by Rachel Caine
Kentworth moved in with the Taser, and Shane arched his back and sidestepped the lunge, like a matador with a bull. But he wasn’t going to be able to get away, not with his hands still pinned behind him.
Claire looked wide-eyed at Hannah. Now or never, she silently thought. She couldn’t take the gun, not against Hannah’s well-trained reflexes.
But Hannah could give it up voluntarily.
Chief Moses nodded slightly and moved her hand away from the holster.
Claire lunged forward and grabbed the weapon; she checked the safety, which had been ingrained in her by weapons training with Shane, and clicked it off. “Call him off,” she said. She didn’t aim the gun at Hannah. She didn’t think she had to.
Hannah said, “Kentworth. Back off. Now.”
He stepped away, leaving Shane wobbling a little, bloodied but still standing. He had a red bruise forming on his forehead, and he spat blood from a cut lip, but she’d seen him worse. A lot worse.
Sullivan was still on the ground, cradling his nose. He yelled something, but it was incomprehensible.
“Knife,” she said to Hannah. Hannah unsnapped a holster on her other side and pulled out a military-style blade with a black grip, which she handed over. Claire took it and backed toward Shane. She kept the weapon raised this time, and focused on Kentworth, who was casting doubtful looks at Hannah, clearly not sure what he was supposed to do about this.
She sawed carefully through one side of Shane’s flex cuffs, and as his hand came loose, she pressed the handle into his palm.
“You give me the best presents,” he said, then freed his other wrist with a practiced slice. The flex cuffs dropped to the grass. “We’re going now. Keys.”
“What?” Kentworth asked.
“Car keys. Toss ’em.”
Kentworth was clearly considering going for his weapon, not his keys; whatever doubts he had about the Daylight Foundation—if he had any at all—were back-burnered by the fact that two of his prisoners had somehow managed to escape their restraints and gain weapons. When he twitched slightly, though, Hannah said flatly, “Give them the keys. That’s an order.”
“I can take her, ma’am.”
“And you’ll have to wake up tomorrow knowing you shot a teenage girl dead when you didn’t need to,” Hannah said. “Toss the keys, Charlie. They’re not going anywhere.”
Kentworth looked doubtful, but Hannah’s firm, calm tone made the difference. He unclipped the keys from his belt loop and tossed them at Shane’s feet. “It’s a long way to the car, son,” he said. “You might want to think about the danger you’re putting your girlfriend in out there.”
Shane twirled the keys around his finger for a second, then tossed them. Claire thought for a second that his aim was off, but it wasn’t, because he wasn’t throwing them toward her at all.
He was throwing them toward Hannah, who effortlessly fielded them. “Sorry about this,” she told Kentworth, and before Claire could really understand what exactly had just happened, Hannah walked past Kentworth to Sullivan. She rolled the protesting man over and used her handcuffs to pin his hands behind his back. When Sully gave a gargling yell of protest, she leaned an elbow into his back. “Sully, I could do a hell of a lot worse to you than just handcuff you. If I have to gag you, you’ll choke on your blood from that broken nose. So stay quiet, or I’ll make you quiet.”
Sully shut up. He took Hannah seriously, no question about that. She stood up and looked at Kentworth, who slowly raised both hands in the air. He reached up, took the Daylighter pin from his collar, and dropped it on the ground.
“Happy to help, ma’am,” he said. “Never really liked any of this from the beginning. I only joined them because you did.”
“That was my mistake,” Hannah said. She looked at Claire and Shane. “Amelie’s not really dead, is she?”
“Nope,” Shane said, and held out his hand to her. She shook it and nodded gravely. “Nice to have you back, Hannah.”
“Nice to stop pretending that I’m a true believer,” she said. “Fair warning—I’m not sure I can stay on your side for long, if Fallon sets me to hunting vampires. Can’t control that much at all.”
“The good news is that Fallon’s vampire cure seems to work for whatever we are, too. But word of advice—try biting somebody who survived it. Not Michael, though. He’s been through enough.”
