Daylighters

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.

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.”

“Never thought I’d say that, but, yeah, she’s our friend, too,” Shane agreed. He dumped the armload of blood bags on the floor next to the fountain, and Claire added her own to the pile.

“Then the faster we get the blood in, the faster you can go find her,” Hannah said. “Help move it.”

Myrnin, despite the shock collar still crackling around his neck, despite the intense sunlight outside, helped them carry the rest of the blood into the atrium, running back and forth, until the pile of bags was waist-high, and the trunk and backseat of the cruiser were empty.

Claire remembered, despite the frantic pace, that they still had a problem—a big one. “The hellhounds,” she said. “Fallon could activate them at any time. If Hannah turns against us—”

“I’ve been working on adapting Fallon’s filthy cure to the purpose,” Myrnin said. “During my time outside this prison. I have a small supply made up in my lab. It’s hidden in the back by my armchair, behind a pile of books. Enough for three more doses, if you’re careful. Oh, and while you’re there, do feed Bob. He’s been hunting on his own lately, but he does enjoy being shown a little kindness.”

And that, Claire thought, was Myrnin in a nutshell. He was capable of wild mood swings that went from murder to concern for a spider in under five minutes. In the end, loving Myrnin, really loving him, would be like living with an unexploded bomb—sooner or later it was bound to go off, and for someone fragile and human, it would be fatal.

It didn’t make her love him any less, but she knew better than to think that she could fix him . . . or survive him, if she let him get too close.

“Mrs. Grant,” Hannah said, “get your folks out of here. Take the prisoners with you. I’m going to release them.”

Mrs. Grant nodded and gave quick instructions. Each team of four took one of the guards and escorted them out. Most looked relieved to be going, honestly.

“We’re going to wait the rest of this out in Blacke,” Mrs. Grant said. “Morganville’s your town, not ours. We said we’d help free the vampires, and we have. Now it’s up to you.” She looked at Claire and Shane, and for a moment she looked as if she was going to reverse that, or at least regret it. She came to Shane and gave him a hug, then embraced Claire. “You two, you take care. I’ve gotten fond of you.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Grant,” Shane said. “You’ve done enough. You’re right. This is Morganville business now.”

Then they were headed out, back to their bus. Knowing Mrs. Grant and Morley, Claire was pretty sure that Blacke would already be prepared for an all-out war with the Daylighters, just in case. Armed to the teeth.

She and Shane looked at Hannah, who nodded and backed up toward the doorway. “You two, get in the car,” she said. “Once I hit the releases for their collars, they’ll be shaking it off and getting up fast.”

Myrnin didn’t follow them. He stood where he was, staring blindly at the pile of blood bags. Claire didn’t think he was really seeing them, though. “Find her,” he said. “Find Jesse. I’ll lead the rest of them once they’re fed. Leave Fallon to me.”

“Myrnin—Fallon’s a zealot. He played on people’s fears. He made them believe that killing all of you was the only way to stay safe. Don’t prove him right,” Claire said. “Please. Don’t prove him right.”

She didn’t know if he heard her, or understood; he didn’t give even the slightest indication. But there wasn’t time. Hannah was hustling them out the door, and Claire saw her thumb come off the button. “In the car,” she ordered, and practically shoved them inside.

They were already driving away when the first vampires, collars off their necks and drained blood bags in their hands, appeared in the doorway of the Bitter Creek Mall.

Myrnin’s lab was located in a cul-de-sac at the end of a small, run-down neighborhood. It was next door to a Founder House—the Day House, built along the same plan as the Glass House.

Only the Day House wasn’t there anymore. There was a pile of old timbers, and some construction equipment.

Fallon was making good on his threat to destroy the Founder Houses.

Claire swallowed hard. “What happened to them? Gramma Day?”

“Moved,” Hannah said. “She was grateful to be going, in the end. The Day family never were too comfortable with that house, though they stayed in it for the better part of a hundred years. But she’s fine. Got a brand-new place over on the other side of town, where the new development is going in.”

“And Lisa—did she join the Daylighters?” Claire wouldn’t have been at all surprised by that from the Day granddaughter, who’d been totally anti-vamp for as long as she’d known her . . . but Gramma Day, ancient as she was, had a broader view of things.

