Текст книги "Lord of Misrule"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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“Too easy, too easy,” Hannah kept on muttering. “What’s the point of doing this if Bishop is just going to let him go?”

The eyebolts were all ripped loose, and Gérard grabbed Myrnin’s arm and helped him to his feet.

Myrnin’s eyes sheeted over with blazing ruby, and he shook Gérard off and went straight for Hannah.

Hannah saw him coming and put the gun between them, but before she could fire, Gérard’s partner knocked her hand out of line, and the shot went wild, impacting on the stone at the other side of the room. Silver flakes drifted on the air, igniting tiny burns where they landed on the vampires’ skin. The two bodyguards backed off.

Myrnin grabbed Hannah by the neck.

“No!” Claire screamed, and ducked under Gérard’s restraining hand. She raised her wooden stake.

Myrnin turned his head and grinned at her with wicked vampire fangs flashing. “I thought you were here to save me, Claire, not kill me,” he purred, and whipped back toward his prey. Hannah was fumbling with her gun, trying to get it back into position. He stripped it away from her with contemptuous ease.

“I amhere to save you,” Claire said, and before she could think what she was doing, she buried the stake in Myrnin’s back, on the left side, right where she thought his heart would be.

He made a surprised sound, like a cough, and pitched forward into Hannah. His hand slid away from her throat, clutching blindly at her clothes, and then he fell limply to the floor.

Dead, apparently.

Gérard and his partner looked at Claire as if they’d never seen her before, and then Gérard roared, “What do you think you’re—”

“Pick him up,” Claire said. “We can take the stake out later. He’s old. He’ll survive.”

That sounded cold, and scary, and she hoped it was true. Amelie had survived, after all, and she knew Myrnin was as old, or maybe even older. From the look he gave her, Gérard was reassessing everything he’d thought about the cute, fragile little human he’d been nursemaiding. Too bad. Claire thought one of her strengths was that everybody always underestimated her.

She was cool on the outside, shaking on the inside, because although it wasthe only way to keep Myrnin calm right now without tranquilizers, or without letting him rip Hannah’s throat out, she’d just killed her boss.

That didn’t seem like a really good career move.

Amelie will help,she thought a bit desperately, and Gérard slung Myrnin over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and then they were running, moving fast again back down the hall to where Amelie had stayed to secure their escape.

Gérard came to a fast halt, and Hannah and Claire almost skidded into him. “What?” Hannah whispered, and looked past the two vampires in the lead.

Amelie was at the corner ahead of them, but ten feet past her was Mr. Bishop.

They were standing motionless, facing each other. Amelie looked fragile and delicate, compared to her father in his bishop’s robes. He looked ancient and angry, and the fire in his eyes was like something out of the story of Joan of Arc.

Neither of them moved. There was some struggle going on, but Claire couldn’t tell what it was, or what it meant.

Gérard reached out and grabbed her arm, and Hannah’s, and held them in place. “No,” he said sharply. “Don’t go near them.”

“Problem, sir, that’s the way out,” Hannah said. “And the dude’s alone.”

Gérard and the Texan sent her a wild look, almost identical in their disbelief. “You think so?” the Texan said. “Humans.”

Amelie took a step backward, just a small one, but a shudder went through her body, and Claire knew—just knew—it was a bad sign. Really bad.

Whatever confrontation had been going on, it broke.

Amelie whirled to them and screamed, “Go!” There was fury and fear in her voice, and Gérard let go of both girls and dumped Myrnin off his shoulder, into their arms, and he and the Texan pelted not for the exit, but to Amelie’s side.

They got there just in time to stop Bishop from ripping out her throat. They slammed the old man up against the wall, but then there were others coming out into the hall. Bishop’s troops, Claire guessed.

There were a lot of them.

Amelie intercepted the first of Bishop’s vampires to run in her direction. Claire recognized him, vaguely—one of the Morganville vamps, but he’d obviously switched sides, and he came for Amelie, fangs out.

