Something caught her eye as she did . . . another folder, lying in the tray on top of the desk. This one also had a cure stamp on the outside. She pulled it over and found that it belonged to a vampire she knew a little: Mr. Ransom. Ransom was an old, ghostly man who ran the local funeral home.
There were, she realized, little boxes under the cure stamp.
She hadn’t noticed them before. One said voluntary. The other said involuntary.
The involuntary box was checked on Ransom’s.
She opened it, and found the history again, and the strengths and weaknesses analysis page . . . in Ransom’s case, not very informative. He was too much of a loner, hardly interacting with even other vampires, much less humans.
But there was another page, a new one. There was a photo of Mr. Ransom.
He looked . . . dead.
It was a very clinical kind of picture, taken from above; Ran- som’s body was lying on a steel table mostly covered by a thin white sheet. No wounds. He looked old and withered and pa- thetic, and she couldn’t imagine anything that would have kept a vampire lying there like that, being photographed, except a stake in the heart . . . but there was no stake in Ransom’s heart. No wound at all.
He just looked dead.
She flipped the page. It was a medical report, tersely worded.
Subject Ransom received the Cure in the appropriately measured dose as established in Protocol H, as determined by age, height, and weight. After a brief period of lucidity, his mental state rapidly declined, and he lapsed into a comatose state. He roused from this upon three oc asions, indicating significant pain and distres . Recordings were made of his vocalizations, but the language was not familiar to any of the observers.
After the third period of partial lucidity, Subject Ransom experienced a rapid mental and physical decline, as has be n previously documented in the trials; this decline fell within the boundaries of the approximately 73% failure rate. He evidenced a brief period of reversion to True Human before experiencing a fatal isch-emic event. Time of death: 1348 hours.
May God have mercy on his soul.
Mr. Ransom was dead. Because of their so- called cure.
It couldn’t be called a cure if there was a seventy- three percent failure rate, could it?
She opened the drawer and checked Michael’s file again. The box was marked for an involuntary cure.
What had happened to Mr. Ransom— they meant to do it to Michael, too.
Claire ripped the information out of Ransom’s folder and added it to her stash, then quickly made her way back to the stor- age closet and out through the window. No sign of Fallon and Eve, but she saw a car’s taillights disappearing around the corner.
Claire ran for Eve’s hearse, digging the keys out of the purse.
She’d rarely driven the thing, but it couldn’t be much tougher than Shane’s beast of a muscle car; this was more of an ocean liner, with all the problems of maneuvering it around corners. Claire started the engine and did a super- wide turn in the nearly empty parking lot, heading for the street. She was just pausing to check directions when a voice way too close to her ear said, “So where are we going, then?”
Myrnin. She got a grip on herself after the first, uncontrollable flail of shock, and turned to glare at him. He was leaning over her seat, cheek almost pressing hers, and his eyes reflected red in the dashboard lights.
“Would you please sit back?” she said, once she had control of her voice again— though it stayed up in the higher registers. “You just scared ten years off of me.”
“Only ten? I’m losing my touch.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“Hiding,” he said. “You might have noticed that Fallon’s got his very own vampire- hunting pack of human hounds. Unfortu- nately, they had my scent for a while. I think I’ve thrown them off, but I thought it wise to go to ground for a while. You know that I’m clever as a fox.”
“Crazy like one, too,” she said. “Where’s Jenna?”
“Gone home,” he said. “She took me to my laboratory, but I found it in less than salutary condition. I got what I need, how- ever.” He patted lumps under his shirt absently. “I do hope you’re going my way.”
“I’m following Fallon. I think he’s taking Eve to the mall.”
“Ah. Perfect, then. That will be fine. Proceed.” He sat back, as if she were his private limo driver, which made her grit her teeth, but she concentrated on driving for a minute, until she had Fallon’s taillights in sight again. He was, indeed, heading for Bitter Creek Mall, it seemed.
She said, “Fallon thinks he has some kind of a cure for vampir- ism. Did you know?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I know all about Fallon and his misguided quest to become our once and future savior. It’s never worked. It’s never going to work.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Yes. I plan to kill Fallon and destroy everything he’s built.”
“I think Shane would say that’s a goal, not an actual plan. How exactly are you going to do that?”
“Fangs in his throat,” Myrnin said. “To be specific. I am going to take a great deal of pleasure in draining that man to the very last drop. Again.”
“Again?” Claire hit the brakes and held them, staring at Myrnin in the rearview mirror. “What are you talking about?”
Myrnin clambered over the seat and dropped into the front next to her. He fussed with his clothes— still mismatched, of course— and finally said, “Fallon, of course. I killed him once. I brought him over as a vampire some, oh, two hundred years ago or more— it’s difficult to be exact about these things. I didn’t much care for him even then. He was a bit of a morose and morbid sort, but— well, circumstances were different. Let’s just leave it there.”
“He’s not a vampire!”
“Well, not now, obviously. But he most certainly was once.
Didn’t love the life I’d given him, Fallon. Thought he was so much better than the rest who did.” Myrnin shrugged. “He might have been right about that, of course. But the point is that he devoted all the time I’d given him to finding a way to reverse the process and make himself human again.”
“He found one,” Claire said. “He cured himself. That’s what this cure is he wants to give Michael . . . the same one.”
“I wouldn’t call it a cure,” Myrnin said. “He’s simply no longer dependent on blood.”
“What is he dependent on, then?”
“What are any of you? Air, water, food, the kindness of ran- dom strangers.” Myrnin shuddered, and it looked genuine. “I’d much rather be dependent on blood. Much simpler and easier to obtain in times of chaos. Never rationed, blood. And very often freely donated.”
“But he’s— he’s human.”
“Well, yes. Heartbeat and all.”
“Is he still immortal?”
“No one is immortal.” Myrnin sounded quite serious when he said that, and he looked away, out the window. “Certainly no vam- pire. We are as vulnerable as humans to the right forces. Only gods and demons are immortal, and we are neither of those things, though we’ve been called one or the other.”
“I mean— does he age now?”
“Yes. The instant he gave up his vampire nature, he began the slow march to death again. I expect after all that time with his heart stilled in him, he thinks of each beat as a tick off his mortal clock. I certainly would.”
“How did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” Myrnin said. He sounded sober and thought- ful, and rested his head on one hand as he continued to stare out at the night. “I really have no earthly idea. He was desperate to find some kind of cure when I lost track of him. He’d employed physi-cians, scientists, even sorcerers, to try to break what he saw as his curse. Until I saw him again here, I’d have sworn that such a thing was completely impossible. There is still much to learn in the world, as it turns out. The problem is that some lessons are very, very unpleasant, Claire. I hope this isn’t one of them, but I very much fear it will be.”
She thought of the stamp on Michael’s folder. involuntary.
“Mr. Ransom is dead,” she said. “According to the notes in the file in Fallon’s desk, this cure of his— it’s only about twenty- five percent successful.”