Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(82)

He made a harsh buzzer sound. “Sorry, wrong answer,” he said. “Old pioneer days, Claire. You’re not keeping up. We’ve got privileges now. You can’t keep us walking around on leashes anymore like tame dogs.”

His pacing reminded her of a caged animal, too. Creepy. “Don’t make me stake you, Jason. I’d have to tell your sister, and I don’t want to do that.”

“As usual, it’s all about Eve. Why is it her business what I do?”

“She still cares about you, you know.”

“She never really cared. Don’t try that on me. If she’d been any kind of a stand-up sister, she’d have watched out for me. She just ran off and left me behind to take my punishment and shacked up with her precious Michael.” Jason singsonged the name like a grade-schooler. He’s just trying to scare you, Claire told herself, somewhat unconvincingly. You’ve dealt with Myrnin all this time; you can handle this stupid kid.

But she wasn’t so sure. She’d counted on a vampire who’d back down, not one who was the poster child for unbalanced. Time for a shift of strategy.

Claire put down the stake. She needed both hands as she unzipped her backpack and reached inside to the inner pocket.

Jason decided it was the perfect time to make his move. He was fast, she had to give him that, but so was she, and she’d known he’d take the bait; he wasn’t the cautious sort. So when her hand came up out of the bag holding the canister, he laughed, and his hands closed on her shoulders with crushing force.

“What’re you going to do? Perfume me?”

She sprayed liquid silver in his open mouth.

Jason’s shriek almost burst her eardrums, and, coughing and gagging, he staggered backward, smoke pouring from between his lips. His skin was burning from the sunlight. Claire shoved him backward into the shadows, and he stumbled a few steps, kept gagging, and sank down to his hands and knees to cough convulsively.

“It’s just a little,” she told him. “Consider it breath freshener. The next time, I spray it in your eyes, Jason, so keep the hell off me if you like your face.”

He was too busy retching to try to speak, even if he could have managed it. Claire bypassed him and went to Sarah, tugged the ropes free, and let her pull the tape off her mouth. It must have hurt. The skin beneath it looked red and abraded, and Sarah whooped in a deep breath of relief. She fixed a poisonous glare on Jason. “You just wait, you little piece of crap,” she said. “My Protector’s not going to stand for this.”

“Neither will mine,” Professor Carlyle said. He looked pale and shaky, but righteously angry. Claire found paper towels behind the bookstore’s counter and folded some into a thick pad, which she gave him to apply to his head wound. “Thank you, Danvers.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “So…can we talk over that B on the last paper? Because it was really an A effort. I’d take a B if I deserved it, but—”

“Yes, yes, fine, A it is. As far as I’m concerned, you have an A for the rest of the class,” he said. “Sarah, would you like me to call someone, or—”

“Nope,” the woman said, and climbed to her feet. She was small but had a wiry strength that probably came from bench-pressing boxes of textbooks all day. “I’m calling the pound to see if they can come get this damn rabid dog—”

Before she could finish the thought, Jason had scrambled to his feet and was running for the back door. Alleys, Claire thought. Shaded alleys, with sewer access. He’d be gone before anyone could catch him.

“Might want to keep that back door locked from now on,” she said to Sarah as she returned the silver canister to her backpack and picked up the stake to slide it into the holster next to it. “Professor.”

They both nodded, clearly still off-balance from the encounter with their own mortality; Claire felt it, too, a hissing tension running through her body that made her realize how much she’d just taken on herself. Shane would have been livid that she’d tried it without backup.

She went outside and walked fast, all the way home.

Where she was going to have to tell Eve her brother had gone full-on Hannibal Lecter. Fun.

She spotted the shiny black van of the ghost hunters—clearly driven off from their targeted hospital visit, thankfully—cruising slowly down the street. Jenna and Angel were arguing (there was a shocker) and Jenna was consulting a street map. There weren’t many maps of Morganville that the vampires hadn’t, ah, edited, so if the team members were trying to find some “haunted” location, they wouldn’t be finding anything more exotic along the way. Except maybe Jason, who could be on the rampage after not getting his afternoon snack.

Claire swallowed her pride, dialed Amelie’s number, and got the brisk, Irish-accented voice of her assistant, Bizzie. “Please tell Amelie that Jason Rosser’s out here biting people, in public. Protected people. And if she wants those ghost hunters to get a good story, he’s a great way to do it.” She didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. Amelie would shut Jason up; she might shut him up permanently, but that wasn’t Claire’s concern. She was more worried about the ghost hunters.

Nobody had said so, but it had seemed obvious from her conversation with the police that the decision the vampires were considering about the strangers had two outcomes: wiping their memories and dumping them out of town somewhere, or planting them somewhere deep, where no one would ever find the bodies. If they were still here, it was almost as if Amelie (or Oliver) had decided to toy with them, with no intention of letting them ever leave town alive.