Shane silently flipped one to her. On the casing was drawn, in black marker, the alchemical symbol for silver. Definitely Myrnin, because only he would think to write a warning that nobody but the two of them could possibly read. "How do you know what this means?"
Shane looked faintly injured. "I make it my business to know everything about silver. And I saw your notes. I study up on everything when it comes to your boss, anyway." There was a flicker of jealousy about that, but she didn't have time, or energy, to consider it very much. Not even whether she liked it.
"There must be hundreds of shells in there," Claire said wonderingly, as she leaned over the crate. Her hair, growing longer now, brushed over her face, and she impatiently pushed it back. It needed a wash, and that made her yearn for a shower, but cold bottled-water rinses were all she could look forward to for a while. "I thought he used everything he had during the battle last night."
"He's worked straight through," Naomi said. "Shut away in a room down the hall. He summoned guards to bring these here only an hour ago. I understand he has commandeered others to make these cartridges as well."
When Myrnin worked that feverishly, it meant one of two things: he was desperately afraid, or he was in a severely manic phase. Or both. Neither was good. When he was afraid, Myrnin was very unpredictable. When he was manic, he was inevitably going to crash, hard, and there was no time for that now.
As if she'd read Claire's thoughts, Naomi said, "He does need looking after, but it can wait until we find Theo."
"Amelie's that bad?" Shane asked.
"Yes. She is that bad, I'm afraid. If I still had a heart, it would ache for her, my brave and foolish sister. She should never have come after us. The law is the law. Those caught by draug are already dead. Rescuing us put all others at risk."
Claire stopped loading shotgun shells into her messenger bag to stare. "She saved you. And Michael. And Oliver."
"It doesn't matter who she saved. The point is that she allowed herself, our queen, to be put at risk for others, and that is foolish, and emotional. The time of Elizabeth in armor is long over. Queens have ever ruled far from the battles."
"News flash, lady. There are no queens anymore," Shane said. He loaded shells in a shotgun and snapped it shut, then searched for a place to strap it on that didn't interfere with the flamethrower. "No queens, no kings, no emperors. Not in America. Only CEOs. Same thing, but not so many crowns."
"Vampires will always have rulers," Naomi said. "It is the order of things." She said it like the sky was blue, a plain and obvious fact. Shane shrugged and gave Claire a look; she shrugged back. Vamp politics were so not their business. "Come. We must find the doctor."
Shane shook his head. "He's the only one you have?"
"No," Naomi said, "but he is the best, and the only one we have who has moved somewhat beyond medieval techniques of bleeding and cupping." She handed Claire a shotgun and gave her a doubtful look. "You can shoot?"
Claire nodded as she loaded the cartridges. "Shane taught me." Not that it was easy for someone her size; a shotgun packed a hard kick to the shoulder, and she'd always come away from practice bruised and aching. Naomi was even more frail, but Claire was willing to bet that it would be nothing for her.
Shane settled his flamethrower more comfortably on his shoulders. "Ladies? After you."
"Rude," Claire said.
"I was being polite!"
"Not when you have a flamethrower."
CHAPTER TWO
MICHAEL
I miss my guitar.
That sounded stupid in my head, and it probably was stupid, but my fingers ached to be holding the weight of it. Music always stilled the noise inside me, made everything seem orderly, logical, not so out of control and terrifying. From the first time I'd picked up an instrument I'd realized that those sounds that other people made, famous people ... those could be mine, mine to control, mine to use to speak without words. And that had been more than magic.
It had been survival.
Now, without my guitar, I felt naked, alone, out of control. But it would be deeply risky to go back to the house to retrieve anything, much less something everybody would see as nonessential. Maybe I could get to the music store where I taught lessons; that was farther uptown, away from where the draug were holed up. Didn't matter if it was closed. A vampire didn't have to seriously worry about things like locked doors and steel screens over windows, and entry restrictions didn't apply to stores.
I still couldn't quite reconcile that. I was a vampire.
I know, it wasn't a revelation, exactly .... I had been a vampire for a while now, and before that, I'd been half vampire, half ghost, trapped in my house, put on hold between life and death. But until today, I hadn't felt so ... wrong. So alien.
So not myself.
Naomi, who had taken more interest in me than the others, had warned me this would happen, that I'd start to feel distance between me and the humanity I'd once had; she'd warned me that living as I did, trying to still be what I'd been, would start to hurt me, and hurt the people I cared about.
And she'd been right. I'd proven that, hadn't I? I'd lost control. I'd bitten Eve.