“You mean, I have a right to be silent? How about my right to an attorney, do I have that? Ouch. Look, you haven’t done this be- fore, have you? Let me help you out—”
“Shut up, smart- ass. You’re creating a disturbance.”
“I just want to see Chief Moses!”
“Chief Moses is busy. You get to see me instead.”
“Should we be doing something?” Eve asked Claire, who was still sitting frozen in her chair. “Because I’m kinda used to Shane being arrested, but this seems wrong. And weren’t you going to ask the questions?”
Claire snapped herself out of the feeling of unreality that had settled over her, and stood up. Officer Friendly’s (the name really did fit him) eyes flicked over to scan her, then dismissed her.
She tried anyway. “Sir, we know Hannah Moses. She wouldn’t want you to do this. We only need to ask her some questions. Im- portant questions.”
The lady on the phone, who had just finished her call and fi- nally replaced the receiver, rolled her eyes. “Yeah. About a dog bite.”
Oddly enough, that stopped Officer Friendly for a couple of seconds, and then he grabbed Shane by the shoulder, turned him around to face him, and said, “You got bit by a dog?” It was said with both concern and eagerness, such a weird combination that Claire couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. Neither could Shane, by his expression. “When?”
Shane managed to shrug, despite the handcuffs and the grip on his shoulder. “A while back.”
The cop turned Claire’s boyfriend back around, skinned up one of Shane’s sleeves, got nothing, and tried the other. He stared at the ruddy scar for a second, then took out his keys and unlocked the handcuffs. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “I’ll get the chief.
Have a seat.”
Just like that, he left. All of them— even the officer/ receptionist— looked silently confused, and it lasted for a full minute until the frosted- glass door opened again to admit Han- nah Moses.
“Sorry,” the lady behind the desk said, “but this young man was very insistent—”
Hannah ignored her. She walked to Shane, grabbed his arm— the correct one— and looked at the scar. “Dammit,” she said.
“Come with me, all of you.”
She led them into her office, where she slammed and locked the door behind them.
“I just—,” Shane began, but then she held up one finger to stop him, went behind her desk, and opened a drawer. She flipped some kind of switch, then nodded. “What is that, spy crap?” Shane asked.
“Spy crap,” she affirmed, and sat down in the wheeled office chair. “I knew you’d been bitten, but in the press of everything else, it slipped my mind. I’m sorry. What kind of aftereffects are you feeling?”
“Hang on a minute. Who the hell is trying to listen in on you? All the vamps are back there not shopping at the mall,” Eve said.
“Unless . . . you don’t trust your shiny new boss. I think he is your new boss, right? Fallon the Fanatic?”
Hannah didn’t answer that. She just fixed Shane with that steady look and waited until he said, “The bite’s feeling pretty weird, actually. Not so bad when I left Morganville, but it flared up on the road, and got worse when I came home. It started small, sort of like an ache in my arm, but then I started feeling this . . . urge.”
“An urge to hunt vampires. Fight them. Kill them,” Hannah said. “Which is why you left the mall so suddenly. You couldn’t control it anymore.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It felt like something was taking me over, and I didn’t like it. Still don’t. Look, I’m not saying I’m some vampire groupie or anything, but I don’t hate hate them, not like I used to do. Not like my dad did.” It was unusual, Claire thought, for Shane to look like this— helpless. Lost. “I just don’t know what I’m doing. I only know I don’t want to.”
“Hannah . . .” Claire sank down in one of the visitor chairs and leaned forward, staring at the chief. “Please tell us what’s going on.
Please. We need to know.”
Hannah looked away, as if she was composing herself for a moment, and then she nodded. “The Daylight Foundation has been conducting research for a long time,” she said. “It’s an old organization, very old, though they’ve only recently come out of hiding. They conducted cutting- edge genetics experiments; some worked, some didn’t. Some ended up creating things they found useful.”
“Like the devil dogs,” Shane said. “Like the one that bit me that night.”
“The dogs were part of Fallon’s advance team,” Hannah said.
“He’d seen an opening, with Oliver’s exile from Morganville. He thought there was enough unrest, given what had just happened, to depose Amelie from her position. And he was right, damn him.