“Maybe not,” Hannah said. “I can even the odds a little.” She went back to the cruiser and picked up the radio mike, adjusted the frequency, and squeezed the button on the side. “Bitter Creek team, come in. Moses here.”
The response came within seconds. “Salazar here, boss.”
“Situation?”
“Same as ever. Bunch of freaking statues staring at us. Nobody’s doing nothing. They’re hungry, though. When is the next blood shipment coming?”
“A few hours,” Hannah responded. “Listen, I’m going to need you to send four more men out to Founder’s Square for crowd control.”
“Boss? That just leaves me here.”
“You’ve got Fallon’s Daylighters, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“That’s an order, Salazar.”
He hesitated just a few seconds before his voice came back over the radio. “Yes, ma’am. Sending the rest to Founder’s Square. ETA about ten minutes.”
“Ten-four.” Hannah hung up the mike and nodded to Mrs. Grant. “That takes most of my guys out of harm’s way for now. Salazar’s a good man. I’ll go in first and have him turn over the collar control box to me. Look, you’re not going to like it, but we have to wait for the others to leave, and I need Shane and Claire to run a little errand for me.”
“What?” Claire asked.
“Blood,” Hannah said. “If you don’t want those vampires in there snacking on us as soon as I release their collars, we’re going to need a lot of blood. Blood bank’s still got a stockpile. Go get it.”
“Are they just going to give it to us?”
“I’ve got a contact inside,” she said. “I’ll call ahead. You pull around to the back vampire entrance, and they’ll bring it out to you. Hurry.”
She stepped out of the way, and Claire got in on the driver’s side, racked the seat forward, and started the car.
It was only then, when she looked in the rearview mirror, that she saw Shane still sitting in the backseat, looking annoyed. “Oh,” she said, and covered her mouth with her hand, mostly to hide a smile. “Sorry. We should have let you out.”
“You think?”
“Sorry. We’re going—”
“—to the blood bank. I heard. Awesome. Always wanted to be the plasma delivery service for a bunch of cranky vamps with a grudge. Wait, that pretty much describes daily life around here, doesn’t it?”
She let him have the last word as she pulled the car out to the uneven street, heading for the blood bank.
It was actually a smooth exchange, though Claire had expected something to go really wrong. As she pulled the police car to a stop, the alley door opened, and a man in a white lab coat wheeled out a large cart, like something hotels would fill with laundry.
Only this was filled with blood bags.
“Trunk,” he told her through the rolled-down window, and she searched for a bit to find the release for it. Then she got out, remembering to open Shane’s door along the way, and ran to help the doctor—Was he a doctor? She didn’t ask—fling the bags into the trunk of the police car. Shane joined her, and with the three of them working it took only a couple of minutes to pack the space available. There were a few bags left, and Shane stacked them on the car’s floorboards in the back.
“Tell Hannah it’s the pure supply; I destroyed the stuff they contaminated,” the man said, and rolled the cart back inside.
Claire slammed the trunk shut and jumped in the driver’s seat while Shane climbed in the passenger seat this time. She drove carefully, trying to avoid being spotted by anyone she recognized or by any other patrol car. So far, there were no alerts. She hoped Kentworth still had Sully under control.
As she parked next to the bus once more, she saw that Hannah was organizing the Blacke residents into teams of four—enough to cover each other’s backs if necessary. Claire gave her a thumbs-up as she rolled down the window, and Hannah replied with a crisp nod and turned to address everyone.
“Right,” she said. “We’ve got the blood. Here’s how this will work. I go in and recover the controller for the collars. I shock the vampires down—for their safety as well as ours. Your job is to take down the Daylighter guards—but be careful. They won’t hesitate to fight back. While you’re taking them down, the kids and I will be piling all the blood in the center square of the atrium. By preference, most of the vamps will go for it when I free them, but I warn you: some will come for you or the Daylighters. Be prepared to defend yourselves there, too, and get out of the building while they feed.”
It sounded like a solid plan, and Claire swallowed hard as Hannah ordered her into the backseat. Hannah drove slowly to the edge of the building, and watched as Mrs. Grant’s people followed on foot, keeping to the edge of the wall.
Hannah turned the corner. “Both of you, get down and stay down until I come out,” she said. “I don’t want them seeing you or this could all go bad.”
They followed instructions. Claire had a clear view of the blood bags stacked on the floor beside her, the thick dark-red liquid shifting inside the bags as Hannah got out of the car and walked away, toward the entrance. The morning heat was starting to make itself felt, and Claire felt sweat forming on her back, where the sun shone brightly. Without the AC running in the car, it would get uncomfortable quickly.
But it wasn’t long before the radio in the car crackled to life, and Hannah’s voice said, “Give the signal to Mrs. Grant.”
Claire wasn’t sure what the signal was, but Shane rose up from behind the dashboard and gave Mrs. Grant, staring into the windshield from a few feet away, a big thumbs-up.
The people from Blacke—thirty strong, at least—rushed into the building.
No need to hide now, Claire thought, and she sat up to try to see what was going on. Which was useless, since there wasn’t much of a view inside. But after a few long minutes of silence, Hannah’s voice came over the radio again. “Pop the trunk. Bring it in.”
Shane opened her door on the way to the back of the car, and they grabbed full armloads of the squishy bags and ran for the entrance. Hannah opened the door for them. In her right hand, she was holding the controller box for the shock collars, and Claire saw that there were vampires down on the floor, still convulsing. She was holding them that way.
The Daylighters were mostly down, too, being tied up by the folks from Blacke, but not all of them had fallen into the trap. In fact, one was leaning over the second-floor balcony, aiming a handgun at them. Claire would have missed him, except that she heard Myrnin shout, “Claire, get down!” and she obeyed without question, dragging Shane with her.
The gun went off, and the bullet went over their heads to shatter one side of the entry doors into an explosion of glass shards.
Then Myrnin rose up pale behind the shooter, and sank his fangs into the man’s neck.
Claire watched, horrified, because in that moment her gentle, sweet, goofy boss became Vampire, with a capital V. She remembered moments like this, when all his humanity stripped away, but this time it seemed even more frightening—mainly because he was
He drained the man dry, and snapped his neck when he was done, simply out of sheer fury . . . and then he tossed him over the railing, to smack like a rag doll onto the tile floor.
That made everyone stop what they were doing for an instant—even the other Daylighters who were still fighting.
Myrnin, Claire realized, was still getting shocks from the collar. He was just . . . ignoring them. Hannah realized it, too, and she didn’t like it; she unsnapped the fastener on her sidearm as Myrnin leaped over the balcony’s edge and landed catlike beside the body of his victim.
“You can stop that now,” he said to Hannah. His voice was uneven and ragged, and his eyes were burning