She put him down on the floor with one twisting move, fast as a snake, and looked back at Hannah and Claire, with Myrnin’s body sagging between them. “Get him out!” she shouted. “I’ll hold the way!”

“Come on,” Hannah said, and shouldered the bulk of Myrnin’s limp weight. “We’re leaving.”

Myrnin felt cold and heavy, like the dead man he was, and Claire swallowed a surge of nausea as she struggled to support his limp weight. Claire gritted her teeth and helped Hannah half carry, half drag Myrnin’s staked body down the corridor. Behind them, the sounds of fighting continued—mainly bodies hitting the floor. No screaming, no shouting.

Vampires fought in silence.

“Right,” Hannah gasped. “We’re on our own.”

That really wasn’t good news—two humans stuck God knew where, with a crazy vampire with a stake in his heart in the middle of a war zone.

“Let’s get back to the door,” Claire said.

“How are we going to get through it?”

“I can do it.”

Hannah threw her a look. “You?”

It was no time to get annoyed; hadn’t she just been thinking that being underestimated was a gift? Yeah, not so much, sometimes. “Yes, really. I can do it. But we’d better hurry.” The odds weren’t in Amelie’s favor. She might be able to hang on and cover their retreat, but Claire didn’t think she could win.

She and Hannah dragged Myrnin past the symbol-marked doorways. Hannah counted off, and nodded to the one where they’d entered.

Not too surprisingly, it was marked with the Founder’s Symbol, the same one Claire wore on the bracelet on her wrist.

Hannah tried to open it. “Dammit! Locked.”

Not when Claire tried the knob. It opened at a twist, and the single candle in the corner illuminated very little. Claire caught her breath and rested her trembling muscles for a few seconds as Hannah checked the room and pronounced it safe before they entered.

Claire let Myrnin slide in a heap to the floor. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to him. “It was the only way. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”

She had no idea if he could hear her when he was like this. She wanted to grab the stake and pull it out, but she remembered that with Amelie, and with Sam, it had been the other vampires who’d done it. Maybe they knew things she didn’t. Besides, the disease weakened them—even Myrnin.

She couldn’t take the risk. And besides, having him wake up wounded and crazy would be even worse, now that they didn’t have any vampires who could help control him.

Hannah returned to her side. “So,” she said, as she checked the clip on her paintball gun, frowned, and exchanged it for a new one, “how do we do this? We got to go back to that museum first, right?”

Did they? Claire wasn’t sure. She stepped up to the door, which currently featured nothing but darkness, and concentrated hard on Myrnin’s lab, with all its clutter and debris. Light swam, flickered, shivered, and snapped into focus.

No problem at all.

“Guess it’s only roundabout getting here,” Claire said. “Maybe that’s on purpose, to keep people out who shouldn’t be here. But it makes sense that once Amelie got here, she’d want to take the express out.” She turned back. “Shouldn’t we wait?”

Hannah opened the door and looked out into the hall. Whatever she saw, it couldn’t have been good news. She shook her head. “We bug out, right now.”

With a grunt of effort, Hannah braced Myrnin’s deadweight on one side and dragged him forward. Claire took his other arm.

“Did he just twitch?” Hannah asked. “ ’Cause if he twitches, I’m going to shoot him.”

“No! No, he didn’t; he’s fine,” Claire said, practically tripping over the words. “Ready? One, two . . .”

And three, they were in Myrnin’s lab. Claire twisted out from under Myrnin’s cold body, slammed the door shut, and stared wildly at the broken lock. “I need to fix that,” she said. But what about Amelie? No, she’d know all the exits. She didn’t have to come here.

“Girl, you need to get us the hell out of here, is what you need to do,” Hannah said. “You dial up the nearest Fort Knox or something on that thing. Damn, how’d you learn this, anyway?”

“I had a good teacher.” Claire didn’t look at Myrnin. She couldn’t. For all intents and purposes, she’d just killed him, after all. “This way.”

