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by the shirt and towed him with her into the little-used parlor at the front of the house, the farthest she could get from Frank, although she knew it really wasn't any use. He was a vampire; he could probably hear ants walking. Well, at least it felt like privacy.

She let go of Shane, who looked down at her with what seemed like a kind of amusement. "You know," he said, "most people were scared to death of my dad, at least when he was drinking. Including me, mostly. Now he's a vamp, and you just ordered him around like you don't give a crap."

"I don't like him very much."

"Yeah, got that. You look like a strong wind will snap you off at the knees, but you're a tough little thing, aren't you?"

She smiled and wished that for once she wouldn't blush at a compliment, but that was a lost cause. "I guess," she said. "I'm still here. That counts."

"Yeah," he said, and moved a strand of hair back from her face. "That counts." He suddenly realized what he was doing and cleared his throat. "Okay, so what's the plan? We get Frankenstein and his friends to back us up?"

"I heard that!" Frank called from the living room. Shane silently shot him the finger, which Claire slapped down.

"Don't do that!" she whispered.

"What, you think he can sense it with his magic vampire powers?"

"We need him, Shane."

He smiled bleakly. "Yeah, well, Frank's never been around when I needed him, so don't put a lot of faith in that."

"We need to come at this two ways," Claire said. "First, you and I are going to go in the front entrance to the lab. Second, right about the time we get Myrnin distracted--"

"Who's Myrnin?"

Claire controlled an urge to roll her eyes. "Badass crazy vampire scientist who's my boss."

"You realize no part of that sentence made sense, right?"

"Just stay out of his way. Don't let him get close."

"Yeah, that's easy."

"If you can get a crossbow bolt or a stake in him, do it," Claire said. "It won't kill him if you don't use silver, but it'll put him down and out of the way until we're finished."

"What if he has friends? You know, backup?"

"We do the same thing to them."

Shane pointed a thumb at the living room. "And what about him and his friends?"

"They come in the back way," Claire said. "Through the portal." "Good plan," Shane said, and then paused. "What's a portal?"

Claire sighed. "We've got work to do."

Chapter Fourteen

FOURTEEN

Frank's friends turned out to be--no surprise--kind of the dregs. A couple of vampires whom Claire absolutely didn't trust around her veins, and who had a disturbing tendency to flash fangs at her when they thought she wasn't looking. One was named Rudolph (and she had to resist the temptation to laugh), and the other just went by West. They looked exactly like the kind of friends she'd have expected Frank Collins to have--greasy, shifty, and tough. Oh, and West was a woman, a tough blond biker-type chick who wore a muscle tee to show off her biceps, which even Shane agreed were impressive.

He'd also brought in some humans--again, biker types, who were big on muscles and (Claire thought) not so much with the brains. But they were going to help, and for their own reasons--mainly because their family or friends or girlfriends had forgotten all about them. They weren't the kind of people who liked being overlooked.

The Glass House filled up pretty quickly, and Claire had to send people out for supplies; she broke out all of the vampire-fighting equipment she knew about in the house, which was considerable, but it still wasn't enough to equip what was shaping up to be a small army. She gave her recurve bow--a souvenir of her last trip outside of Morganville--to West, who said she used to be a competition archer, back in her day. Which was, apparently, back in the day when people wore armor. Claire kept a small folding crossbow for herself.

By the time the human bikers came back with more wood for stakes, and cases of beer and Cokes, the day was half over.

"Do they have to drink beer before we do this?" Claire complained to Frank, who was looking over a selection of stakes and testing them for sharpness on the end. He had a can in his hand, too. "Correction: do you have to drink beer before we do this?"

"You get ready your way," he told her, and chose his