Feast of Fools Page 0,87

and then Myrnin said, "It's not what you think."

Claire stepped away from the door. She swung it shut and clicked the padlock shut. "If you didn't want anybody coming after you, you should have locked up."

"I don't have time for this, and neither do you. Now, do you want to help me, or - "

"I'm done helping you!" she shouted. Her abused voice broke like shattered glass, and she heard the raw fury bleed out. "You ran! You left us all to die!"

Myrnin flinched. He looked away, down at what he'd been doing at the lab table, and she saw that he'd prepared a number of slides. "I had my reasons, " he said. "It's the long game, Claire. Amelie understands."

"Amelie got staked in the heart," she said.

His head slowly rose. "What?"

"Bishop bought off her tribute, Jason. Jason staked her."

"No." It was a bare thread of sound. Myrnin shut his eyes. "No, that can't be. She knew - I told her - "

"You left her to die!"

Myrnin's legs failed. He slid down to his knees and buried his face in his hands, silent in his anguish.

Claire gripped the cross, holding it at her side, and walked toward him. He didn't move.

"Is she alive?" he asked.

"I don't know. Maybe."

Myrnin nodded. "Then it is my fault. That shouldn't have happened."

"And the rest of it should have?"

"Long game," Myrnin whispered. "You don't understand."

There was a chessboard, a familiar one, set up in the corner where Myrnin normally read. A game was frozen in midattack. Claire stared at it, and for a second she saw the specter of Amelie sitting with Myrnin, moving those pieces in white, cold fingers.

"She knew," she said. "She helped you. Didn't she?"

Myrnin stood up, and Claire held up the cross between them. Myrnin didn't so much as look at it. She pushed it closer. Maybe it was a proximity thing?

Myrnin closed his hand over hers, and took the cross away. He held it on the open palm of his hand.

No sizzling. No reaction at all.

"Crosses don't work," he said. "We all pretend they do, but they don't."

Her mouth was hanging open. "Why?" Great. Her last words were, as always, going to be questions.

"Obviously, it keeps people from moving on to things that will hurt us." Myrnin lifted his eyebrows, but the dark eyes below them were cautious and sad. "Claire. I wasn't supposed to stay. I was to provide a distraction, get my sample, and leave."

"Sample."

He pointed toward the lab table, and what he'd been doing. Claire saw the silver gleam of the knife he'd carried to the feast - clean now, no trace of blood.

But there was blood carefully mounted and fixed on glass slides, ranks of them.

"Bishop's blood?"

Myrnin nodded. "We've never been able to obtain a sample from any vampire beyond Morganville. As far as we knew, there weren't any vampires beyond Morganville. Look."

Claire didn't trust him. He stepped back, far back, and indicated the microscope with an apologetic bow.

"Mind if I hold this?" she asked, and grabbed the knife.

"So long as you keep it pointed away from me," he said. The weight of it eased her jitters a little, but it still took her several tries to look into the microscope long enough to focus, instead of checking his position.

When she did, she immediately recognized the difference.

Bishop's blood cells were - for a vampire - healthy.

She stepped back and stared at Myrnin. "He's not infected."

"It gets better," Myrnin said, and nodded toward the ranks of slides. "Try number eight."

She switched out the slides. "I don't see any difference."

"Exactly," he said. "That is my blood, mixed with Bishop's. Now check number seven - my blood, alone."

It was a nightmare. Worse than Claire had ever seen it. Whatever the serum was doing to Myrnin, it was destroying him.

She checked slide eight again.

Slide seven.

"He's the cure," she said.

"Now you see," Myrnin said, "why I was willing to risk everything and everyone to be sure."

Myrnin's health failed again after another hour - longer than Claire would have given him, based on what she saw under the slides. When he started tiring and mixing words, she unlocked the prison door and took him back to his cell.

"Damn," she sighed, remembering the broken door. "We need to move you."

That took some time, although she grabbed only what Myrnin pointed out as essentials - clothes, blankets, the rug, his books. By the time she'd gotten everything put into the next cell, and replaced the ancient filthy bunk with the clean cot, Myrnin