war,” she said softly. She understood now what Jesse had meant by that. “You’re willing to kill innocent people to save them. Sounds like a real crusade now, doesn’t it?”
“Quiet,” he said. He sounded gratifyingly angry. “Down on your knees. Do it. Hands behind your head.”
She did it, because she didn’t see how getting herself killed would make anything better, but she kept smiling because it seemed to upset him.
She kept smiling even as they grabbed her wrists and handcuffed her—for the second time in a day—and dragged her to her feet.
“You’re going to lose,” she told him.
“Take her out of here,” he said, and this time he forced a smile, too. It didn’t look convincing. “For her own protection, of course.”
“Take her where?” She could barely understand the guard’s voice; he sounded angry and muffled and bloody, and his nose was probably hurting him badly. She almost felt a bolt of guilt for it. Almost.
“The same place you took her friend,” Fallon said. “Tell Dr. Anderson this one needs reeducation, too. And Claire? I’m going to raze your Founder House to the ground. You’ll have no place to go back to. Call it a brand-new start.”
“It’s just a house,” she said, and kept smiling. “And we’re never letting you win.”
But she knew that the first half of that was a lie. The Glass House was never just a house.
Not to them.
NINE
The guard brought along a friend to drive, since his eyes were swelling shut and his face was a gory mess of blood. His nose, Claire thought, looked like something a monster makeup artist might have rejected as “too weird.” It was amazing how much damage she’d done to him, and she felt increasingly guilty about it. That was the difference between her and Shane in the end, she thought; she couldn’t take any pride in her violence. But it was still good to know she could defend herself when it was necessary.
The guards didn’t say anything to her on the way. She thought they were too angry to try to be civil, and truthfully, she didn’t want to talk to them anyway. She was busy searching the dusty crack between the seat and the backrest, trying to see if anyone had dropped something useful. She found a rolled tube that felt like a cigarette but was probably something less legal, and left it there. Just when she was about to give it up as a lost cause, her fingers brushed across something that felt metallic. She grabbed for it, and realized it was a paper clip, one of the larger, sturdier ones. She teased it out slowly from between the fabric, then tried to think how to hide it. She settled for sliding it into a frayed opening in the jeans she was wearing, and clipping it to the thin white strings so that it dangled inside. It might fall off, but it was all she could do in case they searched her.
Not a long ride in the police car—Hannah was evidently allowing use of official equipment for private security guards, which seemed like a bad idea to Claire—before they pulled up at the front of the iron gates of an old, brooding place that looked as if it had been built to be some kind of fortress. Narrow, barred windows, and forbidding Gothic doors. The sign above the door read MORGANVILLE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY. That didn’t seem promising.
The guards turned to look at her as they pulled the car to a halt inside the gates, next to the front door. “Don’t give us any more trouble,” said the one whose nose she hadn’t busted. “I don’t like whaling on skinny little girls, but if you pull a stunt like that again, I promise you, I won’t hesitate to put you on the ground.”
The other one mumbled something that sounded like approval, but between his congested nose and his bad mood, Claire couldn’t be sure of anything. She sat quietly as the uninjured man opened her door and then let him help her out, since having her wrists bound behind her back made everything about ten times harder (which was probably the point). The stony gray mass of the building—the
But Fallon had managed to plant one deep, sprouting seed of doubt. Because what did “all right” really mean, in the end? Status quo? Vampires continuing to oppress and disadvantage humans for their own wealth and benefit? Humans hating vampires and trying to kill them? Constant tension and bloodshed, on both sides? Was she on the right side—or was there a right side at all? There had to be, on balance.
Still. The gnawing sense that in this moral gray area she was walking on the wrong side of the line was really starting to scare her.
Or it did until the old Gothic doors swung open, and Dr. Irene Anderson stepped out to greet them.
She looked much the same as she had back in Cambridge, when Claire had liked her so much as a mentor; she looked calm and competent and quirky, not at all like an agent of evil and chaos. The white coat she was wearing gave her even more of an air of legitimacy. But the look she gave Claire was both pleased and chilling. “So glad to see you again, Claire,” she said. “Please, come in. I’m sure you’ll be just as happy as I am that we get to work together again for the common good.”
“If that means not at all, then yes,” Claire said. She had a real reluctance to take the two steps up to the doorway where Anderson waited, but there didn’t seem to be much choice. The two wannabe cops behind her would push her in if she didn’t go on her own, and Anderson would get a lot of pleasure out of that. Out of her fear.
Claire held eye contact and walked up to join Dr. Anderson, who put a friendly hand on her shoulder. “So nice to see you again,” she said, and it was a lie, and the look in her eyes was unreadable. “Don’t be afraid. We’re going to help you get past these feelings of loyalty you have to the vampires. It’s not your fault. More of a Stockholm syndrome hostage reaction, seeking to please those with power over you so you can survive. Nothing to be ashamed of, just something to be fixed.”
“Thanks. Can you take these off, please?” Claire rattled her handcuffs. Anderson’s smile deepened and turned just a touch mean.
“Maybe later,” she said. “It looks to me like you’ve taken on some very bad habits, Claire. I want to be sure I can trust you first.”
“You can trust me,” Claire said.
“To do what? Act out? Yes, I’m certain I can trust you to be as much of a handful as possible . . . like your friend Eve.”
Claire couldn’t help but ask. “Is she all right?”
“Fine,” Anderson said. “You’ll see her soon.”
The doors boomed shut and locked behind them as they passed into the shadows, and Claire fought back a feeling that she’d just made a really terrible mistake.
The asylum (okay, it wasn’t called that, but Claire couldn’t help but think of it that way) was surprisingly quiet, and once her eyes had adjusted to the lower light levels, it was also surprisingly lush. New, springy carpet cushioned her feet, and she smelled the sharp tang of new paint on the walls. Here, as in the rest of Morganville, there’d been a makeover.
But the doors—heavy metal doors, with sliding windows inset in them—still locked.
“Cheery,” Claire said. “Where’s Eve?”
“Beginning her course of treatment,” Anderson said. “Don’t worry, you’ll see her, but not immediately. This is more of an immersive therapy.”
“I figured you’d need my help making more copies of VLAD.” That was the name she’d given—maybe a little whimsically—to the device she’d created in Myrnin’s lab that worked as a kind of super-Taser on vampires, only it acted by attacking them mentally, not physically. It was effective. Way too effective, in fact.
