Bitter Blood (30 page)

Oh.
Oh
. The machine. It lay on the coffee table, glowing a faint green, and the business end was pointed toward where Claire and I had been standing. It had gotten turned on when she’d dumped it there, I supposed.

And then, ha ha not funny, it had turned
me
on.

Claire, blushing a furious and gorgeous shade of red, circled around the table and flipped some kind of switch on the back. The glowing died, and so did the humming, and I felt…not normal, but less crazed. “Sorry,” she said, and bit her lip. They were still damp and swollen from our kissing, and I shook myself out of focusing on them with a real effort. “It’s—kind of an experiment.”

“Myrnin’s making a lust ray,” I said. Of course he was, because…why not? I had to admit, I’d probably see some value in that myself. Hell. I just
had
. “Wait a second. I accidentally pointed that at Michael, and it made him—”

“Angry,” Michael said. “Hyper-angry. Ready to kill.”

“No, no, it’s not—” Claire swallowed and visibly tried to calm herself. “It’s not a lust ray. It just magnifies what you’re feeling. And it’s not Myrnin’s. It’s mine. I was just—experimenting.”

“I know I’m not a scientific peer review or anything, but I have to say I think it works. If that’s what you were going for, anyway.” I skipped over the whole issue of why it had decided to focus on that particular impulse in me. She’d take it as a compliment, hopefully, but I wasn’t too sure about that. My track record of guessing what might offend girls wasn’t exactly perfect. “What were you thinking of using it for? Because the way it sent Michael into rage overdrive…”

The blush just wasn’t getting any less red, or—even without the ray—any less interesting. “The idea is that once I can exactly amplify a feeling, I can also cancel it out,” she said. “It was supposed to just work with vampires, not humans. I don’t know why—why it worked on you, Shane. I’m so sorry.”

“Well”—I shrugged—“I’m not, particularly. That was a little bit fun.”

“I hate to admit it, but it was when it was pointed at me, too,” Michael said. “Kind of like it took away all the inhibitions.”

“A drunk gun,” I said. “Awesome.”

“Not,” Claire said, and frowned. “It’s dangerous.” She picked it up and stuck it in her backpack, engaging some kind of safety switch I hadn’t noticed before. “I’ll find someplace to keep it where it won’t hurt anybody until I can destroy it. It was probably a dumb idea, anyway.”

Eve disappeared into the kitchen, ever practical, and came out with a blood bag that she tossed to Michael, who snatched it out of the air and bit into it with a frightening level of enthusiasm. He drained it in about, oh, ten seconds or less, the same way a human would chug water after a really aggressive workout. And it had about the same effect; he got a little weak-kneed and had to brace himself on a wall, but after the shock passed, he seemed almost immediately better. His eyes faded back to simple blue, and his
skin coloring went from dead-guy pale to more like ivory. Wounds started shutting faster, too.

“Thanks,” he said to Eve. She raised a cocky eyebrow.

“You’ll make it up to me later,” she said, and winked. That got a really different kind of smile from Michael, and I found something else to look at, fast. Now I was the one feeling like an intruder on something personal, like I guessed Mikey had earlier, what with all the passionate groping and tongues.

Funny how just the way they smiled at each other could be intimate. Or maybe I was just turning into a girl, living with two of them in the house. That was frightening. Not that I don’t like girls. I just preferred to be plain old insensitive me.

“One down,” I said. “But Frank gave me a warning. This town’s really going to go crazy. We need to be ready.”

“Always,” Eve said, and high-fived me.

But I wondered if we really, truly were.

T
he portal system had gone completely, utterly dead. The next morning, Claire started trying each of the entrances she had mapped out, and she found each of them just as inactive as the ones in the Glass House. Even Amelie’s emergency escape, the one upstairs in the secret attic room, was gone.

