Ysandre, Bishop’s pale little girlfriend. Beautiful, sure. Delicate as jasmine flowers, with big, liquid eyes and a sweetly rounded face.
She was poison in a pretty bottle.
“Well,” she said, and crouched down next to Claire. “Look at what the cat dragged in. Meeow.” Her sharp nail dragged over Claire’s cheek, and judging from the sting, it drew blood. “Where’s your pretty boyfriend, Miss Claire? I really wasn’t done with him, you know. I hadn’t even properly started.”
Claire felt an ugly lurch of anger mix with the fear already churning her stomach. “He’s probably not done with you, either,” she said, and managed to smile. She hoped it was a cold kind of smile, the sort that Amelie used—or Oliver. “Maybe you should go looking. I’ll bet he’d be sohappy to see you.”
“I’ll show that boy a real good time, when we do meet up again,” Ysandre purred, and put her face very close to Claire’s. “Now, then, let’s talk, just us girls. Won’t that be fun?”
Not.Claire was struggling against the ropes, but Jason had done his job pretty well; she was hurting herself more than accomplishing anything else. Ysandre grabbed Claire’s shoulder and wrenched her upright against the wooden wall, hard enough to bang Claire’s injured head. For a dazed second, it looked like Ysandre’s ripe, red smile floated in midair, like some undead Cheshire cat.
“Now,” Ysandre said, “ain’t this nice, sweetie? It’s too bad we couldn’t get Mr. Shane to join us, but my little helper here, he’s a bit worried about tackling Shane. Bad blood and all.” She laughed softly. “Well, we’ll make do. Amelie likes you, I hear, and you’ve got on that pretty little gold bracelet. So you’ll do just fine.”
“For what?”
“I ain’t telling you, sweetie.” Ysandre’s smile was truly scary. “This town’s going to have a wild night, though. Real wild. And you’re going to get to see the whole thing, up close. You must be all atingle.”
Eve would have had a quip at the ready. Claire just glared, and wished her head would stop aching and spinning. What had he hit her with? It felt like the front end of a bus. She hadn’t thought Jason could hit that hard, truthfully.
Don’t try to find me, Shane. Don’t.The last thing she wanted was Shane racing to the rescue and taking on a guy who’d stabbed him, and a vampire who’d led him around by a leash.
No, she had to find her own way out of this.
Step one: figure out where she was. Claire let Ysandre ramble on, describing all kinds of lurid things that Claire thought it was better not to imagine, considering they were things Ysandre was thinking of doing to her.Instead, she tried to identify her surroundings. It didn’t look familiar, but that was no help; she was still relatively new to Morganville. Plenty of places she’d never been.
Wait.
Claire focused on the crate that Jason was sitting on. There was stenciling on it. It was hard to make it out in the dim light, but she thought it said BRICKS BULK COFFEE. And now that she thought about it, it smelled like coffee in here, too. A warm, morning kind of smell, floating over dust and damp wood.
And she remembered Eve laughing about how Oliver bought his coffee from a place called Bricks. As in, tastes like ground-up bricks,Eve had said. If you order flavored, they add in the mortar.
There were only two coffee shops in town: Oliver’s place, and the University Center coffee bar. This didn’t look like the UC, which wasn’t that old and was mostly built of concrete, not wood.
That meant . . . she was at Common Grounds? But Common Grounds didn’t make any sense; there wasn’t any kind of portal leading to it.
Maybe Oliver has a warehouse.That sounded right, because the vampires seemed to own a lot of the warehouse district that bordered Founder’s Square. Brandon, Oliver’s second-in-vampire-command, had been found dead in a warehouse.
Maybe she was close to Founder’s Square.
Ysandre’s cold fingers closed around Claire’s chin and jerked it up. “Are you listening, honey?”
“Truthfully, no,” Claire said. “You’re kind of boring.”
Jason actually laughed, and turned it into a fake cough. “I’m going outside,” he said. “Since this is going to get all personal now.” Claire wanted to yell to him not to go, but she bit her tongue and turned it into a subsonic whine in the back of her throat as she watched him walk away. His footsteps receded into the dark, and then finally a small square of light opened a long way off.
It was a door, too far for her to reach—way too far.
“I thought he’d never leave,” Ysandre said, and put her cold, cold lips on Claire’s neck, then yelled in shock and pulled away, covering her mouth with one pale hand. “You bitch!”
Ysandre hadn’t seen the silver chain Claire was wearing in the dim light, as whisper-thin as it was. Now there were welts forming on the vampire’s full lips—forming, breaking, and bleeding.
Fury sparked in Ysandre’s eyes. Playtime was over.
As Claire squirmed away, the vampire followed at a lazy stroll. She wiped her burned lips and looked at the thin, leaking blood in distaste. “Tastes like silver. Disgusting. You’ve just ruined my good mood, little girl.”
As she rolled, Claire felt something sharp dig into her leg. The knife.They’d found the stake, but she guessed their search hadn’t exactly been thorough; Jason was too crazy, and Ysandre too careless and arrogant.
But the knife wasn’t going to do her any good at all where it was, unless . . .
Ysandre lunged for her, a blur of white in the darkness, and Claire twisted and jammed her hip down at an awkward angle.
The knife slipped and tore through the fabric of her jeans—not much of it, just a couple of inches, but enough to slice open Ysandre’s hand and arm as it reached for her, all the way to the bone.
Ysandre shrieked in real pain, and spun away. She didn’t look so pretty now, and when she turned toward Claire again, from a respectful distance this time, she hissed at her with full cobra fangs extended. Her eyes were wild and bloodred, glowing like rubies.
Claire twisted, nearly yanking her elbow out of its joint, and managed to get the ropes around her wrist against the knife. She didn’t have long; the shock wouldn’t keep Ysandre at bay for more than a few seconds.
But getting a silver knife to cut through synthetic rope? That was going to take a while—a while she didn’t have.
Claire sawed desperately, and got a little bit of give on the bonds—enough to almostget her hand into her pocket.
But not.
Ysandre grabbed her by the hair. “I’m going to destroy you for that.”
The pain in her head was blinding. It felt like her scalp was being ripped off, and on top of that, the massive headache roared back to a new, sickening pulse.
Claire loosened the rope enough to plunge her aching hand into her pocket and grab the handle of the knife. She yanked it out of the tangle of fabric and held it at a trembling, handicapped en garde—still tied up, but whatever, she wasn’t going to stop fighting, not ever.
Ysandre shrieked and let her go, which made no sense to Claire’s confused, pain-shocked mind. I didn’t stab her yet. Did I?Not that she wanted to stab anybody, even Ysandre. She just wanted—
What was going on?
Ysandre’s body slammed down hard on the wooden floor, and Claire gasped and flinched away . . . but the vampire had fallen facedown, limp, and weirdly broken.
A small woman dressed in gray, her pale hair falling wild around her shoulders, dropped silently from overhead and put one impeccably lovely gray pump in the center of Ysandre’s back, holding her down as she tried to move.