Daylighters

He grabbed her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he kissed her again, a long and deep kiss that said more than words ever could about how he felt. How they both felt.

Miracle, Fallon had called it. And in Michael’s case he’d been right, because Michael Glass, who’d been various shades of dead ever since Claire had known him, was now himself again. Human. Vital. Alive.

And, Claire thought with a sudden chill, vulnerable.

She turned away from them, and it hit her with breathtaking horror that most of the vampires struggling against their bonds right now around her, glowing from within as Fallon’s medicine did its work . . . most of them wouldn’t make it.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

Claire channeled her anxious, sick frustration into action. She hustled Michael and Eve out of their own private world and put them to work tying up the lab workers, who were starting to rouse. She dragged the two police officers off to the side and covered up the dead one that Oliver had shot. Halling was spitting with fury, but Claire didn’t listen to what she was saying. It would only make her angry, and she was feeling bad enough.

When there was nothing left to do, she crouched down next to the lab attendant who was waking the fastest, and helped her along by rubbing knuckles across her breastbone. That hurt, Claire remembered. And it roused the woman fast.

It didn’t take the woman long to adapt to the new situation. She realized that she was tied up, and that Claire and Eve and Michael were the only ones standing. Not a stupid woman, either—fear flickered across her face before she concealed it beneath a mask of professional distance. “Untie me,” she ordered.

“Bite me, Miss Mengele,” Eve said. “Not that stupid.”

The woman’s eyes fixed on Michael, and she looked . . . elated. “You made it,” she said. “I knew you would, Michael.”

“You know me?” Michael asked. He wasn’t smiling.

“Of course I do! I’m a big fan of your music. I’m Amanda. I work at the hospital.”

He blinked. “But you stuck poison in my arm.”

“To save you!”

He opened his mouth, then looked confused and weirdly embarrassed, and Claire realized he was trying to show fangs he no longer had. Well, that was awkward. “What about them?” He pointed to the others. Some had gone still. Some were still struggling.

Her eyes flickered toward them, then came back quickly to focus on him. “Better they die than live on in that hell,” she said. “We’re saving people. People. Not monsters.”

“The counteragent,” Claire said. “Tell me where it is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, but her round face wasn’t made for lying. “What counteragent?”

“The one that used to be locked in the safe and isn’t there anymore,” Claire said. “Where is it now?”

“No idea.”

“Don’t play poker, Mandy,” Eve said, “because you suck at it. Who has it?”

Amanda set her mouth into a flat, stubborn line and glared back. Oh, she didn’t like Eve at all. Which was sharply contrasted with the worshipful way she looked at Michael.

Claire stood up and grabbed her friends. She dragged them off a bit and lowered her voice. “She’s got a crush on you, Michael. Eve, she’s jealous of you. So back off and let Michael charm the info out of her.”

Michael looked a little bit ill. “Do I have to?”

“People are dying. Do you?”

He winced, nodded, and said, “Go do something else. I don’t need you guys staring at me. I feel bad enough already.” Claire knew he was thinking of the fact that he’d survived the process and so many . . . so many weren’t going to. Or maybe he was hating the slimy necessity of charming someone who didn’t see anything wrong with killing to cure.

But she took Eve’s arm and said, “Check Oliver.”

Eve’s eyes went wide. “Claire—I—I can’t. I can’t even go near him.”

“You just went to Michael—”

“That’s different. And—he was changing.”

“So was Oliver,” Claire shot back. “Just go!”

Claire went to check the others. Half were already gone, their light extinguished, their skin left chalky pale and bizarrely hard to the touch, as if it had turned to ash. Those were, unquestionably, dead.

Two others besides Michael had made the transition back to human and were gulping in convulsive breaths, looking panicked and wild, as if they were drowning in a sea of air. One was weeping, and it looked like tears of joy. The other two, though . . . they looked lost and horrified. Claire supposed that after so many years— hundreds, maybe—of existence as a vampire, being plunged back into mortality must have felt a lot more like a punishment than a salvation.

One woman had settled into the state that Oliver had been in—more of a coma than either a recovery or a decline. Her skin had turned chalky, but it was still pliable to the touch, and she didn’t have the fallen-in look of those who’d failed the process completely. The REVs, Claire thought. The ones Miss Amanda would have been happy to euthanize, for their own good. The thought made her ill, thinking of Oliver and this unnamed woman lying there helpless, trapped, unable to defend themselves.

Eve came back to her, looking flushed and scared. “He’s not breathing, but he’s not dead, either,” she said. “I can’t get too close, Claire, it makes me—” She swallowed hard. “I’m hoping this is just the doped blood they gave me, right? It’s not—not permanent?”

“I don’t think so,” Claire said. “Anderson said the treatment needed to be repeated a bunch of times, so I think you’ll be okay.” She hugged Eve, impulsively, and Eve took in a shuddering breath

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t—”

“None of that. We save each other, right? It’s what we do.”

“It’s what we do.” Eve stepped back and offered a fist bump, which they exploded and brought back, just because.

The moment of peace faded, though, as Claire looked again at the still, silent woman lying on the slab. “I don’t know her, do you?”

“Ayesha,” Eve said. “She’s okay. I think she was a lawyer. I used to make a lot of bloodsucking attorney jokes. Not so funny now, I guess.”

The woman was very small—maybe five feet tall—and had a rounded figure perfectly proportioned for her height. Pretty, too, under the unhealthy color of her skin; in human life she must have been of African descent, and she wore her hair in an abundant Afro cut held back with a colorful band. A real person, Claire thought. A real person, caught between life and death. They were all real people. That was what Fallon and his crew couldn’t seem to grasp . . . the cost of what they were doing. The history they were destroying.

Claire held the woman’s hand for a moment. It felt cool and unresponsive.

Michael was back a few minutes later, and when she looked up she was thrown off balance by the color in his skin, and the flush in his cheeks and on his lips. He looked like a young man who’d been locked away from the sun for too long, but he was definitely, unmistakably human.

It still seemed impossible.

“She doesn’t know where the antidote is,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” He didn’t say how he knew, which was probably for the best for everyone. “How is Ayesha?”

“I don’t know. Not dead, I guess. Like Oliver. But not alive, like you.”

He nodded slowly, watching the vampire woman with a slight frown between his brows. “We should get them out of here,” he said. “Her and Oliver, anyway.”

“What about the other ones who, you know, made it back to human?” Eve pointed vaguely at the other three survivors, who were still trying to get used to breathing for a living. “Shouldn’t we take them, too?”

“Fallon won’t hurt them. They’re his success stories.” Michael shook his head, still frowning. “I suppose I’m grateful to him for what he did, in a way. I wanted to get back to human, but I was afraid it wouldn’t work for me.