Daylighters

NINE

The guard brought along a friend to drive, since his eyes were swelling shut and his face was a gory mess of blood. His nose, Claire thought, looked like something a monster makeup artist might have rejected as “too weird.” It was amazing how much damage she’d done to him, and she felt increasingly guilty about it. That was the difference between her and Shane in the end, she thought; she couldn’t take any pride in her violence. But it was still good to know she could defend herself when it was necessary.

The guards didn’t say anything to her on the way. She thought they were too angry to try to be civil, and truthfully, she didn’t want to talk to them anyway. She was busy searching the dusty crack between the seat and the backrest, trying to see if anyone had dropped something useful. She found a rolled tube that felt like a cigarette but was probably something less legal, and left it there. Just when she was about to give it up as a lost cause, her fingers brushed across something that felt metallic. She grabbed for it, and realized it was a paper clip, one of the larger, sturdier ones. She teased it out slowly from between the fabric, then tried to think how to hide it. She settled for sliding it into a frayed opening in the jeans she was wearing, and clipping it to the thin white strings so that it dangled inside. It might fall off, but it was all she could do in case they searched her.

Not a long ride in the police car—Hannah was evidently allowing use of official equipment for private security guards, which seemed like a bad idea to Claire—before they pulled up at the front of the iron gates of an old, brooding place that looked as if it had been built to be some kind of fortress. Narrow, barred windows, and forbidding Gothic doors. The sign above the door read MORGANVILLE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY. That didn’t seem promising.

The guards turned to look at her as they pulled the car to a halt inside the gates, next to the front door. “Don’t give us any more trouble,” said the one whose nose she hadn’t busted. “I don’t like whaling on skinny little girls, but if you pull a stunt like that again, I promise you, I won’t hesitate to put you on the ground.”

The other one mumbled something that sounded like approval, but between his congested nose and his bad mood, Claire couldn’t be sure of anything. She sat quietly as the uninjured man opened her door and then let him help her out, since having her wrists bound behind her back made everything about ten times harder (which was probably the point). The stony gray mass of the building—the asylum—loomed over her like it was planning to collapse and bury her, and she felt a small tremor of fear, looking at her future. No, we’re getting out of here, she thought. Me and Eve, we’re blowing this place and saving the Glass House and Michael and Oliver and Myrnin and making it all right again.

But Fallon had managed to plant one deep, sprouting seed of doubt. Because what did “all right” really mean, in the end? Status quo? Vampires continuing to oppress and disadvantage humans for their own wealth and benefit? Humans hating vampires and trying to kill them? Constant tension and bloodshed, on both sides? Was she on the right side—or was there a right side at all? There had to be, on balance. You have to be on the side of the ones being hunted and imprisoned, don’t you?

Still. The gnawing sense that in this moral gray area she was walking on the wrong side of the line was really starting to scare her.

Or it did until the old Gothic doors swung open, and Dr. Irene Anderson stepped out to greet them.

She looked much the same as she had back in Cambridge, when Claire had liked her so much as a mentor; she looked calm and competent and quirky, not at all like an agent of evil and chaos. The white coat she was wearing gave her even more of an air of legitimacy. But the look she gave Claire was both pleased and chilling. “So glad to see you again, Claire,” she said. “Please, come in. I’m sure you’ll be just as happy as I am that we get to work together again for the common good.”

“If that means not at all, then yes,” Claire said. She had a real reluctance to take the two steps up to the doorway where Anderson waited, but there didn’t seem to be much choice. The two wannabe cops behind her would push her in if she didn’t go on her own, and Anderson would get a lot of pleasure out of that. Out of her fear.

Claire held eye contact and walked up to join Dr. Anderson, who put a friendly hand on her shoulder. “So nice to see you again,” she said, and it was a lie, and the look in her eyes was unreadable. “Don’t be afraid. We’re going to help you get past these feelings of loyalty you have to the vampires. It’s not your fault. More of a Stockholm syndrome hostage reaction, seeking to please those with power over you so you can survive. Nothing to be ashamed of, just something to be fixed.”

“Thanks. Can you take these off, please?” Claire rattled her handcuffs. Anderson’s smile deepened and turned just a touch mean.

“Maybe later,” she said. “It looks to me like you’ve taken on some very bad habits, Claire. I want to be sure I can trust you first.”

“You can trust me,” Claire said.

“To do what? Act out? Yes, I’m certain I can trust you to be as much of a handful as possible . . . like your friend Eve.”

Claire couldn’t help but ask. “Is she all right?”

“Fine,” Anderson said. “You’ll see her soon.”

The doors boomed shut and locked behind them as they passed into the shadows, and Claire fought back a feeling that she’d just made a really terrible mistake.

