Daylighters (24 page)

And then Michael screamed. It was a sound that sliced through Claire’s blanket of shock and stabbed her right in the heart, and her eyes flew open of their own accord to fix on his tense, suffering face, his
glowing
face, on the shimmering, flickering light gliding beneath his skin, tracing veins and arteries, centering in his heart . . .

And regardless of her pain, of the drug, of all that they’d done to make her loathe and fear the sight of a vampire, Eve shoved herself bodily off the wall and lunged forward to grab his hand in hers. She was gagging and shaking, but she grimly held on, even though every fiber of her body was trying to make her run away.

Michael was breathing in deep, agonizing gulps, and Claire could see his pulse pounding hard in the vein at his throat. His eyes were wide open, so blue, blue as the Texas sky, and he was staring mutely at Eve, shaking and trembling and
staring
 . . .

“Live,” Claire said. She whispered it under her breath, a chant, a prayer, a desperate plea. “Live, live,
live
!”

And then the light in him went out, and Michael went completely, utterly still.

H
e’s dead,
Claire thought numbly.
I killed him.
It was an incoherent thought, and it had a sound to it like ashes falling, a taste like bitter acid at the back of her throat.
I killed him.
She hadn’t, but it felt that way. She should have been faster. Better. Stronger.

She should have stopped all this from happening. But she hadn’t, and now Michael was dead.

Eve was staring at him as if she hadn’t realized the truth, as if somehow it would all still come out okay. “Michael?” she asked. His eyes were still open. “Michael?” The horror weighed her voice down, dragged it to a low, uneven whisper. “Please look at me. I love you, please look at me, please . . .”

Claire’s eyes were filling with tears now, and her view of his face became a wash of color—palest possible pink for skin, blue for his eyes, gold for his hair. She blinked, and the tears glided hot down her face, hot as blood. She put her hand on his arm.

It shouldn’t feel like that, she thought, so close to her own skin temperature. So much like he was still alive.

And then her fingertips felt a small whisper of a pulse.

No, I imagined that. I couldn’t have . . . it couldn’t . . .

Another beat. Then another. It wasn’t her pulse.

It was his.

“Michael, you have to look at me,” Eve was saying between tears. She looked pale and sick, facing what was, for her, the end of the world. “You can’t leave me, you can’t, you
promised me
 . . .”

He took a breath.

Eve let out a muffled cry, and fell across his chest to kiss him. It was, Claire thought, maybe a little premature for that, because he seemed too dazed to understand what was happening . . . and then all that changed, and he was kissing her back, really kissing her, and his skin was taking on a skin tone that wasn’t too much darker than before but somehow much more
alive
. He was gasping for breath when they parted, but smiling, and there was color in his cheeks and lips.

It struck Claire that she’d never seen him alive before. Not really one hundred percent alive, anyway. He looked as he had when she’d first met him, but this time . . . this time, he was simply and only human.

It was . . . She didn’t want to call it a miracle, but that’s what it was. A miracle.

It came to her slowly that he was still strapped to the table, and he was straining to break free. Claire wiped her tears, got hold of herself, and quickly sawed through the webbing on his left wrist, and then his left ankle. By the time she’d reached his right hand, she had to gently but firmly force Eve to back up as she freed him completely . . . and then
she
was the one getting shoved out of the way as Michael lunged for Eve and enveloped her in a hug so complete that it was as if he’d never really hugged her before.

Which, Claire supposed, he hadn’t. Not like this.

“Can you feel it?” he asked Eve. He was crying.
Michael
was crying, tears flooding his face. He wiped at them, but he couldn’t seem to stem the tide. “My heart. It’s beating.”

“I feel it,” Eve said, and pressed her hand against his chest. “Oh, God, Michael, I—I should probably say something snarky right now, but I—”

He grabbed her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he kissed her again, a long and deep kiss that said more than words ever could about how he felt. How they both felt.

Miracle,
Fallon had called it. And in Michael’s case he’d been right, because Michael Glass, who’d been various shades of dead ever since Claire had known him, was now himself again. Human. Vital. Alive.

And, Claire thought with a sudden chill,
vulnerable.

She turned away from them, and it hit her with breathtaking horror that most of the vampires struggling against their bonds right now around her, glowing from within as Fallon’s medicine did its work . . . most of them wouldn’t make it.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

Claire channeled her anxious, sick frustration into action. She hustled Michael and Eve out of their own private world and put them to work tying up the lab workers, who were starting to rouse. She dragged the two police officers off to the side and covered up the dead one that Oliver had shot. Halling was spitting with fury, but Claire didn’t listen to what she was saying. It would only make her angry, and she was feeling bad enough.

