by Rachel Caine
In the end, she snuggled in next to him, her warmth easing his shakes. Just before she drifted off to sleep, she heard him whisper, “Please tell me you’re really here.”
“I’m here,” she whispered back. Her heart ached for him, and she tightened her arms around him. “I’m right here, Shane. Honestly, I am.”
He didn’t answer.
In the morning, Shane seemed … better. Quiet, and with a wary look in his eyes that scared her a little, but he looked good. The red marks on his skin were healing up, and the transfusion seemed to have done a good job of restoring his healthy coloring. Theo had insisted on adding glucose in the last hour, even though Shane had begun griping about having the needle in.
Claire had finally left him, but not alone; Eve had shown up bright and early, coffees in hand and balancing a small tray of baked goods. Shane had accepted the coffee, and had been eyeing the cookies as Claire finally left to visit the incredibly awkward chemical toilets and do what sponge bath she could with shower gel and a bottle of water. She felt better, too, for having done it. She’d slept unbelievably deeply, not moving all night; that had been the deadening effects of the adrenaline draining away, she guessed.
Shane hadn’t said a lot to her this morning, but then, he’d just woken up. He will, she thought. He’ll be himself again today.
She was on her way back to the room when Myrnin stepped out of one of the hallways, saw her, and stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes were wide and black, and his expression tense and cautious. “Claire,” he said. “I hear he is better.” No question who the he was that Myrnin referred to, either.
“No thanks to you at all,” she snapped, and started to bypass him. He got in front of her.
“Claire, I didn’t—you must believe me, I never meant him harm. I thought …”
“You thought wrong, didn’t you? You were willing to let my boyfriend die out there. Now get out of my way.”
“I can’t,” he said softly. “Not until you understand that I did not want him dead. In no way is that true. I believed he was dead already, and I tried to spare you the pain of—”
“Shut up. Just shut up and get out of my way.”
“No!” In a shockingly fast move, he backed her against the wall, hands braced on either side of her head as he leaned in on her. “You know me, Claire. Do you believe me so petty, so … pathetic that I would do this for selfish personal reasons? The draug are not to be played with. You’ve taken huge and violent risks, going back there, and you must understand that I am a vampire. It is not in my nature to be so … careless with my own safety. Not for a single human.”
She stared at him for a long few seconds, and then said, very quietly, “Including me?”
There was a flicker in his expression, a bit of agony, and he pushed off and walked away from her. She’d hurt him. Good. She’d meant to. “Yes,” he finally said, sharply, and rounded on her from a few feet away. “Yes, even you. Stop thinking of me as some … personal tame tiger! I am not, Claire.”
“And I’m not your puppet,” she said. “Or your assistant anymore. I quit.”
“It would not be the first time, would it?” Oh, he was angry now, eyes flashing with strobes of red. “If you are not adult enough to understand why I tried to minimize our losses, then I have no use for you, girl. Cling to your friends and your follies. I am done coddling you.”
She laughed. “Wait—you coddle me? Are you kidding? I’m the one who follows you around and picks up the pieces of crazy you drop all over the place, Myrnin. Me. You don’t take care of me. I take care of you. And the least you could have done for me was to go back for Shane. But you didn’t.”
The strobing faded away, leaving his eyes black and a little cold. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. And I didn’t because in my experience, there’s never been anything left to rescue. I couldn’t allow you to see him like that, Claire, reduced to bones and blood. That was a kindness.”
She started to fire back at him, but couldn’t find the words. He was serious about that. Very serious.
“Furthermore,” he said, “I realized why they’d taken him. You didn’t.”
“Myrnin, just—I don’t know what you’re talking about, but just—”
“They were using him to get to you, Claire.” He let her think about that in silence for a long moment, and then continued, “You are perfectly right to hate me. Feel free. But I am glad he is all right, all the same. They were using him to lure you back, and it worked. Magnus wants you. You might give some consideration to that, because I think it is quite important.”
Magnus. Standing there, watching her. Waiting not for Shane, not for Michael, but for her.
