We didn’t have much time to admire the decor. There was a kitchen off to the right, with the divine possibility of all kinds of sharp objects and explodable chemicals, but the driver was right behind us with his gun. Pete was behind him, but he had Liz over his shoulder, and it looked to me like all the fight was out of him. Behind him came another, unburdened guy, and two more dragged Michael, who was still convulsed into a shuddering ball.
Beyond the front room with its dusty ceramic ducks and floral wallpaper, though, things changed. The next room had been renovated with a steel door, a vinyl floor, white walls, and embedded fluorescent fixtures above. A lab. I knew what they looked like, though I wasn’t one to spend a lot of time in chem classes. This one had a variety of cages up against the wall, from ones small enough to hold rats up to big ones that could have safely contained a tiger.
They put Michael in that one.
‘No, relax, it’s okay,’ I said, as Eve tried to pull free of me. I kept my voice low and gentle, because I could feel the desperation in her now, and knew she was on the verge of breaking. ‘He’s safe. Nothing’s going to happen to him. I’m more worried about us.’
‘Us?’ She frowned at me, still distracted; I got that. If it had been Claire in the cage, I couldn’t have concentrated, either. ‘What do they need us for?’
‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘Which is why I’m worried.’
The driver, right on cue, turned to the four of us – me, Eve, Pete and the limp form of Liz – and said, ‘In there.’ He emphasised it with a flick of the gun toward another doorway. Steel. With a prominent lock on it.
‘Hey,’ I said, and held up my hands. ‘I’m on your side, remember?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, kid, sure you are. Inside. Don’t worry, you’re not in any danger. We need you, to keep your smart little girlfriend in line.’
‘Wait,’ Eve said. I thought she was going to go ballistic again, but she stared the guy down, calmly, and when he nodded, continued, ‘Could we maybe have a bathroom break first? Because I personally need to pee like mad.’
He looked irritated, but it wasn’t like bad guys didn’t understand the need to pee. Everybody got that. Not everybody cared, though, and I held my breath a second hoping he wouldn’t just toss a bucket into the room or something, but then he nodded, reluctantly. ‘Go with him,’ he said, and pointed to one of the other guys who’d been holding Michael. ‘Door stays open.’
‘Are you
kidding
?’ Eve’s voice rose, and she put her hands on her hips. ‘What are you, some kind of perv? You get off on watching teenage girls—’
He flinched. ‘Fine. But you have one minute, and if you’re not done, the door opens hard.’ He jerked his head, and his boy took Eve off out the other door. ‘Anybody else got a shy bladder?’
Pete and I shook our heads. I raised my hand. ‘But I wouldn’t say no to the bathroom, either.’
‘Me too,’ Pete said. ‘In case this is a long stay in jail.’
‘Count on it,’ the driver said. ‘All right. When the girl comes back, you go next.’ He pointed to Pete. ‘You go last, Shane.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because I dislike you the most.’
Ditto
, I thought, and smiled at him. He smiled back. I was thinking about how I was going to take the gun away from him, and he was probably thinking about how hard he was going to shoot me when I tried it.
Diplomacy.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Michael, in the cage, raise his head. Funny. In my peripheral vision, his eyes were burning red. I remembered what Myrnin had said about Michael needing blood to fight whatever this force was acting on him … and no matter how strong that cage looked, it wasn’t good enough to contain Michael, or any of the vamps, if they really wanted out.
Turns out I was wrong about that. Michael took hold of the bars – moving quietly – and started to bend them. They didn’t go far. He kept trying, but whatever the cage was made of, it was definitely proof against vampire muscles. Not silver, because it didn’t burn him. It was just … stronger.
He let go and, as one of the guards glanced his way, collapsed back into a shrinking, shiver ball of misery.
Nice
, I thought. At least we had one ace in the hole, even if it was locked up. Sooner or later, they’d underestimate him, and let him loose.
And then the joker would definitely be wild.
Eve returned from the bathroom, and Pete left; she leant against the wall and folded her arms, staring defiantly at our driver. He walked over to check Liz, slumped against the wall. I’d already done it. Her breathing was good, but I didn’t like the chalky pallor of her skin. Whatever they’d given her to put her out when they’d abducted her, it had really taken her down. I supposed we were lucky they hadn’t given us the same tranquillisers … yet.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Eve said.