The asylum (okay, it wasn’t called that, but Claire couldn’t help but think of it that way) was surprisingly quiet, and once her eyes had adjusted to the lower light levels, it was also surprisingly lush. New, springy carpet cushioned her feet, and she smelled the sharp tang of new paint on the walls. Here, as in the rest of Morganville, there’d been a makeover.

But the doors—heavy metal doors, with sliding windows inset in them—still locked.

“Cheery,” Claire said. “Where’s Eve?”

“Beginning her course of treatment,” Anderson said. “Don’t worry, you’ll see her, but not immediately. This is more of an immersive therapy.”

“I figured you’d need my help making more copies of VLAD.” That was the name she’d given—maybe a little whimsically—to the device she’d created in Myrnin’s lab that worked as a kind of super-Taser on vampires, only it acted by attacking them mentally, not physically. It was effective. Way too effective, in fact.

“You sabotaged the last one I handed you, and are responsible for all the deaths that happened after, because of your actions,” her former mentor said. She couldn’t quite keep the resentment from her voice. “I don’t think I can count on you to see reason anymore, Claire. It’s too bad. You’re a very bright young woman, and you could have done great things.”

“Still can,” Claire said. “But probably not with you, because you’re insane.”

“You should know all about that, given your . . . intimacy with Myrnin.” There was something in Anderson’s voice that made Claire give her a startled, then angry glare. “Does he know, your boyfriend? About your affair with the vampire?”

“I’m not having any kind of affair!”

“What is it people your age call it, then? A hookup?”

“Ugh,” Claire said. “Just shut up. You’re embarrassing yourself. I think it’s you who wanted a hookup with Myrnin back in the day, and you never got it.” She said it, and meant it, and even felt a little flare of pleasure when Dr. Anderson flinched. She’d learned dirty fighting from Shane, but she’d learned how to go for someone’s weak spot from Monica Morrell. Funny, you could learn something from even your worst enemies. “Besides, I thought you were all about slimy Dr. Davis back in Cambridge. Did he tell you he talked my housemate into bed, too? Or maybe you’re just hot for Fallon these days. Doesn’t matter. They’re both loser choices, and they say a whole lot about you as a person.”

Hard to tell from Anderson’s furious blush which guess was on target, but it didn’t really matter; Claire had hit the mark squarely. Anderson opened a creaking metal door, shoved Claire off balance into it, and before Claire could hop enough to get her feet under her again, she heard the hollow boom of her only escape being cut off . . . and then, the key turning.

The room wasn’t much—simple, plain as any cell, with a small twin bed, a pillow, a blanket, and a small wooden chest of drawers that Claire imagined would hold standard-issue pajamas and underwear for the patients. A mirror was bolted to the wall over the sink—not actual glass, of course. Plastic. At least the toilet/shower combination was in a separate little alcove.

It smelled like Lysol and desperation.

The window slid aside, and Anderson stared at her for a long moment. “Don’t get comfortable,” she said. “Your treatments will start soon.”

“How about unlocking these handcuffs?”

“No.” The window slid shut with a final click, and Claire heard that lock in place, too.

There was an odd sound just at the edge of her hearing. At first she thought it might be a siren . . . and then she knew it wasn’t.

It was screaming.

Treatments.

Claire felt her knees go weak. She sank down on the bed, wincing at the shrill squeak of the springs, and took a deep breath. I have to get out of here.

She felt around the back of her pants to where she’d stashed the paper clip.

It was still there, tangled up in thin acid-washed threads. It took time and patience and cramping fingers to work the paper clip free; after she’d finally succeeded, she took a break, working her sore, still-pinned hands and trying to get some feeling back into them. The guards who’d taken her in had, not unexpectedly, put the cuffs on too tightly, and she had throbbing pain around her wrists. Her hands felt bloated and tingly, and for lack of anything better to do at the moment, she stretched out prone on the bed and held her hands up at a painful angle to reduce the blood flow. The tingling faded in a couple of minutes, and the fingers felt better. Still clumsy, but better.

She sat up again, took a deep breath, and started working with the paper clip. It took a long time to pick the lock on the handcuffs. Myrnin had drilled her, at one time, in the finer points of the art; he’d felt it was a necessary skill to have, in Morganville, and it turned out he was almost certainly right. Still, she was rusty, and it took too long to bend the tough, thick clip into the right shapes, and to maneuver it into position. Then she had to fight her own burning, cramping muscles to delicately trip all the little triggers inside the lock, but finally she felt the first of the cuffs slip free. The second took only about a third as much time, now that she had the right angle on the problem.

Freed, she took a few seconds to breathe and silently celebrate. Then she checked the drawers of her little room. As expected, there were ugly cotton undies, in a variety of sizes, and some equally ugly sports bras (though she quickly switched out what she’d been given back at the Vampire Mall, since even this stuff was an upgrade). Then she pulled on the drawer and found it slid smoothly, in and out.

