“Who are you?”
“Just another daytimer,” he said with a greasy smile.
Gideon started forward and I pressed him back. “No, you’re not.”
“Okay, you caught me.” He clasped his hand to his breast dramatically, as if shot. “I’m from House Grey. I think you already heard of us, from that whining were-brat.”
This was the first time I’d ever met a House Grey vampire. “Why are you here?”
“To help control those pathetic were-distractions outside.” He tapped his head. “House Grey specializes in fucking with minds. Which I’ll show you, as soon as I get near. Without your Shadows to protect you—” He made a tsking sound and shook his head as though I was in trouble. “Did the Rose Throne really think we were going to let her rise go unchallenged?”
“Who?” I pretended not to know.
In the blink of an eye he was two steps closer. Even though he was a daytimer, he’d had vampire blood yesterday. That made him stronger-faster-everythinger than me. He pointed an accusing finger at me. “I witnessed your trial, so don’t pretend you don’t know who I mean.”
I swallowed. I didn’t like being reminded of being stabbed by vampires just now. “Anna,” I said, taking another step back as he took a corresponding step forward.
“Yes. Her. That’s why we’re here. For the blood. But I bet you knew that already.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the MRI table at his side and gave me a heavy-lidded grin. “Who knows, if I kill you—they might give me some of it.”
“You need to stop right there.” My gun was down, no way I could lift it before he’d cross the distance between us. I reached into my pocket that had the darts.
“Sorry, lady, but I can’t have you interfere.” He stepped in front of the MRI.
I backed up again, shoving Gideon behind me. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said, trying to look as helpless as possible.
“Why? How are you going to stop me?” He gave me an amused look.
“Because I know something you don’t.”
“Really?” He laughed. “Lady, I have lived for a long, long time. I survived smallpox and the black plague. I won’t be dying here.” Then all his humor faded, and his eyes focused on me. “But you will.” Gideon leaned forward in warning against my back.
I pulled a trank dart out of my pocket and threw it at him. It raced toward him like a javelin, seeking to mate with the superpowered magnet on his far side. Picking up speed, it punctured him, making a clean hole at the level of his heart. It tinged cheerfully when it hit the MRI.
He appeared aghast, and then he crumpled, joining his own cigarette ash on the floor. I stepped forward to stomp on the pile of dust. “Oh yeah? The MRI is always fucking on, asshole.” I ran back and grabbed Gideon’s arm. Together we hobbled back the way we’d come into the room.
We got to the end of the hall and came up the stairs to the ground floor. Three more hallways down and we found ourselves at the transfusion lab’s back door. I waved Meaty’s badge around in front of the access panel, but the lock didn’t click. Gideon shoved me aside.
“Edie?”
I turned back and Sike was racing down the hall. “Edie!”
“Shhhh!”
“I came as soon as you texted. What the hell is going on? It’s full of weres outside.”
“They’re after the—” I began, and stopped. Would she help me, or hinder me, in what I was about to do next? I wouldn’t know till I knew. The door unlocked for Gideon, and I opened it. “Just come inside with me.”
I closed the door behind us, and Gideon set to locking it again. The entire room thrummed with electricity— power running to refrigerators, microscopes, testing equipment—things that a hospital always needed to be on. County was a twenty-four-hour operation. Now it was like a science lab in a ghost town, empty and eerily still except for the were-shadows running back and forth outside. The far wall of the room was lined in skinny 1960s wire-glass windows. Past that, they were protected by metal bars.
“What is this place?” Sike asked, wandering around.
I took Meaty’s keys out of my pocket. “You’ll see.” I skirted the edges of the room, looking for a locked fridge that my keys would open—and found it.
Small, squat—it could have been a medication fridge on any floor. But my key fit in its lock, and inside it was stacked high with small vials and bags of blood. Each one of them was stamped with the same stamp—Y4.
“This is your last chance to fix all this!” I shouted up at the ceiling and down to the crevices on the floor. If this had all been some shitty Shadow-test …
But nothing responded to me. “Okay then.” I started throwing the fridge’s contents into the sink, fistfuls of plastic at a time.
“Edie, no.” Sike caught the first bag I’d thrown before it hit the sink’s metal bowl. “I can’t condone this.”
“All those weres outside? They’ve all been drinking werewolf paw-print water for weeks. House Grey’s controlling them. They’re after this.” I shook one of the blood bags in Sike’s face.
There was the squeal of metal scraping cement outside, and then something—someone—hit the window with a
She looked at the blood bag she’d caught. “How do you know House Grey’s behind this?”
“I killed one of them down the hall.”
Sike snorted. “That wasn’t smart of him then, was it?” She curled in her fingers until her nails pierced the blood bag like an overripe fruit, then wrung it out over the sink, making sluggish blood ooze out.
Up until that moment, there’d been a chance she’d have stopped me. Relief ran through my body in a wave, then another were banging on the window outside made me jump. I focused and tossed another blood bag to her. “I don’t think we have much time.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
The sink didn’t have a garbage disposal. But all sinks at hospitals had one thing in common underneath— industrial-strength cleaners and bleach.
The weres outside were pinging off the window like grasshoppers in July. I emptied out the entire fridge and tossed the small desks in the room till I found a pair of scissors. Then I pulled on gloves and started cutting the bottom ends of bags, while Sike popped off the plastic caps and poured the contents out. I turned the sink on as hot as it would go to denature proteins and started splashing in floor cleaner.
“Damn House Grey. This is a horrible waste.” She watched the blood swirl down the sink like Minnie watching the drain of my shower.
“Can’t be helped,” I said, handing her another bag. “This is the last one.” She flipped it over to look at it.
“It would be were-blood.” With a sigh, she ripped it open and squeezed the contents out.
I pulled off my gloves and threw them away. She washed her hands with the cleaner. The windows were vibrating percussively with each blow. I tried not to look at them there, slavering, smearing spit and blood on the barred windows.
“We can’t stay here,” Sike said. “Did you have another plan?”
“There’s an emergency exit through the accounting department, down to the loading docks.”
Sike inhaled deeply. “Let’s go.”
Gideon opened the back door for us, and we started running—or hobbling in my case—down the back halls.
I heard a skittering of claws on a tile floor. Sike heard it first. She flung her arm out, catching me in my