“Lisa did. Gramma declined,” Hannah said. “Gramma said it reminded her of all those speeches out of Germany in the war. I don’t think she was so far off.”

Claire didn’t, either. The image of those banners around Founder’s Square still gave her a chill.

She led the way to the entrance to Myrnin’s lab. It was locked up by an iron grate and a shiny new padlock, but Hannah had the keys. “Fallon had it secured,” she explained. “I have no idea how Myrnin would have gotten into it.”

Myrnin always had his ways, but Claire didn’t explain that; she didn’t think Hannah needed any more nightmares. As they descended the steps, the lights came up, responding to motion, revealing . . . a wreck. Well, even more of a wreck than it normally was. The equipment was mostly shattered, the books ripped apart, the furniture broken. Either Myrnin had thrown an epic tantrum—which frankly wasn’t all that unlikely—or Fallon’s goons had been in here making damn sure nothing useful would be coming out of the lab again.

Claire climbed over the piles of rubble, careful of the broken glass, and made her way to the back of the lab. Myrnin’s armchair had been broken, but the remains of it were more or less where they’d originally been. Bob the Spider’s tank had been turned on its side, but not broken. There was no sign of him in the webs, but he certainly wasn’t starving; plenty of unfortunate insects had been cocooned into his pantry.

Claire combed through the wreckage, and under a pile of books that included a battered first edition of Alice in Wonderland and two sketchy-looking volumes written longhand in a language she didn’t even recognize, she found a box. It didn’t look like much—old, battered, not very clean. She flipped the lid off, and inside, packed carefully in old newspapers, was an old-style syringe full of brownish liquid.

“Got it!” she called back to Hannah and Shane, and scrambled over the piles to them. Hannah was already unbuttoning her uniform shirt.

“Hurry,” she said. “Something’s happening.” Something was. Hannah’s eyes looked different, lighter, and between blinks Claire saw them quickly shifting to yellow.

“Crap,” Shane said. He took hold of Hannah’s arm and held it steady. “He’s activated her. Do it fast.”

“In the bite?” Because Hannah’s bite was raised and inflamed and prominent, just as Shane’s had been.

“Yes! Go!” Shane yelled, just as Hannah let out a vicious snarl.

Claire jammed the needle home, and depressed the plunger—but only about a third of the way. She hoped Myrnin was right about the dosage; if she undermedicated Hannah, that might be worse than not doing it at all.

Hannah’s snarl turned to a startled yip, and then she was collapsing to her knees, trembling, mouth open in a silent scream. Her eyes were wild and yellow, but only for a moment. Then her skin took on a muted silvery glow as the cure took hold.

Claire held her breath. Myrnin had adapted this from Fallon’s cure, but what if it had the same shortcomings? What if it only worked part of the time?

It seemed to take forever. Hannah never quite collapsed completely, but she trembled, clearly very ill, and as the silvery glow finally faded under her skin, she looked up at Claire. Her eyes, after one last acidic pulse of yellow, settled back to their normal human brown color.

Hannah pulled in a few hard, quick breaths, and nodded. Shane let go of her. She made a face. “Tastes funny,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse. “Aches, too.”

“It’ll pass,” he said, and helped her up. “You took it a lot better than I did.” He wasn’t looking at her face, though, he was examining her arm. The bite was looking a little better. “I think I screamed like a baby.”

“Give me a minute and I might just get there,” Hannah said, and attempted a smile. It wasn’t quite right, but it was brave. “Let’s get out of here.”

Claire would have, but as they turned for the stairs, she caught sight of a fuzzy black spider about the size of her palm sitting on top of a book, watching her with eight bright, beady eyes. He looked almost cute.

“Hey, Bob,” she said. She reached down, and he climbed up on her hand. “Let’s get you back in your tank, okay?”

He didn’t seem unhappy with that. She carried him back over the rubble, and he clung to her hand easily, riding all the uneven progress without much concern. She righted his tank and held out her hand, and he scuttled off and settled into the gauzy webs, looking perfectly comfortable.

She resisted the urge to pat him on the head. Thorax. Whatever. “Good boy, Bob. I’ll be back soon.”