Good news.

Claire padded the area beneath the drawer with the pillow from the bed, emptied out what was inside, and yanked hard on the mechanism. It caught firmly, refusing to slide out. She worked it up and down, side to side, until one of the small wheels inside slipped free of the guides, and then the left side popped free. From there it was simple enough to wrench it loose from the right, but the drawer was heavy and awkward, and she was glad she’d put the pillow in place to catch it as it fell or the noise would have echoed down that hall—quiet, now that the screaming had faded away.

Once the drawer was out, she saw the metal guides screwed into its sides. Perfect.

Claire worked on her paper clip until it was twisted into a makeshift screwdriver that slotted into the heads of the screws. Working with it took muscle power, sweat, patience, and more strained muscles, but she managed to loosen two out of three fasteners on one side, and the third didn’t matter; she torqued the metal until it ripped loose.

She’d started handcuffed, armed with a paper clip. Now she had a ten-inch strip of metal with sharp edges, handcuffs, and a paper clip. Her odds were improving all the time.

There wouldn’t be time to fashion the metal properly, but she found that using the heavy edges of the wooden drawer, she could press on the metal and fold it into a sharp point. An extra pair of undies wrapped nicely around the other end, to provide a decent grip.

Instant knife.

She worked on the other guide and got it free, and bent it into a springy U-shape. With the carefully wrapped addition of a sports bra, she had a passable slingshot. The screws she’d loosened provided ammunition. So did pieces she managed to tease out of the bed’s frame.

The drawer went back in, filled with the clothing, and the pillow back on the bed. At first glance, everything looked perfectly normal.

Claire made a sheath for her knife out of cardboard (they’d left some with crayons, for drawing, in a drawer) and fastened it with a loop of torn elastic to the belt loop of her jeans. Then she put the sheath down the side of her leg, inside the jeans, and slid the knife in. It did show, but not as much as it would have if the jeans had been tighter. Good enough.

The ammunition for the makeshift slingshot went into her pockets. On impulse, she broke up the crayons and added those, too. And the button off her blue jeans.

She was contemplating what to do with the handcuffs when the door rattled, and after a second’s thought, she jammed the slingshot down the small of her back, and put the cuffs back around her wrists, but just barely clicked on . . . loose enough that she could get her hands free with a brisk shake.

She was standing in the middle of the room looking crestfallen when Dr. Anderson swung the door open again. “Can you please take these off now?” she asked, and tried to sound chastened. “They hurt.”

“In a while,” Anderson said, which was exactly what Claire had expected her to say. She gestured for Claire to come out, and she did. The metal slingshot jammed against her back felt raw and awkward, and she knew it would be visible from behind, poking out against her thin shirt, but Anderson didn’t go behind her; she took her elbow and walked next to her quickly down the hallway toward the end. No one passed them, and when Claire risked a look behind, she didn’t see anyone following, either.

“Not much of a staff,” she said.

“We’re just hiring,” Anderson said. “You and your friend are our very first patients. I’m sure you’re honored.”

That wasn’t how Claire would have put it, but she didn’t have a chance to fire off a sarcastic rejoinder, either, because they turned the corner to the left and arrived at another metal door. This one had a sign that read: TREATMENT ROOM. NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT PRIOR AUTHORIZATION. Anderson pulled a thick set of keys from her belt to open it up.

The screaming had started again—muffled, but clearly coming from the other side of this door.

It swung open, and Claire saw Eve. Her friend was strapped into a chair, completely locked down, and she was being bitten by a vampire. It wasn’t Michael. It was some filthy, wild-eyed hobo with fangs, with his mouth on her throat. A tiny thread of blood dripped down her pale skin showed that he’d hit the vein.

“No!” Claire screamed, and lunged forward—into a plate-glass window that stood between them. “Stop it! Leave her alone!”

“She’s the one who chose this,” Anderson said. “She chose to degrade herself like this, offering herself to the vampires.”

“No, she didn’t! She and Michael—”

“Michael’s a vampire.”

“Stop this!”

“I want you both to see just what they are, these vampires. They’re predators. Parasites. They don’t care about you, except as food, and they never will. Look at him, Claire. Look.”

Anderson forced her to stay still for a torturously long few seconds, and then reached past her to press a button set into the wall next to her. “That’s enough,” she said to someone at the other end of the speaker. “It’s time for the next phase.”

Eve was barely conscious now; she’d stopped screaming, and her skin had an awful bluish cast to it. Two white-coated staffers came into the room through another door behind Eve; one had a Taser, and the other had a silver-coated collar on the end of a long pole. The Taser shocked the feeding vampire away from Eve, and as he snarled and showed bloodied fangs, the second attendant slipped the metal collar over his head and pulled it tight with a trigger mechanism on the side. The vampire choked and tried to pull free, but the attendant pushed it out the door and into a cage beyond.

