“You hope. So, who else we have left?”
They’d covered almost all of their particular sector of Morganville; Michael had taken the more vampire-centric neighborhoods this morning, and Eve had braved it with him, trying to show the vampires she could be well behaved and perfectly acceptable. By common consent, they’d all decided that Claire and Shane had the reputations to win over unwilling humans, or at least get them to listen.
They’d been about seventy percent successful, which was better than Claire had expected, but it had been a long day, and her feet hurt. “We should hit it tomorrow,” she said. “I need to lay down.”
He raised his eyebrows at her, and she swatted his shoulder. “Rest,” she said.
“Well, we could rest together. I swear, I’ll be good.” He gave her a charming, intensely hot smile. “You can take that any way you want.”
So many levels to that, she got dizzy trying to sort them out. But it warmed her, and made the walk home less of a trial . . . at least, until her cell phone rang. The ringtone was a dead giveaway, emphasis on dead . . . creepy organ music. She didn’t even have to glance at the image of fanged bunny slippers on the screen to know who was calling. She just sighed, thumbed it on, and held it to her ear.
“Claire! I need you here immediately. Something’s wrong with Bob.” Myrnin, her mad-scientist, blood-addicted boss, sounded actually shaken. “I can’t get him to eat his insects, and I used his favorites. He just sits there.”
“Bob,” she repeated, looking at Shane in wide-eyed disbelief. “Bob the spider.”
“Just because he’s a spider doesn’t mean he deserves any less concern! Claire, you have a way with him. He likes you.”
Just what she needed. Bob the spider liked her. “You do realize that he’s a year old, at least. And spiders don’t live that long.”
“You think he’s dead?” Myrnin sounded horrified. So wrong.
“Is he curled up?”
“No. He’s just quiet.”
“Well, maybe he’s not hungry.”
“Will you come?” Myrnin asked. He sounded calmer now, but also oddly needy. “It’s been very lonely here these past few days. I’d like your company, at least for a little while.” When she hesitated, he used the pity card. “Please, Claire.”
“Fine,” she sighed. “I’m bringing Shane.”
After a second of silence, he said, flatly, “Goody,” and hung up.
“You’re kidding,” Shane said. “Do you think I want to visit Crazy McTeeth in his lair of insanity?”
“No,” Claire said, “but I’m pretty sure you won’t like it if I go alone when I just kind of promised to be with you. So . . . ?”
“Right. I’ve been missing Nutty McFang anyway.”
“Stop making up names for him.”
“What about Count Crackula?”
“Just stop.”
THREE
CLAIRE
Crazy or not, Myrnin was trying.
For one thing, he’d cleaned up the lab, meaning that he’d moved the leaning stacks of books up against the walls instead of leaving them as trip hazards between the tables. He’d even uncovered the surface of one of the marble-topped tables, and had set up . . . God, what was that? A genuine china tea service?
He was standing next to it, wearing his somewhat clean white lab coat with the patch on it that said EVIKL GENIUS UNION KLOCAKL 101 on it, and there were goggles dangling around his neck. For a vampire, he was surprisingly versatile in his wardrobe, in a cracked-out way. From a purely objective viewpoint, Myrnin was a good-looking guy—frozen at the age of maybe his mid-twenties, with dark hair and a ready smile. A sharp but handsome face.
If only he didn’t crazy it up all the time.
“Have you been watching Dr. Horrible again?” she asked him, as Myrnin poured tea into two delicate floral cups. “Not that I don’t love it, but . . .”
“Thank you for coming,” Myrnin said, and offered the first serving to Shane, saucer and all. Shane blinked and took it, not quite sure what to do with it; the fragile porcelain looked particularly endangered in his large hands. “It’s very nice to see you both. And how have you been? Please, sit down.”
“Where?” Shane asked, looking around. Myrnin looked momentarily panicked, and then just . . . disappeared, in a vibrating flash. He was back before Claire could draw in a startled breath, and he was carrying two large armchairs, one in each hand, lifting them like they were made of Styrofoam. Myrnin thumped them down on the floor and indicated them with outstretched palms.
“There,” he said.
Well, he’d gone to a lot of trouble, really. Shane sat, then jumped back up with a yelp, splashing tea in a pale brown wave.
“Oh, sorry,” Myrnin said, and picked up something that looked like a surgical saw from the seat. “I wondered where that had got off to.”
“Should I even ask?” Claire said.
“You know I do the occasional research,” he said. “And in answer to your question, quite likely you should not. Milk?”
That last was directed at Shane, who was still recovering. He slowly settled into his chair. “Dude, we live in Texas. Hot tea is not our thing. Iced tea, sure. I have no idea. Is milk supposed to be in there?”
“I give up trying to civilize you,” Myrnin said, and turned to Claire. “Milk?”
“No, thank you.”
“Much better.” Myrnin set down the cream pitcher and leaned against the lab table, hands in his pockets. He’d stuck the surgical saw in there, too; Claire hoped he wouldn’t slice something off accidentally. “I’ve thought of a few improvements to make to our system, Claire. Just a few. Nothing that will cause concern, I promise. And by our agreement, I am not making them on my own without peer review. Well, not peer, as I have no peers, but you do understand what I mean.”
“All that, and modest, too,” Shane said. “Is Frank around?”
They all three paused for a moment, waiting. Frank Collins—Shane’s dad—was more or less a ghost, to all intents and purposes. In fact, he was only a little dead.... His brain had been saved, and wired into Myrnin’s alchemical machine that ran a lot of the stranger things in Morganville. But sometimes Frank paid attention, and sometimes he just didn’t want to respond. Maybe he was asleep. Brains needed sleep.
But after a long stretch of seconds, there was a flicker at the end of the lab, like an old cathode-ray tube television starting up . . . and then a slowly stabilizing image of a man walking toward them. Frank always manifested in gray scale, not color, and it was a paper-thin two-dimensional image. Limitations of the system, though Claire had never been able to figure out why. Then again, she didn’t altogether understand the whole mechanism of how he projected the image at all.
Frank had chosen his avatar to look a lot like his old physical self: middle-aged (though not quite as beaten-up as Claire remembered him) with a scar on his face, and a perpetual bad-tempered scowl. He even wore the same old motorcycle leathers and stomping boots.
The scowl eased up as he saw Shane sitting in the chair. “Son,” he said. “That girl’s got you drinking tea now?”
Shane very deliberately took a sip of tea Claire absolutely knew he didn’t want. “Hi, Frank.” He was trying on this front, too; dealing with his dad alive had been a struggle, and dealing with him as a vampire had been worse. But now at least there was one thing settled between them: Frank couldn’t physically abuse him. And from Shane’s perspective, things were looking up. “How’s living in a jar these days? Fulfilling?”
“Been better.” Frank shrugged. “I see you’re still together. Good. You could do worse.”