Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(75)

“Angry,” Michael said. “Hyper-angry. Ready to kill.”

“No, no, it’s not—” Claire swallowed and visibly tried to calm herself. “It’s not a lust ray. It just magnifies what you’re feeling. And it’s not Myrnin’s. It’s mine. I was just—experimenting.”

“I know I’m not a scientific peer review or anything, but I have to say I think it works. If that’s what you were going for, anyway.” I skipped over the whole issue of why it had decided to focus on that particular impulse in me. She’d take it as a compliment, hopefully, but I wasn’t too sure about that. My track record of guessing what might offend girls wasn’t exactly perfect. “What were you thinking of using it for? Because the way it sent Michael into rage overdrive…”

The blush just wasn’t getting any less red, or—even without the ray—any less interesting. “The idea is that once I can exactly amplify a feeling, I can also cancel it out,” she said. “It was supposed to just work with vampires, not humans. I don’t know why—why it worked on you, Shane. I’m so sorry.”

“Well”—I shrugged—“I’m not, particularly. That was a little bit fun.”

“I hate to admit it, but it was when it was pointed at me, too,” Michael said. “Kind of like it took away all the inhibitions.”

“A drunk gun,” I said. “Awesome.”

“Not,” Claire said, and frowned. “It’s dangerous.” She picked it up and stuck it in her backpack, engaging some kind of safety switch I hadn’t noticed before. “I’ll find someplace to keep it where it won’t hurt anybody until I can destroy it. It was probably a dumb idea, anyway.”

Eve disappeared into the kitchen, ever practical, and came out with a blood bag that she tossed to Michael, who snatched it out of the air and bit into it with a frightening level of enthusiasm. He drained it in about, oh, ten seconds or less, the same way a human would chug water after a really aggressive workout. And it had about the same effect; he got a little weak-kneed and had to brace himself on a wall, but after the shock passed, he seemed almost immediately better. His eyes faded back to simple blue, and his skin coloring went from dead-guy pale to more like ivory. Wounds started shutting faster, too.

“Thanks,” he said to Eve. She raised a cocky eyebrow.

“You’ll make it up to me later,” she said, and winked. That got a really different kind of smile from Michael, and I found something else to look at, fast. Now I was the one feeling like an intruder on something personal, like I guessed Mikey had earlier, what with all the passionate groping and tongues.

Funny how just the way they smiled at each other could be intimate. Or maybe I was just turning into a girl, living with two of them in the house. That was frightening. Not that I don’t like girls. I just preferred to be plain old insensitive me.

“One down,” I said. “But Frank gave me a warning. This town’s really going to go crazy. We need to be ready.”

“Always,” Eve said, and high-fived me.

But I wondered if we really, truly were.





THIRTEEN





CLAIRE




The portal system had gone completely, utterly dead. The next morning, Claire started trying each of the entrances she had mapped out, and she found each of them just as inactive as the ones in the Glass House. Even Amelie’s emergency escape, the one upstairs in the secret attic room, was gone.

She had known that was coming, but it was still…weirdly sad. She shuddered, and tried not to think about Frank dying slowly in his silent tomb as she exited the abandoned warehouse—portal number twelve on the map—and headed back toward the center of town. This side of Morganville was mostly left to rot and rats—had been for years, slowly falling into ruin as the businesses closed or relocated. The porch had finally fallen down at the front of the old hospital building where she and Shane had once run from both his father and Oliver, blocking it to even the hardiest urban explorers. There were likely lots of other ways in, but nobody sane wanted to go in there. It was a great place to go permanently missing—not just because of the vampires, but because there were some serious drug trade people who had claimed it for their own property. They could have it, as far as Claire was concerned. The place wasn’t just haunted; it was evil.

I could have spent the morning working on the machine—what am I going to call it? The Vampire Power Cancellation Device? VPCD, for short? Fine, how about the Magic Thingy? She was fantasizing too much about what it could do, she thought, but she couldn’t shake the idea that if she could just get a perfect amplification signal to match what the vampires were sending out, she could somehow cancel it…and perfectly nullify the effect.

Not that it would have stopped Pennyfeather from trying to rip her throat out, of course. Drawbacks.

This area of town was really run-down. Claire cursed under her breath as she tripped over another fallen fence. The vampires really could have done some urban renewal around here, but they liked having some ruins around; maybe it suited their Gothic sensibilities, or maybe it was just practical, having places where they could stalk around after dark in private. She wondered why they hadn’t shut down the meth trade, though. Maybe—likely—they just didn’t care enough.