Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,114
seemed calm enough, but she wasn’t going to get anything out of him. Or any of them. Shane might have; he liked to be provocative and confrontational, but it was a tactic that Claire knew she wasn’t good at.
So after a few more lame attempts at conversation failed, she waited.
It seemed to take forever, but they finally bumped off the smooth main road onto something that seemed a lot rougher, and then finally pulled to a stop crunching on gravel. The daylight that streamed in when the door slid open made the vampires flinch and squeeze their eyes shut, but they were all old enough to bear a little sun without injury. Still, Claire ached for them as their skin began to steam in the merciless glare. Oliver’s broke out into little tongues of flame before they unlocked him, and they hustled him out quickly.
Claire climbed out, and was immediately grabbed by the man who’d been sitting beside her. ‘Hey!’ she protested, but that got her nowhere. So she looked around instead as he pulled her onward.
Farm hadn’t been code. It was an actual farm, and there was an actual barn and a square two-storey farmhouse with a porch. She hoped for the farmhouse, but instead they headed her off to the big, dark-red barn.
She expected hay and horse stalls, but inside, the structure had been turned into a lab, a nice one that had a thick concrete floor, clean-room walls, steel tables and cabinets and bright overhead lighting. It was full of equipment, too. Some of it Claire recognised, but a lot was new to her. Dr Davis took charge of the three vampires and had them led over to the right side of the large open space, where he had them manacled to large steel staples in the floor. All three promptly collapsed into protective crouches.
‘This way,’ her guard said, and dragged her left, after Irene Anderson.
That part of the lab was a replica of what Dr Anderson had at MIT, with a few changes; one of the most vivid being that two tables were neatly laid out with parts and schematics. Claire recognised one of them as being the constituent parts of VLAD; the second table, though, was different.
That was the pieces of the mod, Claire realised. This would tell her exactly what Dr Anderson had done to make her device into an offensive weapon. Claire picked up the plans and studied them, took each part and looked it over. She was still examining things when Dr Anderson thumped down the heavy weight of VLAD on the table … not the working one, she realised. That was still slung across Anderson’s chest.
This was the prototype model that hadn’t yet been upgraded.
‘I’m pretty sure you can figure this out,’ Anderson said. ‘The plans are right there. You wanted to be my lab assistant. Do your job. Any funny business, and I promise you, your boyfriend will suffer for it. Got it?’
Claire nodded. She focused on the plans first. Anderson was right – it was a straightforward enough job, but a lot of it required her to disassemble the base model, and reassemble in the new configuration. She studied the schematics, and examined each piece that she was to add into the machine. That was an amplifier, capable of boosting the signal at least a hundred times beyond what she’d originally planned. That piece, snapping on underneath, was an inverter that changed the signal from something that enhanced to something that cancelled – which was what she had originally intended, to be able to remove a vampire’s desire to attack instead of having to fight in the first place. These were the modifications she’d have made in the course of her studies … something that would have made VLAD a mostly benign defensive weapon.
But the last piece was the most sinister. It was a complex combination of several different pieces, but from what Claire could puzzle out, it was designed to trigger a different set of emotions. Fear, obviously – overwhelming, paralysing terror. It also seemed to have some other component. From what Claire had seen of its effects, it must have sensitised nerves and created a strong pain reaction. Like a taser, only more intense, and very long lasting.
‘What are you doing?’
She jumped. Irene Anderson was staring at her, cold suspicion in her gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ Claire said. ‘I just wanted to be sure I understood what I was doing first. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.’