Lord of Misrule

That was creepy. Really creepy. Claire shivered and looked at the others, but nobody seemed to have anything to say.

“Claire. Attend me,” Myrnin said, and walked with her to one corner of the room. “Have you spoken with your doctor friend?”

“I tried. I couldn’t get through to him. Myrnin, are you . . . okay?”

“Not for much longer,” he said, in that clinical way he had right before the drugs wore off. “I won’t be safe to be around without another dose of some sort. Can you get it for me?”

“There’s none in your lab—”

“I’ve been there. Bishop got there first. I shall need a good bit of glassware, and a completely new library.” He said it lightly, but Claire could see the tension in his face and the shadow in his dark, gleaming eyes. “He tried to destroy the portals, cut off Amelie’s movements. I managed to patch things together, but I shall need to instruct you in how it’s done. Soon. In case—”

He didn’t need to finish. Claire nodded slowly. “You should go,” she said. “Is the prison safe? The one where you keep the sickest ones?”

“Bishop finds nothing to interest him there, so yes. He will ignore it awhile longer. I’ll lock myself in for a while, until you come with the drug.” Myrnin bent over her, suddenly very focused and very intent. “We must refine the serum, Claire. We must distribute it. The stress, the fighting—it’s accelerating the disease. I’ve seen signs of it in Theo, even in Sam. If we don’t act soon, I’m afraid we may begin to lose more to confusion and fear. They won’t even be able to defend themselves.”

Claire swallowed. “I’ll get on it.”

He took her hand and kissed it lightly. His lips felt dry as dust, but it still left a tingle in her fingers. “I know you will, my girl. Now, let’s rejoin your friends.”

“How long do they need to be here?” Eve asked, as they moved closer. She asked not unkindly, but she seemed nervous, too. There were, Claire thought, an awful lot of near-stranger vampire guests. “I mean, we don’t have a lot of blood in the house. . . .”

Theo smiled. Claire remembered, with a sharp feeling of alarm, what he’d said to Amelie back at the museum, and she didn’t like that smile at all, not even when he said, “We won’t require much. We can provide for ourselves.”

“He means, they can munch on their human friends, like takeout,” Claire said. “No. Not in our house.”

Myrnin frowned. “This is hardly the time to be—”

“This is exactly the time, and you know it. Did anybody ask them if they wanted to be snack packs?” The two remaining humans, both women, looked horrified. “I didn’t think so.”

Theo’s expression didn’t change. “What we do is our own affair. We won’t hurt them, you know.”

“Unless you’re getting your plasma by osmosis, I don’t really know how you can promise that.”

Theo’s eyes flared with banked fire. “What do you want us to do? Starve? Even the youngest of us?”

Eve cleared her throat. “Actually, I know where there’s a big supply of blood. If somebody will go with me to get it.”

“Oh, hell no,” Shane said. “Not out in the dark. Besides, the place is locked up.”

Eve reached in her pocket and took out her key ring. She flipped until she found one key in particular, and held it up. “I never turned in my key,” she said. “I used to open and close, you know.”

Myrnin gazed at her thoughtfully. “There’s no portal to Common Grounds. It’s off the network. That means any vampire in it will be trapped in daylight.”

“No. There’s underground access to the tunnels; I’ve seen it. Oliver sent some people out using it while I was there.” Eve gave him a bright, brittle smile. “I say we move your friends there. Also, there’s coffee. You guys like coffee, right? Everybody likes coffee.”

Theo ignored her, and looked to Myrnin for an answer. “Is it better?”

“It’s more defensible,” Myrnin said. “Steel shutters. If there’s underground access—yes. It would make a good base of operations.” He turned to Eve. “We’ll require your services to drive.”

He said it as if Eve were the help, and Claire felt her face flame hot. “Excuse me? How about a please in there somewhere, since you’re asking for a favor?”

Myrnin’s eyes turned dark and very cold. “You seem to have forgotten that I employ you, Claire. That I own you, in some sense. I am not required to say please and thank you to you, your friends, or any human walking the streets.” He blinked, and was back to the Myrnin she normally saw. “However, I do take your point. Yes. Please drive us to Common Grounds, dear lady. I would be extravagantly, embarrassingly grateful.”

He did all but kiss her hand. Eve, not surprisingly, could say nothing but yes.

Claire settled for an eye roll big enough to make her head hurt. “You can’t all fit,” she pointed out. “In Eve’s car, I mean.”

“And she’s not taking you alone, anyway,” Michael said. “My car’s in the garage. I can take the rest of you. Shane, Claire—”

“Staying here, since you’ll need the space,” Shane said. “Sounds like a plan. Look, if there are people looking for them, you ought to get them moving. I’ll call Richard. He can assign a couple of cops to guard Common Grounds.”

“No,” Myrnin said. “No police. We can’t trust them.”

“We can’t?”

“Some of them have been working with Bishop, and with the human mobs. I have proof of that. We can’t take the risk.”

“But Richard—,” Claire said, and subsided when she got Myrnin’s glare. “Right. Okay. On your own, got it.”

Eve didn’t want to be dragged into it, but she went without much of a protest—the number of fangs in the room might have had something to do with it. As the Goldmans and Myrnin, Eve and Michael walked downstairs, Shane held Claire back to say, “We’ve got to figure out how to lock this place up. In case.”

“You mean, against—” She gestured vaguely at the vampires. He nodded. “But if Michael lives here, and we live here, the house can’t just bar a whole group of people from entry. It has to be done one at a time—at least that’s what I understood. And no, before you ask me, I don’t know how it works. Or how to fool it. I think only Amelie has the keys to that.”

He looked disappointed. “How about closing off these weird doors Myrnin and Amelie are popping through?”

“I can work them. That doesn’t mean I can turn them on and off.”

“Great.” He looked around the room, then took a seat on the old Victorian couch. “So we’re like Undead Grand Central Station. Not really loving that so much. Can Bishop come through?”

It was a question that Claire had been thinking about, and it creeped her out to have to say, “I don’t know. Maybe. But from what Myrnin said, he set the doorway to exit-only. So maybe we just . . . wait.”

Robbed of doing anything heroic, or for that matter even useful, she warmed up the spaghetti again, and she and Shane ate it and watched some mindless TV show while jumping at every noise and creak, with weapons handy. When the kitchen door banged open nearly an hour later, Claire almost needed a heart transplant—until she heard Eve yell, “We’re home! Oooooh, spaghetti. I’m starved.” Eve came in holding a plate and shoveling pasta into her mouth as she walked. Michael was right behind her.

“No problems?” Shane asked. Eve shook her head, chewing a mouthful of spaghetti.

“They should be fine there. Nobody saw us get them inside, and until Oliver turns up, nobody is going to need to get in there for a while.”

“What about Myrnin?”

Eve swallowed, almost choked, and Michael patted her kindly on the back. She beamed at him. “Myrnin? Oh yeah. He did a Batman and took off into the night. What is with that guy, Claire? If he was a superhero, he’d be Bipolar Man.”

The drugs were the problem. Claire needed to get more, and she needed to work on that cure Myrnin had found. That was just as important as anything else . . . providing there were any vampires left, anyway.

They had dinner, and at least it was the four of them again, sitting around the table, talking as if the world