Bitter Blood

unemployed. The least she can do is help me grill burgers. And you two can chop veg—” He paused, looking straight at Claire. “What the hell happened?”

“Monica got creamed in the election?”

“We’ll throw the party later. And?”

She really didn’t want to say it. “I saw Jason. He was kind of…attacking people. So I stopped him. By the way, the silver pepper spray? Works great.”

Eve had gone completely still. She stared at Claire for a moment, then said quietly, “Is he okay?”

“I didn’t get him too badly. He’s okay. Just less bitey for a while. Eve—he’s not, ah—”

“Not wound too tight,” Eve supplied, and lowered her gaze to fix on the bubbles in her Coke. “Yeah, copy that. He’s always been off. You know that.”

Off didn’t really describe the feeling she’d had with Jason today. “I think it’s worse than that,” she said, as gently as she could. “He’s really—vicious.”

Michael stepped in, then. “It’s not unexpected that would happen,” he said. “Look, becoming a vampire—it’s complicated, what it does to you, but it does kind of amplify whatever bad impulses you already had. It’s tough to hang on to the good stuff, but easy as hell to bring the bad with you. I knew he’d be…” Michael shook his head. “Anyway. I’ll let Oliver know. He’s in charge of Jason.”

“From what Oliver’s doing now, he won’t really care,” Claire said. “He’s gone a little power crazy. You might have noticed.”

“Okay, so Jason Rosser is evil, and Oliver’s power hungry. This is not breaking news that should keep us from grilling burgers,” Shane said. “Can I get an amen?”

Eve and Michael chimed in, but Claire kept her head down. She was feeling pretty low. She’d spent a lot of energy this morning running down the portals and coming up empty, and then there had been the excitement of the rally, and Jason…. She was drained—not even hungry, actually, which was surprising.

She was also worried, really worried, about Myrnin. She’d thought that by now she’d have gotten some word from him. Bob was sitting upstairs in her room, contentedly spinning webs around flies that she’d caught for him, and she couldn’t believe that even at his craziest, Myrnin would have left his pet to starve. He was careless of assistants, but never of his spider.

So…where was he? And if he couldn’t communicate, how was she supposed to even begin to find him? It made her head hurt, and her stomach churn, and suddenly all she wanted was to finish her cold, sweet soda and crawl upstairs to sleep.

“Hey,” Michael said as he took out tomatoes, lettuce, onions and pickles from the refrigerator. “Hand me a knife, would you?”

She pulled one off the magnetic strip Shane had installed on the wall—easier access, he’d said, in case it came down to that kind of a fight. Shane always thought ahead that way. She gave the blade to Michael without comment and watched as he chopped stuff up. He was neat, fast, and accurate. Vampire senses apparently made for great prep cooks. “Michael,” she said as he finished slicing pickles into quarters, “do you know what bloodline Myrnin comes from?”

“I’m guessing you don’t mean Welsh,” he said. “Vampire bloodline?”

She nodded.

“No. Why?”

“Because I need to track him, and I remember Naomi could, you know, drink a sample of another vampire’s bloodline to find him. She did it with Theo. Maybe—maybe you could do it to find Myrnin?”

“Maybe,” Michael said, but he sounded doubtful. “I heard there’s a blood record somewhere, but I have no idea where it is. Or if Myrnin’s in it. From what I heard, he’s the only one still living out of his line. It’s pretty ancient, and he didn’t make any others who survived long, so there may not be a record.”

“But could you ask? Maybe look around? I need to find him, Michael. I think—I think he’s in trouble.”

“Why?” He put down the knife and looked at her directly. “Did he say something?”

“Only that he didn’t like the way things were going in town,” she admitted. “And that he was planning to leave. But you know how he is. I don’t think he really would have run away. Not like that. You saw the lab!”

He shrugged. “The lab’s always a mess; you know that. It’s impossible to tell whether there was a struggle, or he just didn’t like the latest newspaper he read and decided to trash the place.”

“He left Bob! And how did Pennyfeather get in? He didn’t have authorization.”

“You don’t know that. And maybe he just forgot about Bob. It’s not like he’s an exciting pet.”

“Bob’s cool, and Myrnin loves him like any other pet. He’d never just abandon him to starve,” Claire said. “But…I just have the feeling, okay? So would you? For me?”

Michael ruffled her hair. “Yeah, sure. For you. Here. Chop some onions.”

“Hey!”

“Consider it prepayment.”

Lunch cheered her up—as did Michael’s promise—and Claire actually enjoyed the burgers, which Shane had cooked pretty much to perfection. Eve and Shane got into it over the age-old mustard versus mayonnaise debate, but they had a nice time, even with that controversy devolving to tossing packets of condiment at each other. Even better, since it was Shane’s turn to clean up.

After lunch, Claire went upstairs to her room while Michael and Shane settled in to try out a new first-person shooter game, and Eve shopped online; she stretched out on the bed and fell immediately, deeply asleep.

For a while she was too tired to dream, but finally she dreamed, and it was…odd.

At first, she didn’t really understand. She was someplace dark and very, very quiet, except for the steady hiss of water dripping. She was cold and felt a gnawing, desperate hunger.

Then she heard a voice out of that dark whisper, “Claire?” It was as if she were torn out of her body and thrown violently up through the dark in a blur, and everything in her wanted to scream but she didn’t actually have lungs or a body to use to do that, only a pure, condensed feeling of real terror….

And from a great height, she looked down into a very deep, narrow pit, and far below, a starkly pale face upturned to her in the moonlight.

The voice.

It had sounded like Myrnin’s voice, but it couldn’t have been; it couldn’t. There was no sense to this dream, because what would Myrnin be doing at the bottom of a hole, and why wouldn’t he just jump out?

“Help,” he said, from very far below, very far away. “Help me.”

“I don’t know how!” she called down, at least in the dream, and because it was just a dream, it made sense that he could hear her, somehow, and that even though she was very far away, she could see the desperation in his expression.

“Come for me,” Myrnin said, and it sounded like a ghost, like Shane’s sister whispering out there in that eerie vacant lot, like Miranda being torn to shreds of fog.

It sounded like someone who was already gone.

She woke up with a pounding heart and a nauseating headache bad enough to drive her to the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen, which she washed down with handfuls of bottled water in frenzied gulps. Somewhere in there, she noticed she’d managed to sleep away the rest of the day; it was already approaching sunset. What the hell was that? she wondered. She’d had anxiety dreams before, lots of them, but they usually involved being naked in a crowd, or running in slow motion, or taking a test unprepared. Nothing like this.

This was awfully—suspiciously—specific. If she was going to dream about Myrnin, why have him stuck deep in a hole in the ground?

Trap-door spider, something whispered in the back of her mind. Gramma Day always called him that. So did you, once.

Yes, but she hadn’t meant it literally.

Maybe you just want him to need you, that awful, calm voice said. Maybe you just like it that he depends on you so much.

The thought unsettled her. She decided to put it out of her mind, all of it, especially the dream, because it was just her imagination working out her anxieties, just as it ought to do.

Maybe.

She went downstairs and found the video game amazingly still in progress, but on pause, as Michael and