Bitter Blood

I came to a sudden and complete halt, staring at him—at the man I’d never really known, because he’d never let me know him; he’d treated me like a useful tool and potential enemy my whole life.

“You’re different,” he said. “You’re better than I ever was. And I’m proud of you for being so strong. That’s all. I just needed to tell you, before the end.”

He dissolved in electronic smoke. Gone.

“Dad?” I turned on my heel, my voice echoing through the cool, silent lab. “Dad?”

Nothing. Just…silence. That told me he had no further energy to spare, and we were out of time. The lights flickered, warning me of the same thing.

Claire suddenly said, “Oh no—Bob!”

“Bob?” I stared at her blankly, and she pointed across the lab.

Oh. The spider. I shook my head and jogged over to pick up the tank—which, except for the glass content, was light—and made damn sure the lid was on it tightly before carrying it to the portal. Claire waited anxiously as the lights continued to flicker, faster and faster.

I paused on the edge of the portal as she stepped through. I wanted to say something profound, but I’m not that guy, so I just said, awkwardly, “Okay, Dad. See you.”

“See you.” His voice sighed, and there was something wistful in his electronic voice.

I stepped through the portal into the cool, familiar air of the Glass House, and felt the thing snap shut— utterly shut—behind me. There was an almost physical sensation of disconnection, of the whole system just… dying.

I put my hand on the blank wall and concentrated, for a moment, on just breathing. You’ve lost him before, I told myself. He wasn’t really there anyway.

But it had felt real to me when he’d said he was proud. Maybe I’d always craved that, needed it. Maybe he’d known it.

But despite the surge of sadness, there was something good about leaving him this time—something that felt final, and complete.

Maybe this was what all those TV psych doctors meant when they talked about closure.

I put Bob’s tank down on the dining room table, to Eve’s muttered distress, and Claire quickly dumped the heavy, clunky machine on the coffee table, along with her bow and arrow. I noticed vaguely that it was pointed in my direction, but at the moment, that didn’t mean anything—and neither did the prickly feeling that raced through me.

“You’re all right?” Claire said, and stepped closer with an expression of pure concern. She looked…I can’t explain it, exactly, but all of a sudden I felt a bolt of heat go through me like fire out of heaven, and, man, did I want her in all kinds of ways—right and wrong. She’d grown over the past year—filled out in curves that begged to be held and stroked, and this definitely wasn’t the time, but all of a sudden I was considering not minding what was appropriate behavior.

“Fine,” I said through a suddenly dry throat. “I mean, I will be, anyway.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wish we could’ve done something.”

“That’s why I love you,” I said, and reached over to brush her hair back from her face. “Because you care so much.” Her gaze came up and hit mine, and more heat exploded through me like a bomb. I saw the shock wave of it in her eyes. Oh.

I really could not explain what was going on in my head and ricocheting around my body, but it was…good. Great, in fact. I fitted my hand around Claire’s cheek and bent to kiss her. Her lips tasted like cherries and salt, sweet and tart together, and I growled somewhere deep and leaned in, pulling her close. She was mine, mine, and that was all that mattered. Myrnin had gone, vanished, and he wasn’t any threat now. Some traitorous little whisper told me I could have asked Frank about him, about what had happened, but I hadn’t wanted to know. He was gone.

And I had Claire, body and soul, and man, did I want her, right now. In so many ways.

“Hey,” Michael said from somewhere behind me. “That’s really sweet and all, but we just killed a guy and your dad—are you sure you want to be doing this now?”

He was dead right about that, but I couldn’t take my hands away from her—or my lips. I’d somehow worked my thumbs under the tight knit of her shirt and found skin beneath, and I didn’t want to let that go. The sensation of her fine, soft flesh, even that much of it, made me feel as if my head were on fire.

And then Claire gasped, coughed, and fought her way free of me. I instinctively reached for her and got air, and stumbled after…and as soon as I did, I sucked in a sharp, cold breath of air and felt something like sanity start to come back.

Oh. Oh. The machine. It lay on the coffee table, glowing a faint green, and the business end was pointed toward where Claire and I had been standing. It had gotten turned on when she’d dumped it there, I supposed.

And then, ha ha not funny, it had turned me on.

Claire, blushing a furious and gorgeous shade of red, circled around the table and flipped some kind of switch on the back. The glowing died, and so did the humming, and I felt…not normal, but less crazed. “Sorry,” she said, and bit her lip. They were still damp and swollen from our kissing, and I shook myself out of focusing on them with a real effort. “It’s—kind of an experiment.”

“Myrnin’s making a lust ray,” I said. Of course he was, because…why not? I had to admit, I’d probably see some value in that myself. Hell. I just had. “Wait a second. I accidentally pointed that at Michael, and it made him—”

“Angry,” Michael said. “Hyper-angry. Ready to kill.”

“No, no, it’s not—” Claire swallowed and visibly tried to calm herself. “It’s not a lust ray. It just magnifies what you’re feeling. And it’s not Myrnin’s. It’s mine. I was just—experimenting.”

“I know I’m not a scientific peer review or anything, but I have to say I think it works. If that’s what you were going for, anyway.” I skipped over the whole issue of why it had decided to focus on that particular impulse in me. She’d take it as a compliment, hopefully, but I wasn’t too sure about that. My track record of guessing what might offend girls wasn’t exactly perfect. “What were you thinking of using it for? Because the way it sent Michael into rage overdrive…”

The blush just wasn’t getting any less red, or—even without the ray—any less interesting. “The idea is that once I can exactly amplify a feeling, I can also cancel it out,” she said. “It was supposed to just work with vampires, not humans. I don’t know why—why it worked on you, Shane. I’m so sorry.”

“Well”—I shrugged—“I’m not, particularly. That was a little bit fun.”

“I hate to admit it, but it was when it was pointed at me, too,” Michael said. “Kind of like it took away all the inhibitions.”

“A drunk gun,” I said. “Awesome.”

“Not,” Claire said, and frowned. “It’s dangerous.” She picked it up and stuck it in her backpack, engaging some kind of safety switch I hadn’t noticed before. “I’ll find someplace to keep it where it won’t hurt anybody until I can destroy it. It was probably a dumb idea, anyway.”

Eve disappeared into the kitchen, ever practical, and came out with a blood bag that she tossed to Michael, who snatched it out of the air and bit into it with a frightening level of enthusiasm. He drained it in about, oh, ten seconds or less, the same way a human would chug water after a really aggressive workout. And it had about the same effect; he got a little weak-kneed and had to brace himself on a wall, but after the shock passed, he seemed almost immediately better. His eyes faded back to simple blue, and his skin coloring went from dead-guy pale to more like ivory. Wounds started shutting faster, too.

“Thanks,” he said to Eve. She raised a cocky eyebrow.

“You’ll make it up to me later,” she said, and winked. That got a really different kind of smile from Michael, and I found something else to look at, fast. Now I was the one feeling like an intruder on something personal, like I guessed Mikey had earlier, what with all the passionate groping and tongues.

Funny how just the way they smiled at each other could be intimate. Or maybe I was just turning into a girl, living with two of them in the house. That was frightening. Not that I don’t like girls. I just preferred to be plain old insensitive me.

“One down,” I said. “But Frank gave me a warning. This town’s really going to go crazy. We need to be