For the first time in a long time, Hannah actually smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind. Tactical question—what’s Amelie waiting for? Why isn’t she taking Fallon down right now?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure she’d love to, but she wants to be sure that her people are free before she does it. No more hostages. That’s how he got her in the first place—hostages and threats, right?”
“No,” Hannah said. “Not threats. His task force took ten vampires hostage, all right, but his first act when he got Amelie to show up to rescue them was to stake half of them with those booby-trapped stakes. They died when she tried to help them. She gave herself up to stop him from killing the rest the same way.” She hesitated, then continued, “They were all her bloodline. Siblings, and vampires she created. Family, as vampires count these things.”
Amelie had never seemed all that easy to manipulate, but Claire knew how she felt about her people—she’d created Morganville specifically to protect them against all the threats that surrounded them. She would fight and die for them. And when it came to actual family . . . “That’s horrible.”
“Yes,” Hannah said. “But I don’t think Fallon recognizes it anymore.”
Shane exchanged a look with Claire and said, “We need to get Michael and Eve out of the middle of this. Michael isn’t used to being human. He’s going to make a mistake, get himself killed trying to react like a vampire.”
“We can’t,” Claire said. “They’re on the stage. We have to leave them there for now.” She saw the expression that crossed his face, and she sympathized; she didn’t like it, either. But he knew she was right.
“Then we have to hurry,” Hannah said. “Kentworth, you’re in charge of Sully. Keep him quiet.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Be careful.”
“Always.”
Turned out there was no easier way to leave Founder’s Square than in the custody of the Morganville chief of police.
THIRTEEN
Mrs. Grant hadn’t backstabbed them after all. By the time they arrived at the Bitter Creek Mall, the bus from Blacke was idling on the north side of the parking lot, out of sight of the front doors, where the guards were stationed. Claire spotted it from the road, and pointed it out to Hannah, who nodded and turned into the street that looped around the mall. The asphalt was cracked and split, so she took it slow, avoiding the occasional bush that had pushed its way up from the darkness.
Mrs. Grant stepped off the bus as the police car pulled to a halt. She was holding a shotgun, which she pointed at the driver’s-side window.
“No!” Claire yelled, and fumbled at the passenger-side door. She exited fast and waved her arms frantically. “No! She’s on our side!”
The older woman hesitated for only a moment, then nodded and returned the shotgun to a resting position on her shoulder. “Just rock salt, anyway,” she said. “Don’t want to be killing any innocent people, even the ones the Daylighters have got their hooks into. We’re visitors here. Wouldn’t be polite, would it?”
Hannah got out of the cruiser and gave Mrs. Grant a professional threat assessment, then stepped forward to offer her hand. “Chief Hannah Moses,” she said. “You must be Mrs. Grant.”
“Heard of me?”
“You left an impression. You may be the first combat librarian I’ve ever met.”
That earned an almost-full smile from the other woman. “I think most librarians are combat qualified,” she said. “It’s not as peaceful a job as it looks. We were about to go in without you. What about the others?” She meant Amelie, Oliver, and Morley.
“Fallon’s making them a
spectacle,” Hannah said. “Good for us, because that means the attention won’t be here. If you want to save these vampires, you’d better do it now. He plans to start his conversion therapy on all of them today. Odds are, three-quarters of them won’t survive.”
“They won’t just let him do it to them. I know vampires. They’re not very biddable.”
“If they resist, he’ll kill them,” Hannah said flatly, “and call it a riot and a necessary defensive measure. He’ll firebomb the place. If there are any survivors, he’ll give them his cure. One thing about Fallon, he’s not squeamish. He’s already got most of his Daylighter guards and my own people in there, armed with things lethal to vampires and ready to use them.”
“And he’s got the vampires wearing shock collars,” Claire added. “So he can stun them first. No matter what, they can’t win without our help.”
“Is there any other way in except the front?” Mrs. Grant asked.
