us.”
“Shit,” Claire whispered. She sorted keys again, nearly frantic now, and found one that slotted neatly in. It turned.
The door opened in front of her, on a room that was the mirror opposite of the one where they’d found the dead, discarded vampires—the ones who’d failed their conversion back to human. That had been a hastily assembled morgue.
This was a bright, clean, well-equipped lab, complete with glass-fronted cabinets and counters, stations for preparation of compounds, refrigerators . . . and it held about the same number of tables, and on them lay vampires.
The difference was that these vampires still survived, at least for now.
Claire’s gaze swept down the line and fixed on tousled blond hair. “There!” she yelled to Eve, and they both raced forward . . . and then had to stop, because two guards stepped out into their path. These were police officers, wearing Morganville blues, with the Daylighter pins gleaming on their collars. Claire recognized one of them—Officer Halling, the woman who’d found the dead body at the Glass House.
Officer Halling unsnapped her holster and put her hand on the butt of her gun.
Eve didn’t hesitate; she lunged forward with the Taser, but unfortunately for her, Halling’s partner was fast, and he grabbed Eve by the arm and wrenched it hard, forcing the Taser out of her hand to drop and roll on the floor. Halling dismissed Eve, and focused her cold gaze on Claire.
Claire pulled the scalpel from the cardboard sheath, but she didn’t attack. Instead, she ran in the opposite direction, to the last bed on the end. She’d seen a familiar face there, too.
Oliver.
He was strapped down with some kind of silver-coated webbing on his arms and legs, and there was an IV needle in his arm, buried in a thick, ropy, blue vein. His skin looked chalky, but beneath that his arms looked wiry and strong, and his chest thick with muscle.
His eyes were open. He lifted his head to stare at her, and his eyes were a ferocious, unnerving shade of red. He didn’t speak.
Claire ripped the IV out of his arm, and took a scalpel to the webbing that held him down. It was tough and dulled the edge pretty quickly, but she managed to get one hand free.
Oliver did the rest. He rolled onto his side and ripped at the silver web until it was shredded, even though it burned and cut his fingers, and then sat up to tear at the stuff holding his ankles.
A shot shattered glass on a counter past Claire, and she looked up to see Halling taking aim again. This time she wouldn’t be firing a warning shot.
“Stop!” Halling yelled. “Drop the knife!”
Claire did, and it hit the tile floor with a musical
Dead wrong.
Oliver came off the table in a blur and stopped with her gun arm in one hand and her throat in the other. Claire shut her eyes, because she didn’t want to see, but she heard the snap of bones breaking . . . and when she was able to look again, Halling was down on the floor.
Without much of a pause, Oliver turned toward the other policeman, who was holding Eve down. He turned sideways, an elegant and weirdly old-fashioned motion, held Halling’s confiscated pistol at his side, and said, “I don’t offer second chances. This is your first and only warning. Drop your weapon now and let the girl go.” It was almost as if he was . . . dueling. He even put his left arm behind his back, crooked at the elbow.
And then he
Oliver didn’t try hard, but before the man’s gun was halfway up, Oliver brought his own weapon up, leveled, aimed, and fired.
The other man went down.
Oliver held the pose for a long second, watching the man to be sure he wouldn’t get up, and then the tension released and he stumbled sideways. He crashed into another vampire’s bed and grabbed for support, but couldn’t hold himself upright. He slipped to his knees, tangled in sheets, and as Claire watched in horror, he began to convulse.
“Oliver!” She dropped down next to him in a crouch, not sure what to do, whether she
It went on a long time, but he finally went limp. “I hear you,” he said. His voice sounded raw and strange, and it sounded . . . afraid. He opened his eyes then, and they weren’t vampire-red anymore. They were a plain, unremarkable brown. His skin had taken on an odd shimmer, as if it was shifting colors. “You must stop them, Claire. Don’t let them destroy everything we—” He stopped and let out a cry of pain, real pain, and flung out his hand. She didn’t think twice, even given what she’d just seen him do. She grabbed his fingers and held them, felt him shaking as if he were flying apart. His hand closed over hers with crushing strength, but it was only human strength now, not vampire strength.
His skin was
Claire’s eyes widened.
Oliver was, before her eyes, turning human. And she knew, somehow, that this was the very last thing he would want.
“No,” he said, and it burst up out of him like a growl, a primal and furious snarl. His convulsions jerked his back into a tight bow, and Claire gasped and had to pull her hand free as his grip grew tighter and tighter around hers. “No! I
It was almost a chant, or a prayer, but she couldn’t imagine God listening to anything that savage, that angry. The rage that fueled it seemed totally beyond the capacity of any human body to create, much less contain.
And suddenly, the glow inside him died, leaving his skin that chalky, translucent white again, as if he was made of milky, empty glass.
He let out a sigh, and his muscles went limp. The brown, suffering eyes drifted shut.
She was terrified to touch him, but she put her fingers on his wrist.
Silent. No pulse. No rise and fall of his chest.
But he didn’t look quite as dead as the corpses in the morgue on the other side of the building. Not yet, anyway. He looked—comatose. Suspended between life and death, vampire and human.
She supposed he would have to fall in one direction or the other.
Claire dragged him to a more comfortable position—more for herself than him, really—and raced to the other side of the lab. There were manuals there, chemicals, ranks of IV bags, checklists and protocols.
She grabbed the protocol manual and feverishly slid her finger down the table of contents.
The section was a dry, clinical table of results. Seventy-three percent average deaths, which Claire already knew. But, strangely, only a flat twenty percent human conversion score.
Which left seven percent . . . REV? The code didn’t mean anything to her, and she scanned the rows of legends until she found it. REV meant
Seven percent of those treated with the cure reverted to vampire. The line was marked with a footnote symbol, and she scanned down to read it.
Protocol D, Claire discovered, had an illustration of one of the Daylighters’ special liquid-silver-filled stakes being plunged into a vampire’s chest, then removed to release the liquid.
In other words, they euthanized any vampires who survived their cure and stayed vampire.