Claire felt cold creep up her spine, and chill bumps shivered over her arms.
“Hey,” Shane said. He was leaning against the doorway, looking almost back to his old self again; he had color back in his face, and he’d changed into fresh clothes—his own, brought back by Eve. She’d managed to grab his favorite ironic saying T-shirt; this one read ZOMBIE BAIT. “Are you two crazy kids fighting about me?” There was no amusement in his expression, Claire thought. “Because don’t. Myrnin was right. You should have left me and called it good.”
“Shane—”
“You’re mad because he did something smart, not because it was stupid. You came back, yeah, but you got help, and that was important. If you’d tried it alone, you wouldn’t have made it, and you know that’s true. He was right to run.” He sucked in a deep breath and met Myrnin’s eyes squarely. “Thanks for making her be smart, too. Even if it didn’t take.”
“Oh,” Myrnin said, clearly taken aback. “Well, yes, all right.”
Claire stared at Shane. How could he say leaving him was smart? And yes, okay, she’d gotten reinforcements, and maybe that had been smart, but she’d have come back all alone, and he knew it.
“Hey,” she said. “You’d have done exactly the same thing if it was me.”
“Yeah,” he said, and shrugged. There was even an attempt at a smile. “But I never said I was smart, did I?” The smile—not convincing—didn’t last long. “We can’t afford to fight like this. Not right now. He’s on Team Us. Don’t kick him off. We don’t have enough players on the field as it is.”
“You’re seriously going to go with a sports analogy right now?”
“Yep,” he said, and sipped his coffee. “Just like normal.” But there was a shadow in his eyes, a flash that made her wonder just how deep the fractures went inside him. “Theo cut me loose. I’m topped up and ready to go.”
Myrnin was watching him with a guarded expression, and then he finally said, “I suppose you need rest, then.”
“Not really. I slept, and I got a transfusion. I feel … pretty good, actually.” Physically, that might be true, but Claire doubted he felt at all good inside. She remembered that whisper in the dark. Are you really there?
Always, she thought. I’ll always be here.
“Did you have some kind of mission you wanted to send us on?” Shane asked. “Seeing as how brilliantly the last one turned out?”
“The last mission killed enough draug to prevent their singing,” Myrnin countered, “and we lost no one.”
“No thanks to you,” Claire muttered. She saw his back stiffen.
“Oliver would like us to consider more … scientific approaches. I will need your assistance for that, Claire. I will expect you in the laboratory in—” He darted a glance from her to Shane and back again. “In your own good time. Good day.”
He clasped his hands behind his back and walked away. For the first time, Claire realized what he was wearing: crazy lab coat. Cargo pants. And his vampire bunny slippers, bedraggled but still flapping their red mouths with every step. She wondered if he’d just thrown it on, or if this time he’d dressed to make her think of him as … helpless. Inoffensive.
There was a lot more to Myrnin than just the pleasantly crazy mayhem; underneath it, there was calculation, and a cold, still monster that
he kept mostly caged.
She didn’t realize that she’d shivered, again, until Shane put his arm around her. He was warm now, and she turned and put her arms around him. She rested her head on his chest and listened to the slow, steady beat of his heart. Alive, alive, alive.
“Hey,” he said, and tipped her chin up. “I didn’t get to say hello properly last night. Sorry. Mind if I—”
She lunged upward and captured his lips in midsentence, and the kiss was fierce and sweet and hot. His mouth felt soft and hard at the same time, and he sank into a chair and pulled her onto his lap, which was a relief from standing on tiptoe to reach him. It was a long, needy, almost desperate kiss, and when she finally broke it, it was to gasp for air.
He combed through her hair with his fingers, gentle with the snags, and searched her face with a dark, intense stare. She didn’t know what he was looking for.
“What is it?” she asked him, and put her hands on either side of his face. His beard was a little rough beneath her skin. He needed a shave. “Shane?”
