Bite Club

TWO

Unfortunately, Stinky Doug wasn’t that easy to find. For one thing, she’d never learned his last name. Hacking into Professor Larkin’s class records would be easy enough, but Claire had other classes, one after another, right up through midafternoon. Then she was scheduled for the lab—the real one. And an evening of weird science with the weirdest boss ever.

Myrnin, she hoped, wouldn’t notice if she was a little late. He had a pretty flexible concept of time.

Claire stopped off in the University Center, which had Wi-Fi, and claimed a table in the coffee bar area. Her housemate Eve must have finally dragged herself out of bed, because she was behind the counter, yawning and sipping a massively large cup of what, knowing Eve, must have been pure espresso.

“Hiya, cutie,” Eve said, and leaned on the bar to smile at Claire. “Mornings are hard.”

“It isn’t morning,” Claire said, straight-faced.

Eve made a tragic face. “I stand corrected. Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don’t do them anymore.” She took a gulp from her cup, shuddered, and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. Caffeinate me. So, Beautiful Brainiac, what can I do for you?”

“The usual, I guess.”

“One piping-hot mocha, extra large, coming up!” Eve rang it up and took Claire’s money. As she counted out change, she shook her newly shag-cut black hair back from her pale face and grinned. The grinning didn’t really go with the whole Goth thing, but that was Eve. She didn’t do labels. “Hey, did you get how excited Shane was about that martial arts thingy? He almost ran me over when I came downstairs. I never saw somebody so thrilled to be invited to an ass kicking.”

“He was pretty stoked,” Claire agreed. “How about you? Are you going?”

“Take classes? That I actually pay for? What do you think I am—a college girl or something? Besides, I defend myself just fine.” She did, actually. Eve not only made her own stakes, but she also blinged them out with crystal designs. The wooden ones were sort of like stun guns for vamps; wood couldn’t kill most of them, just immobilize them, unless the vamps were very young, like Michael.

But Eve also made silver ones, and those were deadly. Claire felt a shiver along her spine as she remembered just how deadly they could be. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d destroyed one vampire that way. Nasty. And even though she’d done it in self-defense, she hadn’t felt good about it.

“Hmmm,” Eve was saying now, in a contemplative kind of way. She tapped her lip with one black fingernail and smiled. “There could be a use for that gym after all, now that I think about it. You know, there is one martial art I like.”

“Which is?”

“A surprise, Claire Bear. Yeah, that might definitely be some fun. You might even enjoy it, too.” A cute, tiny frown line slowly appeared between her eyebrows. “You okay? You look kind of spooked.”

“Yeah, coming from someone who looks like an actual ghost.…..”

“Respect the awesome look, girlfriend. Okay, if you don’t want to talk, don’t. One mocha, coming up! Sit down; I’ll bring it over. It’s slow, anyway.”

It wasn’t just slow; this hour of the day, it was deserted. Claire left Eve to the espresso construction (something Eve was amazingly good at, actually) and flipped open her laptop. It took her exactly seven minutes to hack into Larkin’s class roster and discover that Stinky Doug’s full name was Doug Legrande. Larkin, creepily enough, even had all their addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails, although Claire was pretty sure she’d never provided him with any of that intel. Either the university was really free with their personal details, or Larkin had connections.

Duh, she already knew that. He had a bracelet from Oliver. Connections didn’t quite cover it.

“You gonna drink that?”

Claire looked up. Eve was sitting across from her, slumped in the rickety plastic chair, sipping her massive cup of whatever—it was Eve’s own cup, with a cartoony got blood? on the side. On campus, it was funny. Off campus…not so much.

As Claire stared blankly at her, Eve nodded to the mocha that had magically appeared next to her laptop. “The whipped cream is getting all melty,” Eve said. “Whipped cream is a terrible thing to waste. Oh, except it’s not real whipped cream—it’s that canned stuff, which is kind of nasty, so there’s that. Maybe a good choice after all, letting it melt. Whatcha doing?”

That was Eve, through and through, even when she was sleepy. Keeping up with her required a healthy gulp of the mocha and a very active brain. “I’m trying to find Stinky Doug,” Claire said. “He lives on campus, in Lansdale House, I guess.”

