if I was possessed.
I looked at Claire, hoping that she had some miracle up her sleeve, some genius move that would get us out of this.
But Claire looked, in that moment, like a vulnerable eighteen-year-old girl, scared and numbed and overwhelmed, and I dragged her into my arms and held her because that seemed like the only thing I could do, hold her. Try, in that last desperate moment, to keep her safe. Because any second now, they were going to surround this van and riddle it with enough bullets to make us look like a drug cartel piñata. They had nothing to lose. We’d proved we weren’t going to be useful to them, and Dr Anderson didn’t need Claire any more if she’d just destroyed their vampire stock of lab rats.
And Michael would live through that. Sadly.
‘I killed them,’ she whispered to me. Her voice was shaking, and I felt hot tears wet against my skin. ‘Oh God, Shane, I killed them …’
I couldn’t do anything but hold her. I don’t know if it helped her, but it helped me push back the violent impulses inside of me that said I ought to take out the only remaining vampire among us, before it was too late.
The gunfire started, and I flinched and threw Claire to the van floor, covering her. I heard the others hitting the deck, too. I waited for the sound of metal punching in, glass breaking … but it didn’t come.
Whatever they were firing at, it wasn’t us.
I waited for a few more seconds, then carefully rose to a crouch. I couldn’t see a thing out the front windows, because we were pointed the wrong way, but if nobody was firing at us, it was giving us a chance we couldn’t waste.
I opened the van’s side door. ‘Out! Everybody out! Run for it!’
I didn’t even know where we’d go, but staying where we were wasn’t an option. Being out in the sun was going to be hell for Michael, though, and I looked around for something to help him. I found a plastic tarp rolled up in a bin behind the driver’s seat, and I tossed it to him; he broke the rope that held it closed and draped the thing around him like a portable tent.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Watch Eve.’
I nodded. With him so close to me, it was hard not to do something violent. The conflict inside was tearing me apart, but I tried not to let it show; even so, Michael gave me a weird look before he bailed out, blue tarp flapping around him like the world’s most heavily waterproofed cloak. Pete and Liz followed, then Eve.
Claire and I were the last ones out.
‘What are you doing?’ I yelled. ‘Move—’ Because the rest had stopped dead where they were, only a few feet from the van.
And then I saw why.
The guards were down. Well, one was still running and firing wildly, but as I watched, Jesse – Lady Grey – took a running leap that crossed at least twenty feet of space. She landed flat-footed in front of him, grabbed him by the throat, and tossed him twenty feet back, to Oliver, who caught him and – well, broke him. I tried not to see more of that than I had to.
Myrnin was up, too, although all I saw of him was a flicker of motion as he disappeared into the barn. Oliver finished up with the guard, nodded to Jesse, and he followed Myrnin.
She went into the farmhouse. And then there was screaming.
There was a lot of screaming.
‘Jesus,’ Eve whispered. She crossed herself, an involuntary motion dragged up from childhood habit; what we were seeing was something that not even I had seen before: vampires let loose from all their inhibitions. The purest expression of predator.
It was bloody terrifying.
‘They’re – they’re killing—’ Claire was shaking now, and her face was blank. ‘They’re killing everyone.’
I put my arms around her and didn’t say anything. I concentrated on breathing, on trying to cool the fire in my blood; it wasn’t getting easier. In fact, now that the three older vamps were back in the game – and sweeping the table clean – it was actually worse. These instincts were screaming at me to do something.
Kill them. Kill them all.
I dropped the gun I was holding. I was afraid to keep holding it. I wasn’t sure I could control this thing inside me too much longer.
Myrnin emerged from the barn. He was