Bitter Blood

TEN CLAIRE

“Well?” Shane demanded. “Who was it?” Claire was on the phone with him as she headed home. Wherever he was, it was machine-shop noisy, metal grinding and whining, and he had to shout to make himself heard. “Who tried to hit Oliver?”

“I don’t know.”

“C’mon, Claire. Take a guess.”

“No, really, I don’t. Whoever it was had a mask and jacket and gloves and everything. Kind of tall, maybe a little on the skinny side. Good with a crossbow, though. Seriously good.” She remembered the cut on her cheek and touched it with tentative fingers. It didn’t really hurt, and the bleeding had stopped, but there was a definite slice. For the first time, she actually wondered how bad it looked, and whether it might leave a scar. “Um, anyway, I didn’t get a look at him without the mask. It wasn’t you, was it?” That last was teasing. She knew better; Shane wouldn’t have fired with her in the way, not unless he had no choice. This was someone who wasn’t quite as…involved.

“Hell, girl, if it had been me, he’d be dead on the floor right now, because I wouldn’t have missed. Make my day. Tell me he’s hurting.”

“Oh yeah, he’s definitely hurting,” she said. “And I don’t think he was behind Pennyfeather last night. But there’s something weird about him, Shane.”

“When isn’t he weird?”

“No, I mean—” She couldn’t put her finger on it, really. “Did Eve tell you what happened this morning?”

“What?” Shane instantly sounded on guard again, braced for the bad news. “What now? Damn, hang on…” He retreated from what sounded like a car being crushed in the background, until he found a relatively calm space. “Go on.”

“Oliver fired her from Common Grounds. I guess he got kind of pissed when she accused him of trying to kill her. You know Eve. It probably wasn’t subtle.”

“Might have involved trying to hit him with something, like an espresso machine,” Shane agreed. “She’s home, but she’s not talking. Went straight to her room. She had that look, like she was going to cry, so I didn’t get in her way.”

“Coward.”

“Crying, so yeah. Are you on your way home?”

“Yes,” she said. “I need to make a stop, though. See you in about an hour.”

Shane knew her way too well. “You’re going to see Myrnin, aren’t you? Claire—”

“I need to see what he’s doing,” she said quickly. “He was strange the last time I saw him.”

Her boyfriend mumbled something that might have been He’s always strange, but he mostly kept his dissatisfaction to himself. “Say hi to my dad while you’re there. You know, the brain in the jar? Frankenstein? That guy.”

“You could come and—”

“No,” Shane said flatly. There was a second’s pause, as if he’d surprised himself by the vehemence of his reply, and when he spoke again it was in a softer tone. “Be careful out there. If you want me to come along…”

“To Myrnin’s lab? That’s just asking for trouble and you know it. I can manage. I’ve got resources.” And silver-coated stakes, in her backpack. She had resolved to never leave home without them, after the events of last night. “If I’m not home before dark, though—”

“Yep, rescue has been calendared. Got it,” he said. “Love you.”

She heard the effort it took him to say it—not because he didn’t mean it, but because boys just didn’t like admitting it over the phone. He even lowered his voice, in case someone—Michael?—could overhear him.

Honestly.

“Love you, too,” she said. “Watch out for Eve, will you? There’s something funny about all this. I think Pennyfeather really did come for her, not for any of the rest of us. I think there’s something going on in vampireland that has to do with her and Michael.”

“Copy that,” he said. “Collins out.” He made a kissing sound into the phone before he hung up, which was way more embarrassing than saying Love you, but probably amused him more, and she smiled so much on her walk to Myrnin’s lab that her face hurt—especially around the cut.

The street that held the entrance to Myrnin’s lair—she always thought of it as a lair, as much as a lab—was a pretty much normal Morganville residential neighborhood; more run-down than some, better than others. The houses were mostly cheaply built clapboard, thrown up forty or fifty years ago, though there were a few standouts. Two houses had burned down or been otherwise trashed during the recent draug invasion, and those were busy with swarms of hard-hatted workers scrambling over piles of bricks, lumber, and tile. The skeletons of new houses were up already. Claire wondered what it might be like to move into a new place, one that had never had anyone else in it, one that was fresh and unhaunted. That would be odd, probably. She’d gotten so used to houses with history.