“Stinky Doug? Oh, God. Please tell me you’re going to do everyone a public service and deliver him some shower gel. The last time he came in here, I thought I was going to have to call those biohazard guys. Although if this is some weird and inconceivable college-crush thing, I don’t want to know. Let me have my fragile illusions.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Trust me, I wouldn’t kiss Doug even after the shower gel and decontamination. No, he did something stupid, and I need to convince him not to make it worse—that’s all.” She explained about the experiment, the blood, and Doug’s boneheaded move. Eve kept steadily drinking her coffee, eyes half closed.

“You considered snitching on him?” she asked. “Because, honestly, wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. Just make sure Larkin knows you didn’t take it. Let him draw his own conclusions.”

“That’s the same thing as throwing Doug under the bus,” Claire said. “Look, he’s just dumb, that’s all. And he doesn’t know about”—Claire waved vaguely around, indicating Morganville—“all this.” Well, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that, actually, but he shouldn’t know. That counted.

“If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? Caught dead? I crack myself up.” Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn’t need. “So you’re visiting Stinky Doug and warning him off, without explaining why. Is that your whole plan?”

“Kinda.”

“Awesome. Let me know how it goes, Plan Girl.”

“You have any better ideas?”

Eve took another delicate swallow of coffee. “Well,” she said, “Stinky Doug has a lot of classes. If you’ve got his dorm room address, how difficult would it be to toss the place, find the stuff, and get rid of it? Nobody has to know.”

“Great. And do you actually know a ninja?”

“Yep,” Eve said, and gave her a sleepy, luminous smile. “He’s my boyfriend.”

Hmmm. Claire had to mull that over for a few seconds, because technically vampires were like ninjas—quiet, sneaky, fast, and deadly. And when they wanted to be, they could be disturbingly invisible. “Would he do it?” she asked. That wasn’t what she wanted to ask, actually; she wanted to ask, Will he tell Oliver?

Because, like it or not, Michael was a vampire in equal measure to being her friend, and even though he tried to stay on the human side, sometimes he had to be a vamp first. Maybe this was one of those times.

Eve jacked up her black eyebrows another half inch in answer.

“Okay,” Claire finally said. “I admit, he has significant ninja qualities.”

“Booyah. I will summon the ninja. Oh, and take a lunch break while we burgle.”

“You’re going, too?”

“Am I not ninja enough? Are you saying that I lack ninja?”

“No, I was just thinking you’re a little, uh, recognizable, maybe?”

Eve batted her thick eyelashes. “Why, thank you, sweetie. That’s the nicest insult I’ve had today, not counting the jock who said he’d date me but he had a restraining order out for necrophilia. I promise, I’ll dowdy up for the occasion. It’ll take me five minutes.” She took her cell out of her pocket and texted as she spoke. “Promise me you won’t leave without me.”

“I promise.”

“Want me to organize Shane into this posse, too?”

“He’s at work.” Claire sighed. She would have gladly had Shane added to the mix at this point, but he was already on fragile ground at work, considering he’d ditched twice this month—once for a legitimate sick day, but the other had been just plain boredom. “Next time we commit crime, we’ll make sure to include him.”

Eve held up one fist while she kept typing with one thumb, and Claire tapped it. Eve finished with a flurry of keystrokes, snapped the phone shut, and drained her coffee. “Right. Mikey’s on the way. I’ll be anti-Eve in five. Enjoy your mocha.”

Claire did, drinking fast. It was a good thing she did, because in just about five minutes, Michael was walking through the big UC open hall outside the coffee area, a guitar case slung over his back. He should have drawn attention—Michael was just plain gorgeous, and girls looked—but he was walking with his shoulders slumped, hands in his pants pockets, looking down, and the whole aura just projected Don’t look at me so strongly that Claire couldn’t see a single person other than herself actually taking notice of him.

He slid onto a seat next to her, leaning the guitar case against the table. “So, now we’re going to be actual criminals,” he said.

“And, see, you brought a guitar.”

He gave her a look. “I was on my way to practice.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.”

“Sounds like I didn’t have much of a choice. This guy has vampire blood?”

“I guess so. Larkin was using it for some experiment. I suppose it was authorized.”

“Larkin? Had to be. He wouldn’t dare do it on the side.” Michael nudged her empty mocha cup with a fingertip. “Where’s Eve?”

“Right here, Ninja with Fangs.” Eve leaned over behind him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him right over the cool blue veins. “Claire said I had to go in disguise as a regular person.”