Claire didn’t pay any attention to the vampire after that; she was too concerned about Eve, who was breathing too fast, too shallowly, and stirring weakly in her chair. Her throat was still bleeding.

Another white-coated staffer came into the room and quickly, efficiently, bandaged up the bite. Then she brought out a syringe and shot it into Eve’s arm.

Eve’s eyes opened very, very wide, and she suddenly looked horribly alert, even though she still seemed weak. The attendant rolled a portable IV rack into the room and hung some bags on it—dark red ones. The woman must have had a lot of experience, because she hit Eve’s vein in the bend of her arm expertly on the first try, and hooked up the IVs to drain.

“What are you giving her?” Claire asked. Her voice felt raw in her throat. She wanted to act, but she knew this wasn’t the moment; there was no way to get to Eve from where she was, and she needed to help her friend, not just escape. “What is that stuff?”

“Blood, obviously,” Dr. Anderson said. “Your friend has lost at least two pints, and she’s dangerously low. Any more, and she might have suffered cardiac distress.”

“So that’s your aversion therapy? You let a vamp bite her, then you save her?”

“No,” Anderson said. “That’s part of it, of course, the loss of control and fear. But the most important part is what is in the blood she’s receiving. It contains a compound I’ve developed that reacts intensely to the presence of a vampire. She’ll feel terrible pain when she’s around one, and after we repeat this process a few more times, she won’t even need the transfusion to feel it. The human brain is funny that way; it will anticipate pain, and save itself from it. It will take a few weeks of this, but in the end, she’ll be unable to tolerate the very sight of vampires—any vampires. Even Michael Glass. She’ll be overcome by the conditioned fear and the revulsion.”

“Can she see me?” Claire asked. She was trying not to let her anger get the better of her before she was sure it would be useful, but it was so hard, watching Eve shiver and twitch like that.

“No. It’s one-way glass so we can observe the patient,” Anderson said with a smile. “Don’t worry. Her treatment will be over in another half hour, and then it’ll be your turn. I thought it might be helpful for you to know what was coming.”

It was absolutely all Claire could do not to shake off the cuffs right then and punch Anderson in the face, but she clung to one thing: I’m going to punch you in the face. Just not now. When the time is right. Because Anderson so utterly deserved it.

“You know that you’re evil, right?” Claire asked. “I mean, genuinely, deep-down evil. You understand that what you’re doing is wrong.”

“Evil is being a Renfield, like you,” Anderson said. “As in Dracula’s minion in Stoker’s novel. An apologist for the vampires. A collaborator. A traitor to humanity. And I think that before long, we’re going to show you the error of your ways, Claire, and then you can help us find better, faster ways to get rid of the monsters. Finally, you’ll be useful.”

Claire bit the inside of her lip until it bled, and watched in silence as the blood bags emptied into her friend’s arm. Eve seemed steadier, and her color was better, by the time the second bag had drained in, and that, at least, was a good thing.

As the attendant in the room took the empty bags from the stand, Anderson steered Claire back out the door they’d entered and to another one on the right-hand side. It was locked, but Anderson had a thick ring of keys on her belt, and she opened it and pulled Claire through it with her, then firmly shut the door behind them.

And they were in the room where Eve was being unstrapped from the “treatment chair.”

“Claire?” Eve’s voice sounded weak, and it trembled with tears, and Claire couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t stand to wait even one more second.

She gave her hands a sharp shake, and the cuffs slid off. She caught them in her right hand, slipped them over the back of her hand, and punched Dr. Anderson in the face. Shane had taught her how to do that, too, all the power coming straight from her shoulder, her body weight leaning into it, and the move caught Anderson completely by surprise. She stumbled, hit the wall behind her, and went down. Claire bent and ripped the keys from her belt, then realized that there were two attendants in the room, not just the one she’d expected.

No time to worry about it.

As the attendants were just starting to be aware of the violence, she dropped the handcuffs and took out her slingshot. She loaded it with a handful of screws and pieces of crayon and let fly as the two started toward her.

She hit them both in the face. They stumbled back, startled, and she reloaded and hit them again, moving the whole time. The male attendant had a Taser club in his belt loop, and she grabbed it, thumbed it on, and slammed it into his chest to trigger the charge. He went down. Seconds later, so did his colleague.

Eve shook her head, as if she was still woozy. “Claire? What the hell are you doing here?”

Claire was already unbuckling the rest of the straps that held her friend down. “Being a menace to society, I guess.”