He hopped up and down a little in the webs, then turned his attention to one of his stored insects.

She was happy to skip that part, actually.

As she came back to them, Hannah already seemed much better, and Shane looked relieved. “Swear to God, I don’t get you and that spider,” he said. “But if you’re done playing Dr. Dolittle . . .”

“I know where they’ll have Jesse,” Claire said. “Let’s go.”

But she was wrong.

The asylum—mental hospital—whatever the current politically correct term might be—was closed and locked. Nobody there. Claire went around back to check windows, but she didn’t find anything. Just to be thorough, Hannah broke in (though according to her it was an emergency entry), but she came back shaking her head. She looked disturbed, though. “Bodies,” she said. “Quite a few. He’s been processing vampires through his conversion faster than I thought. But Jesse’s not in there.”

“Then where?” Shane asked.

Claire thought frantically. It could be anywhere, absolutely anywhere in Morganville, but Fallon seemed to be a man who enjoyed sticking the knife in and twisting it just a little bit more. That meant if he’d moved Jesse, he’d moved her for a reason.

“I think he’s got her with him,” Claire said. “At Founder’s Square. Don’t you?”

“Well,” Hannah said, “we have to go there anyway. Hop in.”

The ride back to Founder’s Square wasn’t as easy as leaving, mainly because the alerts about Hannah had gone out; they heard it on the police radio in the car when the news dropped. Chief Hannah Moses to be arrested on sight. Armed and dangerous.

“That,” Hannah said, “is code for Killing her would be just fine. Most of my folks won’t feel that way. I hire good people, mostly, though some of them got forced on me, like Sullivan. But Fallon’s Daylighters will be out for blood, and they won’t hesitate.”

Not good news, Claire thought. They needed Hannah by their side. “So how are we going to get there?”

“On foot,” Hannah said. She stopped the car and parked it in front of the City Lights Washateria, where only a couple of people sat inside, looking depressed and watching the dryers spin. “Give me two minutes.”

She went in, had a short exchange with the woman sitting there, opened the dryer, and pulled out some clothes.

“Um . . . ,” Claire said, and poked Shane in the ribs. “Is she changing clothes?”

“Yep,” he said. “Normally, if we weren’t in mortal danger, I would really find this fascinating.”

It was actually less than two minutes before Hannah was back, carrying a bundle with her uniform and gun belt. She’d found a slightly large pair of dress pants that weren’t really long enough (but flood pants were in, Claire remembered) and a too-frilly pink shirt that was also a little big, but surprisingly cute. The only things that seemed far out of place were her shoes, which were typical police issue, but at a glance she could pass easily as a civilian.

She’d also taken the Daylighters pin from her uniform collar and was wearing it on the shirt.

“Camouflage,” she said, when Claire pointed at it. She opened the doors. “We’ll be walking from here on in. Shane, you’re familiar with this.” She tossed him the shotgun from the rack in front. “Claire—take the Taser.”

“What about you?”

Hannah slipped her sidearm into a pancake holster at the small of her back, and flipped the shirt down over it.

“Unless it’s take-your-shotgun-to-work day, I’m going to get noticed,” Shane said. “Not that it isn’t a great late birthday present, though.”

Hannah looked around the other stores on the block, and grinned. “I can fix that.”

And she did.

“I hate this,” Shane complained, and sneezed. Turned out he was allergic to roses. And he was carrying a thick bundle of them to conceal the shotgun. It was kind of bizarrely clever, because nobody thought a guy carrying roses was dangerous in the least, did they? Especially one who was sneezing.

Claire could tell from how hard he was gritting his teeth that he really did hate it. A lot.

They walked quickly but calmly the short distance to Founder’s Square. Hannah must have thought ahead, because they went to one of the side entrances; it was guarded by a police officer, but as Hannah got closer, she locked stares with the woman and said, “Get on the right side, Gretchen. Semper Fi.”

Gretchen—a trim woman with thick white-blond hair—nodded, gave them all a quick glance, and swung the gate open. “I never saw you, boss,” she told Hannah.

“Affirmative.”

And then they were in, approaching from the side. There was a school choir onstage, singing something that it took Claire a moment to realize was “Here Comes the Sun.” They weren’t very good.

