Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(65)

There was no note. Nothing to tell her whether Myrnin was just temporarily out, or gone for good. She couldn’t believe that he’d just…leave. Just like that.

“Frank?” Claire walked out of the bedroom into the main lab. “Frank, can you hear me?” Frankenstein, Shane called him. Frank Collins had, once upon a time, been Shane’s dad—maybe not a good one, but still. Then he’d been turned vampire, against his will. Then he had died, and Myrnin had decided to scavenge his brain and use it to power the town’s master computer.

Maybe Frankenstein wasn’t too bad a name for him, after all.

There was a buzzing sound that seemed to come from all around her, and it coalesced finally into a distorted, drunk-sounding voice. “Yes, Claire,” it said.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” it said, after a long pause. “Hungry.”

Claire swallowed hard and clenched her fists. Frank—Frank Collins, or what was left of him—was hardwired into a computer downstairs, an area that Myrnin hadn’t wanted her to venture into. “I thought your nutrients were delivered automatically.”

“Tank dry,” he said. He sounded terribly tired. “Need blood. Get blood, Claire.”

“I—I can’t do that!” What was she supposed to do—order up a gallon drum from the blood bank? Somehow magically haul it all the way down there herself? She had no idea how Myrnin did these things; he’d never included her on any of that maintenance activity. But she strongly suspected the only one who’d be able to manage it would be a vampire. “Is Myrnin gone?”

“Hungry,” Frank said again, faintly, and then just…stopped talking. The buzz under his voice shut down. She thought he was the equivalent of offline, like a laptop drained of battery shutting down.

If she wanted him to survive, she really did have to figure this out. Clearly, Myrnin wasn’t here to do it.

Claire went to the glass enclosure in the corner. It was hard to see under all the webs, but when she took the top off the tank, Bob the Spider crawled up eagerly to the top of his wispy multilevel construction. He was a big fuzzy spider, and somehow impossibly cute, although part of her still screamed like a little girl at the thought of touching him.

He bounced up and down in his web, all eight eyes staring right at her.

“You’re hungry, too,” she said. “Right? Myrnin didn’t feed you, either?”

That was really strange. Myrnin might neglect Frank, because he and Frank really weren’t a marriage made in heaven (and Frank could be faking it; he had a cruel and weird sense of humor), but leaving Bob on his own and starving wasn’t like her boss at all. He was ridiculously fond of the thing. She still remembered Myrnin’s utter panic the first time Bob had molted. It had been like a normal person freaking out over the birth of a child.

It was not like him to leave Bob behind if he was really leaving.

Something was wrong here. Very wrong.

Claire pulled out her phone and dialed Myrnin’s speed dial. It rang on the phone, and suddenly she heard an echo in the lab, a ringtone composed of scary organ music. She’d given him the phone and had put the ringtone on it herself.

The phone was lying in the shadows next to a stack of books. It had a cracked screen, but it was still working. Claire picked it up and felt stickiness on her fingers.

Blood.

What had happened?

“You shouldn’t have come,” Pennyfeather said from behind her. His voice, like the rest of him, was colorless, and his odd, lilting accent only made him seem less human, somehow. “But don’t worry. You won’t be leaving.”

Claire stumbled backward in surprise, catching her heel on a pile of discarded volumes, which overbalanced and rained down dusty, heavy tomes on top of her. She yelped and ducked, and realized she had an opportunity as Pennyfeather paused to survey the chaos; she jumped, slid over the top of the nearest lab table, sending books and glass beakers flying, and hit the floor running. She heard soft noises behind her, and in her mind’s eye she saw Pennyfeather leaping effortlessly onto the same table, touching down, and racing after her.

She felt human, solid, clumsy, and utterly outmatched against his eerie grace. Claire was accustomed enough to running from vampires not to be utterly terrified—she’d done it often enough here, in this lab—but Pennyfeather was different from the others. Oliver, Amelie, Myrnin…They all had some kind of humanity to them, some hints of mercy, however hidden. They could be reached.

Pennyfeather was pure vampire-fueled serial killer, and a human, any human, was no match for him.

Claire grabbed for the silver-coated stake in her backpack, but it had rolled to the side, and running and hunting around in a bag and watching treacherous footing weren’t exactly complementary activities. It was inevitable that just as her fingertips brushed the cool metal, her foot would come down on a book that slid greasily to the side, and she’d tumble, off-balance, to the floor.

As she did.

She got a grip on the stake just as Pennyfeather landed on her chest, nimble and startlingly heavy. He easily pinned her arms down. All she could do was rattle the stake ineffectively against the tile. No way could she get leverage to stab him, or even scratch him. She bucked, trying to throw him off, but he rode it out easily.

It came to her, with cold clarity, that she wasn’t getting out of this. No last-minute brainstorms. No clever little science applications to solve the problem. In the end, she was just going to be another Morganville statistic. Score another one for the vamps.