“Thank God!” Eve came up off the table and enveloped Claire in a hug that left her breathless and actually picked her up off the floor. “Sorry you had to rescue me, but thank you. They—they were—”

“I know,” Claire said, and hugged her back, hard. “I saw.” She wanted to cry, but this wasn’t the time, and it certainly wasn’t the place. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here, right now.”

Dr. Anderson was down, but she wasn’t out—not yet; she was trying to get up, in fact. Claire let go of Eve, grabbed the Taser from where she’d put it on the bed, and held it out, crackling, in front of the doctor’s widened eyes. “Don’t,” she warned her. “I don’t want to hurt you more than I already have.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Anderson said. It sounded ragged and pained, and she spat out some blood. That, Claire thought with some surprise, had been one hell of a punch. Shane would have been so proud. “Because after this, there won’t be any delicate little adjustments to your psyche. You’re not going to be fixed—you’re just going to be put down. I’ve said that would be necessary ever since I got here, but Fallon wasn’t listening. Now he will know I was right.”

Claire bent, picked up the handcuffs from the floor, and quickly clicked them over Anderson’s wrists to pin them behind her. “Stay down,” she said. “Eve?”

“We are so leaving,” Eve said. She looked down at herself and shuddered, and Claire realized for the first time that she was wearing shapeless hospital pajamas—pale pink. “Okay, we are so leaving as soon as I find out what these fashion murderers did with my clothes, because, seriously, I would not be caught dead in this.” She was trying to be her old self, but Claire could see the fragility in her, the fear, the horror.

“I don’t think we have time to shop,” Claire said, because the big orderly in the white coat was slowly getting his muscle control back and looking at them with murder in his bloodshot eyes. She darted over and collected his keys, and then the other woman’s. “Flee now. Fashion later.”

“There’s always time for fashion!” Eve protested, but when Claire grabbed her hand and towed her toward the door, she followed. Claire slammed the door as they left, and locked it with Dr. Anderson’s keys. No point in leaving her enemies behind her without at least trying to slow them down, she thought.

They ran down the hall toward the front, but Claire caught sight of figures heading toward them—three at least, all wearing white coats. “Not that way,” she said, and they backpedaled and turned the other way. That hall ended in another locked door, but Claire had the keys from Dr. Anderson, and she rifled through the choices until she found one that fit. One quick twist and they were inside. The key lock was in place on this side, too, so Claire turned the key and heard the bolts slam home. “Done,” she said to Eve, but Eve wasn’t listening.

Eve was staring at the room they were in, and after the first blink, Claire was, too.

Because it was a room full of corpses.

Vampire corpses.

“Mr. Ransom,” Claire said. She walked to the table that held his partially covered body. It looked exactly the same now as it had in the photo she’d seen in Fallon’s office, and it also looked . . . sad. Alone and lost. She tugged the sheet up over his still face. “That one, that’s Amelie’s assistant. And that one used to be one of her guards.” She covered each of them as she passed. She didn’t know some of them, and some she didn’t like, but that didn’t matter now. They were victims now. There was no mistaking that they were dead—she couldn’t explain how she knew, but it was the color of them, the fallen-in emptiness.

“What the hell happened to them?” Eve asked. She already knew the answer, Claire thought. There was dread in her voice, real dread.

“Fallon gave them his so-called cure,” she said. “These are the ones who didn’t make it.”

“But—but he’s giving it to Michael!”

“I know,” Claire said. She took a deep breath and turned away from the dead. “And Oliver, and a bunch more of them. I heard Fallon; he was putting Anderson in charge of the cure, and if she’s here that has to mean that Michael and the others are here, too. Maybe behind those locked doors in the hallway. We’ll find them, Eve.”

“You’ve got a Taser,” Eve said. “I feel militantly underdressed.” She looked around the room, then pulled out the drawers. There were knives in them. Saws. All kinds of things that made Claire feel a little bit faint, seeing them.

Eve hesitated, then reached in and took out a thick, wicked-looking knife. Claire snapped the elastic holding her makeshift homemade weapons and traded out for a scalpel that fit inside the cardboard sheath. Then she looked at the shelves, and the ranks of bottles.

“Wait,” she said, and began pulling things down.

“We can’t wait. They’re going to give that poison to Michael!”

“I know. Just wait.”

Eve didn’t want to, but Claire had all the keys. “What the hell are you looking for?”

“Trichloroethylene,” she said. “Hydrogen fluoride and bromine. I’m making anesthetic gas. Halothane.”

“Is that safe?”

“No,” Claire said. “But it’s safer than using knives on people, and we might need to knock out a bunch of people all at once.”

Eve kept her objections silent, at least, though Claire was pretty sure she was screaming them inside. Claire didn’t let it affect her concentration, because doing this wrong would be a very bad idea. Halothane was volatile, and this wasn’t the best-equipped setting in which to be making a gas. She found some breathing masks and put one on, then handed one to Eve, who only complained a little. “They’ll be getting here soon,” Eve reminded her. “One of them is bound to have keys.”

