The third person in the group was Jason, who looked just as bad as the other two, and not nearly as fine with it. He was shaking, visibly shaking, and there were rough bandages wrapped around his left wrist and hand that were soaked through with blood.
Eve finally, belatedly, recognized her brother, and reached out to grab him into a hug. Jason stayed frozen for a moment, then patted her on the back, awkwardly. “I’m okay,” he said. That was a lie, Claire thought, but a brave one. “You’ve got blood on your face.”
“Hit my head,” Eve said.
“Oh, so, no damage, then,” Jason said, which was such a brother thing to say that Claire smiled. “Seriously, that looks bad, Eve.”
“No broken bones. My head hurts, and I feel dizzy. I’ll live. What the hell happened to you?”
“Don’t ask,” Jason said, and stepped away. “Need some help, man?”
Michael had grabbed hold of the desk and shoved it back against the door again, and he was now struggling to keep it in place. “Sure,” he said. Not that Jason’s muscle power was going to work any miracles, Claire thought; he was stringy and strong, but not vamp-strong.
“Let them in,” Morley said, and finished redistributing dust from his clothes to the rest of them with a final slap. “It’s my people. Unless you don’t trust us?”
“Now, why wouldn’t we?” Eve said sweetly, and turned to Michael. “Don’t you dare!”
“You’d rather leave them out there to be torn apart?” Morley asked, without any particular emphasis, as though it didn’t really matter to him one way or the other. “I would have thought someone with so much compassion would be less judgmental.”
“Excuse me, but you tied us to seats. And put needles in our arms. And drank our blood. So no, I’m not really seeing any reason to get all trusty with you!”
Morley shrugged. “Then let them die. I’m sure you’ll have no problem listening to their screams.”
Someone was, in fact, shouting on the other side of the door now, not so much battering on it as knocking. “Michael! Michael, it’s Jacob Goldman! Open the door! They’re coming!”
Michael exchanged a quick look with Claire, then Eve, then Oliver. Oliver nodded briskly.
Michael grabbed the desk and pulled it backward, nearly knocking Jason to the ground in the process. “Hey!” Jason protested. “A little warning next time, man!”
“Shut up.” Michael shoved him back as the door pushed open from the outside, and vampires started flooding into the room.
Morley’s people. They, like Morley, hadn’t come through this unharmed; every one of them, including Jacob and Patience Goldman, looked as if they’d fought for their lives. A few were wounded, and Claire knew from experience that it took a lot to hurt a vampire, even temporarily.
Jacob was cradling his right arm, which was covered in blood. Patience was supporting him from the other side. Even Eve looked a little concerned at the sight of his ice white face and blind-looking eyes. He seemed to be in serious pain.
Patience settled him against the wall and crouched next to him as Morley and Oliver, with Michael’s help, engineered some kind of barrier for the door when the last of Morley’s people were crammed into the small room.
There weren’t nearly so many as before.
“What happened?” Claire asked Patience. The vampire girl looked up at her, and there was a shadow of fear in her face that turned Claire cold inside.
“They wouldn’t stop,” Patience said. “They came for our prisoners. They wouldn’t—we couldn’t make them stop. Even when we destroyed one, two came out of the shadows. It was—we couldn’t stop them.” She looked down at Jacob, who had closed his eyes. He looked dead—more dead than most vamps. “Jacob almost had his arm torn off trying to protect them. But we couldn’t help.”
She sounded shocked, and deeply distressed. Claire put a hand on her shoulder, and Patience shuddered.
“You’re okay,” Claire said. “We’re okay.”
“No, we’re not,” she said. “Not at all. These are not vampires, Claire. They are animals—vicious beasts. And we—we are just as much prey for them as you are.”
“Right,” Morley said, raising his voice over the rising babble of conversation. “Everybody, shut it! Now, we can’t stay here—”
“The bus is burning,” someone said from near the window. Morley seemed to pause, obviously not expecting that, but he moved past it at light speed.
“Then we don’t use the bus, clot-for-brains. We find another way out of this accursed graveyard of a town.”
“In the sunlight?” Jacob asked. His voice was soft and thready with pain. “Not all of us will survive for long, and those who do will suffer. You know that.”
“Your choice—go and burn; stay and be torn apart.” Morley shrugged. “For my part, burns heal. I’m not sure that my disconnected pieces would, and I’d prefer not to find out.”
“Something’s coming,” a voice called from the window. “A truck. A delivery van!”
Claire shoved through the crowd of vampires, ignoring the cold touch of skin and the hisses of annoyance, and managed to get a clear space right in front of the window, where a solid couple of feet were still bathed in sunlight. Eve had already claimed it, but she let Claire squeeze in beside her.
The van was a big yellow thing, some kind of bread truck, with a boxy, windowless back. As Claire watched, it jumped the curb and bounced up onto the lawn, charged forward, and knocked down the leaning iron fence around the Civic Hall. It missed the statue of what’s-his-name, the town’s patron saint, but the vibrations caused the whole thing to wobble uncertainly, and as Claire watched, it toppled over that last couple of inches, and gravity took over, slamming the smug statue’s face into the grass once and for all.
Thankfully, not in the way of the van.
The van reversed, turned, and then backed up fast toward the window. It stopped a few feet away, and Shane hopped down from the driver’s side. He ran to the window and grinned at Eve and Claire.
His grin faded fast as his eyes adjusted to the shadows, and he saw all the vampires in the room. “What—”
“Morley’s people,” Claire said. “I guess we’re all in this together right now.”
“I’m ... not loving that.”
“I know. But we all need to get out of here.”
Shane shook his head, shaggy hair sticking in damp points to his face, but he turned and opened up the back doors of the van. Inside, there wasn’t much space, but there was enough to hold all the vamps—maybe. “I’ll take as many as can fit,” he said. “But seriously, once they’re out of here, all bets are off.”
“Agreed,” Morley said, and stepped forward into the sun. If it bothered him, it was only to make him narrow his eyes a little. He grabbed the frame of the window and, with one hard pull, ripped it right out of the stone and tossed it out into the overgrown grass. “Right, youngest first. Go, now.”
There was a hesitation, until Morley gave a low-decibel growl, and then vampires started stepping up, quickly throwing themselves out into the sunlight and moving fast to the sheltering darkness of the van. In only a few seconds it was just her, Michael, Jason, Eve, Morley, and Oliver, with Shane standing outside the window.
“I said youngest first,” Morley said, glowering at Michael. Michael raised pale eyebrows at him. “Idiot.”
“I stay with my friends.”
“Then it would appear you get to tan with them, as there’s no more room in the back.”
“No,” Oliver said. “Michael goes in the back. You and I ride outside.”
Morley let out a black bark of a laugh. “Outside?”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept.” Oliver, without even looking at him, grabbed Michael by the shoulder and almost threw him across the open space to the back of the van. Michael crashed into the small open space left and was pulled inside by Patience Goldman, who looked anxious, almost frightened. Shane slammed the back doors of the truck and ran to the front. “Right. Move it, ladies.”