“That’s a little on the nose,” Shane said. “I think maybe ‘Black Hole Sun’ might be more appropriate.”

He was right, of course. The audience Fallon had gathered, though, seemed entranced; they were swaying to the music, holding hands, looking for all the world like they were having a religious experience.

Amelie, Oliver, and Morley were still motionless on the stage, blistering and steaming in the sun. It must have been agonizing, waiting for their chance. Claire wondered why they hadn’t done it already, but then she realized they were waiting for word that the vampires in the mall had been rescued.

It was up to her, and Shane, to let them know.

She spotted Eve and Michael. They were sitting in chairs onstage next to Fallon, pretty much held there by the two Daylighter guards standing behind them. Maybe that was another reason why Amelie hadn’t moved; Eve and Michael would be the first in danger if she did.

The choir was still singing when the vampires began to arrive at Founder’s Square.

Some were covered by blankets, coats, whatever they’d been able to scavenge along the way from the mall. Some, the older ones, had made do with a hat or some kind of cap. They came over the walls in a silent stream, landing quietly in the bushes and moving forward to gather at the edges of the crowd. It was done very calmly. Nobody threatened. Nobody attacked.

Then someone in the crowd must have noticed that a vampire was standing right beside him. He yelled, and a flurry of confusion erupted. People began drawing back, flinching from the sudden appearance of the bogeymen all around them . . . and as their false sense of security shattered into chaos, and the crowd began to stampede in all directions.

Faith in the sunlight wasn’t enough in the face of real danger, apparently.

The choir was still singing, but it was falling apart, too, and Fallon shoved through them to get to the microphone. “Don’t run!” he shouted, and his voice rang out over the square, echoing back from the buildings with their fluttering banners. “Don’t run from them! Stand up to them! Fight for your town. You have the advantage—they are few, and they are weak. Take Morganville back!”

“Go,” Hannah said. “Get Michael and Eve out of there! I need to make sure nobody does anything stupid.” She was already gone, running flat out for two of her own cops, one of whom was drawing his sidearm but not quite sure where to aim it.

Shane grabbed Claire’s arm and towed her quickly toward the stage. That wasn’t easy, because a lot of the crowd was running in that direction, as if Fallon’s presence was somehow going to protect them from about vampires gathering on the other side of the folding chairs. Fallon was right—the humans outnumbered them. But the fear of vampires was so ingrained that it didn’t seem to be making a difference.

Myrnin was in front of the rank of vampires, Claire saw, but he didn’t move forward. He held up his hand, and the others stayed behind him, ready to move. She’d seen them in army mode before, fighting the draug, but it was still eerie and terrifying, knowing how much hell they could unleash.

“Myrnin,” Fallon said. His voice held so much, just in saying the name—so much anger, and so much pain. “Come to mourn your fallen?”

“This doesn’t have to end this way,” Myrnin said. “I have no quarrel with you, Rhys. I never have.”

“You destroyed my life, spider. You preyed upon me and blackened my soul, and it took me hundreds of years to claw my way back to the light. Well, I’ve done it. And now I’m going to drag you into the light, too.”

“I’m standing in the light now,” Myrnin said. “Lest it escaped your notice. Not even a hat on my head. What makes you think I fear it?”

Fallon pointed at the sizzling bodies of Amelie, Morley, and Oliver. “Ask them,” he said. “They’re proof of your damnation. Proof that the sun itself hates and rejects your kind.” He shifted his gaze away from Myrnin to the people crowding around the stage. “We will stand in the sunlight and they will be defeated! The sun makes us strong. Stand together!”

“Come on, we need to get Eve and Michael out of there,” Shane said. He shoved through the crowd, heading for the stairs that led up to the stage. As they took the steps, they were crowded to the edge by the fleeing choir, but he practically body-slammed his way through, heedless of their yells and cries, and he somehow kept hold of Claire and made enough space for her to follow.

Then they were at the top, and Michael spotted them.

It was what he’d been waiting for, apparently, because he turned and threw a sharp elbow right into the jaw of the man behind him and Eve. Eve let out a war yell, threw her chair aside, and kicked the man solidly in the chest as he tried to throw a punch in return. It threw him backward and tangled him in the curtains, and they were ripped loose as he toppled off the stage to the rear.

