“The one that used to be locked in the safe and isn’t there any- more,” 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 weep- ing, 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 pun- ishment 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 perma- nent?”
“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. 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 transpor- tation 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 dan- gled 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 trou- ble, 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 per- fectly 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,”
Claire took her at her word, and moved on to do her part. Get- ting 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 man- aged 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 Aye- sha 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.