There were two ways out of Myrnin’s lab, besides the usually-secured dimensional doorway: steps leading up to street level, which were probably the absolute worst idea ever right now, and a second, an even more hidden dimensional portal in a small room off to the side. That was the one Amelie had used to get them in.

But the problem was, Claire couldn’t get it to work. She had the memories clear in her head—the Glass House, the portal to the university, the hospital, even the museum they’d visited on the way here. But nothing worked.

It just felt . . . dead, as if the whole system had been cut off.

They were lucky to have made it this far.

Amelie’s trapped,Claire realized. Back there. With Bishop. And she’s outnumbered.

Claire double-checked the other door, too, the one she’d blocked.

Nothing. It wasn’t just a malfunctioning portal; the whole network was down.

“Well?” Hannah asked.

Claire couldn’t worry about Amelie right now. She had a job to do—get Myrnin to safety. And that meant getting him to the only vampire she knew offhand who could help him: Oliver. “I think we’re walking,” she said.

“The hell we are,” Hannah said. “I’m not hauling a dead vampire through the streets of Morganville. We’ll get ourselves killed by just about everybody.”

“We can’t leave him!”

“We can’t take him, either!”

Claire felt her jaw lock into stubborn position. “Well, fine, you go ahead. Because I’m not leaving him. I can’t.”

She could tell that Hannah wanted to grab her by the hair and yank her out of there, but finally, the older woman nodded and stepped back. “Third option,” she said. “Call in the cavalry.”

5

It wasn’t quite the Third Armored Division, but after about a dozen phone calls, they did manage to get a ride.

“I’m turning on the street—nobody in sight so far,” Eve’s voice said from the speaker of Claire’s cell phone. She’d been giving Claire a turn-by-turn description of her drive, and Claire had to admit, it sounded pretty frightening. “Yeah, I can see the Day House. You’re in the alley next to it?”

“We’re on our way,” Claire said breathlessly. She was drenched with sweat, aching all over, from the effort of helping drag Myrnin out of the lab, up the steps, and down the narrow, seemingly endless dark alley. Next door, the Founder House belonging to Katherine Day and her granddaughter—a virtual copy of the house where Claire and her friends lived—was dark and closed, but Claire saw curtains moving at the upstairs windows.

“That’s my great-aunt’s house, Great-Aunt Kathy,” Hannah panted. “Everybody calls her Gramma, though. Always have, as far back as I can remember.”

Claire could see how Hannah was related to the Days; partly her features, but her attitude for sure. That was a family full of tough, smart, get-it-done women.

Eve’s big, black car was idling at the end of the alley, and the back door kicked open as the two of them—three? Did Myrnin still count?—approached. Eve took a look at Myrnin, and the stake in his back, sent Claire a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look, and reached out to drag him inside, facedown, on the backseat. “Hurry!” she said, and slammed the back door on the way to the driver’s side. “Damn, he’d better not bleed all over the place. Claire, I thought you were supposed to—”

“I know,” Claire said, and climbed into the middle of the big, front bench seat. Hannah crammed in on the outside. “Don’t remind me. I was supposed to keep him safe.”

Eve put the car in gear and did a ponderous tank-heavy turn. “So, who staked him?”

“I did.”

Eve blinked. “Okay, that’s an interesting interpretation of safe.Weren’t you with Amelie?” Eve actually did a quick check of the backseat, as if she were afraid Amelie might have magically popped in back there, seated like a barbarian queen on top of Myrnin’s prone body.

“Yeah. We were,” Hannah said.

“Do I have to ask? No, wait, do I wantto ask?”

“We left her,” Claire said, miserable. “Bishop set a trap. She was fighting when we had to go.”

“What about the other guys? I thought you went with a whole entourage!”

“We left most of them. . . .” Her brain caught up with her, and she looked at Hannah, who looked back with the same thought in her expression. “Oh, crap. The other guys. They were in Myrnin’s lab, but not when we came back. . . .”

“Gone,” Hannah said. “Taken out.”