‘About what?’ I asked, still watching the driver.
‘I think you’re still an asshole.’ And she turned and slapped me. Hard enough to leave a mark. I blinked and caught her hand on the second attempt, and felt her other hand, disguised by all the drama, shove something into the pocket of my jeans. I didn’t look down, just straight into her face.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I get your point.’ I shoved her backward, and the driver got to his feet, frowned, and opened up the steel door. He shoved Eve inside, then me, and dragged Liz in as well.
‘If you want to go at each other, do it in there,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sending in any bandages. You want to fight, you can just bleed freely.’
‘He’s not worth the effort of a punch,’ Eve said. She turned her back and walked away, arms folded again.
Pete arrived and was shoved inside, and the door boomed shut. I didn’t get a bathroom trip, probably to punish me for being myself.
The room, upon inspection, was a plain concrete box, no windows, nothing. There was a faintly antiseptic smell, as if it had been used for storage of medical supplies, but there was nothing left but us, and a small hand-sized drain in the centre of the floor. My dad had already said that a human body could fit through any size of hole large enough to accommodate the head; it was just a matter of dislocating enough bones. Yeah, he was fun that way.
But this hole wasn’t even big enough for my clenched fist, never mind my skull. So that was out. Fortunately.
I checked the door and the ceiling and the corners. I didn’t see any cameras watching us, but I didn’t think I could rely on privacy; tech had gotten way too good for that. We’d been spied on once by someone we’d thought of – wrongly – as a friend, and I wasn’t about to spill my plans, such as they were, to Douche Bag Davis and his friends.
I was scared for Claire. Heart-stoppingly scared. She was all alone, surrounded by wolves who could take her down at any time, and the only thing she had to use was her guts, and her wits.
Fully armed, then. But it still scared me.
I put my hands in my pants pockets and slouched, like any street corner punk. Give me a backward cap and saggies and a sports jersey, and I’d have nailed the whole look. But it wasn’t just attitude. It gave me the chance to figure out what Eve had managed to shove down my pants – a thing that I wasn’t going to tell Claire about, incidentally.
It was a piece of rusted metal, probably some kind of flange to hold the sink drain in. About four inches long, jagged on the end. As weapons went, it was jailhouse-nasty. Pretty much perfect, actually. Too bad I hadn’t gotten a bathroom trip; there must have been plenty of other opportunities in there for fun mayhem-makers. You could kill somebody with a bar of soap, if you tried hard enough.
‘So,’ Eve murmured, head down so any cameras wouldn’t see her talking. ‘What’s our play, then?’
‘Still hating me?’ I talked to my shoes, too, and kept it quiet, in case there were microphones as well as cameras.
‘It’ll take a little bit longer for the burn to go away, yeah. Why? Am I hurting your little tender feelings?’
Yes
, I thought, but I said, ‘Bitch, please. You know I ain’t got no feelings.’
‘About that plan?’
‘Yeah, about that,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’re going to have to kill me.’
‘Goody.’
What have I done?
It kept running through Claire’s mind at breakneck speed, over and over … that moment when Anderson had pulled the trigger, and the Myrnin she knew had just disappeared. What was left was a crying, shaking wreck of a man who didn’t even seem to be a vampire, just a shattered relic of a human being. If she’d passed him in a doorway, she would have assumed he was a homeless, mentally disturbed wreck.
Which, technically, she guessed he was. And she’d done it to him.
Claire had rarely felt so alone. She’d thought coming across the country to MIT was a new start; she’d thought she was here to learn, to grow, to change. But instead, it had been a scam from the start. Anderson had never intended to teach her a thing. She’d just wanted VLAD, and Claire was the means to the end.
Speaking of VLAD, Dr Anderson had been hard at work on it, apparently, and she’d taken it from concept to harsh execution while Claire had been thinking they were going back to basics. All that she’d been doing, she understood now, had just been busy work, so Dr Anderson could perfect what she’d already done.
And test it.
