Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(3)

“Obviously,” he said. Like most vamps, he had an accent, but she’d long ago given up trying to identify it; if they lived long enough, vampires tended to pick up dozens of accents, and many of them were antique anyway. His facial features seemed…maybe Chinese? “Identification.”

“For walking?”

“Identification.”

Claire swallowed her protest and reached in her backpack for her wallet. She pulled out her student ID card and Texas driver’s license and handed them over. He glanced at them and shoved the cards back.

“Not those,” he said. “Your town identification.”

“My…what?”

“You should have received it in the mail.”

“Well, I haven’t!”

He took off his sunglasses. Behind them, his eyes were very dark, but there were hints of red. He stared at her for a moment, then nodded.

“All right. When you get your card, carry it at all times. And next time, watch your step. You get yourself hit by a car, I’ll consider you roadkill.”

With that, he put the sunglasses back on, turned, and got back in his car. Before Claire could think about any way to respond, he’d put the cruiser in gear and whipped around the corner.

It did not improve her mood.

Before she could even think about going home, Claire had a mandatory stop to make, at her part-time job. She dreaded it today, because she knew she was in no shape to deal with the incredibly inconsistent moods of Myrnin, her vampire mad-scientist boss. He might be laser focused and super-rational; he might be talking to crockery and quoting Alice in Wonderland (that had been the scene during her last visit). But whatever he was doing, he’d have work for her, and probably too much of it.

But at least he was never, ever boring.

She’d made the walk so often that she did it on autopilot, hardly even noticing the streets and houses and the alley down which she had to pass; she checked her phone and read texts as she jogged down the long marble steps that led into the darkness of his lab, or lair, whichever mood he was in today. The lights were on, which was nice. As she put her phone away, she saw that Myrnin was bent over a microscope—an ancient thing that she’d tried to put away a dozen times in favor of a newer electronic model, but he kept unearthing the thing. He stepped away from the eyepiece to scribble numbers frantically on a chalkboard. The board was covered in numbers, and to Claire’s eyes they looked completely random—not just in terms of their numerical values, but in the way they’d been written, at all angles and in all areas of the available space. Some were even upside down. It wasn’t a formula or an analysis. It was complete gibberish.

So. It was going to be one of those days. Lovely.

“Hey,” Claire said with fatalistic resignation as she dumped her backpack on the floor and opened up a drawer to retrieve her lab coat. It was a good thing she looked first; Myrnin had dumped an assortment of scalpels in on top of the fabric. Any one of them could have sliced her to the bone. “What are you doing?”

“Did you know that certain types of coral qualify as immortal? The definition of scientific immortality is that if the mortality rate of a species doesn’t increase after it reaches maturity, there is no such thing as aging…black coral, for instance. Or the Great Basin bristlecone pine. I’m trying to determine if there is any resemblance between the development of those cellular colonies with the replacement of human cells that takes place in a conversion to vampirism….” He was talking a mile a minute, with a fever pitch that Claire always dreaded. It meant he was in need of medication, which he wouldn’t take; she’d need to be stealthy about adding it to his blood supply, again, to bring him down a little into the rational zone. “Did you bring me a hamburger?”

“Did I— No, Myrnin, I didn’t bring you a hamburger.” Bizarre. He’d never asked for that before.

“Coffee?”

“It’s late.”

“Doughnuts?”

“No.”

“What good are you, then?” He finally looked up from the microscope, made another note or two on the board, and stepped back to consider the chaos of chalk marks. “Oh dear. That’s not very—is this where I started? Claire?” He pointed at a number somewhere near the top right corner.

“I wasn’t here,” Claire said, and buttoned up her lab coat. “Do you want me to keep working on the machine?”

“The what? Oh, yes, that thing. Do, please.” He crossed his arms and stared at the board, frowning now. It was not a personal-grooming highlight day for him, either. His long, dark hair was in tangles and needed a wash; she was sure the oversized somewhat-white shirt he was wearing had been used as a rag to wipe up chemical spills at sometime in its long life. He’d had the presence of mind to put on some kind of pants, though she wasn’t sure the baggy walking shorts were what she’d have chosen. At least the flip-flops kind of matched. “How was school?”

“Bad,” she said.

“Good,” he said absently, “very good…Ah, I think this is where I started…. Fibonacci sequence—I see what I did….” He began drawing a spiral through the numbers, starting somewhere at the center. Of course, he’d be noting down results in a spiral. Why not?

Claire felt a headache coming on. The place was dirty again, grit on the floor that was a combination of sand blown in from the desert winds, and whatever Myrnin had been working with that he’d spilled liberally all over the place. She only hoped it wasn’t too toxic. She’d have to schedule a day to get him out of here so she could get reorganized, sweep up the debris, stack the books back in some kind of order, shelve the lab equipment…. No, that wouldn’t be a day. More like a week.