At the end of the street loomed the old Day House. It was a Founder House, built almost exactly like the Glass House where Claire lived; it had been freshly painted a blinding white, and the trim had been done in a dark blue. As always, there was a rocking chair on the porch. Claire expected to see Gramma Day’s ancient little form there, rocking and knitting, but instead, the woman sitting there was tall, long-legged, and she wasn’t knitting.

She was cleaning a gun.

Claire veered off from the alleyway that was the entrance to the lab, and paused respectfully at the gate that blocked the Day House sidewalk. “Hi, Hannah,” she said.

Hannah Moses looked up, and the sunlight threw the scar on her face into sharp relief; it was hard to read her expression, but she said, “Howdy, Claire. Come on up.”

Claire unfastened the gate and came up the steps to the porch. There was another chair sitting across from the rocking chair, and a low table in between where Hannah had laid out the parts of her weapon with straight-line military precision.

“Grab a seat,” Hannah said, and blew dust off the part that she held in her hand. She examined it critically, buffed it with a cloth, and put it down in its place on the table. “Where you headed, Claire?”

“Myrnin.”

“Ah.” Hannah’s gaze fastened on the cut on her cheek. “Something interesting happen?”

“Depends on how you feel about Oliver, I guess. Someone all in black tried to shoot a silver arrow into his heart.”

Hannah paused in the act of sliding a piece onto the frame of the handgun. “Tried,” she repeated. “I assume, not successfully?”

“It was pretty close.”

“I can see that. Apparently, whoever tried didn’t much care if you were in the way.”

“Cared enough to miss, I guess.”

Hannah nodded and went back to reassembling her gun with graceful, practiced efficiency. It took a breathtakingly short period of time, and then she loaded the weapon, chambered a round, and checked the safety before laying it back on the table. “Claire, we both know I’m sidelined by the vampires, and I won’t have much opportunity to help in an official capacity. So I want you to do something for me.”

“Sure!”

“I want you to leave Morganville.”

Claire fell silent, watching her. “I can’t just run away.”

“Yes, you can. You always could have done it.”

“Okay, then, I won’t do it. My grades—”

“You can’t use a good grade if they’re carving it on your tombstone. Pack up and get out. Go find your folks, get them to pack up, and go somewhere else. Far away. An island, if you can manage it. But get the hell away from the vampires, and keep away.”

“But you’re staying?”

“Yes,” Hannah agreed, “I’m staying. This house has been in my family for seven generations. My grandmother’s too old to go, and they’ve still got my cousin locked up somewhere in their dungeons, if she’s not dead and drained. I was like you. I wanted all this peace and love and cooperation to work, but it’s not going to happen. The vampires are ripping up the agreements. That ain’t on us. It’s on them.”

When Claire didn’t speak, Hannah shook her head, leaned over, and picked up the weapon. She seated it in a holster under her arm. “There’s a war coming,” she said. “A real war. There’s not going to be any room for people like you standing in the middle, trying to make peace. I’m trying to save your life.”

“You always wanted peace.”

“I did. But when you can’t have peace, there’s only one thing you can aim for, Claire, and that’s winning the war the best and maybe the bloodiest way you can.”

“I don’t want to believe it. There has to be a way to make Amelie listen, to stop all this—”

“It’s too late,” Hannah said. “She set up the cage in Founder’s Square again. It’s a clear message. Cross the vampires, and you’ll burn. Everything you worked for, everything I worked for, is going away. You pick a side, or you go. Nothing else to do.”

Claire cleared her throat. “How’s your grandmother?”

“Ancient,” Hannah said, “but she’s been that way as long as I can remember. She’s a hundred and two years old this year. I’ll give her your respects.”

There wasn’t anything else to say, so Claire nodded and left. She closed the gate behind her and glanced back to see Hannah stand up, lean against the porch pillar, and gaze out into the street like a sentry watching for trouble on the horizon.

Anybody who decided to go up against Hannah Moses had to have a death wish. It wasn’t just the gun she’d so expertly assembled and loaded—heck, gun toting in Texas was practically normal. It was in her body language: calm, centered, ready.

And deadly.

If there really was going to be a war, being on the side against Hannah would be a very dangerous place.

