She should have stopped all this from happening. But she hadn’t, and now Michael was dead.
Eve was staring at him as if she hadn’t realized the truth, as if somehow it would all still come out okay. “Michael?” she asked.
His eyes were still open. “Michael?” The horror weighed her voice down, dragged it to a low, uneven whisper. “Please look at me. I love you, please look at me, please . . .”
Claire’s eyes were filling with tears now, and her view of his face became a wash of color— palest possible pink for skin, blue for his eyes, gold for his hair. She blinked, and the tears glided hot down her face, hot as blood. She put her hand on his arm.
It shouldn’t feel like that, she thought, so close to her own skin temperature. So much like he was still alive.
And then her fingertips felt a small whisper of a pulse.
No, I imagined that. I couldn’t have . . . it couldn’t . . .
Another beat. Then another. It wasn’t her pulse.
It was his.
“Michael, you have to look at me,” Eve was saying between tears. She looked pale and sick, facing what was, for her, the end of the world. “You can’t leave me, you can’t, you promised me . . .”
He took a breath.
Eve let out a muffled cry, and fell across his chest to kiss him. It was, Claire thought, maybe a little premature for that, because he seemed too dazed to understand what was happening . . . and then all that changed, and he was kissing her back, really kissing her, and his skin was taking on a skin tone that wasn’t too much darker than before but somehow much more alive. He was gasping for breath when they parted but smiling, and there was color in his cheeks and lips.
It struck Claire that she’d never seen him alive before. Not re- ally one hundred percent alive, anyway. He looked as he had when she’d first met him, but this time . . . this time, he was simply and only human.
It was . . . She didn’t want to call it a miracle, but that’s what it was. A miracle.
It came to her slowly that he was still strapped to the table, and he was straining to break free. Claire wiped her tears, got hold of herself, and quickly sawed through the webbing on his left wrist, and then his left ankle. By the time she’d reached his right hand, she had to gently but firmly force Eve to back up as she freed him completely . . . and then she was the one getting shoved out of the way as Michael lunged for Eve and enveloped her in a hug so complete that it was as if he’d never really hugged her before.
Which, Claire supposed, he hadn’t. Not like this.
“Can you feel it?” he asked Eve. He was crying. Michael was crying, tears flooding his face. He wiped at them, but he couldn’t seem to stem the tide. “My heart. It’s beating.”
“I feel it,” Eve said, and pressed her hand against his chest.
“Oh, God, Michael, I— I should probably say something snarky right now, but I—”
He grabbed her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he kissed her again, a long and deep kiss that said more than words ever could about how he felt. How they both felt.
Miracle, Fallon had called it. And in Michael’s case he’d been right, because Michael Glass, who’d been various shades of dead ever since Claire had known him, was now himself again. Human.
Vital. Alive.
And, Claire thought with a sudden chill, vulnerable.
She turned away from them, and it hit her with breathtaking horror that most of the vampires struggling against their bonds right now around her, glowing from within as Fallon’s medicine did its work . . . most of them wouldn’t make it.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
Claire channeled her anxious, sick frustration into action. She hustled Michael and Eve out of their own private world and put them to work tying up the lab workers, who were starting to rouse.
She dragged the two police officers off to the side and covered up the dead one that Oliver had shot. Halling was spitting with fury, but Claire didn’t listen to what she was saying. It would only make her angry, and she was feeling bad enough.
When there was nothing left to do, she crouched down next to the lab attendant who was waking the fastest, and helped her along by rubbing knuckles across her breastbone. That hurt, Claire re- membered. And it roused the woman fast.
It didn’t take the woman long to adapt to the new situation.
She realized that she was tied up, and that Claire and Eve and Mi- chael were the only ones standing. Not a stupid woman, either— fear flickered across her face before she concealed it beneath a mask of professional distance. “Untie me,” she ordered.
“Bite me, Miss Mengele,” Eve said. “Not that stupid.”
The woman’s eyes fixed on Michael, and she looked . . . elated.
“You made it,” she said. “I knew you would, Michael.”
“You know me?” Michael asked. He wasn’t smiling.
“Of course I do! I’m a big fan of your music. I’m Amanda. I work at the hospital.”
He blinked. “But you stuck poison in my arm.”
“To save you!”
He opened his mouth, then looked confused and weirdly em- barrassed, and Claire realized he was trying to show fangs he no longer had. Well, that was awkward. “What about them?” He pointed to the others. Some had gone still. Some were still strug- gling.
Her eyes flickered toward them, then came back quickly to fo- cus on him. “Better they die than live on in that hell,” she said.
“We’re saving people. People. Not monsters.”
“The counteragent,” Claire said. “Tell me where it is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, but her round face wasn’t made for lying. “What counteragent?”
“The one that used to be locked in the safe and isn’t there any- more,” Claire said. “Where is it now?”
“No idea.”
“Don’t play poker, Mandy,” Eve said, “because you suck at it.
Who has it?”
Amanda set her mouth into a flat, stubborn line and glared back. Oh, she didn’t like Eve at all. Which was sharply contrasted with the worshipful way she looked at Michael.
Claire stood up and grabbed her friends. She dragged them off a bit and lowered her voice. “She’s got a crush on you, Michael.
Eve, she’s jealous of you. So back off and let Michael charm the info out of her.”
Michael looked a little bit ill. “Do I have to?”
“People are dying. Do you?”
He winced, nodded, and said, “Go do something else. I don’t need you guys staring at me. I feel bad enough already.” Claire knew he was thinking of the fact that he’d survived the process and so many . . . so many weren’t going to. Or maybe he was hating the slimy necessity of charming someone who didn’t see anything wrong with killing to cure.
But she took Eve’s arm and said, “Check Oliver.”
Eve’s eyes went wide. “Claire— I— I can’t. I can’t even go near him.”
“You just went to Michael—”
“That’s different. And— he was changing.”
“So was Oliver,” Claire shot back. “Just go!”
Claire went to check the others. Half were already gone, their light extinguished, their skin left chalky pale and bizarrely hard to the touch, as if it had turned to ash. Those were, unquestionably, dead.
Two others besides Michael had made the transition back to human and were gulping in convulsive breaths, looking panicked and wild, as if they were drowning in a sea of air. One was weep- ing, and it looked like tears of joy. The other two, though . . . they looked lost and horrified. Claire supposed that after so many years— hundreds, maybe— of existence as a vampire, being plunged back into mortality must have felt a lot more like a pun- ishment than a salvation.
One woman had settled into the state that Oliver had been in— more of a coma than either a recovery or a decline. Her skin had turned chalky, but it was still pliable to the touch, and she didn’t have the fallen- in look of those who’d failed the process completely. The REVs, Claire thought. The ones Miss Amanda would have been happy to euthanize, for their own good. The thought made her ill, thinking of Oliver and this unnamed woman lying there helpless, trapped, unable to defend themselves.