When there was nothing left to do, she crouched down next to the lab attendant who was waking the fastest, and helped her along by rubbing knuckles across her breastbone. That hurt, Claire remembered. And it roused the woman fast.

It didn’t take the woman long to adapt to the new situation. She realized that she was tied up, and that Claire and Eve and Michael were the only ones standing. Not a stupid woman, either—fear flickered across her face before she concealed it beneath a mask of professional distance. “Untie me,” she ordered.

“Bite me, Miss Mengele,” Eve said. “Not that stupid.”

The woman’s eyes fixed on Michael, and she looked . . . elated. “You made it,” she said. “I knew you would, Michael.”

“You know me?” Michael asked. He wasn’t smiling.

“Of course I do! I’m a big fan of your music. I’m Amanda. I work at the hospital.”

He blinked. “But you stuck poison in my arm.”

“To save you!”

He opened his mouth, then looked confused and weirdly embarrassed, and Claire realized he was trying to show fangs he no longer had. Well, that was awkward. “What about them?” He pointed to the others. Some had gone still. Some were still struggling.

Her eyes flickered toward them, then came back quickly to focus on him. “Better they die than live on in that hell,” she said. “We’re saving people.
People.
Not monsters.”

“The counteragent,” Claire said. “Tell me where it is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, but her round face wasn’t made for lying. “What counteragent?”

“The one that used to be locked in the safe and isn’t there anymore,” Claire said. “Where is it now?”

“No idea.”

“Don’t play poker, Mandy,” Eve said, “because you suck at it. Who has it?”

Amanda set her mouth into a flat, stubborn line and glared back. Oh, she didn’t like Eve at all. Which was sharply contrasted with the worshipful way she looked at Michael.

Claire stood up and grabbed her friends. She dragged them off a bit and lowered her voice. “She’s got a crush on you, Michael. Eve, she’s jealous of you. So back off and let Michael charm the info out of her.”

Michael looked a little bit ill. “Do I have to?”

“People are dying. Do you?”

He winced, nodded, and said, “Go do something else. I don’t need you guys staring at me. I feel bad enough already.” Claire knew he was thinking of the fact that he’d survived the process and so many . . . so many weren’t going to. Or maybe he was hating the slimy necessity of charming someone who didn’t see anything wrong with killing to cure.

But she took Eve’s arm and said, “Check Oliver.”

Eve’s eyes went wide. “Claire—I—I can’t. I can’t even go near him.”

“You just went to Michael—”

“That’s different. And—he was changing.”

“So was Oliver,” Claire shot back. “Just
go
!”

Claire went to check the others. Half were already gone, their light extinguished, their skin left chalky pale and bizarrely hard to the touch, as if it had turned to ash. Those were, unquestionably, dead.

Two others besides Michael had made the transition back to human and were gulping in convulsive breaths, looking panicked and wild, as if they were drowning in a sea of air. One was weeping, and it looked like tears of joy. The other two, though . . . they looked lost and horrified. Claire supposed that after so many years—hundreds, maybe—of existence as a vampire, being plunged back into mortality must have felt a lot more like a punishment than a salvation.

One woman had settled into the state that Oliver had been in—more of a coma than either a recovery or a decline. Her skin had turned chalky, but it was still pliable to the touch, and she didn’t have the fallen-in look of those who’d failed the process completely.
The REVs,
Claire thought. The ones Miss Amanda would have been happy to euthanize, for their own good. The thought made her ill, thinking of Oliver and this unnamed woman lying there helpless, trapped, unable to defend themselves.

Eve came back to her, looking flushed and scared. “He’s not breathing, but he’s not dead, either,” she said. “I can’t get too close, Claire, it makes me—” She swallowed hard. “I’m hoping this is just the doped blood they gave me, right? It’s not—not permanent?”

“I don’t think so,” Claire said. “Anderson said the treatment needed to be repeated a bunch of times, so I think you’ll be okay.” She hugged Eve, impulsively, and Eve took in a shuddering breath

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t—”

“None of that. We save each other, right? It’s what we do.”

“It’s what we do.” Eve stepped back and offered a fist bump, which they exploded and brought back, just because.

The moment of peace faded, though, as Claire looked again at the still, silent woman lying on the slab. “I don’t know her, do you?”

