She was in some kind of office, but it hadn’t been used in recent years; the desks looked like something left over from the turn of the century, but these weren’t antiques; they were junk. The wood was rotten, drawers were cracked and hanging loose, and in some cases the legs had actually broken off.
She surprised a mouse in one of the broken drawers, and nearly screamed as it zipped across the dirty floor in her path. Deep breaths. Come on, keep it together; they need you. Shane needs you.
Claire pulled the heavy silver-coated stake out of her pocket and held it in her left hand as she opened the door with her right, ready to attack if she had to ... but the hallway was empty.
She could hear running footsteps, though. Noise upstairs. That didn’t mean there weren’t bad guys down here, however. Thanks to a thorough education in Morganville—Survival 101—she always assumed there were bad guys around every corner.
There was a lot of chaos going on upstairs—furniture crashing, thumping, running feet. People yelled—Claire tried not to think of it as screaming—and it sounded like that might be where Oliver had chosen to go after Morley.
But where was Michael?
Claire opened another door and found an office, with a desk and a computer and an old cup of molding coffee sitting on top of some papers. Nobody there. She tried the next door—same result, only no coffee.
In the third one, she found a woman slumped in the corner. She was unconscious, not dead, thankfully, as Claire discovered on checking her pulse, which proved to be strong. Claire moved the woman into a more comfortable position, rolled over on her side; recovery position, it was called. Shane had taught it to her—he was good at first aid.
The woman was older, kind of heavy, and she looked tired and pale.
Pale.
Claire checked her neck on both sides, but found nothing. Then she checked the woman’s wrists and found a slowly bleeding wound, and not a neat one, either. Claire shuddered, breathed in a few times to steady herself, and then looked around for something to use to tie up the wound. There was a scarf on the woman’s desk; Claire carefully wrapped it around her wrist and tied it tight, and checked the woman again. She was still unconscious, but didn’t seem to be in any trouble.
“It’ll be okay,” Claire promised, and went on. The thing that was worrying her now was that while she certainly wouldn’t put it past Morley and his crew to be snacking on random people, this hadn’t just happened. The blood streaking the woman’s hand had been mostly dried and flaking off, the wound had been half healed, and Morley’s party bus had only just arrived in town.
That didn’t sound right at all.
Out in the hall, the fight was still going on upstairs, and as Claire carefully edged toward the stairs, trying to get a look, there was a sudden thump-rattle-crash, and a body came flying into view, hit the wall, and tumbled down the big, scarred wooden steps to sprawl at her feet.
It was a vampire.
It was not one of Morley’s vampires. She’d gotten a look at every one of them on the bus, and they’d all been typical Morganville folks. None of them had looked Shane’s age, or been wearing a bloodstained, tattered old football jersey that smelled like dead feet even from twenty yards away.
This was not a Morganville vampire.
This was something else.
And it rolled up, bared terrifying lengths of fangs, and came after her with a roar full of fury, hunger, and delight.
10
Claire yelped, backed up, and got the stake level just in time to bury it in his chest. His momentum drove him onto the silver-coated wood, and pushed her into the wall behind her with a bruising slam. Her head hit the bricks, and she felt a hot yellow burst of pain, but she was more concerned by his bloody red eyes, crazy with rage, and those sharp, sharp fangs....
Then he slumped against her; she shoved, and he toppled off her and down to the floor with a crash, hands thumping out to either side. Man, he really stank, as if he hadn’t bathed or washed his clothes in a year. And he smelled like old blood, which was sick.
His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, but Claire knew he wasn’t dead—not yet. The silver in the stake was hurting him, and the stake itself was keeping him immobilized for now. Whether or not the silver would kill him was a question of how old he was, but somehow she didn’t think he was one of the ancient ones, like Amelie and Oliver and Morley. He was more like some bully who’d turned vamp a few years back, if that.
The silver was burning him. She saw black around the wound now.
He tried to kill me. She swallowed hard, her hand tentatively touching the stake, then dropping away. I should let him die.
Except she really needed that stake. Without it, she was unarmed. And she knew—because Michael had told her—that getting staked was painful. Getting staked with silver was agony.
Claire reached for the stake to pull it out. She’d just grabbed hold when a voice behind her said, in a rich, rolling English accent, “You don’t want to be doing that.”
Morley. He must have come down the stairs while she was otherwise occupied. He was bloody, clothes ripped even worse than they had been before, and he had open scratches across his pale face that were healing even as Claire turned to stare at him.
She tightened her grip on the stake and yanked it free as she rose out of her crouch, turning to fully face him.
Morley sighed. “Do any of you fools actually ever listen? I said don’t do that!”
“He’s hurt,” Claire said. “He’s not getting up any time soon.”
“Wrong,” Morley said. “He’s not getting up at all. But then, he doesn’t really have to.”
She felt something cold brush her aching ankle, then wrap hard around it. The teen vamp had grabbed her and was pulling himself toward her.
Morley reached out, grabbed the stake from her hand, and stabbed the vampire again, with easily three times the strength Claire had used. She heard the crunch as the stake pushed through bones and into the wooden floor beneath.
The boy, no older than Shane, went limp again. His skin started to smolder from the silver.
“You can’t—,” she began, and Morley turned on her, his face hard.
“It might have dawned on you by now that I can,” he snapped. “It might also have occurred to you that this boy is not one of my little flock. Doesn’t that make you at all alarmed, Claire?”
“I—”
“It should,” he said, “because apart from those vampires gathered in Morganville, there shouldn’t be more. Amelie, whatever you think of her, is a thorough sort. Those who didn’t agree to participate in her social experiment in Morganville were put down. There are no vampires still walking that I don’t know.” He nudged the boy with one worn boot. “But I don’t know him, or his pack of jackals who just ate my supplies!”
“Pack?” Claire looked up, startled, at another thump and crash from upstairs. Morley ignored her and dashed for the stairs, racing in a blur. There was screaming up there. “Hey, wait! Ate your—supplies—you don’t mean—”
Morley got to the top of the stairs and disappeared before she could manage another word. “My friends?” she finished lamely, and then blinked, because two seconds after Morley had crossed out of sight, Michael emerged from the shadows up there, with Shane beside him.