She had known that was coming, but it was still…weirdly sad. She shuddered, and tried not to think about Frank dying slowly in his silent tomb as she exited the abandoned warehouse—portal number twelve on the map—and headed back toward the center of town. This side of Morganville was mostly left to rot and rats—had been for years, slowly falling into ruin as the businesses closed or relocated. The porch had finally fallen down at the front of the old hospital building where she and Shane had once run from both his father and Oliver, blocking it to even the
hardiest urban explorers. There were likely lots of other ways in, but nobody sane wanted to go in there. It was a great place to go permanently missing—not just because of the vampires, but because there were some serious drug trade people who had claimed it for their own property. They could have it, as far as Claire was concerned. The place wasn’t just haunted; it was
evil.

I could have spent the morning working on the machine—what am I going to call it? The Vampire Power Cancellation Device? VPCD, for short? Fine, how about the Magic Thingy?
She was fantasizing too much about what it could do, she thought, but she couldn’t shake the idea that if she could just get a perfect amplification signal to match what the vampires were sending out, she could somehow cancel it…and perfectly nullify the effect.

Not that it would have stopped Pennyfeather from trying to rip her throat out, of course. Drawbacks.

This area of town was
really
run-down. Claire cursed under her breath as she tripped over another fallen fence. The vampires really could have done some urban renewal around here, but they liked having some ruins around; maybe it suited their Gothic sensibilities, or maybe it was just practical, having places where they could stalk around after dark in private. She wondered why they hadn’t shut down the meth trade, though. Maybe—likely—they just didn’t care enough.

As Claire was walking away, she saw the black ghost-hunting
After Death
van turn the corner and pull to a stop right in front of the building.
Oh, no. No. Don’t…
But there they were: Jenna, Angel, and Tyler, getting out of the van, pulling out all kinds of equipment, cables, boxes. They were clearly going to stage some kind of spirit investigation in there.
Such
a bad idea.

Claire took out her phone and dialed the Morganville police department’s nonemergency number. They weren’t fast responders,
generally, and it took at least ten rings before someone finally picked up. “Hi, it’s Claire Danvers,” she said. “You know who I am?”

“Yes. What do you want?” The voice on the other end was professional and cold. No clues as to who it was she might be talking to, or how the individual really felt.

“I’m standing in front of the old hospital building, the abandoned one? And those stupid ghost-hunting people are here. I just thought—maybe you could send a car over, tell them to move on?” She hesitated for a second, then plunged on. “Why are they still here, anyway?”

“We’re waiting for a decision as to how to handle them,” the voice said. “Until then, we’re letting them poke around. People know to avoid them. The hope is they’ll just lose interest and leave.”

People
meaning, Claire assumed,
vampire people.
The cops seemed to have it handled. “Okay,” she said. “But that hospital’s not safe. You know that, right?”

“We’ll send a car,” he promised, and hung up on her.

So much for being civic-minded. Claire watched the activity over at the van for a while, until she saw them actually ducking through a cut in the chain-link fence around the building. They were going inside.

Not good. For them.

She crossed the street, hoping to hear an approaching siren, but there was nothing except the hissing, constant desert wind and the rattle of tumbleweeds against the fences. In places, there were so many of the balled, thorny plants tangled in that it looked like a barricade. One skipped across open ground and bumped against her pants leg, and she had to stop to pull the burred tips free; her fingertips tingled and itched afterward.

Tyler had already gone inside. Angel was sliding through the fence now, with Jenna holding it open.

“Hey,” Claire said, and they both turned to look at her in surprise. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, but this isn’t a good place. It’s unstable in there. The floor’s all rotten.”

“Ah, it’s—Claire, right?” When she nodded, Angel smiled—with far less wattage than he would have used for Monica, she thought. “Well, we thank you for the warning, but we’re very used to working in dangerous spaces. Remember the asylum, Jenna? The one in Arkansas?”

