by Rachel Caine
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.”
THREE
Claire wasn’t needed for the actual investigation. Myrnin wanted to do it himself…a fact that left her a little bit worried, not so much for him as for the people he was out to question (not very nice people, granted, if Frank Collins had decided they were worth losing). She left a message for Oliver, figuring that it was his problem now, and headed for home.
She expected to find everyone there, but when she unlocked the front door of the house on Lot Street, it sounded quiet. Way too quiet. They weren’t a studious bunch, her housemates. If Shane was home, there should have been game noise; if Eve, loud music. If both, shouting plus both those things.
Michael wasn’t home, either, because she didn’t hear guitar.
“Helllooooooooo,” she called, as she locked the door behind her in standard Morganville precautionary measure. “House ghost? Anybody?” Not that they had a house ghost anymore, but it always seemed polite to ask. Weirder things had happened.
Silence. Claire dumped her book bag on the couch, on top of a sweatshirt someone (Shane) had left balled up there, flopped down, and stretched out. She rarely had the house to herself; it felt nice. Strange, but nice. When nobody was moving around, she could hear something like a low, electric vibration from all over—walls, floors, ceiling. The life of the house.
Claire reached down and patted the wooden floor. “Good house. Nice house. We should do a repaint or something. Make you pretty again.”
She could have sworn that the house’s low hum cycled, like a very faint, approving purr.
After half an hour, she got up and checked the table and other likely spots for any sign of notes left behind, but there weren’t any hints about when she might expect anybody to show up. She was about to go upstairs to study when the flyer caught her eye. It had slipped off the kitchen table and was lying curled against the wall. She picked it up and smoothed it out.
The new martial arts gym. Not likely Eve was there, but for Shane, it was definitely a safe bet that was where he’d gone off to. Claire tapped the paper thoughtfully, then smiled.
“Why not?” she asked. The house didn’t answer or have any opinion one way or another. “I could use the exercise. And I’ve got to see this place.”
She raced upstairs, changed into a pair of low-riding sweatpants and a faded T-shirt that advertised The Killers, and at the last second, added the gold Founder’s pin to her collar. It scratched, but better that than getting caught outside without Protection. After all, she hadn’t gotten martially arted yet.
It was still light out, but fading fast toward twilight. Cold wind twirled the leaves in the gutters, and as she walked, Claire wished she’d thought to bring a sweater. A few cars passed her, some with blacked-out, vampire-friendly windows, but nobody paid her more than a glance that she could tell. The new gym was located in one of the less-trafficked parts of town, near a bunch of warehouses that had seen better days and businesses with long-ago-faded closed permanently signs in the windows. In all that industrial devastation, one neon sign still glowed, with a red-and-green dragon swishing its tail.
The storefront looked newly renovated, and Claire could swear she still smelled fresh paint. There were a lot of cars in the parking lot and lining the street. With surprise, Claire recognized Eve’s black hearse; she didn’t expect Eve to be a fan of sparring. Well, people probably wouldn’t have bet on her showing up, either.
There were no windows to look in through, so Claire pulled open the heavy metal door and walked into a large tiled area with a wooden counter. A buffed-up guy of postcollege age sat on a stool behind it, reading a magazine. He had a lot of tattoos, and a particularly sharp buzz cut. When he glanced up and saw her, his sandy eyebrows went up.
“Here for class?” he asked.
“Uh, maybe. I just want to check it out.”
“All right. You can do a pay-as-you-go for the first couple of visits, but after that, it’s a monthly fee, no refunds.” He shoved a clipboard at her, along with a pen. “Fill out the forms. It’s ten dollars.”
Ten was a lot for just checking it out, but Claire put her name on the papers, along with her address, phone number, medical history, and all the other stuff that was asked about exercise and mobility. Some of it seemed pretty intrusive. She handed it back, along with her faded ten-dollar bill, and got a sticky name tag to slap on her T-shirt. Then the bouncer—she couldn’t think of him as a receptionist—hit a hidden button, and a sharp, electronic buzz sounded.
“Push the wall, right there,” he said, pointing. She pushed, and it opened, cutting off the buzz. It swung shut behind her as she stepped through, and if it locked, she couldn’t hear it over the noise.
Amazing that she’d missed it on the other side of the barrier, because this gym was working. The clang of free weights hitting supports. Solid, heavy clunks from the weight machines as men and women sweat, grunted, and worked at the stations. Whirring wheels on exercise bikes. And in the center of the room, a large open space with mats in the middle, and about thirty people dressed in white martial arts clothes, kneeling with their hands on their thighs, all facing in toward the middle.
Claire looked quickly around, and although she recognized some of those doing the straight exercise stuff, she didn’t see Shane or Eve among them. She edged around toward a stair-climber not in use and stepped on so she could get a better vantage point of the class in progress. Whoever had used it before her had set it to murderous levels; she had to back off on the resistance almost immediately, and so she almost missed Shane, who was sitting facing the mat at an angle.
She spotted him only because he got up and walked to the center of the mats. He wore his uniform well, she realized, like he’d done this before. Maybe he had. He had that look, the one she recognized from w
atching him fight, though those had been more down-and-dirty street things than martial arts bouts. He wasn’t looking at anything but the man facing him.
Shane was a pretty big guy for his age—broad shouldered, kind of tall. And he had at least a foot on the man facing him, who looked frozen at the age of about thirty. The vampire instructor, Claire thought. He had long hair he’d tied back in a ponytail.
They bowed to each other formally and settled back into some kind of stance, almost mirroring each other.
Shane kicked, high and fast. The vampire ducked and let Shane’s momentum spin him out of position, and with one economically placed, almost gentle push, sent him tumbling to the mats. Shane rolled and came up with his hands out, ready to defend, but the vampire was just standing there, watching him.
“Nice attack,” he said. “But I can move out of the way of a kick. You’d do much better to move in close, reduce my reaction time. It’s the only real chance you have, you see. You need to remember how much faster we can move, and how much more observant we are of things like shifts of weight and eye movements.”
Shane nodded, shaggy hair rippling around his hard, intent face, and took two quick, light steps in to close the distance. He struck as he did it, and even though he didn’t land the punch, he came closer. The vampire’s open hand stopped it less than an inch from his face.
He hadn’t flinched.
“You’re quick,” he said. “Very quick, and unless I miss my guess, very well accustomed to fighting all sorts of enemies. You’re young to be so angry, by the way. That can be either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on who you’re fighting. And why.”
Shane fell back into a waiting stance and didn’t answer. The vampire gave him a little one-more-time signal, and Shane went for a punch…but it was a distraction, and this time, his kick actually hit the vampire in the side of his knee, forcing a shift in balance.
The vampire, without seeming to even think about it, spun and kicked Shane right off the mat. He tumbled across the wood floor and into the kneeling students like a ball into bowling pins. They scattered.