“You seem so …” He paused, as if he couldn’t really think of the word. A little line formed above his eyebrows, and she wanted to kiss it away. “Different,” he finally said. “Are you? Different?”
“No,” she said, startled. “No, I don’t think so. How?”
“More …” He shook his head then, and kissed the palm of her hand without taking his gaze away from her face. “More real.”
That should have seemed romantic, but instead she felt another chill, a strong one. There was confusion deep in that stare, uncertainty.
Fear.
“Shane, I’m me,” she said, and kissed him again, frantic with the need to prove it. “Of course I’m real. You’re real. We’re real.”
“I know,” he said, but he was lying. She could feel it in the tremble of his fingertips, and the pressure of his lips when he kissed her back. “I know.”
She would have asked him right then what had happened to him, what those dreams had been, but a voice over her shoulder said, “I guess this means you’re feeling better, bro.”
Michael was walking in, yawning, drinking a cup of something that Claire sincerely hoped was coffee. She’d seen enough blood in the past twenty-four hours to last a lifetime.
“Yeah,” Shane said, and gave her a quick glance of apology as he moved her off his lap. “Better.” He offered a fist, and Michael bumped it. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Couldn’t do anything else.” Michael shrugged. “Claire’s the one to thank. She got us all together. Hannah deserves it, too; she didn’t have to jump in, but she did. And I hate to say it, but you might want to thank Team Morrell.”
“Already did,” Shane said, and frowned a little. “Uh, I think I did. Did I?”
“You did,” Claire said. “It’s okay.” But that worried her, too. Still, shock could make people lose memories, right? Not everything was suspicious. She couldn’t think this way or she’d drive herself crazy. “Don’t downplay it, Michael. You used yourself as bait for the draug. That’s major.”
“Bait?” Shane repeated, and blinked. “What?”
Michael shrugged again and sipped his coffee. “Somebody had to,” he said. “I’m their favorite flavor, and I’m fast. Made sense.”
“Makes zero sense for you all to risk your lives coming after me. How did you know I wasn’t dead?”
“Even if you were,” Michael said, suddenly completely serious, “we’d come back for you. I mean that. And it’s my fault we left you to begin with. Claire didn’t want to go. I had the keys, and I used them to drive off and leave you there. My fault. Nobody else’s.”
“All of a sudden, everybody wants to take the blame,” Shane said. “Thought that was my gig, man.”
“We can share. Many hands, lighter loads, all that crap.” Michael took another drink and changed the subject. “Eve brought my guitar. I was thinking of playing a little later if you want to chill. New songs rattling around in my head. I’d like an opinion.”
Shane flashed him one of those surfer gestures, middle three fingers curled in, thumb and pinkie out. “Shaka, brudda.”
Michael flashed it back and grinned. “Claire. Got something for you.” He pulled a chain over his head and threw her a necklace; she caught it and saw some kind of glass bottle, sealed, full of opaque liquid. “While I was playing my bait act, I scooped up some water from one of the pools.”
She almost dropped it. “Draug?”
“Nope. No draug in that pool. It was empty. Only one that was.” He shrugged. “Thought it might be important. Do your science-y stuff on it. Might be something that could help.”
She shook the bottle, studying the contents, but it didn’t tell her anything. It wasn’t a big sample, maybe an eyedropper full. Enough, though. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” he said. “Later.” He started walking.
“Wait,” she said, and caught up with him. She lowered her voice. “Would you—would you kind of keep an eye on him the rest of the day? Make sure he’s really okay?”
Michael studied her for a second, then nodded. “I know what he’s been through,” he said. “Well, some of it. So yeah. I’ll hang close. You go do what you need to do.”
“Thanks.” She kissed him on the cheek. “And do me a favor. Make up with Eve, okay? I can’t stand this. I can’t stand seeing the two of you …”
“It’s not up to me,” he said, “but I’m trying.”
She went back to Shane and settled in on his lap again, arms around his neck. His circled her waist. “I thought you had to go,” he said. “And don’t think I didn’t see you kissing on my best friend.”