And she had. Eve had scrubbed off every trace of her Goth persona and tied her black hair back in a tight ponytail. She’d changed into a plain black hoodie—one without skulls or symbols, so Claire could only figure she’d raided someone else’s locker for it. The only thing left to indicate she wasn’t like every other college-age girl on campus were the thick-soled boots she was wearing. Still, those weren’t all that noticeable. She’d even thrown on an old pair of blue jeans.

“Wow. We really are stealthy now,” Claire said, and shut her computer. “Can we store stuff in the back?”

“Sure, my locker has an actual lock.”

Claire raised her eyebrows and tugged the cord of the black hoodie. “And you keep this in it?”

“I didn’t say that the locks couldn’t be picked. But actually my good buddy Edie never locks hers, anyway. Come on, let’s get the storage taken care of.”

In the end, they left Michael’s guitar, Claire’s backpack (with laptop), and pretty much everything else behind, as Eve set up the lunch break sign on the counter and locked up the register. In a surprisingly short time, they were headed out again. Michael had brought a leather hat, which looked kind of sloppy-cool and shaded his face and neck. He kept his hands in his pockets.

“You’re not as sensitive anymore,” Claire said. “To the sun, I mean.” Because when Michael had first been venturing out, he’d had to drape himself in a blanket to keep from burning.

“Well, it’s cloudy,” he pointed out. It was; there were ominous dark masses in the sky, and the sun had disappeared behind the curtain. “And I’ve got on two layers. But, yeah, it’s better now than it was.” He said it as if he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, which was strange. Claire supposed that becoming more stable meant he also felt more like a vampire. “I’ll be okay unless the sun comes out full strength again.”

Which, Claire could tell, it wouldn’t. Rain was coming, the kind of torrential desert rain that would drown the streets and create flash floods out in the arroyos outside of town, and would be completely gone tomorrow. There were already flashes of hidden lightning inside the clouds.

Luckily, they weren’t far from Stinky Doug’s dorm. It housed both male and female students, which was lucky, because it meant the three of them were even less noticeable, and there weren’t any sign-ins required. Once they’d made it to the stairwell, Michael took off the hat, stuffed it in his jacket, and ran up the steps with so much ease that Claire, puffing a little in his wake, wondered if maybe this vampire thing might not be okay after all. Eight flights of stairs wasn’t her thing.

At the top, she and Eve caught their breath and joined up with Michael as he stepped out to check the hallway. He motioned for them to follow, so it must have been clear. Claire was surprised to see that this dorm hall was pretty much like her old one, the one she’d first lived in when she’d moved to Morganville—dingy, battered, smelling like old beer and desperation. Doors were closed all along the hall, except for a couple at the end that blasted music she didn’t recognize at top volume in some kind of stereo war.

Stinky Doug’s room was the third on the left. Michael paused in front of it, leaned forward and listened, then nodded. He jiggled the knob. Locked.

That was why it was good to have a vampire along, because a simple twist of his wrist, and that lock problem? Solved. Michael pushed open the door and disappeared inside, and Eve and Claire followed, shutting the door behind them.

And Claire choked, because Stinky Doug’s personal aroma was nothing compared to the state of his dorm room. Her eyes watered. She couldn’t stand to take a full breath, because she was deeply afraid she was going to vomit. Not that it would make the stench any worse.

“Eww,” Eve said, pitifully, holding her nose shut. “Oh, my God! What died?”

Michael turned on the lights. For a couple of seconds, they stared in silence, and then Eve said, in a very small, muffled voice, “It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.”

Because Doug was lying on the bed, eyes open and staring, and he was definitely, completely dead. Not for long, Claire guessed, because blood still dripped from the wound in his neck.

It wasn’t a vampire bite. There was a huge pool of blood soaked into the mattress beneath Doug, staining his T-shirt crimson.

Michael had gone very, very pale—marble white, in fact. He leaned over the body, maybe checking for signs of life, and shook his head. As Claire and Eve stood rooted to the spot in shock, he ransacked Doug’s backpack, then patted down the dead man’s pockets, pulling out keys, a cell phone, breath mints (it made Claire suddenly sad that he carried those when he was so generally unpleasant to the senses), a wallet, some change.

No vials of blood.

“We have to go,” Michael said. “Now. Right now.”