Claire shuddered, thinking of the horrible garbage chute. “None that humans could do on their own, or would want to.”
“Frontal assault it is, then.”
“Maybe not,” Hannah said. “I can even the odds a little.” She went back to the cruiser and picked up the radio mike, adjusted the frequency, and squeezed the button on the side. “Bitter Creek team, come in. Moses here.”
The response came within seconds. “Salazar here, boss.”
“Situation?”
“Same as ever. Bunch of freaking statues staring at us. Nobody’s doing nothing. They’re hungry, though. When is the next blood shipment coming?”
“A few hours,” Hannah responded. “Listen, I’m going to need you to send four more men out to Founder’s Square for crowd control.”
“Boss? That just leaves me here.”
“You’ve got Fallon’s Daylighters, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“That’s an order, Salazar.”
He hesitated just a few seconds before his voice came back over the radio. “Yes, ma’am. Sending the rest to Founder’s Square. ETA about ten minutes.”
“Ten-four.” Hannah hung up the mike and nodded to Mrs. Grant. “That takes most of my guys out of harm’s way for now. Salazar’s a good man. I’ll go in first and have him turn over the collar control box to me. Look, you’re not going to like it, but we have to wait for the others to leave, and I need Shane and Claire to run a little errand for me.”
“What?” Claire asked.
“Blood,” Hannah said. “If you don’t want those vampires in there snacking on us as soon as I release their collars, we’re going to need a lot of blood. Blood bank’s still got a stockpile. Go get it.”
“Are they just going to give it to us?”
“I’ve got a contact inside,” she said. “I’ll call ahead. You pull around to the back vampire entrance, and they’ll bring it out to you. Hurry.”
She stepped out of the way, and Claire got in on the driver’s side, racked the seat forward, and started the car.
It was only then, when she looked in the rearview mirror, that she saw Shane still sitting in the backseat, looking annoyed. “Oh,” she said, and covered her mouth with her hand, mostly to hide a smile. “Sorry. We should have let you out.”
“You think?”
“Sorry. We’re going—”
“—to the blood bank. I heard. Awesome. Always wanted to be the plasma delivery service for a bunch of cranky vamps with a grudge. Wait, that pretty much describes daily life around here, doesn’t it?”
She let him have the last word as she pulled the car out to the uneven street, heading for the blood bank.
• • •
It was actually a smooth exchange, though Claire had expected something to go really wrong. As she pulled the police car to a stop, the alley door opened, and a man in a white lab coat wheeled out a large cart, like something hotels would fill with laundry.
Only this was filled with blood bags.
“Trunk,” he told her through the rolled-down window, and she searched for a bit to find the release for it. Then she got out, remembering to open Shane’s door along the way, and ran to help the doctor—Was he a doctor? She didn’t ask—fling the bags into the trunk of the police car. Shane joined her, and with the three of them working it took only a couple of minutes to pack the space available. There were a few bags left, and Shane stacked them on the car’s floorboards in the back.
“Tell Hannah it’s the pure supply; I destroyed the stuff they contaminated,” the man said, and rolled the cart back inside.
Claire slammed the trunk shut and jumped in the driver’s seat while Shane climbed in the passenger seat this time. She drove carefully, trying to avoid being spotted by anyone she recognized or by any other patrol car. So far, there were no alerts. She hoped Kentworth still had Sully under control.
As she parked next to the bus once more, she saw that Hannah was organizing the Blacke residents into teams of four—enough to cover each other’s backs if necessary. Claire gave her a thumbs-up as she rolled down the window, and Hannah replied with a crisp nod and turned to address everyone.
“Right,” she said. “We’ve got the blood. Here’s how this will work. I go in and recover the controller for the collars. I shock the vampires down—for their safety as well as ours. Your job is to take down the Daylighter guards—but be careful. They won’t hesitate to fight back. While you’re taking them down, the kids and I will be piling all the blood in the center square of the atrium. By preference, most of the vamps will go for it when I free them, but I warn you: some will come for you or the Daylighters. Be prepared to defend yourselves there, too, and get out of the building while they feed.”
