Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(68)

It went on a long time, but he finally went limp. “I hear you,” he said. His voice sounded raw and strange, and it sounded . . . afraid. He opened his eyes then, and they weren’t vampire-red anymore. They were a plain, unremarkable brown. His skin had taken on an odd shimmer, as if it was shifting colors. “You must stop them, Claire. Don’t let them destroy everything we—” He stopped and let out a cry of pain, real pain, and flung out his hand. She didn’t think twice, even given what she’d just seen him do. She grabbed his fingers and held them, felt him shaking as if he were flying apart. His hand closed over hers with crushing strength, but it was only human strength now, not vampire strength.

His skin was glowing underneath, as if something was burning inside him. Or, as if something was being burned out of him. Whatever was happening to him, it was painful. The breaths he was pulling in sounded tortured and strangled, and his pulse . . .

His pulse? Breaths?

Claire’s eyes widened.

Oliver was, before her eyes, turning human. And she knew, somehow, that this was the very last thing he would want.

“No,” he said, and it burst up out of him like a growl, a primal and furious snarl. His convulsions jerked his back into a tight bow, and Claire gasped and had to pull her hand free as his grip grew tighter and tighter around hers. “No! I will not!”

It was almost a chant, or a prayer, but she couldn’t imagine God listening to anything that savage, that angry. The rage that fueled it seemed totally beyond the capacity of any human body to create, much less contain.

And suddenly, the glow inside him died, leaving his skin that chalky, translucent white again, as if he was made of milky, empty glass.

He let out a sigh, and his muscles went limp. The brown, suffering eyes drifted shut.

She was terrified to touch him, but she put her fingers on his wrist.

Silent. No pulse. No rise and fall of his chest.

But he didn’t look quite as dead as the corpses in the morgue on the other side of the building. Not yet, anyway. He looked—comatose. Suspended between life and death, vampire and human.

She supposed he would have to fall in one direction or the other.

Claire dragged him to a more comfortable position—more for herself than him, really—and raced to the other side of the lab. There were manuals there, chemicals, ranks of IV bags, checklists and protocols.

She grabbed the protocol manual and feverishly slid her finger down the table of contents. Outcomes.

The section was a dry, clinical table of results. Seventy-three percent average deaths, which Claire already knew. But, strangely, only a flat twenty percent human conversion score.

Which left seven percent . . . REV? The code didn’t mean anything to her, and she scanned the rows of legends until she found it. REV meant reverted.

Seven percent of those treated with the cure reverted to vampire. The line was marked with a footnote symbol, and she scanned down to read it.

Immediate resolution of all REV subjects using Protocol D.

Protocol D, Claire discovered, had an illustration of one of the Daylighters’ special liquid-silver-filled stakes being plunged into a vampire’s chest, then removed to release the liquid.

In other words, they euthanized any vampires who survived their cure and stayed vampire.

Claire let out a slow, shaking breath. She felt numbed, reading it; if she’d wondered before whether she was on the right side, she didn’t now. If Amelie was the devil she knew, Fallon was far, far worse.

As she was closing the book, a word caught her eye, and she flipped back to it.

The last section was labeled Counteragent.

There was a whole chapter, and she skimmed it as fast as possible, raking her gaze down the thick columns of dryly written explanations.

The counteragent was designed to halt the process of the cure. They’d originally developed it so that they could study the effects while in process—part of their live experiments, and Claire really didn’t want to think too hard about that. She found a handwritten notation to the side.

COMB 733118.

It was a combination, so there had to be a safe. Somewhere, there had to be a safe . . .

She spotted it, finally, half hidden beneath the counter—a small gray thing, digital keypad. She crashed to her knees in front of it and jammed in the numbers. 733118.

The pad beeped, and the door clicked open.

But there was nothing inside it. Nothing at all.

“No!” She screamed it out loud and smashed her palm into it with all the anguish inside her. She could hear the cries coming from the vampires on the other beds now, and she could hear Eve calling her name with frantic desperation.

If the counteragent still existed, they’d moved it. There was nothing here. Nothing to reverse the effects of Fallon’s cure. He’d taken it somewhere she couldn’t find it.

Not in time.

For a moment, Claire thought she just couldn’t do it . . . just couldn’t get up. Couldn’t rise to meet another challenge, face more pain. She just wanted to lie down, curl up, put her hands over her ears, and hide, just this once. She’d faced it all, as directly as she could. She’d fought and planned and tried.

But that open safe, that was the end of all her plans. All her hopes.

And now there was nothing left but to hold on to Eve, and Michael, while everything fell apart.

I need you, she thought. Shane, please, I need you, please be here, please . . .