“Was it—Was it the vamps?” Eve asked. “Can you tell?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But—”

“The ones I know wouldn’t be that bloody,” Michael said. “We have to go.”

They were heading for the stairs, and Claire was still feeling a strange, distant sense of disconnection, when the reality of what she’d seen actually hit her, like color and sound and smell all snapping into focus at the same instant.

Doug was dead. He’d been murdered.

She stopped, put her back against the hallway wall, and slid down to a crouch. She couldn’t breathe. Her whole body was shaking. She’d seen a lot of unpleasant things since moving to Morganville, but this…this was worse. This seemed so…cold.

And the worst part of it was, Michael thought that the monsters hadn’t done it. Not the side of town she usually thought of as monsters, anyway.

Eve was bending over her, pulling on her arm. Having lost the Goth makeup, she looked stark right now, washed pale. “Come on, Claire, we need to get the hell out of here. Too many questions.”

“But we can’t…just leave him—”

“We won’t,” Michael said, and took her other arm. He pulled her to her feet and held her there until her knees stopped shaking. “But we’re not staying. Eve’s right.”

Claire clung to the handrail on the way down. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the way Doug’s face had seemed so slack and empty, the way his eyes stared, all pupils. The way the blood had soaked his bed beneath him.

She stopped on the third-floor landing and put her head down, breathing fast. Eve and Michael were already halfway down to the next level, but they turned and came back. They were talking, but she couldn’t hear them.

It took forever to get moving again and, once they were out in the dorm lobby, to try to act normal. She held on to Michael’s arm, mostly for support. Outside, he put his hat on again and led her to the shade of a tree, where she collapsed in a pathetic heap on the dying grass. Overhead, the dry leaves rattled and hissed. A few broke loose in the freshening breeze.

Michael crouched down beside her, and Eve knelt on the other side. “Claire?” he asked. His eyes were very blue, very clear, and very worried. “Claire, talk to me. You okay?”

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded small and fragile and very far away. “He’s dead. Someone killed him.”

Eve and Michael exchanged worried looks. Michael shook his head. “I’ll get hold of Richard and Hannah,” he said. “This needs to be handled quietly. They need to know what happened before it gets out of hand.”

And right on cue, the thundering music from the top floor of the dorm cut out, and from an open window came the sound of a girl’s scream, long and loud, with razor-edged horror in it. That was the scream Claire hadn’t voiced, the one that still bubbled inside her. Somehow, hearing someone else do it helped ease the pressure. She didn’t feel quite as faint and sick.

“I think that ship’s sailed, Michael,” Eve said, staring toward the dorm. Without the makeup, she looked so young—and so determined. “Better make the call quick. This is going to get crazy fast.”

Michael nodded, stood up, and used his cell phone. It wasn’t a long conversation, but then he dialed another number, and that was a lot longer. Oliver, Claire figured, from the general tone and Michael’s body language. Only Oliver could make him that tense.

He came back as he was ending the call, and looked down at her. “You going to be okay?” he asked.

“You mean now or generally?”

That made him smile a little. “Now.”

“I can deal,” Claire said. “Generally, that’s going to be a little bit tougher. I wasn’t born in Morganville. Still getting used to all the…”

“Mayhem,” Eve said, for once not laughing or making a joke. “Blood. Death. Yeah, sadly, it is something you get used to. But still, this one caught me off guard, too. I’ll call Shane, okay?”

“No, no, don’t. He’ll take off from work, and I’m all right. I’ll be fine.” She was lying through her teeth. She felt cold and shaky and she wished—oh, God, more than anything—that Shane were here right now. Or her parents. She’d never missed her mom and dad more than she did right at this moment, which was dumb, because what were they going to do?

Hug her. Make her feel safe again, just for a little while. Because that was what parents did, or at least what they were supposed to do. Eve hadn’t had that privilege, because her home life had been crap, and neither had Shane, who’d had the worst dad in the world. But Claire’s family had been great, and she hadn’t even known how much she missed it until…well, now.

While they waited for the sirens to arrive, Claire pulled out her phone and dialed her dad’s cell phone number. He answered on the third ring.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. He sounded better than he had before, almost normal. Strong. Considering that he’d left Morganville in an ambulance and had almost died—not from the vampires, but from his own bad heart—it was so good to hear him be more like himself. The connection crackled and hissed. “Sorry for the noise. I’m out walking. It’s getting windy.”