“Super. So, we’re winning, then.” Eve’s tone was wicked cynical, but her dark eyes looked scared. “I talked to Michael. He’s okay. They’re at the university. Things are quiet there so far.”

“And Shane?” Claire realized, with a pure bolt of guilt, that she hadn’t called him. If he’d called her, she wouldn’t have known; she’d turned off the ringer, afraid of the noise when creeping around on a rescue mission.

But as she dug out her phone, she saw that she hadn’t missed any calls after all.

“Yeah, he’s okay,” Eve said, and steered the car at semihigh speed around a corner. The town was dark, very dark, with a few houses lit up by lanterns or candles or flashlights. Most people were waiting in the dark, scared to death. “They had some vamps try to board the bus, probably looking for a snack, but it wasn’t even a real fight. So far they’re cruising without too much trouble. He’s fine, Claire.” She reached over and took Claire’s hand to squeeze it. “You, not so much. You look awful.”

“Thanks. I think I earned it.”

Eve took back her hand to haul the big wheel of the car around for a turn. Headlights swept over a group on the sidewalk—unnaturally pale. Unnaturally still. “Oh, crap, we’ve got bogeys. Hang on, I’m going to floor it.”

That was, Claire thought, a pretty fantastic idea, because the vampires on the curb were now in the street, and following. There was a kind of manic glee to how they pursued the car, but not even a vamp could keep up with Eve’s driving for long; they fell back into the dark, one by one. The last one was the fastest, and he nearly caught hold of the back bumper before he stumbled and was left behind in a black cloud of exhaust.

“Damn freaks,” Eve said, trying to sound tough but not quite making it. “Hey, Hannah. How’s business?”

“Right now?” Hannah laughed softly. “Not so fantastic, but I’m not bothered about it. Let’s see if we can make it to the morning. Then I’ll worry about making ends meet at the shop.”

“Oh, we’ll make it,” Eve said, with a confidence Claire personally didn’t feel. “Look, it’s already four a.m. Another couple of hours, and we’re fine.”

Claire didn’t say, In a couple of hours, we could all be dead, but she was thinking it. What about Amelie? What were they going to do to rescue her?

If she’s even still alive.

Claire’s head hurt, her eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and she just wanted to curl up in a warm bed, pull the pillow over her head, and not be so responsible.

Fat chance.

She wasn’t paying attention to where Eve was going, and anyway, it was so dark and strange outside she wasn’t sure she’d recognize things, anyway. Eve pulled to a halt at the curb, in front of a row of plate glass windows lit by candles and lanterns inside.

Just like that, they were at Common Grounds.

Eve jumped out of the driver’s side, opened the back door, and grabbed Myrnin under the arms, all the while muttering, “Ick, ick, ick!” Claire slid out to join her, and Hannah grabbed Myrnin’s feet when they hit the pavement, and the three of them carried him into the coffee shop.

Claire found herself shoved immediately out of the way by two vampires: Oliver and some woman she didn’t know. Oliver looked grim, but then, that wasn’t new, either. “Put him down,” Oliver said. “No, not there, idiots, over there, on the sofa. You. Off.” That last was directed at the frightened humans who were seated on the indicated couch, and they scattered like quail. Eve continued her ickmantra as she and Hannah hauled Myrnin’s deadweight over and settled him facedown on the couch cushions. He was about the color of a fluorescent lightbulb now, blue-white and cold.

Oliver crouched next to him, looking at the stake in Myrnin’s back. He steepled his fingers for a moment, and then looked up at Claire. “What happened?”

She supposed he could tell, somehow, that it was herstake. Wonderful. “I didn’t have a choice. He came after us.” The uspart might have been an exaggeration; he’d come after Hannah, really. But eventually he would have come after Claire, too; she knew that.

