Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(57)
The branch was too thick to make it completely through the ribs, but it shocked him, and he gave a shriek that made the hair stand up on Claire’s arms. He let go of Eve, and she toppled forward in a heap of tattered red silk, crouched, and spun to face him with a look on her face so murderous that Claire was momentarily shocked. Pennyfeather didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to claw the wood out of his back, but even when he grabbed hold, the springy wood bent, and he only managed to scrape it partly free before it snapped out of his hand.
“Get the bag,” Eve snapped to Claire, and she nodded and dashed back into the kitchen. In seconds, she had hold of one of the black canvas totes they kept ready, but by the time she’d made it back outside, Pennyfeather had yanked the branch free, ripped it to pieces, and was stalking toward Eve with a low, furious growl and one piece still held as a club in his clawed hand.
There was no time to get to Eve. Claire did the next best thing; she spun around and flung the bag. It arced through the air and hit the grass at Eve’s feet, spilling out a confusion of objects, but Eve didn’t hesitate over choices. She grabbed a small bottle, popped the plastic cap, and threw the contents in Pennyfeather’s face.
Silver nitrate.
His growl turned to a howl, rising in volume and pitch until it hurt Claire’s ears, and he sheared off from making his run at Eve to claw at his face. The liquid silver clung like napalm, and burned about as fiercely. Claire grabbed the bag, stuffed items inside as fast as possible, and grabbed Eve’s wrist. “Come on!” she yelled, and they ran around the side of the house, feet sliding on the loose white gravel.
Michael and Shane were at the front, and between the last blast of the fire extinguisher and smothering flaps of the rug, they’d put out a fire that had blackened a ten-foot section of the exterior of the house. Broken glass lay around the base of it, and as they got closer, Claire smelled the sharp, almost-sweet stench of gasoline.
There was something pinned to their front door, too, fluttering pale in the night breeze.
Michael dropped the rug and flashed at vampire-speed to catch Eve in his arms. He must have smelled the blood from her cuts, Claire thought; she could see the faint, iridescent shine of his eyes. “What happened?” he asked, and touched the claw slashes on her kimono. “Who did this?”
“Pennyfeather,” Claire said. Now that the adrenaline rush was passing, she felt weirdly shaky, and she was beginning to realize how many things she’d done that could have gone badly wrong for her. For Eve, too. “It was Pennyfeather. He was—he was going to bite her.”
Michael made a hissing noise, like a very angry and dangerous snake, and blurred out of sight toward the backyard. Shane’s gaze followed him, but he didn’t go along; he reached instead for the bag that Claire held and sorted through the contents. He handed Eve a knife, gave Claire another of the bottles of silver, and for himself, a baseball bat—a regular bat, except that the last six inches of the business end were coated with silver plate. “Been dying to try this out,” he said, and gave them both a tight, wild smile. “Batter up.” He swung it experimentally, nodded, and rested it on his right shoulder. “You good, Eve?”
“This was my favorite robe,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, but it was from rage as much as from fear, Claire thought. “Dammit. It was vintage!”
Shane was still watching the side of the house, around which Michael had disappeared. He was clearly wondering if he ought to go back him up. Claire put a hand on his arm and drew his focus, just for a second. “Eve got Pennyfeather with a face full of this,” she said, and held up her bottle. “He’s got a handicap, and Michael’s really pissed off.”
That eased some of the tension in Shane’s back and shoulders, at least. “I don’t want to leave you two alone out here,” he said. “The fire’s out. Get back inside and lock the doors. Go.”
“What about you guys?”
“If you hear us crying for our mommies, you can come rescue us, but hey, Eve’s kinda half naked and bleeding out here.”
Shane had a great point, and as Claire looked over at her, she saw that Eve was gripping the knife in a white-knuckled hand and shivering badly. It was cold out, and the shock was setting in.
Claire took her arm and steered her up the steps. Shane watched them until they reached the door, and then nodded to her and dashed away into the dark, bat held at the ready. She pushed open the door and hustled Eve inside, then paused and looked at what was pinned to the wood.
She supposed it was Pennyfeather’s writing, because it was hard to read, spiky, and had a nasty brownish color to the ink that might well have been blood.
It said, Done by Order of the Founder, and it was pinned deeply into the wood by a giant knife, like a bowie knife on steroids.
Claire worked it back and forth until she could pull it out of the door’s surface, folded the piece of paper, and locked up with trembling fingers.
Eve was standing there watching her, an unreadable expression on her face. She was still shaking. “It’s a death sentence, isn’t it?” she said. “Don’t lie, Claire. You’re not good at it.”
Claire didn’t even try. She held up the knife. “On the plus side,” she said, “they left us another weapon. And it’s sharp.”
Truthfully, that was cold comfort indeed. And in the end, after Michael and Shane came back in without Pennyfeather, who’d managed to run for his life despite taking a pretty good battering from both of them, nobody much felt like celebrating.