Just close your eyes, Amelie's voice was saying gently, far away. Just close your eyes and sleep now.
And then something hit her and knocked her away, halfway across the room and into a heavy wooden table with a gigantic bowl of dried flowers. It all crashed to the carpet, spilling shattered glass and broken petals, and Claire was lying on her side, staring up at the wall. There was a painting there, something famous, with dark paint and bright bursts of color all done in furious layers and peaks. She blinked slowly, not quite comprehending what had just happened, and saw a bright spot of red closer to her than the painting.
Blood. Blood on her hand-no, on her fingers, welling out as if she'd been stabbed with a hundred pins.
It hurt in a sudden, blazing ignition of feeling, and she realized what had just happened. It crashed in on her fast and hard, and she felt terror rip through her. She squirmed back and up, sitting against the corner, holding her injured hand close to her chest.
Oliver was helping Myrnin unwrap Amelie's fingers from his wrist. As soon as it was done, Myrnin fell to the floor and half crawled, half slid into another corner, cradling his wrist just as Claire was holding her own injured fingers. He looked ... appalled. And scared.
Oliver was standing between the two of them and the bed. Amelie hadn't moved. Not at all. Oliver looked as furious as Claire had ever seen him, face as sharp and pale as bone, eyes like coals smoldering red beneath the black. "You idiots," he snapped, and came toward Claire. When she flinched, he looked even angrier. "I'm not set to hurt you, stupid girl. Let me see your hand."
She was all too aware of the red pooling in her palm, but he didn't wait for her consent; he snatched her arm, vamp fast, and stretched it out to inspect the wound. If the blood itself affected him at all, he showed no signs of it. He took a moment, then let her go, strode away, and came back with a small white towel, which he pitched into her lap. "Clean yourself," he said. "I told you very clearly you were not to enter this room. I never took you for this much of a fool. And you, Myrnin. What the devil were you thinking?"
"We need the key," Claire said. Her teeth were inexplicably chattering, and she felt ice-cold inside, as if she'd lost a lot of blood, not just a little. Maybe it was shock. "The k-k-key to the armored truck, downstairs. W-we need to use it to g-get to the water plant. Myrnin said she had it."
"The key?" Oliver almost laughed. "Don't be ridiculous. It wasn't only the key, was it?"
Myrnin raised his head then. "I needed to find out just how much you've been lying to me about her condition. A considerable amount, it seems to me."
Claire never saw Oliver hit him; she just inferred that it happened from the blur, and Myrnin's head snapping back. He wiped blood from his mouth with the back of one hand, never looking away from Oliver, and said, "You said that she was holding her own. She just asked me to kill her."
"She fights," Oliver said. "And she fights it better without these ridiculous distractions. Take the girl and get out. You risked yourself, and her, for nothing. I thought you liked the child better than that."
"I like both of them better than that. But I came for a reason, and the reason still holds."
"Your curiosity is an addiction that will kill you one of these days. I'm not Amelie. I'll not put up with your whims. Consider this fair warning, Myrnin: when I tell you to stay away, stay away, and keep your pets on leashes."
Myrnin looked past him at Claire. "Are you all right?" He still seemed shaken, but he was pulling himself together fast. He stood up and helped her rise as well. She didn't think she was all right, exactly, but she nodded anyway. Bruises, for sure, but nothing broken. Her hand was the worst of it, and the towel Oliver had thrown at her was soaking up the blood. "Oliver. We still need those keys."
"Keys?" Oliver interrupted, and barked out a laugh. "Keys to what?"
"The Founder's transport car. The armored one. I require them," Myrnin said.
"Be off with you. I don't have them."
"No, the Founder has them." Myrnin stressed the noun a bit more than necessary, and it seemed to make Oliver angrier still, if that was even possible. "And the Founder will give them to me, if she's still herself at all. She knows that I wouldn't ask for no reason."
"Myrnin." Amelie's quiet, gray voice hardly broke the surface of the silence, but both of them turned toward her instantly. There was a flash of something in Oliver's face, something like-fear, Claire thought. It was gone too fast for her to be certain.
"I am sorry, but I cannot control this," Amelie said. "It's best that you leave now. All of you. Leave me to this. I fight it as I can." Her eyes slowly closed, then opened again. "Keys. Keys are in the black box in my desk. Take them." It hurt her to do whatever she was doing-even Claire could see it-but she even smiled, just a little, through the pain. "I don't want to hurt my friends. Oliver has been trying to protect you, you should know that."
"Oh, my dear," Myrnin said, and blinked back tears. "Amelie, hold. You must hold. I'll be back and we will find a way to stop this."
"No," she said. "Don't come back. Never come back, Myrnin. Or I'll have you." She suddenly looked toward Claire, and the impact of it made Claire take in a sharp, painful breath. "I'll remember the taste of you. Don't let me get so close again."
It was a naked, chilling warning, and Claire took it seriously. So, she saw, did Myrnin.
But Oliver had to drive it home. "If you do come back," he said, "I'll kill you before she gets you. It would be a kindness."
Myrnin shook his head. "She'll get you first, you know that."
"I'm not as easy as all that." Oliver held the door for them, and his eyes brushed over Claire, then came to rest on Myrnin. "You of all people should know."
Then he let the door slam shut behind them.
"Let me see," Myrnin said, in the sudden silence of the anteroom, and she realized he was asking about her hand. She unwrapped it and held it out, and flinched as his cool fingers touched her hot, bloodied ones. "They've swollen a bit, but that's good. Your body is fighting the infection. You'll be all right." His hand came away with a smear of blood on it, and he looked at it, then sighed and wiped it on the towel. "That is a great waste."
"What, the blood?"
"Of course not." He sighed. "Amelie, of course. We shall not see her like again in these weak times."
He set a wicked fast pace down the hall; Claire grimly trudged along for her enforced aerobic workout and wondered if her hand might feel better if she just hit him. He was so far ahead she almost missed which turns he'd taken; this building always got her turned around, as she suspected it was supposed to do. There were no signs, no names on doors, just those expensively generic paintings. She supposed that if she could tell one old masters landscape from another, she'd know her way around, but her brain wasn't really wired that way.
"Slow down!" she finally yelled, as Myrnin disappeared around a distant corner. She was tired, shaky, and irritable, and the bruises she'd collected were making themselves felt, definitely. She also had a hot pinpoint headache forming in the center of her forehead.
Myrnin popped his head-just his head-back around the corner at a very weird angle to say, "Oh, just hurry up!" and then he vanished. If Claire had been in the habit of cursing like, say, Shane, she'd have scorched the carpet with it. Instead, she just set her teeth together, hard, and moved faster.
Amelie's office, without its usual complement of guards, was halfway down the next hall, or at least that was the door that Myrnin was in the act of kicking open. It took several attempts, which must have meant that Amelie had built her security against vampires, not humans-sensible, really. Before Claire reached him, Myrnin had beaten the locks, and the heavy wooden door splintered open with a crash. "Faster would be better," he said, "given that her guards are not fully off duty, and they may not appreciate that I took dire measures, even with permission. They have to fix the doors eventually, you know."
He zipped inside, kicked open Amelie's inner sanctum door with a few more violent blows, and by the time Claire got there he was at the desk, ripping open another (locked) drawer and removing a black box.
He hissed and dropped it on the desktop in surprise. His fingers looked burned-in fact, there was a faint wisp of smoke coming from them. But it was a black box, not ...