Oliver gave her a moment to squirm while he stared at her, and then looked back at Myrnin’s still, very corpselike body. The area where the stake had gone in looked even paler than the surrounding tissue, like the edge of a whirlpool draining all the color out of him. “Do you have any of the drugs you have been giving him?” Oliver asked. Claire nodded, and fumbled in her pocket. She had some of the powder form of the drug, and some of the liquid, but she hadn’t felt confident at all that she’d be able to get it into Myrnin’s mouth without a fight she was bound to lose. When Myrnin was like this, you were going to lose fingers, at the very least, if you got anywhere near his mouth.

Not so much an issue now, she supposed. She handed over the vials to Oliver, who turned them over in his fingers, considering, and then handed back the powder. “The liquid absorbs into the body more quickly, I expect.”

“Yes.” It also had some unpredictable side effects, but this probably wasn’t the time to worry about that.

“And Amelie?” Oliver continued turning the bottle over and over in his fingers.

“She’s—we had to leave her. She was fighting Bishop. I don’t know where she is now.”

A deep silence filled the room, and Claire saw the vampires all look at one another—all except Oliver, who continued to stare down at Myrnin, no change in his expression at all. “All right, then. Helen, Karl, watch the windows and doors. I doubt Bishop’s patrols will try storming the place, but they might, while I’m distracted. The rest of you”—he looked at the humans and shook his head—“try to stay out of our way.”

He thumbed the top off the vial of clear liquid and held it in his right hand. “Get ready to turn him faceup,” he said to Hannah and Claire. Claire took hold of Myrnin’s shoulders, and Hannah his feet.

Oliver took the stake in his left hand and, in one smooth motion, pulled it out. It clattered to the floor, and he nodded sharply. “Now.”

Once Myrnin was lying on his back, Oliver motioned her away and pried open Myrnin’s bloodless lips. He poured the liquid into the other vampire’s mouth, shut it, and placed a hand on his high forehead.

Myrnin’s dark eyes were open. Wide-open. Claire shuddered, because they looked completely dead—like windows into a dark, dark room . . . and then he blinked.

He sucked in a very deep breath, and his back arched in silent agony. Oliver held his hand steady on Myrnin’s forehead. His eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, and Myrnin writhed weakly, trying without much success to twist free. He collapsed limply back on the cushions, chest rising and falling. His skin still looked like polished marble, veined with cold blue, but his eyes were alive again.

And crazy. And hungry.

He swallowed, coughed, swallowed again, and gradually, the insane pilot light in his eyes went out. He looked tired and confused and in pain.

Oliver let out a long, moaning sigh, and tried to stand up. He couldn’t. He made it about halfway up, then wavered and fell to his knees, one hand braced on the arm of the couch for support. His head went down, and his shoulders heaved, almost as if he were gasping or crying. Claire couldn’t imagine Oliver– Oliver—doing either one of those things, really.

Nobody moved. Nobody touched him, although some of the other vampires exchanged unreadable glances.

He’s sick,Claire thought. It was the disease. It made it harder and harder for them to concentrate, to do the things they’d always taken for granted, like make other vampires. Or revive them. Even Oliver, who hadn’t believed anything about the sickness . . . even he was starting to fail.

And he knew it.

“Help me up,” Oliver finally whispered. His voice sounded faint and tattered. Claire grabbed his arm and helped him climb slowly, painfully up; he moved as if he were a thousand years old, and felt every year of it. One of the other vampires silently provided a chair, and Claire helped him into it.

Oliver braced his elbows on his thighs and hid his pale face in his hands. When she started to speak, he said, softly, “Leave me.”

It didn’t seem a good idea to argue. Claire backed off and returned to where Myrnin was, on the couch.

He blinked, still staring at the ceiling. He folded his hands slowly across his stomach, but didn’t otherwise move.

“Myrnin?”

“Present,” he said, from what seemed like a very great distance away. He chuckled very softly, then winced. “Hurts when I laugh.”

“Yeah, um—I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” A very slight frown worked its way between Myrnin’s eyebrows, made a slow V, and then went on its way. “Ah. Staked me.”