“He deserved it.”
“Yeah. Maybe I ought to kiss him, too.”
Michael, on his way out, didn’t even bother to turn around for that one. “Oh sure, you always promise.”
“Bite me!” Shane called after him. He was smiling, and it looked like a genuine one this time. That was good. He even turned to Claire and held on to it, though a bit of that shadow crept back into his eyes. That … uncertainty. “Not you. You, I was thinking more like kiss me. If that’s okay.”
“Always,” she said, and proved it.
Going into Myrnin’s lab was a very weird and awkward thing; she’d normally felt okay around him, even when he was strange or psycho … on some deep, fundamental level, there had been some trust.
Not now. Not at this moment.
He looked up as she entered, and the hopeful look on his face smoothed out as he read her expression. “Ah,” he said, in a neutral tone. “Good. Thank you for giving me your time.” That was way too polite for him, normally; it was as awkward as a schoolboy trying to remember his manners. “How is Shane?”
She skipped right over that, because the fact that he even said Shane’s name made her angry. “Michael gave me this,” she said, and showed him the vial full of liquid. “It’s from one of the holding pools at the treatment plant. The draug were avoiding the water.”
Myrnin focused in on the vial, and as what she’d said filtered through whatever he had going on in his head, he snatched the chain away from her to hold it up to a bright, shadeless incandescent bulb. “Interesting,” he said. “Thoughtful of him to retrieve us a sample.”
“Dangerous,” she said. “He’s lucky he didn’t get killed out there.”
“Aren’t we all.” Myrnin grabbed a test tube and carefully poured the contents of the vial in it. It was a meager amount, but he seemed happy enough. “Excellent. Excellent. A good start to our inquisition today.” He paused, then picked up a slender glass pipette and drew off a sample of the water to add to a slide, which he covered with a second glass plate and put under a microscope. “I’ve been thinking about binding agents. Alchemically speaking, our goal was transforming an object from one state to another—lead to gold, obviously, but many different—”
“We don’t have time for alchemy,” Claire said flatly. “Alchemy doesn’t work, Myrnin.”
“Ah, yes, but I read—wait, I have it here somewhere—ah!” He shoved books around and came up with a piece of paper that looked as if it had been printed off a computer. “Alchemists believed it was possible to change the essential nature of a thing, and look, we were right. According to the Journal of Physical Chemistry, a very high-voltage charge conducted through water can actually bring about a phase transition, freezing diffusional motion and forming a single, stable crystal that—”
“I read it,” Claire said. It freaked her out that he’d read it. Off the computer, not paper? Myrnin wasn’t exactly the surf-the-Internet type. “It’s interesting, but it takes a lot of power, and it doesn’t last; plus, it’s not a permanent phase change. As soon as you remove the current, water reverts to its liquid state.” But it was impressive that he’d found that, she thought; she’d considered it herself, because the idea of turning water into a solid was … exactly what they needed, actually. Just not with so much crazy power consumption.
“But it’s a start, is it not?” Myrnin said. He bent over the microscope and clucked his tongue. “I am honestly mystified by how you humans get anything done with the primitive equipment at hand. This is useless.” He took the slide off and, before she could stop him, removed the glass top and licked the sample.
She fought the urge to gag. He didn’t seem at all bothered. He stood quite still, closing his eyes, and then said, “Hmmm. A bit salty, bitter aftertaste … iron … hydroxide.” He smiled then, and looked at her as if he was quite proud of himself. “Definitely iron hydroxide. That is a binding agent, is it not?”
“You are insane,” she said. “You can’t go around … licking things that come out of a water treatment plant. That’s just … unsanitary.”
“Life is unsanitary,” he said. “Death more so, as it turns out. I don’t believe that iron hydroxide has any effect upon me, but of course I should try larger doses. If it in fact has an effect upon the draug, that is quite an advance ….” He turned and rummaged around in drawers. “Bother. You can create iron hydroxide, can’t you? Make some. I think we have all we need in supplies.”
