Daylighters

I was afraid I’d lose you, Eve, and I couldn’t stand that.”

“You’ll never lose me,” Eve said. She sounded totally confident of that. “Just make sure I don’t lose you.”

“Promise,” he said, and kissed her again.

“Guys?” Claire hated to pop their private bubble, but she pointed to the silent form of Ayesha lying on the table. “If we’re taking them, we’d better get going.”

“The tables have wheels,” Eve said. “They unlock.” She stepped on a metal lever and pushed, and the table slid smoothly out a few inches before she stopped it with her hand. “We’ll need transportation once we get them outside, though. Even in Morganville, rolling gurneys with half-dead vamps through the streets might seem a little out of the ordinary.”

“Especially in the new, improved Morganville,” Claire agreed. “Michael, go scout ahead, see if there is some kind of car we can grab. No, wait.” She spotted a coatrack near the door. On it dangled a couple of purses. She sprinted over and dug inside, searching for keys. She came up with a set. There was a photo key ring on it, and it looked like Amanda really was a big fan of Michael’s, because the photo was one of the promotional ones he used for gigs. Black-and-white, very moody.

She tossed him the keys, then almost laughed at his puzzled expression when he spotted the photo. “Get used to it, rock star. Wait until you’re famous outside of town,” she said. “Hurry. We’ll be right behind you.”

He kissed the back of Eve’s hand, which was sweet, and then he took off out the door. Claire hoped he wouldn’t run into any trouble, because she was afraid his human instincts for survival hadn’t quite kicked in yet. He was still thinking of himself as a vampire. It would take time—and probably one or two wounds—for him to develop the caution that came with being mortal again.

Eve sighed. “Do you know how much I hate it that this turned out well for the two of us? Because now—now how am I supposed to feel about it?”

“Think about Oliver,” Claire said. “And Ayesha. And all of these people lying on the tables who didn’t make it. Fallon’s perfectly okay with killing three-quarters or more of the people he experiments on. That’s just not okay, even if Michael was in the lucky bracket.”

“I know,” Eve said. She took a deep breath, leaned over, and quickly pulled the IV tube from Ayesha’s arm —it immediately sealed, which was interesting—and nodded to Claire. “You grab Oliver. Meet you up front.”

“You can do this? You’re sure? Even though she’s—” Claire used the universal finger-fangs-in-neck symbol for vampire, and Eve gave her a pale, broken smile.

“As long as I don’t have to do anything but push the gurney,” she said.

Claire took her at her word, and moved on to do her part. Getting the limp body of Oliver up and onto the bed was a lot more trouble than she had reckoned. She finally got him in a fireman’s carry over her shoulder and staggered the few steps to flop him crookedly onto the gurney. Not a neat job, but it would do to roll him down the hall, as long as she didn’t encounter too many bumps along the way.

Eve was already rolling Ayesha toward the door.

As she left the lab, though, things went wrong. She’d just managed to prop the second door open for the gurney when alarms started shrieking—deafening alarms, designed to paralyze and panic, and it definitely had the second effect on her, if not the first. Her heart was pounding as she steered Oliver’s gurney out. She heard the lock snapping shut behind her. Lockdown. She hoped Eve had kept the front door open.

She had. She’d jammed an empty gurney into it, and as Claire arrived, breathless, she saw that Michael had carried Ayesha down the steps and was putting her in the backseat of the car they’d liberated from lab rat Amanda. “Help me,” Claire panted as she grabbed Oliver’s shoulders. “We don’t have much time!”

Eve just shook her head and stepped away, trying to control nausea with both hands over her mouth. Claire wondered how she was going to feel once it came down to getting into the car with a couple of vampires.

Probably wouldn’t be pleasant.

Michael came running back. She nodded toward him. “Grab Oliver’s legs,” she said. He did, and the sheet around Oliver slipped, revealing way too much pale, ashy skin.

“Uh . . . have you noticed he’s not wearing much?” Michael asked. “At least I got to keep my pants.” He’d thrown a lab coat on over his bare chest, but it didn’t fit very well.

Claire hadn’t noticed, actually, until that very moment, and while it was more than a little distracting, she just ignored all of it as they carried Oliver’s heavy, limp form to the car and jammed it in next to Ayesha. There was a shout from the door, and Claire looked up to see one of the men from Eve’s treatment room—if you could call it that—standing in the doorway, trying to force his way past the jammed empty gurneys. “Get in!” she yelled. She saw the furious face of Dr. Anderson behind the orderly. “We have to go!”

Michael started the car as Eve piled into the front next to him, which left Claire no choice but to climb into the backseat with two half-naked comatose vampires. She tried not to think about that, about the cool, dead- feeling bodies pressed against her.

Eve was gagging again, which was miserable for her, and potentially miserable for everybody else.

Michael jammed the car in reverse just as one of the orderlies—who must have scavenged a gun from one of the fallen guards—took a shot at them. It smashed the windshield into blinding cracks, with a neat hole high in the center, and it took a second for the delayed reaction to kick in. Claire checked herself for leaks, but the bullet had gone through the back without hitting anyone.

“I can’t see!” Michael yelled. Eve, with barely a pause to flinch, braced herself and began to kick the front windshield. Somewhere in the confusion she’d switched out her paper house shoes for a too-large pair of men’s boots, and they came in handy now as she smashed the whole shattered mess out, leaving them with a makeshift convertible. “Claire, get the back!”

That was a lot harder, because she had no leverage and no room. Claire felt around on the floor and found a kid’s baseball bat rolling under her feet; Amanda must have had a son or daughter in Little League.

She smashed at the back window until it broke out into a heap on the trunk. Not clean, but good enough to allow Michael visibility.

Claire lost her hold on the bat as he accelerated backward, and it rolled off, thumped down the slope of the metal, and clattered to the parking lot as Michael swerved, shifted gears again, and roared out at the top speed Amanda’s car could manage.

The cool breeze felt good, and it wiped some of the blank shock from Claire’s mind. There were no more shots from the building behind them, which was lucky. “Where are we going?” Claire asked. Unfortunately, Michael asked it at the same time, which meant none of them had any good ideas . . . and behind them, not more than a couple of blocks back, police lights began strobing. “They’re on us!”

“I see them,” Michael said tightly. “I—holy shit!”

He hit the brakes so hard that Claire—not belted in, for obvious reasons—had to grab his seat back in a death grip to keep from being catapulted through the front open window. The two limp vampires in the back with her slammed forward like crash dummies as the car skidded, tires smoking, and came to a shuddering halt.

Shane was standing in the road.

He looked violent and savage and crazy, and his eyes were that terrifying shade of gold. He was missing a shirt, his pants were ripped and bloody, and underneath it Claire could see that he’d been hurt—cuts and bruises.

But he was mostly human.

As the car stopped just inches from his thighs, he wavered, lost his balance, and slapped both palms on the hood for support as his knees went out from under him.

“Shane!”

“Claire, don’t—,” Michael yelled, but it was too late, she was already out of the car and racing toward him. He won’t hurt me, she thought. He didn’t hurt me before and he won’t hurt me now.

And he didn’t.

Shane’s hands were back to normal human hands, though they looked bloody and bruised, and when he raised his head to meet her gaze, the hot golden color was fading out of his eyes. “Claire?” He sounded lost and scared. “I was looking for you. For Amelie—I smelled her blood . . .”

Michael had opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out, watching them. Ready, Claire thought, to come