Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(67)

There were no cells on this hall, only a single locked door. Claire fumbled with the keys. Her hands were shaking from the adrenaline, and a clock was running in her head. The three they’d left sleeping were going to wake up soon; they’d be groggy and unsteady, and probably have killer hangover headaches, but time was definitely running out on their window to find Michael and the others.

It was, of course, the second to last key Claire tried that turned the lock. She pushed the door open, stepped through, and had to grab the heavy metal slab on the backswing, because it was on some automatic pneumatic pressure to seal shut. Eve was only halfway through. Thick as it was, the steel could have broken her bones if it had hit her squarely.

Eve squeezed through, and Claire let go; the door hissed shut and locks automatically engaged. They were in a small antechamber, and there was another door. Another lock. “Hurry,” Eve said. She looked around at the blank walls, and then up at the small glass semicircle set above them. Her face set hard. “They could be watching us.”

“Shit,” Claire whispered. She sorted keys again, nearly frantic now, and found one that slotted neatly in. It turned.

The door opened in front of her, on a room that was the mirror opposite of the one where they’d found the dead, discarded vampires—the ones who’d failed their conversion back to human. That had been a hastily assembled morgue.

This was a bright, clean, well-equipped lab, complete with glass-fronted cabinets and counters, stations for preparation of compounds, refrigerators . . . and it held about the same number of tables, and on them lay vampires.

The difference was that these vampires still survived, at least for now.

Claire’s gaze swept down the line and fixed on tousled blond hair. “There!” she yelled to Eve, and they both raced forward . . . and then had to stop, because two guards stepped out into their path. These were police officers, wearing Morganville blues, with the Daylighter pins gleaming on their collars. Claire recognized one of them—Officer Halling, the woman who’d found the dead body at the Glass House.

Officer Halling unsnapped her holster and put her hand on the butt of her gun.

Eve didn’t hesitate; she lunged forward with the Taser, but unfortunately for her, Halling’s partner was fast, and he grabbed Eve by the arm and wrenched it hard, forcing the Taser out of her hand to drop and roll on the floor. Halling dismissed Eve, and focused her cold gaze on Claire.

Claire pulled the scalpel from the cardboard sheath, but she didn’t attack. Instead, she ran in the opposite direction, to the last bed on the end. She’d seen a familiar face there, too.

Oliver.

He was strapped down with some kind of silver-coated webbing on his arms and legs, and there was an IV needle in his arm, buried in a thick, ropy, blue vein. His skin looked chalky, but beneath that his arms looked wiry and strong, and his chest thick with muscle.

His eyes were open. He lifted his head to stare at her, and his eyes were a ferocious, unnerving shade of red. He didn’t speak.

Claire ripped the IV out of his arm, and took a scalpel to the webbing that held him down. It was tough and dulled the edge pretty quickly, but she managed to get one hand free.

Oliver did the rest. He rolled onto his side and ripped at the silver web until it was shredded, even though it burned and cut his fingers, and then sat up to tear at the stuff holding his ankles.

A shot shattered glass on a counter past Claire, and she looked up to see Halling taking aim again. This time she wouldn’t be firing a warning shot.

“Stop!” Halling yelled. “Drop the knife!”

Claire did, and it hit the tile floor with a musical clang, but Halling was pointing at the wrong target. Maybe she’d thought it would take Oliver longer to get free, or to recover, but she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

Oliver came off the table in a blur and stopped with her gun arm in one hand and her throat in the other. Claire shut her eyes, because she didn’t want to see, but she heard the snap of bones breaking . . . and when she was able to look again, Halling was down on the floor. Not dead, surprisingly, but her arm was at an entirely wrong angle, held close to her chest. She looked disoriented with shock.

Without much of a pause, Oliver turned toward the other policeman, who was holding Eve down. He turned sideways, an elegant and weirdly old-fashioned motion, held Halling’s confiscated pistol at his side, and said, “I don’t offer second chances. This is your first and only warning. Drop your weapon now and let the girl go.” It was almost as if he was . . . dueling. He even put his left arm behind his back, crooked at the elbow.

And then he was dueling, because the cop dropped Eve, stood straight, and pulled his own sidearm. It was a fast draw, as fast as anything Claire had ever seen outside of an old Western movie . . . but it was miles too slow, even then.

Oliver didn’t try hard, but before the man’s gun was halfway up, Oliver brought his own weapon up, leveled, aimed, and fired.

The other man went down.

Oliver held the pose for a long second, watching the man to be sure he wouldn’t get up, and then the tension released and he stumbled sideways. He crashed into another vampire’s bed and grabbed for support, but couldn’t hold himself upright. He slipped to his knees, tangled in sheets, and as Claire watched in horror, he began to convulse.

“Oliver!” She dropped down next to him in a crouch, not sure what to do, whether she could do anything. “Oliver, can you hear me? Oliver!”