“Here, too. Looks like it might rain.”

“We had some rain earlier this morning. Cooled things down quite a bit. How are you, Claire?”

“Good,” Claire said, and swallowed. “I…just wanted to see how you were doing, Dad.”

“Doing great. They’ve got me walking a lot, trying to build up the old cardiovascular health again. I have to say, I’m glad I finally got that surgery. I didn’t realize how bad I’d been feeling until I felt better.” He paused, and, with that Dad radar she’d always both loved and dreaded, said, “You didn’t just call to say hello, honey. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The concern in his voice turned her all trembly again, and made her want to cry, but she couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t. “It’s pretty much the same here; you know how it is. How’s Mom?”

“She’s joined some kind of scrapbooking club. I never knew you could spend so much time and money on sticking photos in albums, but that’s your mom. Once she gets excited about something…”

“I know, she’s a madwoman,” Claire finished, and smiled a little. She could just see her mother coming home with bags and bags of stuff to hot-glue into memories. “How’s the new house?”

“Embarrassingly large. With a yard, too. I may have to learn how to garden.”

“Grow me something. Irises. I like irises.”

“Purple ones, right?”

“Yeah, purple’s good.”

“Honey, are you sure you’re all right? You sound odd.”

“Just…allergies,” she said, and wiped her leaking eyes. “You take care, Daddy. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, doubtfully. “Call tomorrow. Your mother will hate me if she doesn’t get her turn.”

“I will. Bye.”

Eve had turned away, watching the dorm, but she’d been paying attention. As Claire finished her call, she said, “Feel better?”

“Yeah,” Claire said. She did. Still shaky, but steadier inside, where it counted.

“I wish I could do that,” Eve said. “Call my mom. But no. Whiny, self-absorbed bitching from her probably wouldn’t have the same effect, although it definitely would make me forget about Doug for a second.”

Michael held out his hand, and Eve took it, and their eyes met for a second before Eve looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “Life sucks, we die, or not. Mom is the least of my problems, right?”

“Right at the moment? Yeah,” Michael said. “And now I want to call my parents.”

Claire thought he might be joking, but with Michael, you never could tell. His parents were cool; she’d met them once, but they didn’t live in Morganville anymore, and they weren’t even nearby. Like Claire’s parents, they’d been given permission to move because of medical problems. Michael didn’t say much about them, but then, Michael was the quiet type.

In any case, he didn’t have time to do anything, because a police car, siren blasting and lights flaring, pulled up in front of the dorm in the parking lot, where a crowd of students was gathering. Almost all the students promptly pulled their cell phones out and began busily clicking pictures and taking videos of the police presence. Next stop: the Internet. “Worst invention ever,” Claire muttered. Myrnin was already talking about how to disable the features on all cell phones inside of Morganville. At times such as this, she kind of saw his point.

Hannah Moses was second to arrive on the scene, looking crisp and starched in her police uniform; she’d tucked her corn-rowed hair up under her cap, and apart from the gold bar on the lapel of her blue shirt, she looked exactly like the other police, who got busy cordoning off the scene. Two other men got out of a plain gray car that pulled up behind hers. Claire recognized the men with a little start, because she hadn’t seen them in a while.

“Hey,” said Detective Travis Lowe, nodding to her. He’d lost weight, she thought, and he looked a little bit grayer than before. Detective Joe Hess hadn’t changed at all, except that his smile was more guarded as he nodded, too. “I heard you found yourself a genuine dead person.”

“Travis,” Hannah said, frowning at him. “Go easy on the kid.”

“Her? Listen, I know her. She’s tough. She can take it. Right, Claire?”

She nodded, because what else did you do when someone said something like that? But she didn’t feel tough. Not right at this moment. As if he sensed that, Detective Hess cut in front of his partner and came to talk to her. He had a soothing sort of manner, and the gentle tone of voice he used made her feel a little less…lost.

“Someone you knew, right?” Hess said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I—” Claire suddenly realized that she had a decision to make: tell about the whole reason she and Eve and Michael had come over, or lie and pretend like it was just another of those wacky Morganville coincidences. She didn’t feel like lying, though. Not to Detective Hess. “It’s Doug—Doug Legrande. He was my lab partner in Professor Larkin’s class. He took something he shouldn’t have, and I came to ask him to give it back.”

