Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,111

pocket of my jeans. I didn’t look down, just straight into her face.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I get your point.’ I shoved her backward, and the driver got to his feet, frowned, and opened up the steel door. He shoved Eve inside, then me, and dragged Liz in as well.

‘If you want to go at each other, do it in there,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sending in any bandages. You want to fight, you can just bleed freely.’

‘He’s not worth the effort of a punch,’ Eve said. She turned her back and walked away, arms folded again.

Pete arrived and was shoved inside, and the door boomed shut. I didn’t get a bathroom trip, probably to punish me for being myself.

The room, upon inspection, was a plain concrete box, no windows, nothing. There was a faintly antiseptic smell, as if it had been used for storage of medical supplies, but there was nothing left but us, and a small hand-sized drain in the centre of the floor. My dad had already said that a human body could fit through any size of hole large enough to accommodate the head; it was just a matter of dislocating enough bones. Yeah, he was fun that way.

But this hole wasn’t even big enough for my clenched fist, never mind my skull. So that was out. Fortunately.

I checked the door and the ceiling and the corners. I didn’t see any cameras watching us, but I didn’t think I could rely on privacy; tech had gotten way too good for that. We’d been spied on once by someone we’d thought of – wrongly – as a friend, and I wasn’t about to spill my plans, such as they were, to Douche Bag Davis and his friends.

I was scared for Claire. Heart-stoppingly scared. She was all alone, surrounded by wolves who could take her down at any time, and the only thing she had to use was her guts, and her wits.

Fully armed, then. But it still scared me.

I put my hands in my pants pockets and slouched, like any street corner punk. Give me a backward cap and saggies and a sports jersey, and I’d have nailed the whole look. But it wasn’t just attitude. It gave me the chance to figure out what Eve had managed to shove down my pants – a thing that I wasn’t going to tell Claire about, incidentally.

It was a piece of rusted metal, probably some kind of flange to hold the sink drain in. About four inches long, jagged on the end. As weapons went, it was jailhouse-nasty. Pretty much perfect, actually. Too bad I hadn’t gotten a bathroom trip; there must have been plenty of other opportunities in there for fun mayhem-makers. You could kill somebody with a bar of soap, if you tried hard enough.

‘So,’ Eve murmured, head down so any cameras wouldn’t see her talking. ‘What’s our play, then?’

‘Still hating me?’ I talked to my shoes, too, and kept it quiet, in case there were microphones as well as cameras.

‘It’ll take a little bit longer for the burn to go away, yeah. Why? Am I hurting your little tender feelings?’

Yes, I thought, but I said, ‘Bitch, please. You know I ain’t got no feelings.’

‘About that plan?’

‘Yeah, about that,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’re going to have to kill me.’

‘Goody.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

What have I done?

It kept running through Claire’s mind at breakneck speed, over and over … that moment when Anderson had pulled the trigger, and the Myrnin she knew had just disappeared. What was left was a crying, shaking wreck of a man who didn’t even seem to be a vampire, just a shattered relic of a human being. If she’d passed him in a doorway, she would have assumed he was a homeless, mentally disturbed wreck.

Which, technically, she guessed he was. And she’d done it to him.

Claire had rarely felt so alone. She’d thought coming across the country to MIT was a new start; she’d thought she was here to learn, to grow, to change. But instead, it had been a scam from the start. Anderson had never intended to teach her a thing. She’d just wanted VLAD, and Claire was the means to the end.

Speaking of VLAD, Dr Anderson had been hard at work on it, apparently, and she’d taken it from concept to harsh execution while Claire had been thinking they were going back to basics. All that she’d been doing, she understood now, had just been busy work, so Dr Anderson