Carpe Corpus

die already.”

“Has Bishop tried to reach you through it?”

“Not recently. Or if he has, I can’t feel it anymore.” That would be excellent, if it really was a bad connection. Maybe she was in a no-magic-signal dead zone. “So what can I do?”

“Go knock on doors,” Hannah said. “We’ve got a list of names that we’re still looking for, for the second bus. You can go with Joe Hess.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “He’s okay?” Because she had an instant sense memory of the feeling of that death warrant in her hands, the one she’d given to him.

“Sure,” Hannah said. “Why wouldn’t he be?”

Claire had no idea what had happened, but she liked Detective Hess, and at least riding around with him would give her a feeling of forward motion, of doing something useful. Everyone else seemed to have a purpose. All she could think about was that her parents were on a bus heading out of town, and she didn’t know what was going to happen to them. Or could happen to them.

She wished she’d said a better good-bye. She wished they hadn’t been so upset with her about Shane. Well, they’re going to have to get used to it, she thought defiantly, but even to herself, it felt weak and a little selfish.

But being with Shane wasn’t a mistake. She knew it wasn’t.

Joe Hess was driving his own car, but it had all the cool cop stuff inside—a radio, one of those magnetic flashing lights to go on the roof, and a shotgun that was locked into a rack in the back. He was a tall, quiet man who just had a way about him that put her at ease. For one thing, he never looked at her like some annoying kid; he just looked at her as a person. A young person, true, but someone to take seriously. She wasn’t quite sure how she’d earned that from him, considering the death warrant delivery.

“I’m locking the doors,” he told her as she climbed into the passenger seat, half a second before the click-thump sound echoed through the car. “Nice to see you, Claire.”

“Thanks. It’s good to see you, too. What about the buses?” she said. “Are they out of town yet?”

“Amelie herself escorted them through the barrier a few minutes ago,” he said. “There was a little bit of trouble at the border, nothing we couldn’t handle. They’re on their way. Nobody was hurt.”

That eased a tight knot in her chest that she hadn’t even known was there. “Where are they going—No, don’t tell me. I probably don’t need to know, right?”

“Probably not,” he agreed, and gave her a sidelong look. “You okay?”

She looked out the car window and shrugged. “My parents are on one of those buses, that’s all. I’m just worried.”

He kept sending her looks as he drove, and there was a frown on his face. “And tired,” he said. “When you left me, did you go back to Bishop? Did he hurt you?”

There really wasn’t an easy answer to that. “He didn’t hurt me,” she finally said. “Not . . . personally.”

“I guess that’s part of what I was asking,” he said. “But that doesn’t answer my question, really.”

“You mean, am I in need of serious therapy because of all this?” Another shrug seemed kind of appropriate. “Yeah, probably. But this is Morganville. That’s not exactly the worst thing that could happen.” She turned her head and looked directly at him. “What was on the scroll I gave you?”

He was quiet for so long she thought he was blowing off the question, but then he said, “It was a death warrant.”

She already knew that. “Not yours, though.”

“No,” he said. “Someone else’s.”

“Whose?”

“Claire—”

“It doesn’t matter. We got it reversed. It’s not an issue anymore.”

“I delivered it. I have a right to know.”

For answer, Joe dug into the pocket of his sports jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, still curling at the edges, with fragments of wax clinging to the outside. He held it out to her.

Claire unfolded it. The paper was stiff and crackly, old paper, with a faintly moldy smell to it. The handwriting—Bishop’s—was spiky and hard to read, but the name was done larger and underlined.

Eve Rosser.

“That’s not happening,” Joe said. “I just wanted you to know that. If he tells you about it, I wanted you to understand that Eve is perfectly safe, all right? Nothing will happen to her. Claire, do you understand me?”

She’d carried an order to him to kill her best friend.

Claire couldn’t think. Couldn’t feel anything except a vast, echoing sense of shock. She tried to read the rest of the paper, but her eyes kept moving back to Eve’s name, going over and over it.

She folded up the paper and held it clutched tightly in one hand. Breathe. She felt light-headed and a little sick.

“Why you?” she asked faintly. “Why give it to you?”

“That’s Bishop’s style. He picks out people least likely to do what he wants, so he can punish them when they refuse to carry out the order. Object lessons for the rest of Morganville. He knew I wouldn’t kill Eve. Not a chance. This was less about his wanting to get rid of Eve than to get rid of me.”

She still felt cold. Sure, Detective Hess wouldn’t have done it, but what if she’d been told to take it to someone else? Monica, maybe?

Eve might be dead right now, and it would have been all her fault.

She felt the death warrant being tugged out of her fingers. When she opened her eyes, fighting back tears, Detective Hess was slipping it back into his pocket. “I just wanted you to understand what we’re up against,” he said. “And to understand that no matter what happens, some of us will never do what he wants.”

Claire realized that she couldn’t count herself in that club. She’d already done what Bishop wanted.

More than once.

God, she really didn’t want to think about how far she’d wandered into that swamp, but she was definitely up to her butt in alligators.

“All right, back to business.” Hess handed her a piece of paper. “These are the people we still need to find,” he said. “I heard about what happened with Frank Collins. You and Shane were there?”

She really wasn’t up to talking about that. “Dr. Mills is with Amelie,” she said. “You can cross him off this list. She isn’t going to send him out of town.”

All around Morganville, as they drove, there were signs things were happening—people gathering in groups, whispering at fences, and pausing to stare hard at the passing car. No vampires in sight, but then Claire wouldn’t expect there to be so close to noon. “What is this?” she asked. Hess shook his head.

“There’s still a pretty strong antivampire movement in town,” he said. “It got stronger these last few months. I’ve been trying to keep them calmed down, because if they start this now, they’ll just get themselves killed. And most of them aren’t looking at Amelie’s side as anything but another target. We can’t afford that until Bishop’s gone.”

“So what do we do about it?”

“Nothing. Nothing we can do right now. Bishop’s the one pushing the agenda, not us. If he wants a fight tonight, he’s going to get one. Maybe bigger than he wants.”

The fourth address on the list was an apartment—there weren’t many apartment buildings in Morganville, since most people lived in single-family houses, but there were a few. Like in any small town, the complexes varied from crappy to less crappy; there was no such thing as luxury multifamily housing.

The apartment complex they stopped at was on the crappy end of the short spectrum. It was stucco over brick, painted a sun-faded pink, with two stories of apartments built into an open square on a central . . . well, Claire guessed you could call it a courtyard, if you liked a view that included a dry swimming pool with dark scum at one end, some spiky, untrimmed bushes, and an overflowing trash can.

Joe Hess checked apartment numbers. If the run-down appearance of the place bothered him, he didn’t show it. When they reached number twenty-two, he banged loudly on the door. “Police, open up!” he yelled, and pushed Claire out of the way when she tried to stand next to him. He gave her a silent stay there gesture, and listened. She couldn’t hear a thing from inside.

Neither could he, apparently. He shook his head, but as they turned to go, Claire clearly heard someone