“I . . . uh . . . yeah.” She knew what Oliver’s reaction would have been, if she’d done that kind of thing to him, and the outcome wouldn’t have been pretty. She wasn’t sure what Myrnin might do. Just to be sure, she stayed out of easy-grabbing distance.

Myrnin simply closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. He looked old now, exhausted, like Oliver. “I’m sure it was for the best,” he said. “Perhaps you should have left the wood in place. Better for everyone, in the end. I would have just—faded away. It’s not very painful, not comparatively.”

“No!” She took a step closer, then another. He just looked so—defeated. “Myrnin, don’t. We need you.”

He didn’t open his eyes, but there was a tiny, tired smile curving his lips. “I’m sure you think you do, but you have what you need now. I found the cure for you, Claire. Bishop’s blood. It’s time to let me go. It’s too late for me to get better.”

“I don’t believe that.”

This time, his great dark eyes opened and studied her with cool intensity. “I see you don’t,” he said. “Whether or not that assumption is reasonable, that’s another question entirely. Where is she?”

He was asking about Amelie. Claire glanced at Oliver, still hunched over, clearly in pain. No help. She bent closer to Myrnin. No way she wouldn’t be overheard by the other vampires, though, she knew that. “She’s—I don’t know. We got separated. The last I saw, she and Bishop were fighting it out.”

Myrnin sat up. It wasn’t the kind of smooth, controlled motion vampires usually had, as though they’d been practicing it for three or four human lifetimes; he had to pull himself up, slowly and painfully, and it hurt Claire to watch. She put her hand against his shoulder blade to brace him. His skin still felt marble-cold, but not dead. It was hard to figure out what the difference was—maybe it was the muscles, underneath, tensed and alive again.

“We have to find her,” he said. “Bishop will stop at nothing to get her, if he hasn’t already. Once you were safely away, she’d have retreated. Amelie is a guerrilla fighter. It’s not like her to fight in the open, not against her father.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Oliver said, without taking his head out of his hands. “And neither are you, Myrnin.”

“You owe her your fealty.”

“I owe nothing to the dead,” Oliver said. “And until I see proof of her survival, I will not sacrifice my life, or anyone else’s, in a futile attempt at rescue.”

Myrnin’s face twisted in contempt. “You haven’t changed,” he said.

“Neither have you, fool,” Oliver murmured. “Now shut up. My head aches.”

Eve was pulling shots behind the counter, wearing a formal black apron that went below her knees. Claire slid wearily onto a barstool on the other side. “Wow,” she said. “Flashback to the good times, huh?”

Eve made a sour face as she thumped a mocha down in front of her friend. “Yeah, don’t remind me,” she said. “Although I have to say, I missed the Monster.”

“The Monster?”

Eve patted the giant, shiny espresso machine beside her affectionately. “Monster, meet Claire. Claire, meet the Monster. He’s a sweetie, really, but you have to know his moods.”

Claire reached out and patted the machine, too. “Nice to meet you, Monster.”

“Hey.” Eve caught her wrist when she tried to pull back. “Bruises? What gives?”

Amelie’s grip on her really had raised a crop of faint blue smudges on her upper arm, like a primitive tattoo. “Don’t freak. I don’t have any bite marks or anything.”

“I’ll freak if I wanna. As long as Michael isn’t here, I’m kind of—”

“What, my mom?” Claire snapped, and was instantly sorry. And guilty, for an entirely different reason. “I didn’t mean—”

Eve waved it away. “Hey, if you can’t spark a ’tude on a day like this, when can you? Your mother’s okay, by the way, because I know that’s your next question. So far, Bishop’s freaks haven’t managed to shut down the cell network, so I’ve been keeping in touch, since nothing’s happening here except for some serious caffeine production. Landlines are dead, though. So is the Internet. Radio and TV are both off the air, too.”

Claire looked at the clock. Five a.m. Two hours until dawn, more or less—probably less. It felt like an eternity.

“What are we going to do in the morning?” she asked.

