Daylighters

Claire opened her mouth to tell her why and then . . . couldn’t, at least not at first. All the logical arguments she would have made seemed fake and cheap as old tinsel. She took a breath and composed her words more carefully. “Because no matter what any of you have done, you haven’t all done it. Because it’s not right to judge a class of people by the actions of one, or a few. That’s not justice. It’s prejudice, and I don’t like it. Justice means judging each person individually.”

Jesse’s lips slowly curled into a smile, and her eyes warmed as well. “High-minded,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll find a lot of people living up to your standard.”

Claire shrugged. “Doesn’t matter if they do or not. It’s my opinion; I’m not trying to make anybody else agree. But I don’t want them forcing their opinions on me.”

“And thus begins the war,” said Lady Grey, who’d once been queen. It sounded as though she knew exactly what she was talking about.

The certainty in her voice, and the sadness, made Claire shiver.

EIGHT

“We need to be doing something,” Claire said, pacing the floor. They were back in the room where Myrnin had waited—she still didn’t know if it was his bedroom, or someone else’s, or even if the vamps cared where they slept at all. If they bothered. “If Fallon’s got Oliver, and we should be doing something!”

“Fallon’s quite busy trying to find out what Oliver knows about Amelie’s escape,” Myrnin said. He was sitting on the bed perusing a decades-old water-wrinkled magazine that apparently featured Princess Diana’s wedding on the cover. Probably the only reading material left at the Bitter Creek Mall, Claire guessed. “And what Oliver knows is absolutely nothing. He didn’t even know she’d escaped. So there’s nothing Fallon will learn from him.”

“He could kill him!”

“She’s right,” Jesse said from where she leaned against the wall, arms folded. “He could.”

“He won’t. He needs Oliver, especially if Amelie’s nowhere to be found. Oliver is the only authority he has left that everyone respects. He’s afraid enough of us now; if there’s no one we all follow, then it’s that much harder to keep us in line.” Myrnin shrugged. “And as long as we can hear him screaming, then he’s all right.”

Claire flinched, and looked from him to Jesse, who nodded soberly. “Best you can’t hear it,” she said.

“Help him!”

Myrnin moved, with that eerie vampire speed and grace, and before she could finish saying the two words, he was kneeling next to her, chin raised. “Then help me,” he said, and pointed to the collar. “Help me take this off!”

“No,” Jesse said, coming off the wall to stand next to Claire. “Myrnin, you’ll get her killed, and yourself along with her. You’ve seen how deadly these things can be if you tamper with them.”

“Wait,” Claire said. Her thoughts were racing, and she couldn’t understand what she was trying to think of until an image resolved in her mind, vivid and bloody and sharp. Amelie.

Amelie hadn’t been wearing a collar.

“I’m waiting,” Myrnin said, looking just barely patient.

“How did Amelie take hers off?”

“She didn’t,” he said. “I staked her dead so that she would not feel the burns as they activated the shock collar automatically when we went beyond the border. I only woke her up once we were well beyond the effective range, and then I set her loose. But I had no way to take it off without setting off the explosive.”

“She did,” Claire said. “She wasn’t wearing it when I saw her at the Glass House.”

“The Glass—” Myrnin looked utterly astounded. “She was supposed to go straight for the border, leave this town. Why in the world was she at the Glass House?”

“I think the more urgent question is how did she get the collar off by herself?” Jesse asked.

Myrnin nodded. “Claire, take a look at mine. See if there’s something we’ve missed.”

“Okay,” Claire said. He went to one knee, chin upraised and head tilted, and Claire bent over to study the latch. There wasn’t much to study, really. It was featureless, almost seamless, and there was a keyhole lock. The casing of the collar was hard black plastic. “I . . . don’t see anything that can help. Hold on . . . Do you mind if I . . . ?”

“Not at all,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Which should be obvious to you after all this time, Claire.”

She hesitantly reached out and felt around the collar, looking for any hidden switches, catches, or other weird features that might have given her a clue. It felt smooth and regular, until she found a slightly rougher patch toward the back of the circle. She pressed harder, and felt it give.

A section of the collar’s plastic casing snapped out, exposing wiring and a green circuit board. Claire sucked in her breath and carefully, carefully turned the collar around to expose the rest.

She saw a blinking red light and a gray string of rubbery material that ran through the middle. She stared hard at it, and realized that the gray stuff was probably the explosive that the Daylighters had built into the collars. The stuff designed to remove a vampire’s head. Being this close to the compound was bad, and the smell of ozone and the faintly oily stench of it made her feel even worse, but she pushed that aside. Focus! The circuitry looked pretty straightforward at least, but as she reached in toward it, she saw the red light blink faster. Some kind of proximity alert, maybe a motion detector . . . She forced herself to freeze but not draw her hand back, then take in deep, even breaths as she watched the light.

It slowed down. Motion detector. Move too quickly, and it would activate. She didn’t know whether it would administer a shock—which, as Myrnin had said, would probably fry her brain—or whether it would just blow up, taking her hand with it. Either way, not an outcome she wanted.

It seemed to take forever, but she moved very slowly, pushing her fingertip forward a quarter inch at a time, waiting for the light to slow down, until her fingertip brushed the bottom of the circuit board. She traced the line of the motion detector’s wire to the processor, and spent another few seconds staring at the rest of the configuration to be certain she hadn’t missed anything. It looked like there was only one connection going to the explosive.

“I’m going to try something,” she told Myrnin. “It could go wrong.”

“More wrong than it already has?” he asked. “Do what you must. I won’t know if it explodes.”

That was a grim thought, but she took a breath, held it, and slowly, slowly inched her finger toward the wire. Then she edged it underneath, and gave it a quick, sharp tug to sever the connection.

The blinking light went off.

Claire sighed and pulled back. Just a heartbeat after she did, the stun activated, a sharp blue hissing spark that zapped between the contacts underneath the collar and into Myrnin’s skin, and he fell, convulsing. She smelled burned flesh and leaned forward toward him, but Jesse stopped her with both hands on her shoulders.

“No,” she said sharply. “Wait. Just wait.”

It took a few seconds, but the charge stopped, and Myrnin relaxed, eyes open and blank for a moment before he blinked, reached up, and fumbled the compartment shut. “Well,” he said, “I think that’s enough experimentation for today. By the way, Oliver’s stopped screaming.”

Jesse let go of Claire, after a reassuring squeeze not quite strong enough to hurt. “Fallon must have decided Oliver didn’t know anything,” she said. “That might be good news.”

“It so rarely is,” Myrnin said. “I’ve told you, we need to destroy the human guards. Rip them to pieces. I can take down at least a few now that they can no longer explode me like a pinata, and I assume you—”

“No,” Jesse said, and reached a hand down to him. He took it and got to his feet. “They can still take you down. Besides, you don’t want to die in a bathrobe, do you? So undignified.”

“Has dignity ever been my outstanding characteristic, do you think?” he asked, as he flipped his still-damp, curling hair out of his face. “I’m talking about freeing the rest of us. I can act. You can act, to a point. We must do something. Claire’s proven that given enough time we might be able to deactivate these collars—”

“I didn’t prove that,” she protested. “I just proved I could pull one wire—and even that shocked you senseless. What if I’d move too fast and set off the explosive?”