dump? But it was clear that hygiene wasn’t his biggest issue at the moment, from the fiery intensity of his gaze on her. ‘You and Irene,’ Myrnin began. ‘What have you done?’
Claire was taken aback, because she hadn’t expected him to accuse her like that. ‘Nothing!’ she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. She knew it looked defensive, and she didn’t care. ‘You’re the one who told me to work with her, Myrnin, so don’t blame me if something’s gone wrong in all this. I just wanted to come to college!’
‘And it’s working out so well!’ he said. ‘I trusted Irene implicitly. She has been my agent here in the world for some time, and she has helped conceal our true nature from those who come looking.’
‘Like the government?’
Myrnin didn’t answer that. He couldn’t stand still, and now he stopped moving uneasily from one foot to another to move toward the counter and restlessly open and close the drawers. Claire caught a glimpse of random junk in one, forks and spoons in another. He wasn’t looking for anything, he just needed to fidget. ‘Irene has always had ties to the federal government,’ he said. ‘But that never concerned us directly, until recently.’
‘Just tell me what happened! What made you leave Morganville and come all the way out here in the first place? I know Oliver was already on the road – did you run into him, or did he find you?’
‘That is a great many questions in a row. Oh, look, he has peanut butter. Do you like peanut butter?’
‘Myrnin!’
‘But it’s crunchy …’ She stared at him with inarticulate frustration, and he put the jar back in the pantry and closed the door. There were some rubber bands dangling from the knob, so he picked a couple off and began playing with them. That was good. It would be less distracting, for both of them. ‘I left Morganville because I intercepted a communication that claimed to be able to prove, without any doubt, the existence of vampires in the world.’
‘Oh, God, Myrnin, did you find this on the Internet? Because you can’t believe everything that’s on there.’
‘I know that! And no, I did not believe it. Not at first. But this was no excitable fan of films posting to his friends; it was a doctor, who was preparing a scholarly paper. It was a Google alert, by the way.’ He seemed ridiculously pleased that he had figured out how to set one. ‘He was located in Boston. I felt there had to be some reason that such a revelation would be located so close to Irene, and I phoned her. She did not answer.’
‘People do that sometimes. It doesn’t mean—’
‘I sent you here, Claire. I sent you to Irene, for safety. And I was afraid … I was afraid that she might have betrayed us. Perhaps even accidentally. If word of vampires was out, and taken seriously, then it would only be a matter of time before word of Morganville would be circulated as well. We control these kinds of events; we must, or be wiped from the earth. Normally Oliver would have dispatched agents to see to it, but Oliver was, ah, indisposed …’
‘Exiled, you mean.’
‘Yes, yes, but I couldn’t wait for Amelie to decide who best was ready to deal with this crisis. I know Irene, and I had a good sense of where to locate Oliver. I thought the two of us together could easily handle things.’
‘And how did that go?’
He snapped one of the rubber bands in a convulsive movement, and dropped it to the floor. The second one was tougher, but he was pulling on it way too hard. ‘Not … very well,’ he admitted. ‘I still haven’t been able to locate this doctor that Google found so easily. The human world is much more confusing than I recall. And Oliver was not terribly cooperative. Then Amelie tried to recall me to Morganville. It’s all been very stressful.’
Claire sighed and resisted the almost impossibly attractive impulse to shake him. ‘Tell me what happened today.’
He blinked at her and restlessly snapped the rubber band around his wrist. ‘Oliver and I attempted to track down this doctor at his offices, but he was not there. Oliver got into a dispute with someone who called us homeless bums and attempted to spit upon us. I managed to prevent him from doing anything too foolish, but it wasn’t a very good few moments for our tormentor, I’m afraid. And then we went to the doctor’s home, but again, he wasn’t there. I was somewhat at a loss how to proceed. I’m not generally used to putting out so much effort.’ He went to the faucet and turned the taps on and off. Claire had a faint hope that he might use the opportunity to wash up, but evidently it didn’t occur to him. ‘Michael found us just as we were trying to see Irene; we
were again barred entrance to the university because of our clothing and general dishevelment, and he promised to help us get a motel room where we could wash. Eve said she would secure us new things to wear.’
That would have been interesting. Claire would have paid money to see what Eve would have bought for Oliver, much less Myrnin. It would have, at the very least, been crazy amazing.
‘I’m guessing things didn’t get that far,’ Claire said, ‘since you’re still stinky and wearing rags.’
Myrnin looked down at himself and sighed. ‘My apologies. Life can be harsh. Yes, we were followed as we left the university by men in some sort of large vehicle. When we stopped at the motel and obtained our room key, we were attacked without warning. Michael managed to put himself in the way when the one with the stake came for Oliver, who was busy fighting another; we did not immediately know that the stake was anything but wood. But Oliver had seen something like it before, and stopped me before I tried to pull it out. I remembered that Lady Grey was here, watching over Irene, and I begged her help. And she brought us here.’
‘And did they follow you?’
‘No.’ Myrnin seemed very certain of it, and Claire wondered why for a moment, until she knew. They wouldn’t have left anybody behind capable of following. ‘But we didn’t think it wise to wait for the police to arrive. Jesse thought this would be the safest place. I did not expect to find you here.’
‘It’s been an eventful morning for us, too,’ Claire said. ‘My friend’s been abducted, and the police think Shane and I might have had something to do with it.’
‘Really? Did you?’
‘No! Why would I?’
Myrnin shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it had to be asked. This friend of yours, does she have any knowledge of vampires?’
‘Not a bit. She doesn’t believe in them. Not even in that “maybe it’s real” way that a lot of college kids seem to have.’
‘Hmmm. Then her vanishing might have nothing to do with us, and therefore, it’s of no concern.’
‘Excuse me? No concern? She’s my friend!’