Claire headed down the alley, away from the normal world of construction and power tools and Hannah standing sentry. As the wooden walls rose on either side of her, and narrowed from a one-car street into a cart path into a claustrophobic little warren, she hardly noticed; she’d made this walk so many times that doing it in broad daylight held no terrors for her at all.

But something was different when she got to the end of the alley.

The shack, the ancient, leaning thing that had been there ever since Claire had first come here, was just…gone. There was no sign of wreckage, not even a scrap of wood or a rusty nail left in its place. There had been stairs going down into Myrnin’s lab inside the shack itself.

Now, there was a slab of concrete. It was almost dry, but it had been poured only a day ago, Claire was certain of that; concrete dried fast in the Texas desert heat, and this was still just a tiny bit cool and damp to the touch. Someone had left a handprint at the corner of the slab. She put her own hand in the impression; it was a larger hand, longer fingers, but still slender.

Myrnin’s hand, she thought.

He’d sealed up the lab.

Claire felt an odd wave of dizziness pass over her, and she lowered her head and breathed in deeply to combat it. He’d told her that he was going to leave, but she hadn’t really believed it. Not like this. Not this fast.

But sealing your lab with concrete was a pretty definite sign of intent.

Claire left the alley at a run. She blew through the Day House gate and up the steps, and said breathlessly to Hannah, “I need to use your portal.”

“Our what?”

“C’mon, Hannah. I know you’ve got a portal in your house. It’s in the bathroom. I used it to get to Amelie before. I need to see if I can still get into the lab that way.” Hannah’s face remained tight and guarded. “Please!”

The front door creaked open, horror-movie style, and the tiny, wizened form of Gramma Day appeared in the gap. She studied Claire with faded brown eyes that still held the same sharp intelligence that Hannah’s did, and held out a palsied, wrinkled hand. Claire took it. The old lady’s skin was soft as old, fragile fabric, and burning hot, but beneath it was a wiry strength that almost pulled Claire off-balance. “You get in here,” Gramma Day said. “Ain’t no call for you to be standing out on the porch like some beggar. You, too, Hannah. Nobody’s coming today for us.”

“You don’t know that, Gramma.”

“Don’t you tell me what I know or don’t, girl.” There was a firm tone of command in the old lady’s voice as she led Claire down the hallway. There was an eerie sense of déjà vu to it—the same hall as the Glass House, the same parlor to the left, the same living room opening up ahead. Only the furniture was different, and the march of family portraits on the walls, some of them going back to the mid-1800s, of earnest-looking African American people in their Sunday best. As they shuffled down the hall, it got more modern. Color portrait photos of people with heavily lacquered bouffant hairdos, then thick, luxurious Afros. Toward the very end, Hannah Moses looking incredibly neat and imposing in her military uniform, and a framed set of medals beneath it.

There was one important difference between the Glass House and the Day House: there was a downstairs bath. It must have been added ages ago, but Claire envied it, anyway. Gramma swung open the door and shooed her inside.

“You going to see the queen?” Gramma asked her.

“No, ma’am. I’m going to see if I can find Myrnin.”

Gramma snorted and shook her trembling head. “Ain’t no good gonna come of that, girl. Trap-door spider’s not a safe thing for you to be running after. You ought to go home, lock your doors, get ready for trouble.”

“I’m always ready,” Claire said, and grinned.

“Not like this,” Gramma said. “Never seen a time when the vampires weren’t scared of something, but now, they ain’t afraid of anything, and it’s gonna go hard for us. Well, you do as you like. Folks always do.” She swung the door shut on Claire, and Claire hastily felt for the light switch, an old-fashioned dial thing on the wall. The overheads clicked on. From the look of the bulbs, they might have been original Edisons.

It was an altogether normal sort of bathroom, and although she kind of needed to go, Claire didn’t dare use it. Only Myrnin would have ever been thoughtless enough to build a portal in a bathroom, she thought. The people in the Day House must have a lot more fortitude than she did, because she’d never be able to take down her pants in a room where anyone with the secret handshake could walk right out of the wall and stare at her. Granted, that was a smallish circle of people…Amelie, Oliver, Myrnin, Claire herself, Michael, a few others (and even Shane had managed once or twice).

Oh, and a couple of would-be serial killers who’d gotten their hands on the secret. Ugh.

