But Dr Anderson was shaking her head. 'No. I can't claim credit for that. I just made sure that the research went nowhere on how to fight the illness. Seemed like for once, nature was favouring humans instead of vampires.'
Claire shivered. She'd thought she understood Dr Anderson; she'd thought they were alike. But they weren't, deep down. They'd both survived Morganville, but they'd come out of it completely differently.
'If you didn't think we were at war,' Anderson said, 'then why did you make this?' She patted VLAD's metal frame.
'I just wanted - I wanted a way for us to stop them if it came to a fight. That's all. It's supposed to be for defence.'
'Well, you know what they say: the best defence is a good offence. We've been working on enhanced anti-vampire weaponry for some time. Including biological weapons.'
'Dr Davis was running experiments,' Claire said. 'That bat-thing that killed Derrick. That was his?'
'Yes,' Anderson said. She was watching Myrnin, but not with any compassion or regret. It was all clinical, the look in her eyes. Clinical and bitterly cold. 'He'd made considerable progress, but our samples were degraded. We'd had to rely on what I brought with me out of Morganville, and it wasn't much. I was working on getting Jesse to cooperate with me, but for all her friendly ways, she's smarter than that. Too bad. If she'd just done it peacefully, I wouldn't have had to take the steps I did.'
'Is Jesse-?'
'Alive? Yes. Happy?' Anderson shook her head. 'I didn't want to do it. But she pushed me into it. I've got a monitor on her. So far, the effects haven't worn off. I'm starting to wonder if the beam does permanent neural damage.'
'Permanent? What did you do to VLAD? It was never supposed to be that powerful-'
'I made it work,' Anderson snapped. 'Your job now, if you want to stay on the right side of the fight, is to take the model that Dr Davis was using and make it work as well. I didn't have time to complete it before this crisis erupted. Myrnin's arrival pushed us into an accelerated timeline. I think we've gotten the situation contained, but if any communications made it back to Amelie, we may have a fight on our hands, and I need at least one more working device to be safe. So, you do that, and I'll make sure your boyfriend and your other friends get out of this in one piece. Clear?'
'Clear,' Claire said. 'Dr Davis's gun didn't work? That was a bluff?'
Dr Anderson shrugged. 'I thought you'd recognise it, and it would slow you down so I could use the one that did.'
It was good strategy. Shane would have approved.
'We're ready here,' said Dr Davis. His goons were strapping Myrnin into some kind of harness. Oliver had been taken out already, locked in a similar straitjacket. 'Back to the farm?'
'As quickly as possible,' Dr Anderson said. 'Nobody's scheduled to come into this building until ten, but an early arrival could compromise everything. Let's move out. We won't be coming back here.'
The farm? Claire didn't know if that was some kind of shorthand code, but it didn't sound like the MIT lab, anyway. She went along with them quietly, and ended up sitting next to Myrnin. He was wrapped up like a mummy in the thick canvas jacket, and his head lolled forward so his dark hair cascaded down in waves to veil his face.
'I'm sorry,' she whispered to him. 'I'm so sorry.' She could feel the animal shuddering of his body, wave after wave of what was either pain, or terror, or both. 'I never meant for this to happen, Myrnin, I swear. I just - I just didn't see it.'
He turned his head toward her. She saw a red flash from his eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, and felt a brief pulse of something from him - hunger, anger, blind rage. Then he sighed, slipped to one side, and rested against the metal wall of the van. Chains clinked as he shifted. They hadn't taken any chances, she saw; the chains were coated with silver, and so were the manacles around his wrists and ankles. It was burning him.
Oliver, across from her, was in a similar state, but he wasn't trembling quite so badly. Maybe he'd just had more practice at handling fear and pain, or maybe he hadn't gotten quite so bad a dose of VLAD's medicine. But he didn't look by any stretch good, either.
Last of all, they loaded Jesse.
She looked awful. Her red hair was tangled into a dry net; her lips were dry and pale and crusted, and her eyes were glowing a pained, painful red. She looked alien and strange and pitiful, all at once, and she, too, was wearing the padded jacket and chains, and they locked her down next to Oliver. She didn't seem to see Claire, or if she did, to comprehend any of what was going on. And she looked dangerous.
But the sight of her seemed to somehow make Myrnin a little better. He stopped shaking quite so much, and sat up straight again. So maybe there was something still inside there, after all.
Claire hoped so. The alternative was way too awful to consider.
It was a long, silent ride. Dr Davis was up front with Dr Anderson, and Claire's only company, besides the out-of-it vampires, were the three armed guards crowded inside. None of them were talkative. She wasn't even sure they blinked. She had plenty of time to observe them, in the dim interior lights - there were no windows back here, which was probably lucky for the vamps. Three men of about the same age, thirties to forties; the oldest had some grey in his hair, but not much. All fit. All wearing what seemed like similar dark suits. Claire was no expert, but they didn't look expensive - more like ... uniforms.
And they were all wearing a pin on their lapels. A rising sun pin.
This looked less and less like the government, and more and more like something private that Dr Anderson had gotten herself in deep with. Private, but well funded. The Daylight Foundation. The people Jesse had been so worried about.
Somehow, that was even less comforting than the idea the government knew about the vampires.
'So,' Claire said to the man sitting next to her. 'Are you, ah, from Boston?'
He didn't say anything. He didn't even look at her. He did look at his watch, though, and adjusted the grip on his gun. He seemed calm enough, but she wasn't going to get anything out of him. Or any of them. Shane might have; he liked to be provocative and confrontational, but it was a tactic that Claire knew she wasn't good at.
So after a few more lame attempts at conversation failed, she waited.
It seemed to take forever, but they finally bumped off the smooth main road onto something that seemed a lot rougher, and then finally pulled to a stop crunching on gravel. The daylight that streamed in when the door slid open made the vampires flinch and squeeze their eyes shut, but they were all old enough to bear a little sun without injury. Still, Claire ached for them as their skin began to steam in the merciless glare. Oliver's broke out into little tongues of flame before they unlocked him, and they hustled him out quickly.
Claire climbed out, and was immediately grabbed by the man who'd been sitting beside her. 'Hey!' she protested, but that got her nowhere. So she looked around instead as he pulled her onward.
Farm hadn't been code. It was an actual farm, and there was an actual barn and a square two-storey farmhouse with a porch. She hoped for the farmhouse, but instead they headed her off to the big, dark-red barn.
She expected hay and horse stalls, but inside, the structure had been turned into a lab, a nice one that had a thick concrete floor, clean-room walls, steel tables and cabinets and bright overhead lighting. It was full of equipment, too. Some of it Claire recognised, but a lot was new to her. Dr Davis took charge of the three vampires and had them led over to the right side of the large open space, where he had them manacled to large steel staples in the floor. All three promptly collapsed into protective crouches.
'This way,' her guard said, and dragged her left, after Irene Anderson.
That part of the lab was a replica of what Dr Anderson had at MIT, with a few changes; one of the most vivid being that two tables were neatly laid out with parts and schematics. Claire recognised one of them as being the constituent parts of VLAD; the second table, though, was different.
That was the pieces of the mod, Claire realised. This would tell her exactly what Dr Anderson had done to make her device into an offensive weapon. Claire picked up the plans and studied them, took each part and looked it over. She was still examining things when Dr Anderson thumped down the heavy weight of VLAD on the table ... not the working one, she realised. That was still slung across Anderson's chest.
This was the prototype model that hadn't yet been upgraded.
'I'm pretty sure you can figure this out,' Anderson said. 'The plans are right there. You wanted to be my lab assistant. Do your job. Any funny business, and I promise you, your boyfriend will suffer for it. Got it?'