“Good question.” Eve wiped down the counter. Claire sipped the sweet, chocolatey comfort of the mocha. “When you think of something, let us know, because right now, I don’t think anybody’s got a clue.”

“You’d be wrong, thankfully,” Oliver said. He seemed to come out of nowhere– God, didn’t Claire hate that!—as he settled on the stool next to her. He seemed almost back to normal now, but very tired. There was a shadow in his eyes that Claire didn’t remember seeing before. “There is a plan in place. Amelie’s removal from the field of battle is a blow, but not a defeat. We continue as she would want.”

“Yeah? You want to tell us?” Eve asked. That earned her a cool stare. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Vampires really aren’t all about the sharing, unless it benefits them first.”

“I will tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it,” Oliver said. “Get me one of the bags from the walk-in refrigerator.”

Eve looked down at the top of her apron. “Oh, I’m sorry, where does it say servanton here? Because I’m so very not.”

For a second, Claire held her breath, because the expression on Oliver’s face was murderous, and she saw a red light, like the embers of a banked fire, glowing in the back of his eyes.

Then he blinked and said, simply, “Please, Eve.”

Eve hadn’t been expecting that. She blinked, stared back at him for a second, then silently nodded and walked away, behind a curtained doorway.

“You’re wondering if that hurt,” Oliver said, not looking at Claire at all, but staring after Eve. “It did, most assuredly.”

“Good,” she said. “I hear suffering’s good for the soul, or something.”

“Then we shall all be right with our God by morning.” Oliver swiveled on the stool to look her full in the face. “I should kill you for what you did.”

“Staking Myrnin?” She sighed. “I know. I didn’t think I had a choice. He’d have bitten my hand off if I’d tried to give him the medicine, and by the time it took effect, me and Hannah would have been dog food, anyway. It seemed like the quickest, quietest way to get him out.”

“Even so,” Oliver said, his voice low in his throat, “as an Elder, I have the power to sentence you, right now, to death, for attempted murder of a vampire. You do understand?”

Claire held up her hand and pointed to the gold bracelet on her wrist—the symbol of the Founder. Amelie’s symbol. “What about this?”

“I would pay reparations,” he said. “I imagine I could afford it. Amelie would be tolerably upset with me, for a while, always assuming she is still alive. We’d reach an accommodation. We always do.”

Claire didn’t say anything else in her defense, just waited. And after a moment, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “You were right to take the action you did. You have been right about a good deal that I was unwilling to admit, including the fact that some of us are”—he cast a quick look around, and dropped his voice so low she could make out the word only from the shape his lips gave it—“unwell.”

Unwell.Yeah, that was one way to put it. She resisted an urge to roll her eyes. How about dying? Ever heard the wordpandemic ?

Oliver continued without waiting for her response. “Myrnin’s mind was . . . very disordered,” he said. “I didn’t think I could get him back. I wouldn’t have, without that dose of medication.”

“Does that mean you believe us now?” She meant, about the vampire disease, but she couldn’t say that out loud. Even the roundabout way they were speaking was dangerous; too many vampire ears with too little to do, and once they knew about the sickness, there was no predicting what they might do. Run, probably. Go off to rampage through the human world, sicken, and die alone, very slowly. It’d take years, maybe decades, but eventually, they’d all fall, one by one. Oliver’s case was less advanced than many of the others, but age seemed to slow down the disease’s progress; he might last for a long time, losing himself slowly.

Becoming nothing more than a hungry shell.

Oliver said, “It means what it means,” and he said it with an impatient edge to it, but Claire wondered if he really did know .“I am talking about Myrnin. Your drugs may not be enough to hold him for long, and that means we will need to take precautions.”

Eve emerged from the curtain carrying a plastic blood bag, filled with dark cherry syrup. That was what Claire told herself, anyway. Dark cherry syrup. Eve looked shaken, and she dumped the bag on the counter in front of Oliver like a dead rat. “You’ve been planning this,” she said. “Planning for a siege.”