“Ayesha,” Eve said. “She’s okay. I think she was a lawyer. I used to make a lot of bloodsucking attorney jokes. Not so funny now, I guess.”

The woman was very small—maybe five feet tall—and had a rounded figure perfectly proportioned for her height. Pretty, too, under the unhealthy color of her skin; in human life she must have been of African descent, and she wore her hair in an abundant Afro cut held back with a colorful band.
A real person,
Claire thought. A real person, caught between life and death. They were all real people. That was what Fallon and his crew couldn’t seem to grasp . . . the
cost
of what they were doing. The history they were destroying.

Claire held the woman’s hand for a moment. It felt cool and unresponsive.

Michael was back a few minutes later, and when she looked up she was thrown off balance by the color in his skin, and the flush in his cheeks and on his lips. He looked like a young man who’d been locked away from the sun for too long, but he was definitely, unmistakably human.

It still seemed impossible.

“She doesn’t know where the antidote is,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” He didn’t say how he knew, which was probably for the best for everyone. “How is Ayesha?”

“I don’t know. Not dead, I guess. Like Oliver. But not alive, like you.”

He nodded slowly, watching the vampire woman with a slight frown between his brows. “We should get them out of here,” he said. “Her and Oliver, anyway.”

“What about the other ones who, you know, made it back to human?” Eve pointed vaguely at the other three survivors, who were still trying to get used to breathing for a living. “Shouldn’t we take them, too?”

“Fallon won’t hurt them. They’re his success stories.” Michael shook his head, still frowning. “I suppose I’m grateful to him for what he did, in a way. I wanted to get back to human, but I was afraid it wouldn’t work for me. I was afraid I’d lose you, Eve, and I couldn’t stand that.”

“You’ll never lose me,” Eve said. She sounded totally confident of that. “Just make sure I don’t lose
you
.”

“Promise,” he said, and kissed her again.

“Guys?” Claire hated to pop their private bubble, but she pointed to the silent form of Ayesha lying on the table. “If we’re taking them, we’d better get going.”

“The tables have wheels,” Eve said. “They unlock.” She stepped on a metal lever and pushed, and the table slid smoothly out a few inches before she stopped it with her hand. “We’ll need transportation once we get them outside, though. Even in Morganville, rolling gurneys with half-dead vamps through the streets might seem a little out of the ordinary.”

“Especially in the new, improved Morganville,” Claire agreed. “Michael, go scout ahead, see if there is some kind of car we can grab. No, wait.” She spotted a coatrack near the door. On it dangled a couple of purses. She sprinted over and dug inside, searching for keys. She came up with a set. There was a photo key ring on it, and it looked like Amanda really
was
a big fan of Michael’s, because the photo was one of the promotional ones he used for gigs. Black-and-white, very moody.

She tossed him the keys, then almost laughed at his puzzled expression when he spotted the photo. “Get used to it, rock star. Wait until you’re famous outside of town,” she said. “Hurry. We’ll be right behind you.”

He kissed the back of Eve’s hand, which was sweet, and then he took off out the door. Claire hoped he wouldn’t run into any trouble, because she was afraid his human instincts for survival hadn’t quite kicked in yet. He was still thinking of himself as a vampire. It would take time—and probably one or two wounds—for him to develop the caution that came with being mortal again.

Eve sighed. “Do you know how much I hate it that this turned out well for the two of us? Because now—now how am I supposed to feel about it?”

“Think about Oliver,” Claire said. “And Ayesha. And all of these people lying on the tables who didn’t make it. Fallon’s perfectly okay with killing three-quarters or more of the people he experiments on. That’s just not okay, even if Michael was in the lucky bracket.”

“I know,” Eve said. She took a deep breath, leaned over, and quickly pulled the IV tube from Ayesha’s arm—it immediately sealed, which was interesting—and nodded to Claire. “You grab Oliver. Meet you up front.”

“You can do this? You’re sure? Even though she’s—” Claire used the universal finger-fangs-in-neck symbol for vampire, and Eve gave her a pale, broken smile.

“As long as I don’t have to do anything but push the gurney,” she said.

Claire took her at her word, and moved on to do her part. Getting the limp body of Oliver up and onto the bed was a lot more trouble than she had reckoned. She finally got him in a fireman’s carry over her shoulder and staggered the few steps to flop him crookedly onto the gurney. Not a neat job, but it would do to roll him down the hall, as long as she didn’t encounter too many bumps along the way.