Eve turned back, color burning in her cheeks, and grabbed Claire’s hand. She didn’t speak, but the pressure of her grip was enough. Michael and Shane exchanged quick nods. “What now?” Michael asked.

“We get the hell out of the way, because hell’s coming,” Shane said. “Come on, man.”

But they didn’t make it. The man Eve had kicked off the stage came scrambling back up, and his companion came back from the other side, dragging the limp body of a red-haired woman that Claire recognized a heartbeat later as Jesse.

He dumped her on the stage beside Fallon’s podium, and even from this far away Claire saw the tremor that went through Myrnin.

She saw his eyes turn bloody crimson.

But if Fallon expected him to attack, he was disappointed. Myrnin said, “You’re a fool, Rhys. You achieved your own mortality. Congratulations. Let your anger go. Let her go.”

“After I send your friends to hell, where they belong,” Fallon said. He crossed to Amelie, reached down, and yanked sharply up on the stake.

He expected it to release silver nitrate and destroy her, of course, and it must have come as an awful shock to him when she opened her eyes, sat up, and said, in a calm, clear voice, “Thank you. That was unpleasant.”

He stumbled backward as Amelie climbed to her feet. She was burned and weak, but moving, and the sight of her sent a ripple through the crowd of vampires that were standing so still. She crossed to Oliver and yanked the stake from his chest, too, then helped him rise. Then Morley.

That’s when Fallon stumbled back to the podium and pulled out a copy of Claire’s VLAD device—the clumsy, bulky gun that she had made and Myrnin had steampunked out. This one looked sleeker, and deadlier, and Fallon aimed it at Amelie.

Of course. Claire had been told that Dr. Anderson had been working on making new models. This was a prototype, something he’d brought today to show the true believers. A real weapon they could use to protect themselves from the vampires.

Claire could tell that it had been pushed to its highest setting. It might not kill Amelie, but it would disable her so badly she’d be utterly helpless. My fault, Claire thought in a sickening rush. My invention.

I’m the villain after all.

She watched helplessly as Fallon pressed the trigger.

Oliver threw himself in the way of the blast. He must have known what it would cost him; he’d been hit with it before, twice, and he understood the pain he was in for. But he didn’t hesitate. Claire saw the beam hit him, and saw him fall to the stage floor. He writhed in agony and then curled into a helpless ball, shaking with fear and horror.

That gave Morley an opportunity. He grabbed Fallon, ripped the gun out of his hands, and shattered it over his knee as easily as if it had been made out of balsa wood. Fluids sprayed, sparks flew, but just like that, he’d reduced Fallon’s ultimate weapon to junk and recycling.

It cost him his life.

The Daylighter who’d dragged Jesse up to the stage pulled out a silver stake and lunged forward to drive it into Morley’s chest. Morley might have survived that, at least for a while, but the man quickly pulled it back out . . . which triggered the release of the liquid silver solution inside.

It flooded into Morley’s chest cavity, and he began to burn, screaming.

Claire clapped hands over her mouth and looked away in horror, knowing there was nothing they could do for him; it was fast, and it was deadly. It was also an awful way to die. She heard him fall, and smelled the bitter stench of ashes.

Amelie ignored Fallon, who was backing away now. She moved in a blur to the man who’d staked Morley, and she threw him off the stage—as far as the wall, into the bushes—and dropped down next to her fallen ally. She took his hand as he trembled, staring into her face as the silver bubbled and hissed in his chest cavity.

“I’m here,” she said. “Morley, I’m here. Thank you, my old friend. May God grant you rest.”

He couldn’t speak, but he held her gaze until he was gone, his chest eaten away to a smoking hole filled with ash.

Then Amelie rose, and looked at Fallon with those calm, ice gray eyes, and Claire knew he was finished, one way or the other. He backed away from her, and it came to Claire that what he feared most in the world was being made into a vampire again. Amelie might find that a fitting punishment. Might even find some satisfaction in it.

But Claire really thought she would kill him.

She didn’t do either of those things. Instead, she reached to the podium and took up the wireless microphone and spoke into it.

