“They’ll be getting here soon,” Eve reminded her. “One of them is bound to have keys.”
“I know,” Claire said. “Here. Go jam this in the lock.” She handed her the paper clip, bent into an almost unrecognizable shape now from all the uses she’d already put it to. Eve raced off to do it, and Claire began carefully measuring out beakers of fluids.
She had the bare minimum equipment necessary to capture the gas once it started to react: tubing and a container. She worked fast, with all her attention on the problem at hand. Her mind was clear, at least, and the picture of the chemical compound seemed so real she could have reached out to touch it. She prepped the burners.
The last part would be the problem, because the bromine reaction needed a very high temperature, but she’d just have to do the best she could.
The synthesis of the trichloroethylene and hydrogen fluoride went easily enough; once the temperature reached 130 degrees, the gas progressed to the second stage. She added the bromide and cranked the heat as high as she could. The mixture boiled off into gas, precipitated into the tubing and the container, and Claire quickly stuck a cork in the tube and left it attached to the bottle.
“Are they outside?” she asked Eve, who turned toward her. Eve didn’t need to answer, because Claire could hear the metallic clicking in the lock, followed by a loud bang on the metal door.
“Open up!” someone called. He sounded angry. “Open up now!”
Claire hurried forward and crouched down to uncork the tube.
She crimped it in the middle, and then slid the flexible rubber un- der the door’s bottom edge. “Talk to them!” she said to Eve. “Get them close!”
Eve began spouting something that sounded half crazy about the dead coming back to life and zombies lurching up off the ta- bles, and if Claire hadn’t known it was a lie she might have bought it, too, especially when Eve ended it with “Oh, God, help us, help . . .” and trailed off into a gurgle that sounded especially grue-some.
There was silence on the other side of the door.
“Do you think—,” Eve whispered, but she didn’t need to finish the sentence, because Claire heard a falling body hit the door and slide down. Then another, and another, farther away.
Claire yanked the tube away and rolled the bottle across the room, then pulled off her mask. Eve took hers off as well. “Hold your breath,” Claire warned. She yanked the bent paper clip from the lock and used her key. As she pulled the door open, a man fell in with it— a heavyset older man, mouth loose and open and eyes rolled back in his head. She checked for a pulse and found one, slow but steady. The other two who’d been with him were also down, though one was mumbling sleepily.
Claire grabbed Eve’s hand and pulled her over the bodies at a run, heading down the hall.
“They’ll be okay,” Claire assured her. “The fresh air will wake them up soon.”
“Like I care,” Eve said. “We need to find Michael!”
“Take that side of the hall. Slide the windows open and see if you spot anybody.”
Eve wasted no time, but it didn’t yield any victories. They opened every window on the hall, on both sides, but there were no vampires in the cells. Nobody at all, in fact. Eve sent Claire a de-spairing, panicked look that didn’t need words to be understood, and they raced through the open reception area to the other side of the building.
There were no cells on this hall, only a single locked door. Claire fumbled with the keys. Her hands were shaking from the adrenaline, and a clock was running in her head. The three they’d left sleeping were going to wake up soon; they’d be groggy and unsteady, and probably have killer hangover headaches, but time was definitely running out on their window to find Michael and the others.
It was, of course, the second to last key Claire tried that turned the lock. She pushed the door open, stepped through, and had to grab the heavy metal slab on the backswing, because it was on some automatic pneumatic pressure to seal shut. Eve was only halfway through. Thick as it was, the steel could have broken her bones if it had hit her squarely.
Eve squeezed through, and Claire let go; the door hissed shut and locks automatically engaged. They were in a small antecham- ber, and there was another door. Another lock. “Hurry,” Eve said.
She looked around at the blank walls, and then up at the small glass semicircle set above them. Her face set hard. “They could be watching us.”
“Shit,” Claire whispered. She sorted keys again, nearly frantic now, and found one that slotted neatly in. It turned.
The door opened in front of her, on a room that was the mir- ror opposite of the one where they’d found the dead, discarded vampires— the ones who’d failed their conversion back to human.
That had been a hastily assembled morgue.
This was a bright, clean, well- equipped lab, complete with glass- fronted cabinets and counters, stations for preparation of compounds, refrigerators . . . and it held about the same number of tables, and on them lay vampires.
The difference was that these vampires still survived, at least for now.
Claire’s gaze swept down the line, and fixed on tousled blond hair. “There!” she yelled to Eve, and they both raced forward . . .
and then had to stop, because two guards stepped out into their path. These were police officers, wearing Morganville blues, with the Daylighter pins gleaming on their collars. Claire recognized one of them— Officer Halling, the woman who’d found the dead body at the Glass House.
Officer Halling unsnapped her holster and put her hand on the butt of her gun.
Eve didn’t hesitate; she lunged forward with the Taser, but un- fortunately for her, Halling’s partner was fast, and he grabbed Eve by the arm and wrenched it hard, forcing the Taser out of her hand to drop and roll on the floor. Halling dismissed Eve, and focused her cold gaze on Claire.
Claire pulled the scalpel from the cardboard sheath, but she didn’t attack. Instead, she ran in the opposite direction, to the last bed on the end. She’d seen a familiar face there, too.
Oliver.
He was strapped down with some kind of silver- coated web- bing on his arms and legs, and there was an IV needle in his arm, buried in a thick, ropy, blue vein. His skin looked chalky, but be- neath that his arms looked wiry and strong, and his chest thick with muscle.
His eyes were open. He lifted his head to stare at her, and his eyes were a ferocious, unnerving shade of red. He didn’t speak.
Claire ripped the IV out of his arm, and took a scalpel to the webbing that held him down. It was tough and dulled the edge pretty quickly, but she managed to get one hand free.
Oliver did the rest. He rolled onto his side and ripped at the silver web until it was shredded, even though it burned and cut his fingers, and then sat up to tear at the stuff holding his ankles.
A shot shattered glass on a counter past Claire, and she looked up to see Halling taking aim again. This time she wouldn’t be fir- ing a warning shot.
“Stop!” Halling yelled. “Drop the knife!”
Claire did, and it hit the tile floor with a musical clang, but Halling was pointing at the wrong target. Maybe she’d thought it would take Oliver longer to get free, or to recover, but she was wrong.
Dead wrong.
Oliver came off the table in a blur and stopped with her gun arm in one hand and her throat in the other. Claire shut her eyes, because she didn’t want to see, but she heard the snap of bones breaking . . . and when she was able to look again, Halling was down on the floor. Not dead, surprisingly, but her arm was at an entirely wrong angle, held close to her chest. She looked disoriented with shock.
Without much of a pause, Oliver turned toward the other po- liceman, who was holding Eve down. He turned sideways, an ele- gant and weirdly old- fashioned motion, held Halling’s confiscated pistol at his side, and said, “I don’t offer second chances. This is your first and only warning. Drop your weapon now and let the girl go.” It was almost as if he was . . . dueling. He even put his left arm behind his back, crooked at the elbow.
And then he was dueling, because the cop dropped Eve, stood straight, and pulled his own sidearm. It was a fast draw, as fast as anything Claire had ever seen outside of an old Western movie . . .
but it was miles too slow, even then.
Oliver didn’t try hard, but before the man’s gun was halfway up, Oliver brought his own weapon up, leveled, aimed, and fired.