Maybe that was just his default setting.
There was a knock on the front door, and Pete headed for it. Shane got up, too, frowning. ‘That was too quick for pizza,’ he said. Pete nodded without pausing; he had a baseball bat hidden in the shadows near the doorway, and he grabbed the length of wood on his way. Then he checked the peephole.
‘Is it the police?’ Claire asked. She felt a little short of breath, suddenly, because if it was, there didn’t seem to be an easy way out of this place. Defensible, but limited retreat. And they couldn’t fight their way out, not against regular human police. It would be wrong on every level, even if they weren’t guilty.
‘No,’ Pete said. There was an odd tension in his voice, and he stepped back from the door, opened it, and said, ‘Get in, quick.’
It happened fast – one second he was standing alone on the doorstep, and the next … the next, there were three people crowding the hallway with him. Two supporting a limp, maybe unconscious third.
As Pete slammed and locked the door, Claire bolted forward. So did Shane.
And Eve let out a strangled little sound that was half glad cry, half sob.
She and Jesse were supporting the dead weight of a very pale, very still Michael Glass.
With a wooden stake in his heart.
‘Christ, is that guy dead?’ Pete blurted out, when he saw the stake. Shane ignored him, grabbed Michael’s weight by the shoulders, and helped Jesse carry him over to the couch. Eve followed, and Claire hugged her hard when she paused to try to catch her breath. She was shaking all over.
‘He’s okay,’ Claire said, and rubbed her back. ‘Eve, it’s okay, it’ll be okay …’
‘Pull it out,’ Shane snapped at Jesse, who had crouched down beside the couch to stare at the stake in Michael’s chest. ‘Hurry up, he’s too young, it could really hurt him.’
‘Stop! Don’t touch it. It’s spring-loaded,’ Jesse said, and pointed to a symbol burnt into the side of the wood. ‘I know this mark. It’s a Daylight Foundation inventory sign. It’s got a silver payload built in. If you try to remove it, it’ll flood his heart with silver. It’ll kill him.’
Shane had reached out for the stake, but now he pulled back, eyes narrowed and simmering with fury. ‘Who the
fuck
is the Daylight Foundation?’
‘Trust me, nobody you need to screw around with,’ Jesse said. ‘There’s a method for disarming this thing, but we need to be very careful. I’ve got some experience. Let me handle it.’
‘What the hell happened out there?’ Shane demanded. No one answered him, not even Eve; she was staring down at Michael, her face ashen. Claire held on to her, because it seemed that, after having made the single-minded effort to get Michael to safety, Eve had completely lost all strength to keep herself upright. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t doing anything, except … waiting, with a kind of fatal, desperate patience. The ruby wedding ring flashed and trembled on her clenched left hand. ‘Claire.
Claire
. Go check the door, make sure nobody’s coming after them.’
She didn’t want to leave Eve, but he was right; it was important. Pete seemed rooted to the spot, staring at the completely unexpected second vampire in his living room; he seemed to be rethinking his whole life strategy, in that single moment.
‘Go,’ Eve whispered. ‘I’m okay.’ She stood on her own, somehow, and Claire squeezed her arm and rushed to the door to look through the peephole.
There was a streetlight conveniently situated outside that cast a harsh glow over the sidewalk, which seemed deserted except for Jesse’s car, parked across the street. The peephole didn’t offer much of a glimpse off to the sides, but Claire was pretty certain that everything was clear. She turned back and gave a thumbs-up sign to Shane, who nodded and looked down at Michael again with tense, desperately still silence.
Then the door behind Claire’s back vibrated under a sudden, very strong volley of knocking.
Too
strong. Claire yelped and whipped around to stare out the peephole again, and saw a pallid face under a shock of wildly windblown black hair. No human being was naturally that pale.
She unlocked it and said, ‘Get in, quick!’ because it was Myrnin … and behind him, Oliver.
The two vampires entered in a rush of displaced air, and Oliver quickly shut and locked the door again. He leant against it, seeming tired – weirdly – and Claire had a chance to think,
Why is Oliver here?
Because even though he’d been exiled from Morganville by Amelie, she didn’t think he had any reason to be poking around this part of the country. Oliver looked ragged, too – and dressed down, in worn blue jeans grimy with oil, a faded, loose T-shirt with some kind of wolf design on it, and his long, salt-and-pepper curly hair worn in a loose, sloppy ponytail in back. It didn’t seem to have had a wash recently. Neither did he.
And Myrnin … well, at least he wasn’t dressed any worse than he usually was, but he seemed
very
pale, and not any cleaner than Oliver. They’d both been travelling hard, she guessed, although vampires didn’t really smell bad, unless they came in contact with things that did. From the general miasma around the two of them, they’d been around rotting garbage for a while.
Myrnin stared at her for a long few seconds, then scraped his disorderly hair back from his face, and said, ‘They don’t have you, then. But do they have
it
?’
‘It? What does that mean?’ Claire asked. He didn’t answer her. He just hugged her, suddenly and violently, and before she could even make a surprised sound he was gone. It was like being hugged by a snowman, only less … moist. And more unpleasantly fragrant.
Oliver said, ‘We went to see Irene Anderson. Myrnin has a good relationship with her, even now. However, she was … unhelpful. She had no idea where you had gone, only that you had taken the device with you from her laboratory.’
‘I – wait, what? I didn’t take anything!’
‘Oh,’ Myrnin said, and turned back toward her from where he stood next to Eve. ‘Oh, that is such very, very bad news. Because if you didn’t, someone did. Someone with laboratory access, since I personally reviewed the records.’
Myrnin sounded … sane. Despite the tangled hair, the dirty homeless-style clothes, the smell of garbage and the whiff of things much worse. He looked taut, worried and paranoid, but
not
crazy.
So, things were very, very bad, then. Claire sometimes thought of him as only recreationally crazy; when things were life and death, her boss (and friend) seemed to make a concerted effort to view things with icy precision. He paid for it later, but she’d never been less than grateful to him for making the effort.
‘You’re saying someone broke into Dr Anderson’s lab and took VLAD.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘VLAD?’
‘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.