Lord of Misrule

spinning. What had he hit her with? It felt like the front end of a bus. She hadn’t thought Jason could hit that hard, truthfully.

Don’t try to find me, Shane. Don’t. The last thing she wanted was Shane racing to the rescue and taking on a guy who’d stabbed him, and a vampire who’d led him around by a leash.

No, she had to find her own way out of this.

Step one: figure out where she was. Claire let Ysandre ramble on, describing all kinds of lurid things that Claire thought it was better not to imagine, considering they were things Ysandre was thinking of doing to her. Instead, she tried to identify her surroundings. It didn’t look familiar, but that was no help; she was still relatively new to Morganville. Plenty of places she’d never been.

Wait.

Claire focused on the crate that Jason was sitting on. There was stenciling on it. It was hard to make it out in the dim light, but she thought it said BRICKS BULK COFFEE. And now that she thought about it, it smelled like coffee in here, too. A warm, morning kind of smell, floating over dust and damp wood.

And she remembered Eve laughing about how Oliver bought his coffee from a place called Bricks. As in, tastes like ground-up bricks, Eve had said. If you order flavored, they add in the mortar.

There were only two coffee shops in town: Oliver’s place, and the University Center coffee bar. This didn’t look like the UC, which wasn’t that old and was mostly built of concrete, not wood.

That meant . . . she was at Common Grounds? But Common Grounds didn’t make any sense; there wasn’t any kind of portal leading to it.

Maybe Oliver has a warehouse. That sounded right, because the vampires seemed to own a lot of the warehouse district that bordered Founder’s Square. Brandon, Oliver’s second-in-vampire- command, had been found dead in a warehouse.

Maybe she was close to Founder’s Square.

Ysandre’s cold fingers closed around Claire’s chin and jerked it up. “Are you listening, honey?”

“Truthfully, no,” Claire said. “You’re kind of boring.”

Jason actually laughed, and turned it into a fake cough. “I’m going outside,” he said. “Since this is going to get all personal now.” Claire wanted to yell to him not to go, but she bit her tongue and turned it into a subsonic whine in the back of her throat as she watched him walk away. His footsteps receded into the dark, and then finally a small square of light opened a long way off.

It was a door, too far for her to reach—way too far.

“I thought he’d never leave,” Ysandre said, and put her cold, cold lips on Claire’s neck, then yelled in shock and pulled away, covering her mouth with one pale hand. “You bitch!”

Ysandre hadn’t seen the silver chain Claire was wearing in the dim light, as whisper-thin as it was. Now there were welts forming on the vampire’s full lips—forming, breaking, and bleeding.

Fury sparked in Ysandre’s eyes. Playtime was over.

As Claire squirmed away, the vampire followed at a lazy stroll. She wiped her burned lips and looked at the thin, leaking blood in distaste. “Tastes like silver. Disgusting. You’ve just ruined my good mood, little girl.”

As she rolled, Claire felt something sharp dig into her leg. The knife. They’d found the stake, but she guessed their search hadn’t exactly been thorough; Jason was too crazy, and Ysandre too careless and arrogant.

But the knife wasn’t going to do her any good at all where it was, unless . . .

Ysandre lunged for her, a blur of white in the darkness, and Claire twisted and jammed her hip down at an awkward angle.

The knife slipped and tore through the fabric of her jeans—not much of it, just a couple of inches, but enough to slice open Ysandre’s hand and arm as it reached for her, all the way to the bone.

Ysandre shrieked in real pain, and spun away. She didn’t look so pretty now, and when she turned toward Claire again, from a respectful distance this time, she hissed at her with full cobra fangs extended. Her eyes were wild and bloodred, glowing like rubies.

Claire twisted, nearly yanking her elbow out of its joint, and managed to get the ropes around her wrist against the knife. She didn’t have long; the shock wouldn’t keep Ysandre at bay for more than a few seconds.

But getting a silver knife to cut through synthetic rope? That was going to take a while—a while she didn’t have.

Claire sawed desperately, and got a little bit of give on the bonds—enough to almost get her hand into her pocket.

But not.

Ysandre grabbed her by the hair. “I’m going to destroy you for that.”

The pain in her head was blinding. It felt like her scalp was being ripped off, and on top of that, the massive headache roared back to a new, sickening pulse.

Claire loosened the rope enough to plunge her aching hand into her pocket and grab the handle of the knife. She yanked it out of the tangle of fabric and held it at a trembling, handicapped en garde—still tied up, but whatever, she wasn’t going to stop fighting, not ever.

Ysandre shrieked and let her go, which made no sense to Claire’s confused, pain-shocked mind. I didn’t stab her yet. Did I? Not that she wanted to stab anybody, even Ysandre. She just wanted—

What was going on?

Ysandre’s body slammed down hard on the wooden floor, and Claire gasped and flinched away . . . but the vampire had fallen facedown, limp, and weirdly broken.

A small woman dressed in gray, her pale hair falling wild around her shoulders, dropped silently from overhead and put one impeccably lovely gray pump in the center of Ysandre’s back, holding her down as she tried to move.

“Claire?” The woman’s face turned toward her, and Claire blinked twice before she realized whom she was looking at.

Amelie. But not Amelie. Not the cool, remote Founder—this woman had a wild, furious energy to her that Claire had never seen before. And she looked young.

“I’m okay,” she said faintly, and tried to decide whether this version of Amelie was really here, or a function of her smacked-around brain. She decided it would be a good idea to get her hands and feet untied before figuring anything else out.

That took long minutes, during which Amelie (really?) dragged Ysandre, whimpering, into the corner and fastened her wrists to a massive crossbeam with chains. The chains, Claire registered, had been there all along. Lovely. This was some kind of vamp playpen/storage locker—probably Oliver’s. And she felt sick again, thinking about it. Claire sawed grimly at the ropes binding her and finally parted one complete twist around her hands. As she struggled out of the loops of rope, she saw deep white imprints in her skin, and realized that her hands were red and swollen. She could still feel them, at least, and the burn of circulation returning felt as if she were holding them over an open flame.

She focused on slicing the increasingly dulled knife through the rope on her feet, but it was no use.

“Here,” Amelie said, and bent down to snap the rope with one twist of her fingers. It was so frustrating, after all that hard work, to see just how easy it was for her. Claire stripped the ties away and sat for a moment breathing hard, starting to feel every cut, bump, and bruise on her body.

Amelie’s cool fingers cupped Claire’s chin and forced her head up, and the vampire’s gray eyes searched hers. “You have a head injury,” Amelie said. “I don’t think it’s too serious. A headache and some dizziness, perhaps.” She let go. “I expected to find you. I did not expect to find you here, I confess.”

Amelie looked fine. Not a prisoner. Not a scratch on her, in fact. Claire had lots more damage, and she hadn’t been dragged off as Bishop’s prisoner. . . .

Wait. “You—we thought Bishop might have gotten you. But he didn’t, did he?”

Amelie cocked an eyebrow at her. “Apparently not.”

“Then where did you go?” Claire felt a completely useless urge to lash out at her, crack that extreme cool. “Why did you do this? You left us alone! And you called the vampires out of hiding—” Her