“People of Morganville,” she said. “Please be calm. No harm is going to come to any of you.”

“Liar!” Fallon said, but he didn’t have the mike anymore. And Amelie turned her back on him to address the crowd. She was blistering in the sun, and starting to smoke; she was weak, and still recovering from the wound in her chest. But even with all that, even in stained clothes and with her hair long and wild, she looked like what she was, and always had been.

A queen.

“You’ve gone to great lengths to make us the monsters, Fallon,” she said. “You talk of how we cannot control our bestial impulses, our appetites. About how those different from you must be eliminated, for safety, or converted to a form you find acceptable. But here we stand, different. We could stop every beating heart in this place. In this town. We could rampage across the world, creating more and more of our own kind. But we do not. Do you know why?” Her calm, calming voice was having an effect on the crowd of panicked Daylighters. They were standing now, listening, not pushing or fleeing. If Amelie was worried about the other guards who were closing in on her—Fallon’s fanatical loyalists—she didn’t betray it by so much as a twitch. “Because we are not monsters. We are you, given a curse that most of us never sought but came to accept. Would we return to our human state if given the chance? Some would. Some would not. But forcing us, with the knowledge that you will destroy so many in the process . . . That’s not mercy, Fallon, no matter what you pretend. It’s murder.”

The Daylighter guards were closing in now, silver stakes out.

Amelie sank gracefully to her knees, still holding the microphone. “By all means, murder us in the sunlight you love so much. Murder us in front of witnesses. Show them just how merciful you are, because I know you, Rhys Fallon. I know the callow heart in you, and the selfish rage, and the bitterness. I know that you pursued your humanity with ruthless purpose, and once you had it back . . . you loathed it. You’ve created this to destroy all that reminds you of what you’ve lost.”

It was a powerful image—the most deadly vampire in the world, on her knees, voluntarily. The Daylighters ringing her with their weapons.

But she wasn’t striking out, she wasn’t killing, she wasn’t even threatening.

And the guards didn’t know what to do with that.

Some people in the crowd looked confused now, and some seemed uncomfortable. As if the truth was starting to dawn.

“We’ve been harsh masters here,” Amelie continued. The strength of will it took to ignore her impending death in those silver stakes the Daylighters held, having seen how it had destroyed Morley, was staggering. Claire couldn’t imagine how she was doing it. “Vampires are slow to learn, and slow to change, but we have changed. We know we must change. Before Fallon arrived, we were building a new Morganville, an equal Morganville, one where we might all live in peace together. Don’t let him take that from you—because if you build your new town on the bones of victims, it will never bring you peace. Watch what he does to us now, and remember.”

Fallon knew he was finished, then. He must have. The fact that the vampires hadn’t attacked, that his side had been seen to shoot Oliver and kill Morley, and was now threatening to kill a woman who kneeled, weaponless . . . it was a PR disaster for him. Morganville resented the vampires, yes, but Claire realized that the crowd here in the square wasn’t as big as it could have been. A lot of the town wasn’t here. Wasn’t singing about the sun and celebrating the defeat of the vampires. Maybe that other half still resented the vamps, but if they weren’t here, that meant that they’d had a reason not to show up. It meant that some of them, a lot of them, didn’t agree.

And Amelie knew that.

Fallon could have made a graceful retreat, kept his cool, preached his anti-vampire screed. Amelie would have let him, most likely.

But he wasn’t content with that. He didn’t want to lose.

“Kill her!” he told his men, and snatched up Jesse’s limp body from where she’d fallen to the ground. He took a silver stake from his coat pocket. Sweat was pouring down his face, and his skin was flushing an unhealthy red from the strength of his fury.

Shane dropped the roses he’d been holding and racked the shotgun, then aimed it at the group of men standing around Amelie. “Hey, guys? Don’t,” he said. “This won’t hurt her so much, but it’ll definitely hurt you.”

They froze. All but one dropped their stakes, which tumbled to the stage and rolled to the edge.

One decided to go for it. He stabbed down, hoping Shane would hesitate to fire . . . as he did.

