again. It hurt, but she kept it up, racking and firing again and again. Shane was clearing a path to the truck, so she concentrated on keeping the draug away from the sides. She fell back behind Theo and Harold, keeping them as safe as she could.
The draug didn’t really care about humans; too little gain for them, so it was Theo she really had to worry about. They’d kill to get to him, of course, but unless Harold got in the way he’d be all right … for now. She killed, or at least discorporated, at least five draug before they reached the truck.
Theo didn’t get in. He stood aside, calm as ice water, as Harold scrambled up first. Claire and Shane took up positions on either side of him, firing to keep the draug away, and even though her ears were ringing and her heart racing, Claire could hear another shotgun going off. Naomi was keeping them away from her side of the truck as she waited.
Finally Theo jumped up and into the bed of the truck, and Shane followed last.
Claire gasped and dived for the driver’s side of the truck. Naomi let fly with one last blast at a draug ten feet away, then slid over, and Claire climbed in. Had she thought the truck was too tall before? She didn’t even remember jumping up this time.
The dim afternoon suddenly exploded in orange light behind them, and Claire looked in the rearview mirror to see her boyfriend spraying the entire street with an intense stream of pure, concentrated flame. Where it touched the draug, they evaporated. She could hear the grating, metallic screaming even through the hearing protection of Naomi’s noise cancellation. They sure weren’t singing anymore.
As she put the truck in gear and popped the clutch, Shane lurched forward and nearly fell out of the open bed of the truck—right into the draug.
But Theo grabbed him by the shoulder and held him in place as Harold crouched in the corner of the truck’s bed, looking scared out of his mind.
Claire sighed in relief, and hit the gas pedal hard. In less than thirty seconds, the rain had lessened again to a gentle patter on the roof, and Shane shut off the flamethrower’s little ignition burner.
Naomi kept watch out her window, shotgun ready, all the way back to the warm, welcoming lights of Founder’s Square.
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAIRE
Eve’s coffee and breakfast and cookies were still out on the table when Claire, Theo, and Harold passed through the big round hall. Well, some of it was still there; it looked as if her cooking had been popular this morning. Claire didn’t see Eve, which was odd; she would have expected her to still be working off her nervous caffeinated high. Probably still baking. Or, more worrying, maybe she really had gone out with vampires to put together caches of weapons around town.
But she had a sinking feeling that things were going to get worse before they got better between those two.
“Harold,” Theo said, and opened up a door. “You’ll be safe here. I will be back soon.”
Harold made urgent signs to him—deaf, which was probably the only reason he’d survived out there in draug-held Morganville. Theo smiled and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No one will bother you here. You have my word.”
Harold didn’t seem convinced, but he went into the room and Theo shut the door behind him.
“So … is he a friend of yours?” Claire asked.
“A patient,” Theo said. “And now we must go to another of my patients: Amelie.”
All the doors leading out of this room looked alike to Claire, and she hesitated, wondering which one led to the Founder of Morganville, but Theo didn’t. He made straight for one of them, opened it, and hurried through; she sped to catch up before the door closed again.
They were in one of the building’s endless, identical carpeted hallways, with the tasteful (and probably outrageously expensive) art on the walls. At the end of the hall was a set of double doors, guarded by two vampires. Amelie’s bodyguards.
“Theo Goldman,” Theo said as he approached. “I’m expected.”
“Doctor.” One of them nodded, and reached to open the door for him. “First room on the left.”
Claire followed him in. The guards eyed her, but neither moved to stop her. They just closed the door quietly behind her.
It was odd, but the smell struck her first. Vampires generally didn’t smell of anything … maybe a faint rusty whiff of blood if they’d just fed, or faded flowers at the worst, but nothing like the cloying, damp, sickroom aroma that had sunk deep into the room’s thick carpet and velvet drapes. The place looked beautiful, but it smelled … rotten.
Oliver stepped out of the first room on the left and closed the door behind him. He had his sleeves rolled up to expose pale, muscular forearms. There was a fading bite mark on his right wrist, and a bright smear of blood. He looked … tired, Claire thought. Not the Oliver she was used to seeing.
When he saw them, he straightened to his usual stick-up-his-butt posture and nodded to Theo. His gaze passed over her, but he didn’t say anything.
“How much did they tell you?” Oliver asked Theo, who shrugged.
“Not much,” he said. “She has been bitten, yes?”
“By the master draug. Magnus.”
Theo paused and went utterly still, his gaze locked on Oliver’s face. Then he glanced down at the bitten skin, and the faint bloodstain. “That won’t work,” he said. “You know that. You only endanger and weaken yourself.”
Oliver said nothing. He just stepped aside and let Theo proceed into the room.
When Claire would have followed him, just like the shadow she appeared to have become, Oliver’s hand flashed out and grabbed hold of her shoulder. “Not you,” he said. “She is too ill for human visitors.”
What that meant, Claire thought, was that Amelie was beyond distinguishing between friends and, say, food. She shuddered. She’d seen Amelie go savage, but even then it had been Amelie in control, just in full vampire mode.
This would be different. Very different, and very dangerous.
Oliver was not looking at her, though he still held her shoulder in a tight grip. He said, in a distant voice, “I suppose I should thank you for finding him.”
“I suppose,” she said, and pulled loose from him. He let her do it, of course. Vampires could smash bone with their kung fu grip if they wanted to hold on to something badly enough. “Is she that bad, really?”
“No,” Oliver said in that same quiet, remote tone. “She’s much worse, as he’ll presently see.” He looked at her then, and Claire saw just how … empty he looked. “She will die soon.”
“Die—but I brought Dr. Goldman …”
“For easing her pain,” he said. “Not for saving her. There is no saving one of us from the bite of a master draug, save by measures that are … fatal themselves.”
Claire waited, but she didn’t feel any shock or surprise. She’d known, she supposed, known from the moment that Amelie had fallen to the ground outside the Morganville Civic Pool. But the town wouldn’t be the same without the Founder. There was something distantly kind about Amelie that was missing in the other vampires. Not kind the way humans were, and not emo about it even when she was, but it was hard not to feel some kind of loss at the thought of her being … gone.
Even if it was just fear of the unknown who would step up and take her place.
