Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,29

Anderson sent her a warm, knowing smile. ‘Yeah, I know how that goes. Working for Myrnin means being zookeeper, nanny and best friend. Trouble is, knowing when each of those things is necessary, because making a mistake means you become a Happy Meal. Badge of honour for you to have survived the experience, Claire. And for getting the hell out of Morganville. Bet you think the worst is over, right?’

Claire shuddered, thinking about the draug, and Bishop, about the thousand life-threatening moments she’d made it through since coming to town. ‘Hopefully,’ she said.

‘You’re wrong,’ Dr Anderson said. She sounded certain, and sober. ‘You live there, at that level, it’s like living inside a video game. Surviving is a high, an achievement. Then you come out here into the real world, and the PTSD starts to set in … because nobody cares what you went through, or that you survived it, and your body’s used to a constant adrenaline pump. It’s like coming off a drug. If it hasn’t hit you yet, it will … normal life takes a lot of getting used to, Claire. But if you need to talk to someone, well, I’ve been through it. What’s the biggest thing you’re missing so far?’

‘Shane,’ Claire said. Her throat got tight and raw, and for a moment she couldn’t go on. ‘My boyfriend.’

‘Ah,’ Anderson said. Nothing else. Her eyebrows went up, but she didn’t ask anything, and after she’d waited a moment she got the idea Claire wasn’t going to tell, either. ‘Let me give you the tour, then. I assume you’re familiar with Myrnin’s dimensional portals? Did he teach you how to operate them?’

From there, the hours passed fast, full of technical discussions and equations, lightning-fast chains of thought as each of them built on the other’s ideas and work. By noon, they had a working mathematical expression of how the portals worked, and Claire matched it up against the work she’d done with Myrnin on the same thing.

Dr Anderson’s final version was better, cleaner and covered more theoretical ground.

The afternoon was spent learning equipment, most of which Claire had never seen, though some of it she’d heard about. Most fascinating was a genetic sequencer hard at work cracking the code of vampire DNA. ‘It’s deceptively human,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘Tough to tell the difference, because there’s really very little to find. It’s almost as if the DNA was only part of the equation for how vampires change – it’s not just a physical process. And I don’t have any equipment that can capture something that only happens on the spiritual plane, at least, not yet.’

‘I might,’ Claire said. She felt tentative about it, and a little overwhelmed by what Dr Anderson was doing in this very sparkly lab; who was she to pretend to be an inventor? It didn’t feel nearly as weird when she was with Myrnin; everything seemed possible.

Here, she felt very … young. And inexperienced.

But she had Dr Anderson’s undivided attention. ‘Go on.’

‘I … I thought that since Myrnin had made machines that interacted with vampire powers, then it might be possible to make another machine to cancel them.’

There was a long, strange silence, and Claire felt herself growing hot and uncomfortable under Anderson’s steady stare. Then her professor said, very carefully, ‘Do you have such a device?’

‘Maybe? I mean, I know it can amplify vampire emotions. I think if I can use it in reverse, it could make them afraid instead of angry, cancel out their aggression and hunger … It’s all really just a guess right now.’

‘But you built it.’

‘I have a prototype.’

‘Where?’

Dr Anderson was taking this way more seriously than Claire had ever expected. Even Myrnin hadn’t seemed so impressed. ‘It’s packed, they’re delivering it with all my stuff this week.’

‘You shipped it?’

‘I thought it might be hard to get it through security at the airport.’

‘Ah. Excellent point. But you really thought it was safer to trust it to a moving company? Do the vampires know you have this device?’

‘Myrnin does.’

‘And has he told Amelie?’

‘I don’t know,’ Claire said. She felt more than a little off balance, as if she had done something bad but she wasn’t sure what exactly it was. ‘Shouldn’t he have?’

‘If he thinks you’re worth keeping alive, he won’t,’ Dr Anderson said. She had a remote, calculating look in her blue eyes, suddenly, and it was chilling. ‘The last thing Amelie would want is a device like that, capable of giving humans a way to control vampires. When