Authors: Rachel Caine
She didn’t break.
On the third day, Shane was still on catching duty. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the back of the sofa and wearing one of those white cotton breathing masks. He’d bought it in self-defense, he’d told her; he didn’t want to be breathing in plastic toy dust and coughing up a lung.
She didn’t blame him, but it did make a funny picture, at least until she’d realized the same thing on her end and gotten a mask out of Myrnin’s jumbled stash of supplies. And goggles. Shane now envied her the goggles.
“Hang on,” she said, after her last attempt at pitching a neon plastic ball through had turned it to dust on the other end. “I have an idea.”
“So do I,” Shane said. “Movies, hot dogs, and not doing this anymore. Like it?”
“Love it,” she said, and meant it. “But let me do this one thing, okay?”
He sighed and let his head fall back against the sofa. “Sure, whatever.”
She really was a terrible girlfriend, Claire thought, and raced across the lab, careful of all of Myrnin’s various scattered trip hazards that she couldn’t seem to convince him were dangerous. She arrived at the worktable, where her circuitry (with Myrnin’s incomprehensible additions) quietly hummed away.
She shut the power off and checked the connections again. All of the voltage was steady; there was no reason why the other end would be unstable, unless . . .
Unless it was something Myrnin had done.
Claire began tracing the piping, which led to a spring, which led to a complicated series of gears and levers, which led to a bubbling ice-green liquid in a sealed chamber. . . .
Only it wasn’t bubbling. It wasn’t doing anything, even when she turned the power on. She distinctly remembered him explaining that it was supposed to bubble. She had no idea why that was important, but she supposed that maybe the bubbling created some kind of pressure, which . . . did what?
Exasperated, she thumped the thing with her finger.
It started to bubble.
She blinked, watched the whole thing for a while, decided that it wasn’t going to blow up or boil over, and went back to where Shane was pretending to snore on the other side of the portal.
“Heads up, slacker!” she said, and pitched another neon ball at him, hard.
Shane’s reactions were really, really good, and he got his eyes open and hands up at the same time . . .
. . . and the ball smacked firmly into his grip.
Shane stared down at it for a second, then stripped off his mask as he turned it over in his fingers.
“Is it okay?” Claire asked breathlessly. “Is it—”
“Feels fine,” he said. “Damn. Unbelievable.” He pitched it back to her, and she caught it. It felt exactly the same—not even a little warm or a little cool. She threw it back, and he responded, and before long they were laughing and whooping and feeling incredibly giddy. She raised the ball over her head and jumped around in a circle, just like Eve would have, and made herself dizzy.
She whirled around to an unsteady stop, and Shane caught her.
Because he was
here
, in the lab with her, instead of on the other side of the portal. Her brain sent a message of
Oh, he feels so good
, just about a half second before the logical part kicked in.
Claire shoved him backward, appalled and scared. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What?” Shane asked. “What did I do?”
“You . . . you came through?”
“The ball was fine.”
“The
ball
doesn’t have internal organs! Squishy parts! How could you be so crazy?” She was literally shaking now, deeply terrified that he was about to burst into a dust cloud, melt, die in her arms. How could he be so
insane
?
Shane looked a little off balance, as if he hadn’t really expected this kind of reception, but he looked back at the portal, the piles of dust, and said, “Oh. Yeah, I see your point. But I’m fine, Claire. It worked.”
“How do you know you’re fine? Shane, you could
die
!” She rushed at him, threw her arms around him, and now she could feel his heart beating fast. He hugged her, held her while she tried to get her panic under control, and gently kissed the top of her head.
“You’re right; it was dumb,” he said. “Stop. Relax. You did it, okay? You made it work. Just . . . breathe.”
“Not until you go see the doctor,” she said. “Dumb-ass.” She was still scared, still shaking, but she tried to get the old Claire back, the one who could face down snarling vampires. But this was
different.
What if she’d just killed him? Broken something inside him that couldn’t grow back?
Myrnin came in from the back room, carrying a load of books, which he dropped with a loud bang on the floor to glare at the two of them. “Excuse me,” he said, “but when did my lab become appropriate for snogging?”