Amelie reached up and effortlessly caught his arm as it descended toward her chest. She turned and looked at him. “No,” she said. “Not today.” She plucked the stake from his hand and plunged it into the wooden floor of the stage next to her.

Then she let him go. He backed away, clearly not sure what to do with a vampire who didn’t want to hurt him.

It should have been over, but Fallon still had Jesse, and a stake of his own, and although he should have been making his escape, he was moving forward . . . to the edge of the stage, where he grabbed Jesse’s limp body and stood with her clasped against his chest.

“Myrnin!” Even without the microphone, his shout was loud enough to be easily heard over the crowd. “You need to live in the same hell you left me to rot in—and that means you will rot alone.” He raised the stake.

Myrnin was too far away. Too far away to save her.

But Claire wasn’t.

She fired the Taser into Fallon’s back.

He convulsed, slumped, and fell with a heavy thud, still shaking.

Myrnin arrived just a second later, traveling at blurred vampire speed, and vaulted up onto the stage to gather Jesse in his arms. “Dear lady, dear lady, what’s he done to you . . .” He took her wrist and nipped at it, drawing just a little blood, which he licked. It must have told him what he needed to know. “He’s given her a sleeping drug. It’ll pass soon. She’s all right. Claire, she’s all right.” He looked up, and there were tears in his eyes as he smiled at her.

She smiled back. Her heart was breaking a little bit, because she felt something changing in Myrnin, and she knew that she would no longer be the center of his gravity. He’d always be there for her, and he’d always be her friend, but there was something in the way he held Jesse, stroked her hair, whispered to her in a way that Claire couldn’t ever see him doing with her.

Shane’s warm weight settled in behind her, and his arms went around her. He’d passed the shotgun over to Eve, who was holding it on the Daylighter guards. Beyond him, Amelie had finally risen to her feet. She looked at the vampires still standing in the sun—a sign of their loyalty to her, Claire thought—and raised the microphone. “Get under cover, friends,” she told them. “Thank you. Today you’ve shown me, and all of Morganville, what we truly can be. It will always be a struggle for us, but we can learn, and we will. Go.”

As soon as they started moving, heading for the shadows on the porches of the buildings, Amelie turned to Oliver, who was still lying on the ground, shaking. She knelt gracefully next to him and took his hand.

“I’m here,” she said. It was what she’d said to Morley, but where that had been compassion, this was something far stronger.

“Fool,” he managed to whisper. “Never trust a human’s good intentions.”

“Perhaps we’ll both learn to do better,” she said, and bent to place a kiss on his lips. “Over time.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t trust my intentions.”

“I never do,” she said, and raised her brows just slightly. “Rest. You can bedevil me later.”

“I will,” he said. “Perhaps you might get me into the shade?”

She laughed and picked him up in her arms—a very odd sight, and one Claire was pretty sure Oliver wouldn’t remember fondly—and carried him away out of the sun.

Michael still guarded Fallon. He stood there with one of the silver stakes, turning it restlessly in his fingers. Fallon was starting to shake off the shock.

The look in his eyes was pure, cold hatred.

“Yo, Mikey,” Shane said. “He ain’t a vampire anymore. If you do that, it’s murder.”

“I know,” Michael said. “I won’t do anything he doesn’t make me do. Please don’t give me an excuse, Fallon. I do owe you for giving me back my life.”

Fallon had recovered enough to say something, but it was faint, and Claire almost missed it. “You were a means to an end, boy,” he whispered. “To hurt her.”

Michael shrugged. “Then I won’t invite you to my wedding.”

“What wedding?” Eve called from where she was standing.

“They annulled our marriage, remember? You don’t think I’d let you walk away, do you?”

She blew him a kiss. “Never ever, rock star. Leave him. Let’s go home.”

Fallon smirked as Hannah Moses put handcuffs on him. “You think you have a home to return to?”

They all stopped and stared at him—at the hot, bitter triumph in his smile.

“Michael,” Shane said, “wouldn’t we know . . .”

“We were out of town,” Michael said, and looked at Claire for confirmation. “We wouldn’t, would we?”

She searched inside herself for that connection to the Glass House, that little thread of feeling that she’d come to recognize.

It was still there . . . but it was weak. Very weak.

“We have to go,” she said. “Right now.”