Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,80

gave a thumbs-up sign to Shane, who nodded and looked down at Michael again with tense, desperately still silence.

Then the door behind Claire’s back vibrated under a sudden, very strong volley of knocking. Too strong. Claire yelped and whipped around to stare out the peephole again, and saw a pallid face under a shock of wildly windblown black hair. No human being was naturally that pale.

She unlocked it and said, ‘Get in, quick!’ because it was Myrnin … and behind him, Oliver.

The two vampires entered in a rush of displaced air, and Oliver quickly shut and locked the door again. He leant against it, seeming tired – weirdly – and Claire had a chance to think, Why is Oliver here? Because even though he’d been exiled from Morganville by Amelie, she didn’t think he had any reason to be poking around this part of the country. Oliver looked ragged, too – and dressed down, in worn blue jeans grimy with oil, a faded, loose T-shirt with some kind of wolf design on it, and his long, salt-and-pepper curly hair worn in a loose, sloppy ponytail in back. It didn’t seem to have had a wash recently. Neither did he.

And Myrnin … well, at least he wasn’t dressed any worse than he usually was, but he seemed very pale, and not any cleaner than Oliver. They’d both been travelling hard, she guessed, although vampires didn’t really smell bad, unless they came in contact with things that did. From the general miasma around the two of them, they’d been around rotting garbage for a while.

Myrnin stared at her for a long few seconds, then scraped his disorderly hair back from his face, and said, ‘They don’t have you, then. But do they have it?’

‘It? What does that mean?’ Claire asked. He didn’t answer her. He just hugged her, suddenly and violently, and before she could even make a surprised sound he was gone. It was like being hugged by a snowman, only less … moist. And more unpleasantly fragrant.

Oliver said, ‘We went to see Irene Anderson. Myrnin has a good relationship with her, even now. However, she was … unhelpful. She had no idea where you had gone, only that you had taken the device with you from her laboratory.’

‘I – wait, what? I didn’t take anything!’

‘Oh,’ Myrnin said, and turned back toward her from where he stood next to Eve. ‘Oh, that is such very, very bad news. Because if you didn’t, someone did. Someone with laboratory access, since I personally reviewed the records.’

Myrnin sounded … sane. Despite the tangled hair, the dirty homeless-style clothes, the smell of garbage and the whiff of things much worse. He looked taut, worried and paranoid, but not crazy.

So, things were very, very bad, then. Claire sometimes thought of him as only recreationally crazy; when things were life and death, her boss (and friend) seemed to make a concerted effort to view things with icy precision. He paid for it later, but she’d never been less than grateful to him for making the effort.

‘You’re saying someone broke into Dr Anderson’s lab and took VLAD.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘VLAD?’

‘The – the device. Vampire Levelling Adjustment Device.’ She realised, belatedly, that Oliver, who was decidedly not in her inner circle of people she trusted, was listening, but he refrained from comment. His attention was fixed on Michael, as if he actually cared.

Which, knowing Oliver, he actually might, though he’d no doubt deny it.

She was almost sure Myrnin would glower at her for naming her pet project after a famous vampire – Vlad Tepes, commonly thought to be the historical inspiration for Count Dracula – but he only shook his head in impatience. ‘We must go, and quickly. We can’t stay here,’ Myrnin said. ‘Oliver and I are being hunted.’

‘By who?’

‘Whom, my dear girl, whom, grammar really has descended to the lowest—’

‘Myrnin!’

‘I have no idea.’ His tone was flat, and there were dangerous embers of red in his eyes. ‘When I do, there will be reckoning for Michael.’

‘He took a blow meant for me,’ Oliver said. ‘Stupid. I could likely have avoided it if he’d given me the chance.’

That made Eve spin around and level him with a white-hot glare. ‘Likely? Likely? You asshole, he saved your life!’

Normally, having a human use that tone with him would have made Oliver snarl, show fangs and ‘teach her a lesson’… but he did none of that. He only looked away, and Eve glared a moment more before kneeling down at Michael’s