Claire Danvers was in a rare bad mood, and nearly getting arrested didn't improve it.
First, her university classes hadn't gone well at all, and then she'd had a humiliating argument with her "adviser" (she usually thought of him that way, in quotes, because he didn't "advise" her to do anything but take boring core subjects and not chal enge herself), and then she'd gotten a completely unfair B on a physics paper she knew had been letter perfect. She would have grudgingly accepted a B on something unimportant, like history, but no, it had to be in her major. And of course Professor Carlyle wasn't in his office to talk about it.
So she wasn't fully paying attention when she stepped off the curb. Traffic in Morganville, Texas, wasn't exactly fast and furious, and here by Texas Prairie University, people were fully used to stopping for oblivious students.
Stil , the screech of brakes surprised her and sent her stumbling back to the safety of the sidewalk, and it was only after a couple of fast breaths that she realized she'd nearly been run over by a police cruiser.
And a policeman was getting out of the car, looking grim.
As he stalked over to her she realized he was probably a vampire-he was too pale to be a human, and he had on sunglasses even here in the shade of the building. Glancing at the cruiser to confirm, she saw the extreme tinting job on the windows. Definitely vampire police. The official slogan of the police was to protect and serve, but her boyfriend cal ed the vampire patrol the to protect and serve up for dinner patrol.
It was unusual to see one so close to the university, though. Normally, vampire cops worked at night, and closer to the center of town, where Founder's Square was located, along with the central vamp population. Only the regular residents would see them there, and not the transient- though pretty oblivious-students.
"I'm sorry," she said, and swal owed a rusty taste in her mouth that seemed composed of shock and entirely useless anger. "I wasn't looking where I was going."
"Obviously," he said. Like most vamps, he had an accent, but she'd long ago given up trying to identify it; if they lived long enough, vampires tended to pick up dozens of accents, and many of them were antique anyway. His facial features seemed...maybe Chinese? "Identification."
"For walking?"
"Identification."
Claire swal owed her protest and reached in her backpack for her wal et. She pulled out her student ID card and Texas driver's license and handed them over. He glanced at them and shoved the cards back.
"Not those," he said. "Your town identification."
"My...what?"
"You should have received it in the mail."
"Wel , I haven't!"
He took off his sunglasses. Behind them, his eyes were very dark, but there were hints of red. He stared at her for a moment, then nodded.
"Al right. When you get your card, carry it at alltimes. And next time, watch your step. You get yourself hit by a car, I'll consider you roadkil ."
With that, he put the sunglasses back on, turned, and got back in his car. Before Claire could think about any way to respond, he'd put the cruiser in gear and whipped around the corner.
It did not improve her mood.
Before she could even think about going home, Claire had a mandatory stop to make, at her part-time job. She dreaded it today, because she knew she was in no shape to deal with the incredibly inconsistent moods of Myrnin, her vampire mad-scientist boss. He might be laser focused and super-rational; he might be talking to crockery and quoting Alice in Wonderland (that had been the scene during her last visit). But whatever he was doing, he'd have work for her, and probably too much of it.
But at least he was never, ever boring.
She'd made the walk so often that she did it on autopilot, hardly even noticing the streets and houses and the alley down which she had to pass; she checked her phone and read texts as she jogged down the long marble steps that led into the darkness of his lab, or lair, whichever mood he was in today. The lights were on, which was nice. As she put her phone away, she saw that Myrnin was bent over a microscope-an ancient thing that she'd tried to put away a dozen times in favor of a newer electronic model, but he kept unearthing the thing. He stepped away from the eyepiece to scribble numbers frantically on a chalkboard. The board was covered in numbers, and to Claire's eyes they looked completely random -not just in terms of their numerical values, but in the way they'd been written, at allangles and in allareas of the available space. Some were even upside down. It wasn't a formula or an analysis. It was complete gibberish.
So. It was going to be one of those days. Lovely.
"Hey," Claire said with fatalistic resignation as she dumped her backpack on the floor and opened up a drawer to retrieve her lab coat. It was a good thing she looked first; Myrnin had dumped an assortment of scalpels in on top of the fabric. Any one of them could have sliced her to the bone. "What are you doing?"
"Did you know that certain types of coral qualify as immortal? The definition of scientific immortality is that if the mortality rate of a species doesn't increase after it reaches maturity, there is no such thing as aging...black coral, for instance. Or the Great Basin bristlecone pine. I'm trying to determine if there is any resemblance between the development of those cel ular colonies with the replacement of human cel s that takes place in a conversion to vampirism...." He was talking a mile a minute, with a fever pitch that Claire always dreaded. It meant he was in need of medication, which he wouldn't take; she'd need to be stealthy about adding it to his blood supply, again, to bring him down a little into the rational zone. "Did you bring me a hamburger?"
"Did I- No, Myrnin, I didn't bring you a hamburger." Bizarre. He'd never asked for that before.
"Coffee?"
"It's late."
"Doughnuts?"