“I know,” Claire said. “Here. Go jam this in the lock.” She handed her the paper clip, bent into an almost unrecognizable shape now from all the uses she’d already put it to. Eve raced off to do it, and Claire began carefully measuring out beakers of fluids. She had the bare minimum equipment necessary to capture the gas once it started to react: tubing and a container. She worked fast, with all her attention on the problem at hand. Her mind was clear, at least, and the picture of the chemical compound seemed so real she could have reached out to touch it. She prepped the burners. The last part would be the problem, because the bromine reaction needed a very high temperature, but she’d just have to do the best she could.

The synthesis of the trichloroethylene and hydrogen fluoride went easily enough; once the temperature reached 130 degrees, the gas progressed to the second stage. She added the bromide and cranked the heat as high as she could. The mixture boiled off into gas, precipitated into the tubing and the container, and Claire quickly stuck a cork in the tube and left it attached to the bottle.

“Are they outside?” she asked Eve, who turned toward her. Eve didn’t need to answer, because Claire could hear the metallic clicking in the lock, followed by a loud bang on the metal door.

“Open up!” someone called. He sounded angry. “Open up now!”

Claire hurried forward and crouched down to uncork the tube. She crimped it in the middle, and then slid the flexible rubber under the door’s bottom edge. “Talk to them!” she said to Eve. “Get them close!”

Eve began spouting something that sounded half crazy about the dead coming back to life and zombies lurching up off the tables, and if Claire hadn’t known it was a lie she might have bought it, too, especially when Eve ended it with “Oh, God, help us, help . . .” and trailed off into a gurgle that sounded especially gruesome.

There was silence on the other side of the door.

“Do you think—,” Eve whispered, but she didn’t need to finish the sentence, because Claire heard a falling body hit the door and slide down. Then another, and another, farther away.

Claire yanked the tube away and rolled the bottle across the room, then pulled off her mask. Eve took hers off as well. “Hold your breath,” Claire warned. She yanked the bent paper clip from the lock and used her key. As she pulled the door open, a man fell in with it—a heavyset older man, mouth loose and open and eyes rolled back in his head. She checked for a pulse and found one, slow but steady. The other two who’d been with him were also down, though one was mumbling sleepily.

Claire grabbed Eve’s hand and pulled her over the bodies at a run, heading down the hall.

“They’ll be okay,” Claire assured her. “The fresh air will wake them up soon.”

“Like I care,” Eve said. “We need to find Michael!”

“Take that side of the hall. Slide the windows open and see if you spot anybody.”

Eve wasted no time, but it didn’t yield any victories. They opened every window on the hall, on both sides, but there were no vampires in the cells. Nobody at all, in fact. Eve sent Claire a despairing, panicked look that didn’t need words to be understood, and they raced through the open reception area to the other side of the building.

There were no cells on this hall, only a single locked door. Claire fumbled with the keys. Her hands were shaking from the adrenaline, and a clock was running in her head. The three they’d left sleeping were going to wake up soon; they’d be groggy and unsteady, and probably have killer hangover headaches, but time was definitely running out on their window to find Michael and the others.

It was, of course, the second to last key Claire tried that turned the lock. She pushed the door open, stepped through, and had to grab the heavy metal slab on the backswing, because it was on some automatic pneumatic pressure to seal shut. Eve was only halfway through. Thick as it was, the steel could have broken her bones if it had hit her squarely.

Eve squeezed through, and Claire let go; the door hissed shut and locks automatically engaged. They were in a small antechamber, and there was another door. Another lock. “Hurry,” Eve said. She looked around at the blank walls, and then up at the small glass semicircle set above them. Her face set hard. “They could be watching us.”

“Shit,” Claire whispered. She sorted keys again, nearly frantic now, and found one that slotted neatly in. It turned.

The door opened in front of her, on a room that was the mirror opposite of the one where they’d found the dead, discarded vampires—the ones who’d failed their conversion back to human. That had been a hastily assembled morgue.

This was a bright, clean, well-equipped lab, complete with glass-fronted cabinets and counters, stations for preparation of compounds, refrigerators . . . and it held about the same number of tables, and on them lay vampires.

The difference was that these vampires still survived, at least for now.

Claire’s gaze swept down the line and fixed on tousled blond hair. “There!” she yelled to Eve, and they both raced forward . . . and then had to stop, because two guards stepped out into their path. These were police officers, wearing Morganville blues, with the Daylighter pins gleaming on their collars. Claire recognized one of them—Officer Halling, the woman who’d found the dead body at the Glass House.

Officer Halling unsnapped her holster and put her hand on the butt of her gun.

