Lord of Misrule (20 page)

He did all but kiss her hand. Eve, not surprisingly, could say nothing but yes.

Claire settled for an eye roll big enough to make her head hurt. “You can’t all fit,” she pointed out. “In Eve’s car, I mean.”

“And she’s not taking you alone, anyway,” Michael said. “My car’s in the garage. I can take the rest of you. Shane, Claire—”

“Staying here, since you’ll need the space,” Shane said. “Sounds like a plan. Look, if there are people looking for them, you ought to get them moving. I’ll call Richard. He can assign a couple of cops to guard Common Grounds.”

“No,” Myrnin said. “No police. We can’t trust them.”

“We can’t?”

“Some of them have been working with Bishop, and with the human mobs. I have proof of that. We can’t take the risk.”

“But Richard—,” Claire said, and subsided when she got Myrnin’s glare. “Right. Okay. On your own, got it.”

Eve didn’t want to be dragged into it, but she went without much of a protest—the number of fangs in the room might have had something to do with it. As the Goldmans and Myrnin, Eve and Michael walked downstairs, Shane held Claire back to say, “We’ve got to figure out how to lock this place up. In case.”

“You mean, against—” She gestured vaguely at the vampires. He nodded. “But if Michael lives here, and we live here, the house can’t just bar a whole group of people from entry. It has to be done one at a time—at least that’s what I understood. And no, before you ask me, I don’t know how it works. Or how to fool it. I think only Amelie has the keys to that.”

He looked disappointed. “How about closing off these weird doors Myrnin and Amelie are popping through?”

“I can work them. That doesn’t mean I can turn them on and off.”

“Great.” He looked around the room, then took a seat on the old Victorian couch. “So we’re like Undead Grand Central Station. Not really loving that so much. Can Bishop come through?”

It was a question that Claire had been thinking about, and it creeped her out to have to say, “I don’t know. Maybe. But from what Myrnin said, he set the doorway to exit-only. So maybe we just . . . wait.”

Robbed of doing anything heroic, or for that matter even useful, she warmed up the spaghetti again, and she and Shane ate it and watched some mindless TV show while jumping at every noise and creak, with weapons handy. When the kitchen door banged open nearly an hour later, Claire almost needed a heart transplant—until she heard Eve yell, “We’re home! Oooooh, spaghetti. I’m starved.” Eve came in holding a plate and shoveling pasta into her mouth as she walked. Michael was right behind her.

“No problems?” Shane asked. Eve shook her head, chewing a mouthful of spaghetti.

“They should be fine there. Nobody saw us get them inside, and until Oliver turns up, nobody is going to need to get in there for a while.”

“What about Myrnin?”

Eve swallowed, almost choked, and Michael patted her kindly on the back. She beamed at him. “Myrnin? Oh yeah. He did a Batman and took off into the night. What is
with
that guy, Claire? If he was a superhero, he’d be Bipolar Man.”

The drugs were the problem. Claire needed to get more, and she needed to work on that cure Myrnin had found. That was just as important as anything else . . . providing there were any vampires left, anyway.

They had dinner, and at least it was the four of them again, sitting around the table, talking as if the world were normal, even if all of them knew it wasn’t. Shane seemed especially jumpy, which wasn’t like him at all.

For her part, Claire was just tired to the bone of being scared, and when she went upstairs, she was asleep the minute she crawled between the covers.

But sleep didn’t mean it was restful, or peaceful.

She dreamed that somewhere, Amelie was playing chess, moving her pieces at lightning speed across a black-and-white board. Bishop sat across from her, grinning with too many teeth, and when he took her rook, it turned into a miniature version of Claire, and suddenly both the vampires were huge and she was so small, so small, stranded out in the open.

Bishop picked her up and squeezed her in his white hand, and blood drops fell onto the white squares of the chessboard.

Amelie frowned, watching Bishop squeeze her, and put out a delicate fingertip to touch the drops of blood. Claire struggled and screamed.

Amelie tasted her blood, and smiled.

Claire woke up with a convulsive shudder, huddled in her blankets. It was still dark outside the windows, though the sky was getting lighter, and the house was very, very quiet.