“What’s snogging?” Shane asked.
“Ridiculous displays of inappropriate affection in front of me. Roughly translated. And what are
you
doing here?” Myrnin was genuinely offended, Claire realized. Not good.
“It’s my fault,” Claire said in a rush, and stepped away from Shane, although she kept holding his hand. “I . . . He was helping me with the experiments.”
“In what, biology?” Myrnin crossed his arms. “Are we running a secret laboratory or not? Because if you’re going to have your friends drop in anytime they please—”
“Back off, man; she said she was sorry,” Shane said. He was watching Myrnin with that cold look in his eyes, the one that was a real danger sign. “It wasn’t her fault, anyway. It was mine.”
“Was it?” Myrnin said softly. “And how is it that you do not understand that
here
, in
this
place, this girl belongs to me, not to you?”
Claire turned cold all over, then hot. She felt her cheeks flare red, and she hardly recognized her voice as she yelled, “I don’t
belong
to you, Myrnin! I
work
for you! I’m not your . . . your slave!” She was so furious that she wasn’t even shaking anymore. “I fixed your portals. And we’re leaving.”
“You’ll leave when I—Wait, what did you say?”
Claire ignored him and picked up her backpack. She led the way up the stairs. Three steps up, she glanced back. Shane still hadn’t moved. He was still watching Myrnin. Still
between
her and Myrnin.
“Wait,” Myrnin said in an entirely different tone now. “Claire, wait. Are you saying you successfully transported an object?”
“No, she’s saying she successfully transported
me
,” Shane snapped. “And we’re leaving now.”
“No, no, no, wait—you can’t. I must run tests; I need to have a blood sample.” Myrnin rooted frantically in a drawer, came up with an ancient blood-drawing kit, and came toward Shane.
Shane looked over his shoulder at Claire. “I’m seriously going to kill this guy if he tries to stick me with that thing.”
“Myrnin!” Claire snapped. “No. Not now. I’m taking him to the hospital to get him checked out. I’ll make sure you get your sample. Now
leave us alone.
”
Myrnin stopped, and he actually looked wounded.
Oh stop it,
Claire thought, still furious.
I didn’t kick your puppy.
She was almost at the top of the steps, and Shane was right behind her, when she heard Myrnin say, in a quiet voice that was like the old Myrnin, the one she actually liked, “I’m sorry, Claire. I never meant—I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I am thinking. I wish . . . I wish things could be like they were before.”
“Me, too,” Claire muttered.
She knew they wouldn’t be, though.
Getting Shane seen by a doctor was trickier than she’d thought. Claire couldn’t exactly explain to the emergency room what
might
be wrong with him, so after a complete fail at the ER, she went in search of the only doctor she knew personally—Dr. Mills—who’d treated her before, and knew about Myrnin. He’d actually helped create the antidote to the vampires’ illness, so he was pretty trustworthy.
She still didn’t explain about the portals, but he didn’t push. He was a nice guy, middle-aged, a little tired, like most doctors usually seemed to be, but he just nodded and said, “Let me take a look at him. Shane?”
“I’m not dropping my pants,” Shane said. “I just thought I’d say that up front.”
Dr. Mills laughed. “Just the basics, all right? But if Claire’s concerned, I’m concerned. Let’s make sure you’re healthy.”
They walked off toward his office, leaving Claire in the waiting area with piles of ancient magazines that still wondered whether Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston would stay together. Not that she read that stuff anyway. Much.
She was still mad at Myrnin, but now she realized that it was mostly because she’d been so tired and stressed out. He hadn’t been any worse than normal, really. And how much did
that
suck?
It doesn’t matter
, she told herself.
I did something amazing, and nobody got hurt.
She knew they’d both been lucky, though. It still turned her cold to think what could have happened, all because she hadn’t thought to tell Shane not to come through the portal, no matter how safe it seemed.
Doctors always seemed to take forever, and while Shane was getting checked out, Claire fidgeted and thought about the progress she’d made, and—what worried her more—the progress that
Myrnin
had made. Apparently. What was he thinking? It was impossible to know, but she was pretty sure he hadn’t given up the idea of putting a brain—namely
her
brain—in a jar and hooking it up to a computer. It was the kind of totally cracked thing Myrnin would think was not only logical, but somehow
helpful.