Eve didn’t hesitate; she lunged forward with the Taser, but unfortunately for her, Halling’s partner was fast, and he grabbed Eve by the arm and wrenched it hard, forcing the Taser out of her hand to drop and roll on the floor. Halling dismissed Eve, and focused her cold gaze on Claire.

Claire pulled the scalpel from the cardboard sheath, but she didn’t attack. Instead, she ran in the opposite direction, to the last bed on the end. She’d seen a familiar face there, too.

Oliver.

He was strapped down with some kind of silver-coated webbing on his arms and legs, and there was an IV needle in his arm, buried in a thick, ropy, blue vein. His skin looked chalky, but beneath that his arms looked wiry and strong, and his chest thick with muscle.

His eyes were open. He lifted his head to stare at her, and his eyes were a ferocious, unnerving shade of red. He didn’t speak.

Claire ripped the IV out of his arm, and took a scalpel to the webbing that held him down. It was tough and dulled the edge pretty quickly, but she managed to get one hand free.

Oliver did the rest. He rolled onto his side and ripped at the silver web until it was shredded, even though it burned and cut his fingers, and then sat up to tear at the stuff holding his ankles.

A shot shattered glass on a counter past Claire, and she looked up to see Halling taking aim again. This time she wouldn’t be firing a warning shot.

“Stop!” Halling yelled. “Drop the knife!”

Claire did, and it hit the tile floor with a musical clang, but Halling was pointing at the wrong target. Maybe she’d thought it would take Oliver longer to get free, or to recover, but she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

Oliver came off the table in a blur and stopped with her gun arm in one hand and her throat in the other. Claire shut her eyes, because she didn’t want to see, but she heard the snap of bones breaking . . . and when she was able to look again, Halling was down on the floor. Not dead, surprisingly, but her arm was at an entirely wrong angle, held close to her chest. She looked disoriented with shock.

Without much of a pause, Oliver turned toward the other policeman, who was holding Eve down. He turned sideways, an elegant and weirdly old-fashioned motion, held Halling’s confiscated pistol at his side, and said, “I don’t offer second chances. This is your first and only warning. Drop your weapon now and let the girl go.” It was almost as if he was . . . dueling. He even put his left arm behind his back, crooked at the elbow.

And then he was dueling, because the cop dropped Eve, stood straight, and pulled his own sidearm. It was a fast draw, as fast as anything Claire had ever seen outside of an old Western movie . . . but it was miles too slow, even then.

Oliver didn’t try hard, but before the man’s gun was halfway up, Oliver brought his own weapon up, leveled, aimed, and fired.

The other man went down.

Oliver held the pose for a long second, watching the man to be sure he wouldn’t get up, and then the tension released and he stumbled sideways. He crashed into another vampire’s bed and grabbed for support, but couldn’t hold himself upright. He slipped to his knees, tangled in sheets, and as Claire watched in horror, he began to convulse.

“Oliver!” She dropped down next to him in a crouch, not sure what to do, whether she could do anything. “Oliver, can you hear me? Oliver!”

It went on a long time, but he finally went limp. “I hear you,” he said. His voice sounded raw and strange, and it sounded . . . afraid. He opened his eyes then, and they weren’t vampire-red anymore. They were a plain, unremarkable brown. His skin had taken on an odd shimmer, as if it was shifting colors. “You must stop them, Claire. Don’t let them destroy everything we—” He stopped and let out a cry of pain, real pain, and flung out his hand. She didn’t think twice, even given what she’d just seen him do. She grabbed his fingers and held them, felt him shaking as if he were flying apart. His hand closed over hers with crushing strength, but it was only human strength now, not vampire strength.

His skin was glowing underneath, as if something was burning inside him. Or, as if something was being burned out of him. Whatever was happening to him, it was painful. The breaths he was pulling in sounded tortured and strangled, and his pulse . . .

His pulse? Breaths?

Claire’s eyes widened.

Oliver was, before her eyes, turning human. And she knew, somehow, that this was the very last thing he would want.

“No,” he said, and it burst up out of him like a growl, a primal and furious snarl. His convulsions jerked his back into a tight bow, and Claire gasped and had to pull her hand free as his grip grew tighter and tighter around hers. “No! I will not!”

It was almost a chant, or a prayer, but she couldn’t imagine God listening to anything that savage, that angry. The rage that fueled it seemed totally beyond the capacity of any human body to create, much less contain.

And suddenly, the glow inside him died, leaving his skin that chalky, translucent white again, as if he was made of milky, empty glass.

He let out a sigh, and his muscles went limp. The brown, suffering eyes drifted shut.

She was terrified to touch him, but she put her fingers on his wrist.

Silent. No pulse. No rise and fall of his chest.