Detective Hess was a hell of a lot sharper than most people in Morganville, and he gave her a sideways look as he said very casually, “Would that thing be something that some people in town wouldn’t want to get out?”

“Blood,” she said, keeping her voice in a whisper. “You know what kind of blood.”

“I do. So, tell me what happened when you got here.” And he slowly walked her through it, step by step, from the beginning. He’d also walked her off a little from her friends, and Claire saw that Detective Lowe was talking to Eve, while Michael had Hannah as a conversational partner. Double-checking facts, Claire guessed. The low-key way it was done made her feel a lot less nervous. By the time she was finished, Detective Lowe had finished up with Eve and was sitting on the back bumper of the gray car, making notes with a pad and pen as he talked to Chief Moses. Hannah had notes, too.

“Did we do anything wrong?” Claire finally asked, as Hess jotted down something, as well. “I mean, we tried to do the right thing. For Doug.”

“You probably would have been better off reporting it immediately,” Hess said. That was one thing she liked a lot about him: he was kind about it, but he told her the truth, no matter how difficult it was to hear it. “I can’t say this wouldn’t have still happened, because we can’t jump to the conclusion that his theft had anything to do with his murder, but you need to understand that if it did, Doug didn’t have to die. He might have been in jail, but he would have been safer. Understand?”

She did, and she felt miserable…but, oddly, also more centered. It was what she’d been thinking, anyway. Hearing him say it didn’t make her feel any worse; it made it real enough that she could move on, accept it as a mistake, and plan to never let it happen again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She wasn’t sure if Hess understood, but she thought he probably did.

“You’re learning,” he said. “Sometimes those lessons come harder than others. I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Um, how have you been? I haven’t seen you since, you know…” She didn’t know how to put it. They all avoided talking about Mr. Bishop, definitely the coldest vampire she’d ever met; he’d been cruel, calculating, and way too powerful. The fact that they’d survived his attempt to take over Morganville had been amazing…but nobody wanted to risk going through that again.

“Yeah, since that,” Hess said. “We’ve been working. Travis took a vacation for six months, out of town. Other than that, the usual. This is the first outright murder we’ve had in a while, though.”

He didn’t sound either bothered or excited about it. Just businesslike. Claire didn’t know what to say to that, but it didn’t seem to matter. He walked her back over to the police cars and went to consult with Hannah and his partner.

“You take me the most interesting places,” Eve was saying to Michael when she rejoined them. “Murder scenes, interrogations…”

He hugged her silently. Overhead, thunder boomed and the first drops of rain began to fall.

A police officer brought them a collapsible umbrella from his squad car, and the three of them stood in its shelter as the rain poured down and the police started their investigation. By the time it let up, Hannah said they could leave.

Claire said good-bye to her friends, picked up her backpack from the coffee shop, and then went straight to Myrnin.

“It’s possible,” Myrnin was muttering to himself as he paced the floor of the lab. “Entirely possible. Likely, even.”

Claire, coming down the steps from the entrance, dumped her book bag at the usual strategic location—meaning it was equally accessible whether she needed to defend herself or make a quick exit. She was used to coming into the middle of Myrnin’s conversations with himself. “What’s possible?” she asked.

“Anything,” he said absently. “But that’s not what I was talking about. Oh, hello, Claire. You’re in good time. I need an extra pair of hands.”

“As long as I keep them attached,” she said, which earned her a startled stare.

“The things you say to me, you’d think I was some sort of monster. Oh, here, help me with this.” He gestured to one of the lab tables, which held some gleaming new device with brass fittings and—as always with Myrnin—pipes, wires, and some kind of strange-looking vacuum tubes. “I need it over there.” He pointed to an empty table across the room. And then he kept on pacing, his white lab coat (a recent discovery of his; he thought it made him look more official) flaring around him. It was somewhat spoiled by the flopping bunny slippers, their fangs showing with every step.

Oh. He wasn’t going to help her move it. Well, of course he wasn’t. Myrnin could have picked it up with one hand and carried it easily from one spot to another, but he was busy thinking. Carrying things was her job. Today, anyway.

Claire picked up the engine—if that was what it was—and staggered with it over to the other table. It felt as if he’d packed it with lead, and knowing Myrnin, that wasn’t much of a stretch. It smelled like blood and flowers, and she hesitated to even guess what its purpose might have been.

