"Right. I've been missing Nutty McFang anyway."
"Stop making up names for him."
"What about Count Crackula?"
"Just stop."
Chapter 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."
"Frank," Myrnin said, and all the fussiness was gone from his voice, leaving it flat and cold. "If you wish to be insulting, I can just mute you for a few days until you learn manners. These are my guests. Granted, I don't really like your son, but I tolerate him, and you can do the same."
"I was talking to the girl. I meant she could do worse. Like you, for instance."
Myrnin stared at Frank's flickering image with dark, unreadable eyes for a few long, unsettling seconds. "Crawl back in your cave," he told him. "Now."
"Can't," Frank said. "You had me set to alert you if anything happened on my side of town. Well, it's happening. Somebody just tried to run the southern border of town in a van. It's disabled by the side of the road. I dispatched the cops."
"And?" Myrnin said. "What about it?"
"And someone just walked up to the eastern edge of town and is waiting there for permission to enter. Thought you'd like to know, it being daylight and all."
"Who is it?"
"I don't know, but he's a vampire. He's sitting in a pop-up tent right now."
"Well, that's odd."
"Seems so," Frank agreed. "He doesn't match any of my databases, so he's never been in Morganville. We've got us a genuine newcomer."
"A newcomer who knows enough to wait at the border for permissions," Myrnin said. "That's unusual."
"That's why I brought it up."
Myrnin tapped a finger on his lips for a moment, then suddenly whipped around to face Claire. "You could go," he said. "Ask him what he wants."
"Me? I'm not the vampire welcome wagon!"
"It's daylight," he said. "And while many of us can go out, we'd prefer not to risk it; wearing layers of protection in Morganville tends to mark us as . . . unusual. With the current unrest among the human population, it's safer if we send someone like you."
"Send the cops," Shane said. "That's what you own them for."
"I'd prefer to know exactly who or what we are dealing with before I involve bureaucracy," Myrnin said. "Oh, very well, since you're reluctant, I will come with you. I should get out anyway."
Claire hastily downed the rest of her tea and put the cup and saucer down; Shane gratefully dumped his out on the stone floor. Myrnin did that fast-motion thing again, and zipped back again adjusting a spectacularly badass black leather duster, a wide-brimmed leather hat, and gloves.
And a long, multicolored scarf he looped around his neck about six times.
"Too much?" he asked, pointing at the scarf. Claire didn't have the heart to tell him yes, so she shrugged.
"What about Bob?" she asked.
"Oh, Bob's fine. I think he's shedding his exoskeleton, which is why he didn't want to eat. Our Bob is a growing boy, you know."
Frank gave him an unpleasant smile and said, "You know, I think I'll call and get an exterminator in here. There's a real problem with creepy-crawlies. Present company not excepted, of course, since I consider leeches to be creepy-crawlies as much as spiders."
Frank Collins had been an ass when he was alive, and he wasn't any better dead and living in a machine. Claire didn't like Bob, but that didn't mean she wanted him chemically murdered, either. And referring to Myrnin as a leech . . . Well, that was just rude.
So she frowned at Frank, then turned to Myrnin and said, "I'm ready if you are."
Shane said, very quietly, "I hope you know what you're getting us into."