‘Can I see it?’ Claire asked Dr Anderson, who was still holding VLAD; she’d added a much-needed support strap to it, but it was probably starting to feel really, really heavy. ‘I just want to understand what you did. I was thinking of adding a modulator to it, but—’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Anderson said. She adjusted the heavy weight a little, which meant that she was starting to feel the strain, just as Claire had hoped. ‘And we’re not going to talk about the tech.’
‘But I – I thought you wanted me to help you—’
Anderson gave her a brief, cool, impersonal smile. ‘Don’t try it. You may have given Myrnin up, but that doesn’t mean I trust you with the toys yet, Claire. That, you have to earn. I believe you as far as I can throw your boyfriend right now. And he’s a pretty solid-looking guy.’
She looked tired, Claire thought, and a bit shaky herself. She was watching Professor Davis, who was trying to get some kind of blood sample from Myrnin; he was having a time of it, not because Myrnin was fighting him, but because he couldn’t hold still. Finally, it took three armed men to pin Myrnin down flat, and he made a sound halfway between a wail and a sob that tore Claire right down to her soul.
I did this. I did all of this
.
She swallowed hard. ‘So what now?’ she asked. Her voice had gone harder, and she couldn’t seem to soften it. ‘You’ve got Myrnin, and Oliver, and Jesse, and Michael. You’ve got Shane and Eve. What else do you want?’
‘I want data,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘You’re a scientist, Claire. You realise what a rare opportunity this is, I hope – we have vampires who can be tested in lab conditions. We can break down the biology, which is something Dr Davis has been looking into for some time. We can
win
.’
‘I didn’t know we were at war.’
‘Of course we’re at war. And we were winning for a while; the vampires were sick when I left Morganville, and getting sicker. If you’d left it alone and let nature take its course, it would have been over by now.’
‘Did you make them sick?’ Claire asked, horrified. Myrnin had never completely believed the idea that Amelie’s vampire father Bishop had developed and spread that disease. Had it happened right in front of him?
But Dr Anderson was shaking her head. ‘No. I can’t claim credit for that. I just made sure that the research went nowhere on how to fight the illness. Seemed like for once, nature was favouring humans instead of vampires.’
Claire shivered. She’d thought she understood Dr Anderson; she’d thought they were alike. But they weren’t, deep down. They’d both survived Morganville, but they’d come out of it completely differently.
‘If you didn’t think we were at war,’ Anderson said, ‘then why did you make this?’ She patted VLAD’s metal frame.
‘I just wanted – I wanted a way for us to stop them if it came to a fight. That’s all. It’s supposed to be for defence.’
‘Well, you know what they say: the best defence is a good offence. We’ve been working on enhanced anti-vampire weaponry for some time. Including biological weapons.’
‘Dr Davis was running experiments,’ Claire said. ‘That bat-thing that killed Derrick. That was his?’
‘Yes,’ Anderson said. She was watching Myrnin, but not with any compassion or regret. It was all clinical, the look in her eyes. Clinical and bitterly cold. ‘He’d made considerable progress, but our samples were degraded. We’d had to rely on what I brought with me out of Morganville, and it wasn’t much. I was working on getting Jesse to cooperate with me, but for all her friendly ways, she’s smarter than that. Too bad. If she’d just done it peacefully, I wouldn’t have had to take the steps I did.’
‘Is Jesse—?’
‘Alive? Yes. Happy?’ Anderson shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to do it. But she pushed me into it. I’ve got a monitor on her. So far, the effects haven’t worn off. I’m starting to wonder if the beam does permanent neural damage.’
‘Permanent?
What did you do to VLAD? It was never supposed to be that powerful—’
‘I made it work,’ Anderson snapped. ‘Your job now, if you want to stay on the right side of the fight, is to take the model that Dr Davis was using and make it work as well. I didn’t have time to complete it before this crisis erupted. Myrnin’s arrival pushed us into an accelerated timeline. I think we’ve gotten the situation contained, but if any communications made it back to Amelie, we may have a fight on our hands, and I need at least one more working device to be safe. So, you do that, and I’ll make sure your boyfriend and your other friends get out of this in one piece. Clear?’
‘Clear,’ Claire said. ‘Dr Davis’s gun didn’t work? That was a bluff?’
Dr Anderson shrugged. ‘I thought you’d recognise it, and it would slow you down so I could use the one that did.’