Bite Club Page 0,46

he looked so relieved she almost backed up a step or two.

"There you are!" he cried, and held his phone out to her. "This thing doesn't work."

"It does. I got your text."

"But I've been sending it over and over, and then it just stopped working."

It had stopped working because, evidently, he'd been pushing buttons so hard he'd broken them. Claire shook her head, took the phone, and tossed it in the garbage can in the corner. "I'll get you another one," she said. "Well? I'm here. What's the crisis?"

He stopped and stared at her. "Bishop is on the loose, and you're asking me what the crisis might be? Really?"

"I...thought the vampires would be taking care of that."

"Indeed. Oliver's got half the vampires in Morganville making inquiries of the other half."

"Only half?"

"The half we can trust interrogating the half we can't," Myrnin said. "A sad truth, but there are more than a few who preferred Bishop's open tyranny to Amelie's more reasonable approach. There are always a few, Claire, who like being told what to do instead of being required to think. And those are the ones you should fear. That goes equally for humans, I'm afraid. Critical thinking has become a sadly rare skill these days."

She nodded, because she already knew that. "So what do you want me to do?"

"I want you to speak with Frank. We need him to be on the alert for any sign of Bishop. He has control of the monitoring systems, and he should be able to provide us solid leads."

"Wait, you wantme to do it? Why didn't you?"

Myrnin drew himself up to his full height, hands clasped behind his back. "I have things to do," he said. "And...Frank and Imay have had a little disagreement. He isn't speaking to me anymore."

"He--Wait, can he do that?"

"Damn straight I can." Frank's gravelly voice came from her cell phone speaker, muffled by her pocket, but still clearly audible. "I can do what I want, and I don't want to hear anything from that jackass anymore."

"Frank--" Claire sighed. "Fine. I hate this, you know. I hate that you're all fangs-out at each other when one of you doesn't even have any fangs anymore. But we don't have time for your girl fight, okay? Will you please look for Bishop, so he doesn't get us all killed horribly?"

"Well," Frank said, "you've got a point about that."

Claire turned to Myrnin. "Anybody else you want monitored?"

"Well, there's Gloriana," Myrnin said. "I would definitely look out for Gloriana, since she's the newest in town, and, well, you've met her, haven't you?"

Claire frowned. Gloriana...oh.She'd met her once, briefly, at a party about a month ago. Gloriana--or Glory, for cutesy-short--was beautiful, in an antique kind of way; she had waves of long blond hair and bright blue eyes and a smile that made men melt like ice cream in the sun. Vampire, of course. Charming. But she'd taken a special interest in Michael, and that hadn't sat very well with Eve at all. "Glory's a Bishop girl?"

"I wouldn't put it like that," Myrnin said, "but Gloriana has a history of betting with the winners, and she was Bishop's pet for a short time, about three hundred years ago, I believe. She may still have some fond memories of him, as difficult as that is to understand. Old loyalties die hard among our kind. So do old enemies, and she never was Amelie's friend, though they're polite enough in public."

"Is sheyour friend?" Claire hesitated, then said, "Or, you know,friend ?"

He raised his eyebrows and air quoted. "Friend?"

"You know what I mean. Oliver practically admitted he'd had a fling with her once."

"I don't haveflings ." Again with the air quotes. "And, no, Gloriana is not my friend. Nor my enemy, particularly; I rarely had anything to do with her at all. She's agreed to abide by the laws of Morganville, but if a situation arises where she might sidestep them...well. I would not like to stand between her and her desires. She can be quite cold-blooded."

Claire felt a stab of dread. "Uh, she could be after Shane, then?"

"Shane?" Myrnin rolled his eyes. "Why in the world would you leap to such a conclusion? Definitely not. She doesn't do humans. She finds them commonplace. And, strangely enough, not everyone is as fascinated by your beau as you are."

"Well, then, would she be afteryou ?"

That made him stop for a second, as if the idea had never occurred to him. "No," he finally said. "No, I don't believe