Her phone was buzzing in vibrate mode on the bedside table. She picked it up and found a text message from the university’s alert system.

CLASSES RETURN TO NORMAL SCHEDULE EFFECTIVE 7 A.M. TODAY.

School seemed like a million miles away, another world that didn’t mean anything to her anymore, but it would get her on campus, and there were things she needed there. Claire scrolled down her phone list and found Dr. Robert Mills, but there was no immediate answer on his cell. She checked the clock, winced at the early hour, but slid out of bed and began grabbing things out of drawers. That didn’t take a lot of time. She was down to the last of everything. Laundry was starting to be a genuine priority.

She dialed his phone again after she’d dressed. “Hello?” Dr. Mills sounded as if she’d dragged him out of a deep, probably happy sleep.
He
probably hadn’t been dreaming about being squeezed dry by Mr. Bishop.

“It’s Claire,” she said. “I’m sorry to call so early—”

“Is it early? Oh. Been up all night, just fell asleep.” He yawned. “Glad you’re all right, Claire.”

“Are you at the hospital?”

“No. The hospital’s going to need a lot of work before it’s even halfway ready for the kind of work I need to do.” Another jaw-cracking yawn. “Sorry. I’m on campus, in the Life Sciences Building. Lab Seventeen. We have some roll-away beds here.”

“We?”

“My wife and kids are with me. I didn’t want to leave them on their own out there.”

Claire didn’t blame him. “I’ve got something for you to do, and I need some of the drug,” she said. “It could be really important. I’ll be at school in about twenty minutes, okay?”

“Okay. Don’t come here. My kids are asleep right now. Let’s meet somewhere else.”

“The on-campus coffee bar,” she said. “It’s in the University Center.”

“Trust me, I know where it is. Twenty minutes.”

She was already heading for the door.

 

With no sounds coming from any of the other rooms, Claire figured her housemates were all crashed out, exhausted. She didn’t know why she wasn’t, except for a suppressed, vibrating fear inside her that if she slept any more, something bad was going to happen.

Showered, dressed in her last not-very-good clothes, she grabbed up her backpack and repacked it. Her dart gun was out of darts anyway, so she left it behind. The samples Myrnin had prepared of Bishop’s blood went into a sturdy padded box, and on impulse, she added a couple of stakes and the silver knife Amelie had given her.

And books.

It was the first time Claire had been on foot in Morganville since the rioting had started, and it was eerie. The town was quiet again, but stores had broken windows, some boarded over; there were some buildings reduced to burned-out hulks, with blind, open doorways. Broken bottles were on the sidewalks and spots of what looked like blood on the concrete—and, in places, dark splashes.

Claire hurried past it all, even past Common Grounds, where the steel shutters were down inside the windows. There was no sign of anyone within. She imagined Theo Goldman standing there watching her from cover, and waved a little, just a waggle of fingers.

She didn’t really expect a response.

The gates of the university were open, and the guards were gone. Claire jogged along the sidewalk, going up the hill and around the curve, and began to see students up and moving, even so early in the morning. As she got closer to the central cluster of buildings, the foot traffic intensified, and here and there she saw alert campus police walking in pairs, watching for trouble.

The students didn’t seem to notice anything at all. Not for the first time, Claire wondered if Amelie’s semipsychic network that cut Morganville off from the world also kept people on campus clueless.

She didn’t like to think they were just naturally that stupid. Then again, she’d been to some of the parties.

The University Center had opened its doors only a few minutes before, and the coffee barista was just taking the chairs down from the tables. Usually it would have been Eve on duty, but instead, it was one of the university staffers, on loan from the food service most likely. He didn’t exactly look happy to be there. Claire tried to be nice, and finally got a smile from him as he handed her a mocha and took her cash.

“I wouldn’t be here,” he confessed, “except that they’re paying us triple to be here the rest of the week.”

“Really? Wow. I’ll tell Eve. She could use the money.”

“Yeah, get her in here. I’m not good at this coffee stuff. Give me the plain stuff. Water, beans—can’t really screw that up. This espresso is hard.”

Claire decided, after tasting the mocha, that he was right. He really wasn’t cut out for it. She sipped it anyway, and took a seat where she could watch the majority of the UC entrances for Dr. Mills.

