Carlyle raised his eyebrows and smiled at her thinly. “Someone ate her breakfast this morning,” he said, and turned his laser focus on another hapless student. “Gregory. Explain to me the calculation if T equals zero.”
“Uh—” Gregory was a page flipper, and Carlyle waited patiently while he looked for the answer. It was blindingly obvious, but Claire bit her tongue.
It took Gregory an excruciating four minutes to admit defeat. Carlyle went through three other students, then finally, and with a sigh, turned back to Claire. “Go ahead,” he said, clearly irritated now.
“If there isn’t any T, there isn’t any B,” she said. “So it has to be zero.”
“Thank you.” Carlyle glared at the others in the class. “I weep for the state of engineering, I truly do, if this is the best you can do with something so obvious. Danvers gets bonus credit. Gregory, Shandall, Schaefer, Reed, you all get failing pop quiz scores. If you’d like to solve extra-credit equations, see me afterward. Now. Chapter six, the residual entropy of imperfect crystals…”
It was a grim thing, Claire thought, that even when she got the high grade and dirty looks from her fellow students, she still felt bored and underchallenged. She wished she could go talk to Myrnin for a while. Myrnin was always unpredictable, and that was exciting. Granted, sometimes the problem was to just stay alive, but still; he was never boring. She also didn’t have to sit through the incredibly dense (and wrong) explanations from other students when she was at his lab. If he’d ever had assistants that dumb, he’d have eaten them.
Somehow, she made it through the hour, and the next, and the next, and then it was time to run to the University Center and grab a Coke and a sandwich. It wasn’t Eve’s day to work the counter at the coffee shop, so after gulping down lunch, Claire—done at school for the day—walked to Common Grounds, just to check in on her.
It was only lightly occupied just now, thanks to the vagaries of college schedules; there were a few Morganville residents in the house, and a group of ten students very seriously arguing the merits of James Joyce. Claire claimed a comfortably battered armchair and dumped her bag in it; the chair and everything else smelled like warm espresso, with a hint of cinnamon. Common Grounds, for all its flaws, still had a homey, welcoming atmosphere.
But when she turned to the counter, she saw a sullen young man in a tie-dyed apron and red-dyed emo hair, who glared at her as she approached. He yawned.
“Hi,” she said. “Um, where’s Eve?”
“Fired,” he said, and yawned again. “They called me in to take her shift. Man, I’m fried. Forty-eight hours without sleep—thank God for coffee. What’s your poison?”
At Common Grounds, that might be literal, Claire thought. “Bottled water,” she said, and forked over too much cash for it. Nobody drank Morganville’s tap water. Not after the draug invasion. Sure, they’d cleared the pipes and everything, but Claire—like most of the residents—couldn’t shake the idea that something had once been alive in there.
Better to pay a ridiculous amount for water bottled out of Midland.
“So, what happened this morning to get her fired? Because I know she was planning to come in.”
Counter Guy wasn’t chatty enough to come up with an answer; he just shrugged and grunted as he rang up her purchase and handed over the cold bottle. He had tattoos running up and down his arms, mostly Chinese symbols. Claire considered asking him what they meant, but in her experience he probably didn’t have a clue. He did have one thing in common with Eve: black-painted fingernails.
“Is Oliver here?”
“Office,” Counter Guy said. “But I wouldn’t if I was you. Boss ain’t in a good mood.”
He was probably right, Claire thought, but she knocked anyway, and received a curt, “In,” a command she followed. She shut the door behind her. Counter Guy and the other residents out there wouldn’t come to her rescue if things went badly, and she didn’t want the clueless students involved. They were having enough trouble with James Joyce.
Oliver didn’t even glance up, but then he didn’t need to, she thought; he’d probably identified her before she’d come anywhere near the office, just by her heartbeat or the smell of her blood or something. Vampires were an endless source of creepy. “Pennyfeather attacked Eve last night,” she said. “Did you tell him to do it?”
He still didn’t bother to look up from whatever piece of paper he was reading. He picked up a pen and scribbled down a note, then signed the bottom. “Why?”
“He left a note pinned to the door, ‘Done by Order of the Founder.’”
“I am not the Founder,” he said. “And Pennyfeather is no longer my creature. He does as he pleases. Though I would say his attitude is an accurate weather vane of public opinion among our kind, if that is what you’re asking.” Oliver didn’t ask how Eve was, or what had happened, and that, Claire thought, was different. He’d kind of grown a bit more human since she’d first met him, but now he was back to the bad old vamp, unfeeling and utterly careless of human lives. He wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt Eve, probably, but he wouldn’t bother to help her, either, if it meant he had to make an effort. “Do you have some valid reason for disturbing me, or are you simply trying to annoy me?”
“I know what’s happening,” Claire said softly, and his pen stopped moving on the paper. The sudden silence made her feel breathless, as if she were standing at the edge of a bottomless pit full of darkness. “You’ve wanted to rule Morganville ever since you found out it existed. You came here wanting to get Amelie out of power and make yourself king or something. But she didn’t let you, so you had to get…creative.”
Now he looked up at her, and although his face was human, softened by loose, curling gray hair, the expression and the focus were purely those of a predator. He didn’t say anything.
Claire plunged ahead. “Amelie trusted you. She let you get close. And now you’re playing her to get what you always wanted. Well…it’s not going to work. She may like you, but she’s not stupid, and when she wakes up—and she will—you’re going to be sorry you tried it.”
“I don’t see that my relationship with the Founder is any of your business.”
“You can influence other vampires,” she said. “You told me so before. And you’re subtle about it. Whatever you’re doing to her, stop it before this all goes bad. The humans won’t stand for being cattle, and Amelie won’t let you go as far as you think. Just…back off. Oliver—maybe I’m crazy for saying this, but you’re not like this. Not anymore. I don’t think you really want all this deep down.”
He stared at her with empty, oddly bright eyes, and then went back to his paperwork.
“You may leave now,” he said. “And count yourself lucky you are allowed to do so.”
“Why did you fire Eve?” she asked. It was probably a mistake, but she couldn’t help but ask it. And surprisingly, he answered.
“She accused me of trying to have her killed,” he said. “Just as you did. Unfortunately, I’m unable to fire you. And my patience is now at an end. Begone.”
“Not until you tell me—”
She never even saw him move, but suddenly he was around the desk and slamming the pen into the wood of the door behind her. It was just a simple ballpoint, but it sank an inch deep, vibrating an inch from her head. Claire flinched and came up hard against the barrier at her back. Oliver didn’t move away. This close, he looked like bone and iron, and he smelled—ironically—like coffee. She was forcefully reminded that he’d been a warrior when he was alive, and he wasn’t any less a killer now.
“Go,” he said, very softly. “If you’re wise, you will go very, very far from here, Claire. But in any case, go from my presence, now.”