“What’s possible?” she asked again, leaning against the table and trying to work the kinks out of her arms after stretching them about six inches with the weight of that stupid thing, whatever it was.

Myrnin was muttering under his breath, but he paused and glanced at her, even though he kept pacing. “That your friend was murdered by someone who believed he had a drug. Perhaps he was trying to sell the blood.”

“How did you hear about that already?” She was surprised, because she’d meant to tell him all about it. Myrnin waved that away.

“Interesting news travels quickly in a town as boring as this,” he said. “Also, I tend to monitor police broadcasts. Your name was mentioned in connection with the investigation. I made a few calls to find out the rest. So, do you think he was trying to develop some sort of drug?”

“Myrnin, Doug was stinky, but he wasn’t crazy. There may be people in Morganville who will just take any old thing to see if it gets them high, but he just saw that blood boil under the lights. He wasn’t not going to try to sell it as a drug.”

“You’d be very surprised what people get up to. But, in any case, it’s possible someone else understood the potential of it, and Doug was simply collateral damage.” Myrnin sighed. “I understand it was quite bloody. What a terrible waste.”

He didn’t mean of Doug, of course. He didn’t know Doug, and Claire doubted he would have really cared. No, Myrnin was talking about the waste of plasma. Which made Claire shiver, and reminded her again that no matter how cute and cuddly Myrnin could sometimes be, there was something about him that just…wasn’t quite right.

Not for a human, anyway.

“Frank!” Myrnin yelled, making her jump. “Do you have any insights to share? At all?”

Frank Collins’s voice came out of every speaker in the room—the old radio set in the corner, the newer TV mounted on the wall, the computer on the antique desk, and Claire’s own cell phone in her pocket. “You don’t have to yell. Believe me, I can hear you. Wish to hell I could shut you off.”

“Well, you can’t, and I need your particular expertise,” Myrnin said. He sounded smug and a little bit vindictive; Myrnin didn’t like Frank, Frank didn’t like anybody who drank plasma, and the whole thing was just plain weird.

Because Frank Collins, Shane’s dad, had once been a badass vampire-hunting criminal, and then Mr. Bishop had made him a self-loathing vampire, and now he was…dead. She was listening to a dead man speaking over the radio.

Well, not dead, exactly. After Frank had died saving Claire and Shane, Myrnin had scooped out his still-sort-of-living brain, stuck it in a plasma bath, and hooked it up to a computer. Frank Collins was now the brain that ran Morganville, and, thankfully, Shane didn’t know.

Claire could honestly not imagine how that conversation was going to go when he found out. It made her ill to even try to imagine it.

“This would go easier if you’d show your face,” Myrnin said. “Please. You may be assured that by please, I mean do it, or I’ll put an injection of something nasty in your plasma.”

“Myrnin!” Claire blurted, wide-eyed. He shrugged.

“You have no idea how difficult he’s been lately. I thought Ada was a problem, but she was positively the model of decorum next to this one,” he said. “Well? I’m waiting, Frank.”

In the corner, a faint shadow appeared, a blur of static that resolved into a flat image on the three-dimensional background. He wasn’t bothering with a color image; maybe Frank thought shades of gray made him look more badass.

If so, he was right.

His computer image looked years younger than Claire had last seen him. He had grungy good looks, though his hair was long and messy, and he still had a wicked bad scar on his face. He was dressed in black leather, including a jacket with lots of silver buckles, and big, stomping boots. “Better?” his voice asked. The image’s mouth moved, but his voice still came in surround sound from the speakers. “And if you mess with me, I’ll hit you back, you bloodsucking geek. Don’t think I can’t.”

Myrnin smiled, fangs down. “Well, you can try,” he almost purred. “Now. Let’s have a chat about the criminal elements of Morganville, since you have such a fine and intimate acquaintance with them.”

Frank’s 2-D avatar didn’t have much in the way of facial expression, but, then, Frank in 3-D form hadn’t been big on emoting, either. His voice, however, was full of sarcasm. “Always glad to be of help to the vampire community,” he said. “We all know there is no crime in Morganville. And the humans are all just happy to be here. It’s paradise on earth. Ain’t that what it says in the brochure?”

Myrnin lost his smile, and his dark eyes got that dangerously hot look that made Claire nervous. “I suppose you think you’re irreplaceable in your current position,” he said. “You’re a brain in a jar, Frank. By definition, you are eminently replaceable.”