But he didn’t look quite as dead as the corpses in the morgue on the other side of the building. Not yet, anyway. He looked—comatose. Suspended between life and death, vampire and human.

She supposed he would have to fall in one direction or the other.

Claire dragged him to a more comfortable position—more for herself than him, really—and raced to the other side of the lab. There were manuals there, chemicals, ranks of IV bags, checklists and protocols.

She grabbed the protocol manual and feverishly slid her finger down the table of contents. Outcomes.

The section was a dry, clinical table of results. Seventy-three percent average deaths, which Claire already knew. But, strangely, only a flat twenty percent human conversion score.

Which left seven percent . . . REV? The code didn’t mean anything to her, and she scanned the rows of legends until she found it. REV meant reverted.

Seven percent of those treated with the cure reverted to vampire. The line was marked with a footnote symbol, and she scanned down to read it.

Immediate resolution of all REV subjects using Protocol D.

Protocol D, Claire discovered, had an illustration of one of the Daylighters’ special liquid-silver-filled stakes being plunged into a vampire’s chest, then removed to release the liquid.

In other words, they euthanized any vampires who survived their cure and stayed vampire.

Claire let out a slow, shaking breath. She felt numbed, reading it; if she’d wondered before whether she was on the right side, she didn’t now. If Amelie was the devil she knew, Fallon was far, far worse.

As she was closing the book, a word caught her eye, and she flipped back to it.

The last section was labeled Counteragent.

There was a whole chapter, and she skimmed it as fast as possible, raking her gaze down the thick columns of dryly written explanations.

The counteragent was designed to halt the process of the cure. They’d originally developed it so that they could study the effects while in process—part of their live experiments, and Claire really didn’t want to think too hard about that. She found a handwritten notation to the side.

COMB 733118.

It was a combination, so there had to be a safe. Somewhere, there had to be a safe . . .

She spotted it, finally, half hidden beneath the counter—a small gray thing, digital keypad. She crashed to her knees in front of it and jammed in the numbers. 733118.

The pad beeped, and the door clicked open.

But there was nothing inside it. Nothing at all.

“No!” She screamed it out loud and smashed her palm into it with all the anguish inside her. She could hear the cries coming from the vampires on the other beds now, and she could hear Eve calling her name with frantic desperation.

If the counteragent still existed, they’d moved it. There was nothing here. Nothing to reverse the effects of Fallon’s cure. He’d taken it somewhere she couldn’t find it.

Not in time.

For a moment, Claire thought she just couldn’t do it . . . just couldn’t get up. Couldn’t rise to meet another challenge, face more pain. She just wanted to lie down, curl up, put her hands over her ears, and hide, just this once. She’d faced it all, as directly as she could. She’d fought and planned and tried.

But that open safe, that was the end of all her plans. All her hopes.

And now there was nothing left but to hold on to Eve, and Michael, while everything fell apart.

I need you, she thought. Shane, please, I need you, please be here, please . . .

But she knew in her heart that he couldn’t be here. Not this time.

When she turned to focus on Eve and Michael, she realized that Eve hadn’t gone to Michael’s side. She was standing with her back pressed against the far wall . . . watching the vampires with frantic, horrified eyes. Gagging. Doubling over.

She tried to get closer, but she faltered, and backed up again, covering her face.

“Take it out!” Eve yelled to Claire. “Help him!” She pointed to the IV needle, and Claire yanked it free—but she knew, from the chalky glow of his skin, that it was already too late. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t responding.

Eve was weeping now, and she slammed her palm into the wall hard, over and over. She tried again to come toward him, but whatever they’d loaded into her blood made her sick, physically sick, the closer she got. “Come on, you’re the brain, you’re the smart one, you can fix everything, do something!” The horror and anguish in her friend threatened to knock down Claire’s shocked numbness, and she squeezed her eyes shut to block it out. “Do something, Claire!”

And then Michael screamed. It was a sound that sliced through Claire’s blanket of shock and stabbed her right in the heart, and her eyes flew open of their own accord to fix on his tense, suffering face, his glowing face, on the shimmering, flickering light gliding beneath his skin, tracing veins and arteries, centering in his heart . . .

And regardless of her pain, of the drug, of all that they’d done to make her loathe and fear the sight of a vampire, Eve shoved herself bodily off the wall and lunged forward to grab his hand in hers. She was gagging and shaking, but she grimly held on, even though every fiber of her body was trying to make her run away.

Michael was breathing in deep, agonizing gulps, and Claire could see his pulse pounding hard in the vein at his throat. His eyes were wide open, so blue, blue as the Texas sky, and he was staring mutely at Eve, shaking and trembling and staring . . .

“Live,” Claire said. She whispered it under her breath, a chant, a prayer, a desperate plea. “Live, live, live!”

And then the light in him went out, and Michael went completely, utterly still.