She almost didn’t recognize him. He’d shed his white doctor’s coat, of course, but somehow she’d never expected to see someone like him wearing a zip-up hoodie, sweatpants, and sneakers. He was more the suit-and-tie type. He ordered plain coffee—good choice—and came to join her at the table.

Dr. Mills was medium everything, and he blended in at the university just as easily as he had at the hospital. He’d have made a good spy, Claire thought. He had one of those faces—young from one angle, older from another, with nothing you could really remember later about it.

But he had a nice, comforting smile. She supposed that would be a real asset in a doctor.

“Morning,” he said, and gulped coffee. His eyes were bloodshot and red rimmed. “I’m going back to the hospital later today. Damage assessments, and we’ve already reopened the trauma units and CCU. I’m going to catch some sleep as soon as we’re done, in case any crash cases come in. Nothing worse than an exhausted trauma surgeon.”

She felt even more guilty about waking him up. “I’ll make this quick,” she promised. Claire opened her backpack, took out the padded box, and slid it across the table to him. “Blood samples, from Myrnin.”

Mills frowned. “I’ve already got a hundred blood samples from Myrnin. Why—”

“These are different,” Claire said. “Trust me. There’s one labeled
B
that’s important.”

“Important, how?”

“I don’t want to say. I’d rather you took a look first.” In science, Claire knew, it was better to come to an analysis cold, without too many expectations. Dr. Mills knew that, too, and he nodded as he took possession of the samples. “Um—if you want to sleep, maybe you shouldn’t drink that stuff.”

Dr. Mills smiled and threw back the rest of his coffee. “You get to be a doctor by developing immunity to all kinds of things, including caffeine,” he said. “Trust me. The second my head touches the pillow, I’m asleep, even if I’ve got a coffee IV drip.”

“I know people who’d pay good money for that. The IV drip, I mean.”

He shook his head, grinning, but then got serious. “You seem okay. I was worried about you. You’re just so . . . young, to be involved in all this stuff.”

“I’m all right. And I’m really—”

“Not that young. Yes, I know. But still. Let an old man fret a little. I’ve got two daughters.” He tossed his coffee cup at the trash—two points—and stood. “Here’s all I could get together of the drug. Sorry, it’s not a lot, but I’ve got a new batch in the works. It’ll take a couple of days to finish.”

He handed her a bag that clinked with small glass bottles. She peeked inside. “This should be plenty.” Unless, of course, she had to start dosing all over Morganville, in which case, they were done, anyway.

“Sorry to make this a gulp-and-run, but . . .”

“You should go,” Claire agreed. “Thanks, Dr. Mills.” She offered her hand. He shook it gravely.

Around his wrist, there was a silver bracelet, with Amelie’s symbol on it. He looked down at it, then at her gold one, and shrugged.

“I don’t think it’s time to take it off,” he said. “Not yet.”

At least yours does come off,
Claire thought, but didn’t say. Dr. Mills had signed agreements, contracts, and those things were binding in Morganville, but the contract she’d signed had made her Amelie’s property, body and soul. And her bracelet didn’t have a catch on it, which made it more like a slave collar.

From time to time, that still creeped her out.

It was getting close to time for her first class, and as Claire hefted her backpack, she wondered how many people would show up. Lots, probably. Knowing most of the professors, they’d think today was a good day for a quiz.

She wasn’t disappointed. She also wasn’t panicked, unlike some of her classmates during her first class, and her third. Claire didn’t panic on tests, not unless it was in a dream where she also had to clog dance and twirl batons to get a good grade. And the quizzes weren’t so hard anyway, not even the physics tests.

One thing she noticed, more and more, as she went around campus: fewer people had on bracelets. Morganville natives got used to wearing them twenty-four/ seven, so she could clearly see the tan lines where the bracelets had been . . . and weren’t anymore. It was almost like a reverse tattoo.

Around noon, she saw Monica Morrell, Gina, and Jennifer.

The three girls were walking fast, heads down, books in their arms. There was a whole lot different about them; Claire was used to seeing those three stalking the campus like tigers, confident and cruel. They’d stare down anyone, and whether you liked them or not, they were wicked fashion queens, always showing themselves off to best advantage.