Now Frank’s avatar smiled. It seemed just as artificial as the rest of him. “Then pull the plug, if you think you can do better.”

Myrnin’s gaze slid to Claire, and she felt that chill again, the one that rushed from the bottom of her spine right up to the top of her head. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She knew he’d always thought she was a better candidate for the brain-in-a-jar thing—which meant he thought she’d be easier to control. Frank had just been at the right, or wrong, place at the right time to take her place.

That could always change.

Frank must have figured that out, too, because he said, “You touch my kid’s girl, and I’ll end this miserable town. You know I can.”

“Ada couldn’t pull that off, and she had much longer to think about it than you have,” Myrnin said, suddenly back to his old self. “So let’s abandon the empty threats, shall we? And get back to the subject. I need to understand who in this town might be willing to kill for a sample of vampire blood.”

Frank’s laugh was dry and scratchy and full of contempt. “You want me to print out a phone directory? Between the people who want to figure out how to kill you faster, the ones who want to protect you because they have money riding on it, and the ones who just dig the whole undead look, it could be anybody.”

“A list of anyone who is known to be making antivampire weapons, then,” Myrnin said with icy precision. “And anyone who might possibly be researching how to use vampire blood as a drug.”

“That ship sailed last century,” Frank said. “Everybody knows it makes a crap drug. No real high to it. Makes you stronger for a while, but it’s got no bump, and the fall’s worse than steroids. They tried combining it with other stuff, but there’s nothing you can add it to that vampire blood won’t break down in a hurry.”

Silence. Myrnin was surprised, Claire realized; he hadn’t known humans had even thought about any of this. And it bothered him. If it bothered Myrnin, it would make the other vampires crazy. “How far back does this go?”

“It was already old news when I was in high school.” Frank shrugged. “People kept on trying, but nothing ever worked. So I think you can write off the drug angle. Now, the killing-your-kind-better motive…that I can believe. It would have been at the top of my Christmas list.”

Frank was still identifying vampires as you, not us, which was interesting. He’d been a vampire a relatively short time, and Claire knew he’d been forced into it; it wasn’t something he would ever have chosen for himself. He took a special delight in seeing the vamps one-upped.

“Then I’ll need a list of those people,” Myrnin said. “We’ll need to interview them.”

“No.”

The word came out flat and final. And it rang on the cold stone of the lab’s walls and floors, until Myrnin repeated it very softly. “No?”

“No. I was one of them, and I’m not going to put their names on a piece of paper for you and yours to go out and hunt down.”

“Maybe your son knows,” Myrnin said. He said it in a very offhand way, and without looking at Claire. He was staring at Frank’s flickering image. “Maybe I should ask him instead. Forcefully.”

Frank’s image shifted, and Claire could actually feel the menace coming off it now, like an icy wind. “Maybe you shouldn’t even think about going there.”

“Oh, I do,” Myrnin said, and raised his eyebrows. “I think about it quite a lot.” There was something fey coming out in him in response to Frank’s defiance; it was something Claire hardly ever saw. Maybe it was a guy thing.

She picked up the first pointy thing that came to hand—a pair of scissors—and jammed them against Myrnin’s back, not into his back, stabby-wise, but enough to make an impression.

“Ow,” he said absently, and looked over his shoulder at her. “What?”

“Leave Shane out of it,” she said very quietly. That was all. No explanations, no threats.

Myrnin turned very slowly to face her. That strange, uncomfortable light in his eyes was still glittering, but as he stared at her, it faded, like someone turned down a dimmer switch. “All right,” he said. “Since you ask so nicely.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“I’m aware of that. The sharp point in my back did make it clear.” He caught her wrist in one of those lightning-quick vampire motions and took the scissors away from her. He put them in the pocket of his lab coat. “Wouldn’t want you hurting yourself.”

“No,” Claire said. “You think that’s your job.”

A quick flash of a smile, not a very nice one, and Myrnin turned back to Frank. “All right, my unpleasant friend, we’ll have done with threats, both yours and mine. Please, for the sake of young Claire here, will you be so kind as to provide me with a few places where I might look for a murderer?”

“The mirror’s a great place to start,” Frank said. “But if you’re talking humans, I can give you maybe two names. We’d be better off if they were off the streets, anyway.”

“Détente,” Myrnin said. “How lovely.”