Claire cleared her mind, closed her eyes, and focused. She felt the answering tingle of the portal, lying dormant and invisible, and when she looked, she saw a thin film of darkness forming over the white-painted door. It was misty at first, then as dark as a velvet curtain hanging in midair, rippling gently in an unfelt breeze.

She built the image of Myrnin’s lab in her mind: the granite worktables, the art deco lights on the walls, the chaotic mess of books and equipment. Then there was Bob the Spider’s tank in the corner, larger than ever and thick inside with webs, along with the battered old armchair sitting next to it where Myrnin sat and read, when he was in the mood.

The image flickered in the darkness, ghostly, and then flared out. No, it was still there, Claire thought, but the lights themselves had been turned off. To keep her away?

Screw that. Claire reached into her backpack and pulled out a small, heavy flashlight. She switched it on and stepped through the portal into the dark.

It was not just dark in the lab. It was profoundly, elementally black. This far below ground, and with the entrance sealed anyway, it felt like being sealed into a tomb. Claire felt the portal snap shut behind her, and for a moment she was tempted to turn around and wish herself home, immediately, but that wouldn’t help. She still wouldn’t know.

There was a master switch to the power, and by carefully watching her footing (Myrnin hadn’t bothered to clear up the leaning piles of books or the scattered trip hazards), she found her way to the far wall, next to a musty old mummy case she’d always assumed was a genuine thing—because it was Myrnin’s. She’d never opened it. Knowing Myrnin, there could be anything inside, from a body he’d forgotten about to his dirty laundry.

She threw the master switch up, and lights flared on. Machines started up around the lab with a chorus of hums, pops, crackles, and musical tones. The laptop she’d bought for Myrnin booted up in the corner and glowed reassuringly. At least one beaker started bubbling, though she couldn’t see why.

But there was absolutely no trace of Myrnin.

She stopped at the table where she’d left the device she’d been working on; it was still there, covered over with the sheet. Myrnin hadn’t taken it with him, and he hadn’t made any more of his suspiciously accurate adjustments to it, either. For a moment, Claire debated sticking it in her backpack—she couldn’t leave it here, gathering dust, not when she was close to it actually starting to work—but the weight was pretty extreme, and she needed to look around more.

She’d come back, she decided, and flipped the sheet back into place.

Claire edged past a pile of boxes and crates in the corner and opened the door in the back—or tried to. Locked. She rooted around through drawers until she came up with a set of keys, which contained everything from ancient, rusty skeleton models to modern gleaming ones. She sorted through, eyeing the lock, and tried likely candidates until she found one that fit and turned. The door swung silently open on Myrnin’s bedroom. She’d stayed in it before (without him, of course) when she’d been confined to the lab on punishment duty, so she was well familiar with the contents. Nothing seemed different. The bed had been mussed, pillows tossed to the floor, and drawers were hanging open, but she couldn’t tell—as always—if it was normal, or some kind of panic-packing frenzy.

There was no note. Nothing to tell her whether Myrnin was just temporarily out, or gone for good. She couldn’t believe that he’d just…leave. Just like that.

“Frank?” Claire walked out of the bedroom into the main lab. “Frank, can you hear me?” Frankenstein, Shane called him. Frank Collins had, once upon a time, been Shane’s dad—maybe not a good one, but still. Then he’d been turned vampire, against his will. Then he had died, and Myrnin had decided to scavenge his brain and use it to power the town’s master computer.

Maybe Frankenstein wasn’t too bad a name for him, after all.

There was a buzzing sound that seemed to come from all around her, and it coalesced finally into a distorted, drunk-sounding voice. “Yes, Claire,” it said.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” it said, after a long pause. “Hungry.”

Claire swallowed hard and clenched her fists. Frank—Frank Collins, or what was left of him—was hardwired into a computer downstairs, an area that Myrnin hadn’t wanted her to venture into. “I thought your nutrients were delivered automatically.”

“Tank dry,” he said. He sounded terribly tired. “Need blood. Get blood, Claire.”

“I—I can’t do that!” What was she supposed to do—order up a gallon drum from the blood bank? Somehow magically haul it all the way down there herself? She had no idea how Myrnin did these things; he’d never included her on any of that maintenance activity. But she strongly suspected the only one who’d be able to manage it would be a vampire. “Is Myrnin gone?”