It sounded like a solid plan, and Claire swallowed hard as Hannah ordered her into the backseat. Hannah drove slowly to the edge of the building, and watched as Mrs. Grant’s people followed on foot, keeping to the edge of the wall.
Hannah turned the corner. “Both of you, get down and stay down until I come out,” she said. “I don’t want them seeing you or this could all go bad.”
They followed instructions. Claire had a clear view of the blood bags stacked on the floor beside her, the thick dark-red liquid shifting inside the bags as Hannah got out of the car and walked away, toward the entrance. The morning heat was starting to make itself felt, and Claire felt sweat forming on her back, where the sun shone brightly. Without the AC running in the car, it would get uncomfortable quickly.
But it wasn’t long before the radio in the car crackled to life, and Hannah’s voice said, “Give the signal to Mrs. Grant.”
Claire wasn’t sure what the signal was, but Shane rose up from behind the dashboard and gave Mrs. Grant, staring into the windshield from a few feet away, a big thumbs-up.
The people from Blacke—thirty strong, at least—rushed into the building.
No need to hide now, Claire thought, and she sat up to try to see what was going on. Which was useless, since there wasn’t much of a view inside. But after a few long minutes of silence, Hannah’s voice came over the radio again. “Pop the trunk. Bring it in.”
Shane opened her door on the way to the back of the car, and they grabbed full armloads of the squishy bags and ran for the entrance. Hannah opened the door for them. In her right hand, she was holding the controller box for the shock collars, and Claire saw that there were vampires down on the floor, still convulsing. She was holding them that way.
The Daylighters were mostly down, too, being tied up by the folks from Blacke, but not all of them had fallen into the trap. In fact, one was leaning over the second-floor balcony, aiming a handgun at them. Claire would have missed him, except that she heard Myrnin shout, “Claire, get down!” and she obeyed without question, dragging Shane with her.
The gun went off, and the bullet went over their heads to shatter one side of the entry doors into an explosion of glass shards.
Then Myrnin rose up pale behind the shooter, and sank his fangs into the man’s neck.
&nbs
p; Claire watched, horrified, because in that moment her gentle, sweet, goofy boss became Vampire, with a capital V. She remembered moments like this, when all his humanity stripped away, but this time it seemed even more frightening—mainly because he was angry. Really, really angry.
He drained the man dry, and snapped his neck when he was done, simply out of sheer fury . . . and then he tossed him over the railing, to smack like a rag doll onto the tile floor.
That made everyone stop what they were doing for an instant—even the other Daylighters who were still fighting.
Myrnin, Claire realized, was still getting shocks from the collar. He was just . . . ignoring them. Hannah realized it, too, and she didn’t like it; she unsnapped the fastener on her sidearm as Myrnin leaped over the balcony’s edge and landed catlike beside the body of his victim.
“You can stop that now,” he said to Hannah. His voice was uneven and ragged, and his eyes were burning red, but she still shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. “The others are starving. If I release them, they’ll rip us apart. We’ve got blood. We’re bringing it in. Myrnin, back off. Don’t make me have to hurt you.”
He laughed, in a tense and wildly crazy way that made Claire get a very bad feeling in her stomach. “Hurt me?” he asked. “How would you do that? By taking away everything I love? Everything I honor? You’re too late, Hannah. Far too late. Fallon already did that.”
Claire’s terrible feeling suddenly condensed into a heavy, sickening weight. “He took Jesse,” she said. “Fallon took Jesse.”
“Because he knew it would hurt me,” Myrnin said. “Fallon likes to pretend his crusade is to save us, but in the end it’s about me. He wants to see me suffer, for turning him vampire so long ago. For abandoning him once I did. It is my fault, you know. All my fault. But Lady Grey shouldn’t pay the price.”
“We have to save her,” Claire said, and turned to Hannah. “We have to.”