“The floors were completely gone,” Jenna said. “We had to walk on the beams or we’d have dropped at least three stories straight into the basement. Got some great stuff, though. It was a huge ratings winner.” She pushed a box through to Angel, then a second one. “Don’t worry, we’re trained for this kind of thing.”

“There are snakes in there,” Claire said. “Rattlers. And black widow spiders. It’s
really
not safe.”

“And we’re
really
okay with it,” Jenna said. “You go on, Claire. We’ve got this.” Jenna studied her with curious pale eyes. “You seem pretty eager to keep us out of there. What’s your real reason?”

Claire shrugged and kicked a random rock. “Nothing,” she said. “Just I hate to see you get in trouble in there, for nothing. You’re wasting your time around here, anyway.”

“You’d be surprised what we’ve picked up already around here,” Jenna said. That sounded ominous. “My personal opinion is that this town is a hotbed of paranormal activity. I believe we’ll get dramatic footage out of what we find inside. It’s almost as if—as if we’re being guided.”

“Guided,” Claire repeated. “By what?”

“By whom,” Angel corrected. His smile held just a touch of
indulgent doubt. “Jenna believes that she’s made contact with a lost spirit.”

“I have,” Jenna said, and it sounded like the embers of an old argument, flaring up again. “Maybe you might recognize her. It’s a young girl—”

Not Alyssa,
Claire thought, stricken.
Please don’t say it’s Shane’s sister.
Because there was no doubt in her mind, now, that Alyssa’s spirit lingered, trapped in the lot where she’d died, even though the house had tumbled down.

“Miranda,” Jenna finished. “At least, that’s what I’ve been able to make out from the EVP recordings. We have quite a lot of them. She’s very talkative.”

“Miranda,” Claire repeated, and drew in a deep breath. She’d survived out here, somehow; she’d latched onto the ghost-hunting crew in the hopes of getting help. But that was
so
dangerous. “Um…no, I don’t think I recognize that name. Probably before my time.”

“Huh,” Jenna said, but Claire didn’t like the look in her eyes. It was far too shrewd. “Funny how she knows
your
name, then. And a whole lot more.”

She was saved by the distant wail of a siren. It was coming closer. Jenna and Angel looked at each other, eyebrows raised, as it became clear it was heading into their area, and both called, at the same time, “Tyler!”

Tyler backed out of the tumbled, brick-strewn doorway of the hospital. “Yeah, what? I’m going to have to climb over all this crap to get in this way. Maybe we should check the side—”

“Did you clear the location with the PD?” Angel asked.

“Didn’t you?”

Jenna sighed. “Dammit, Tyler—”

Claire made a quick, tactical retreat as the Morganville police
cruiser pulled up behind the van, lights and siren still going, and left them to sort it out.

Miranda
was still around, and she was working with the ghost hunters in some way. Well—that was good that she’d found a way to survive, but still, Claire had a terrible feeling that it was also a complication.

Maybe a big one.

Claire felt better after leaving the neighborhood and starting to see open businesses again, ragged as they were; most of them were scrap yards and places that repaired appliances, maybe a couple of “antique shops” that were where you took things a step above the scrap yard. A secondhand clothing store Claire sometimes visited, though it was mostly Morganville natives who shopped there; the store over by campus was the one with stuff in her size, and from out of town generally, because of the college students who shed their clothes by season. It was terrible to be thinking of clothing just now, though; she’d just eliminated any possibility of searching Myrnin’s lab for clues to where he’d gone. It deeply sucked. Not to mention that it would take a jackhammer and a backhoe to dig through the concrete sealing the entrance if she ever intended to rescue Myrnin’s books, which were mostly irreplaceable.

She saw the first mayoral campaign sign stapled to a light pole—one for Captain Obvious—and remembered, with a shock, that the election was
today.
She hadn’t cast a ballot yet. Well, the day was still young; she had time. And it was kind of her duty, since it had been her brainstorm in the first place, to vote for Monica, though she’d have to hold her nose to do it.