“Hungry,” Frank said again, faintly, and then just…stopped talking. The buzz under his voice shut down. She thought he was the equivalent of offline, like a laptop drained of battery shutting down.

If she wanted him to survive, she really did have to figure this out. Clearly, Myrnin wasn’t here to do it.

Claire went to the glass enclosure in the corner. It was hard to see under all the webs, but when she took the top off the tank, Bob the Spider crawled up eagerly to the top of his wispy multilevel construction. He was a big fuzzy spider, and somehow impossibly cute, although part of her still screamed like a little girl at the thought of touching him.

He bounced up and down in his web, all eight eyes staring right at her.

“You’re hungry, too,” she said. “Right? Myrnin didn’t feed you, either?”

That was really strange. Myrnin might neglect Frank, because he and Frank really weren’t a marriage made in heaven (and Frank could be faking it; he had a cruel and weird sense of humor), but leaving Bob on his own and starving wasn’t like her boss at all. He was ridiculously fond of the thing. She still remembered Myrnin’s utter panic the first time Bob had molted. It had been like a normal person freaking out over the birth of a child.

It was not like him to leave Bob behind if he was really leaving.

Something was wrong here. Very wrong.

Claire pulled out her phone and dialed Myrnin’s speed dial. It rang on the phone, and suddenly she heard an echo in the lab, a ringtone composed of scary organ music. She’d given him the phone and had put the ringtone on it herself.

The phone was lying in the shadows next to a stack of books. It had a cracked screen, but it was still working. Claire picked it up and felt stickiness on her fingers.

Blood.

What had happened?

“You shouldn’t have come,” Pennyfeather said from behind her. His voice, like the rest of him, was colorless, and his odd, lilting accent only made him seem less human, somehow. “But don’t worry. You won’t be leaving.”

Claire stumbled backward in surprise, catching her heel on a pile of discarded volumes, which overbalanced and rained down dusty, heavy tomes on top of her. She yelped and ducked, and realized she had an opportunity as Pennyfeather paused to survey the chaos; she jumped, slid over the top of the nearest lab table, sending books and glass beakers flying, and hit the floor running. She heard soft noises behind her, and in her mind’s eye she saw Pennyfeather leaping effortlessly onto the same table, touching down, and racing after her.

She felt human, solid, clumsy, and utterly outmatched against his eerie grace. Claire was accustomed enough to running from vampires not to be utterly terrified—she’d done it often enough here, in this lab—but Pennyfeather was different from the others. Oliver, Amelie, Myrnin…They all had some kind of humanity to them, some hints of mercy, however hidden. They could be reached.

Pennyfeather was pure vampire-fueled serial killer, and a human, any human, was no match for him.

Claire grabbed for the silver-coated stake in her backpack, but it had rolled to the side, and running and hunting around in a bag and watching treacherous footing weren’t exactly complementary activities. It was inevitable that just as her fingertips brushed the cool metal, her foot would come down on a book that slid greasily to the side, and she’d tumble, off-balance, to the floor.

As she did.

She got a grip on the stake just as Pennyfeather landed on her chest, nimble and startlingly heavy. He easily pinned her arms down. All she could do was rattle the stake ineffectively against the tile. No way could she get leverage to stab him, or even scratch him. She bucked, trying to throw him off, but he rode it out easily.

It came to her, with cold clarity, that she wasn’t getting out of this. No last-minute brainstorms. No clever little science applications to solve the problem. In the end, she was just going to be another Morganville statistic. Score another one for the vamps.

“Hey,” a scratchy, electronic voice barked over Pennyfeather’s shoulder, and a grayscale, two-dimensional image flickered into existence there. Frank Collins, Shane’s absent/abusive dad, looking scarred and scary, was wielding a tire iron, which he swung at Pennyfeather’s head.

Pennyfeather reacted to the thing coming at him from the corner of his eye, jerking out of the way and letting go of Claire to stop the swing of the blunt object…but his hands went right through Frank’s insubstantial arm, and Pennyfeather pitched forward, off-balance. Claire seized the chance to roll away, and Frank flickered between her and Pennyfeather, confusing the issue.

“Out of my way, spirit!” Pennyfeather snarled, fangs out.