She really didn’t want to end up in a jar, like Ada had before her. A ghost, slowly going mad because she couldn’t touch, be touched, be
human.
Although in Ada’s case, she’d been a vampire. But still, Ada hadn’t exactly come through it with all her marbles. Oh, she’d seemed to do her job, running the systems; she’d kept the portals open and the boundaries closed, issued alerts when residents tried to flee, probably even done a lot more that Claire had never seen. But in the end, Ada had gotten less and less sane, and more and more determined to keep Myrnin all to herself, and never mind the rest of Morganville.
And Myrnin hadn’t been able to admit that there was a problem.
That brought a bad flashback of Ada’s proper Victorian school-mistress image standing in front of her, hands folded, smiling. Waiting for Claire to die.
Well, I didn’t die
, Claire thought, and controlled a shudder.
Ada died. And I’m not ending up like Ada, some insane thing trying to stay alive at any cost. . . .
She flinched as someone touched her shoulder, but it was Shane. He grinned down at her. “Hospitals freak you out?”
“They ought to,” she shot back. “You’re always ending up in here.”
“Not fair. You’ve had your turns, too.”
She had, more than she liked. Claire scrambled to her feet, grabbed her stuff, and saw Dr. Mills standing a few feet away. He was smiling. That was a good sign, right?
“He’s fine,” the doctor said, in such a soothing voice Claire knew she was looking anxious. Or panicked. “Whatever he was accidentally exposed to, I can’t find anything that’s off. But if you start feeling odd, dizzy, experiencing any pain or discomfort, be sure to call me, Shane.”
Shane, his back to the doctor, rolled his eyes, then turned and said a polite thank-you. “How much do I owe you, Doc?”
Dr. Mills raised his eyebrows. “I see you’re wearing Amelie’s pin.”
Shane was, haphazardly stuck in the collar of his shirt; he’d bitched about it at first, but Claire had insisted they all wear the pins, all the time. Amelie had promised that they would identify them as a special kind of neutral, free from attack by any vampires—though she’d yet to test out the theory.
Apparently, they were also gold cards, because Dr. Mills continued. “There’s no charge for services for friends of Morganville.”
Shane frowned, and it looked like he might argue, but Claire pulled on his arm, and he let himself be led away to the elevators. “Never turn down free,” she said.
“I don’t like it,” Shane said, before the doors even closed. “I don’t like being some charity case.”
“Yeah, well, trust me: you couldn’t afford his bill anyway.” She turned toward him as the elevator beeped its descent to the ground floor, and stepped closer. “You’re okay. You’re really okay.”
“Told you I was.” He bent down, and she turned her face up, but they had time for only a quick, sweet kiss before the doors opened and they had to dodge out of the way of a gurney with a patient on it. Shane took her hand, and they walked out of the hospital lobby and into the late-afternoon sun.
On the way out she caught a glimpse of a face in shadows, pale and sharp and hard. An older man with a vivid scar marring his face.
Claire stopped walking, and Shane continued on for a step before looking back at her. “What?” he asked, and turned to see where she was staring.
Nothing was there now, but Claire was sure of what she’d seen, even in that brief flash.
Shane’s father, Frank Collins, had been watching them. That was unsettling, creepy. She hadn’t seen Frank in a while—not since he’d saved her life. She’d heard that he’d been around, but seeing him was an entirely different thing.
Frank Collins was the world’s most reluctant vampire, and besides that, she was sure that he was the person Shane least wanted to see.
“Nothing,” she said, and focused her attention back on Shane with a smile that she hoped was happy. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“So, how do we celebrate my okayness? It’s my day off. Let’s go crazy. Glow-in-the-dark bowling?”
“No.”
“I’ll let you use the kiddie ball.”
“Shut up. I do
not
need the kiddie ball.”
“The way you bowl, I think you might.” He grabbed her in an exaggerated formal dance pose and whirled her around, backpack and all, which didn’t make her any more graceful. “Ballroom dancing?”