“I’m not a spirit,” Frank countered, and his fangs descended, too, as he returned the snarl. “I’m your worst damn nightmare, Skeletor. I’m a vampire killer with fangs and a grudge.”

That sounded so much like Shane that Claire was actually startled. So was Pennyfeather, as a sudden blaze of fire shot up from one of the Bunsen burners nearby. Claire barely glimpsed it before scooping up the rolling stake and her book bag, and lunging for the dark doorway of the portal. Concentrate! she begged herself, shaking all over with adrenaline. She had seconds, at most, before Pennyfeather reached her no matter what kind of distractions Frank might be trying; he didn’t have any actual, physical force to wield on her behalf, even if he was inclined. She needed out of here, fast.

She couldn’t mentally reconstruct the Day House bathroom under this kind of pressure, or anywhere else that Myrnin had established one of his teleportation thresholds. The only one that leaped clearly and instantly to her mind was home—the living room of the Glass House, with its comfy couch and armchair and barely controlled chaos….

It formed in front of her as she plunged forward, trusting somehow, desperately, that she could make it happen.

Pennyfeather lunged forward and caught her foot just as she pushed through the plastic-wrap pressure of the doorway, and she was stuck, mostly out but with her left leg held in a grip so iron-strong, she knew he’d drag her back through.

Or worse. If she was stuck in the portal when it closed, she’d be cut apart.

“Help!” Claire shrieked.

Michael, Eve, and Shane were all in the living room. Michael and Shane dropped the game controllers they’d been holding and twisted around on the sofa to look blankly at her, as Eve—already facing her—clapped hands to her mouth in shock.

“Help me! Pull me out!”

All three of them broke out of their momentary freeze at the same time. Michael scrambled over the back of the sofa and got to her first, grabbing her arm just as Pennyfeather yanked backward, and although Michael held on, they both slid toward the portal.

Claire couldn’t get her breath. “He’s got me; he’s got me; I can’t—!” she shrieked as Pennyfeather yanked hard on her leg, and she felt the strain in her muscles. He was still playing with her. She’d seen an angry vampire rip limbs off a person, and it was frighteningly possible just now.

Shane took hold of Claire and wrapped his arms around her in a grip so tight it felt as if she’d be crushed. “Go, Mike. I’ll hold her here! Get the bastard off her!”

“It’s the lab!” Claire blurted, “He’s in the lab!”

She wasn’t sure Michael could make it through at all—there wasn’t much room—but she twisted over to the side in hopes of making more space. At least Michael knew what he was doing. He paused for a moment, fixing the lab’s location in his mind, then nodded at her and plunged through in a rush.

Claire felt the disturbance of the thin membrane still holding her leg at the knee like a strange tidal wave, and Pennyfeather’s grip tightened. He started to yank her steadily backward, and all of Shane’s strength wasn’t enough to keep them from sliding forward. If anything, Pennyfeather just seemed to be more intent on taking her with him, not less.

Claire screamed and buried her face in Shane’s chest as she felt the strain on her leg increase, going from painful to intensely agonizing, and in one more second she knew she’d feel muscles tearing loose….

But then a second later, the crushing hold on her ankle released. Shane had braced himself and was pulling with all his strength to counterbalance, and when the pressure let go, they both went crashing to the wooden floor with her on top. She was breathless and frightened, but it was still nice to be body-to-body with him, and she saw the pleasure fire in his eyes, too, just for a moment. He brushed her hair back from her face and said, “Okay?”

She nodded.

“Then let’s do this again later,” he said, “but right now, Michael needs backup. Stay here.” He rolled her off him, got to his feet, grabbed the black canvas bag that Eve threw to him from the kitchen door, and dived into the dark.

Eve hurried to her side as Claire tried to bend her leg, and winced at the shooting pains that went through it. “Don’t,” Eve ordered, and dropped down next to her to run her hands over Claire’s knee. “Damn, I can’t believe Myrnin did that to you. I’ll stake his ass myself, if there’s anything left when the boys get done teaching him manners.”

“Myrnin?” Claire asked, and then realized what she’d done. “It’s not Myrnin!”

With a horrible sense of doom, she realized that she hadn’t told them it was Pennyfeather.

And neither of the boys was prepared for that.