She didn’t know if he heard her, or understood; he didn’t give even the slightest indication. But there wasn’t time. Hannah was hustling them out the door, and Claire saw her thumb come off the but- ton. “In the car,” she ordered, and practically shoved them inside.
They were already driving away when the first vampires, collars off their necks and drained blood bags in their hands, appeared in the doorway of the Bitter Creek Mall.
Myrnin’s lab was located in a cul- de- sac at the end of a small, run-down neighborhood. It was next door to a Founder House— the Day House, built along the same plan as the Glass House.
Only the Day House wasn’t there anymore. There was a pile of old timbers, and some construction equipment.
Fallon was making good on his threat to destroy the Founder Houses.
Claire swallowed hard. “What happened to them? Gramma Day?”
“Moved,” Hannah said. “She was grateful to be going, in the end. The Day family never were too comfortable with that house, though they stayed in it for the better part of a hundred years. But she’s fine. Got a brand- new place over on the other side of town, where the new development is going in.”
“And Lisa— did she join the Daylighters?” Claire wouldn’t have been at all surprised by that from the Day granddaughter, who’d been totally anti- vamp for as long as she’d known her . . .
but Gramma Day, ancient as she was, had a broader view of things.
“Lisa did. Gramma declined,” Hannah said. “Gramma said it reminded her of all those speeches out of Germany in the war. I don’t think she was so far off.”
Claire didn’t, either. The image of those banners around Founder’s Square still gave her a chill.
She led the way to the entrance to Myrnin’s lab. It was locked up by an iron grate and a shiny new padlock, but Hannah had the keys. “Fallon had it secured,” she explained. “I have no idea how Myrnin would have gotten into it.”
Myrnin always had his ways, but Claire didn’t explain that; she didn’t think Hannah needed any more nightmares. As they de- scended the steps, the lights came up, responding to motion, revealing . . . a wreck. Well, even more of a wreck than it normally was. The equipment was mostly shattered, the books ripped apart, the furniture broken. Either Myrnin had thrown an epic tantrum— which frankly, wasn’t all that unlikely— or Fallon’s goons had been in here making damn sure nothing useful would be coming out of the lab again.
Claire climbed over the piles of rubble, careful of the broken glass, and made her way to the back of the lab. Myrnin’s armchair had been broken, but the remains of it were more or less where they’d originally been. Bob the Spider’s tank had been turned on its side, but not broken. There was no sign of him in the webs, but he certainly wasn’t starving; plenty of unfortunate insects had been cocooned into his pantry.
Claire combed through the wreckage, and under a pile of books that included a battered first edition of Alice in Wonderland and two sketchy- looking volumes written longhand in a language she didn’t even recognize, she found a box. It didn’t look like much— old, battered, not very clean. She flipped the lid off, and inside, packed carefully in old newspapers, was an old- style sy- ringe full of brownish liquid.
“Got it!” she called back to Hannah and Shane, and scrambled over the piles to them. Hannah was already unbuttoning her uni- form shirt.
“Hurry,” she said. “Something’s happening.” Something was.
Hannah’s eyes looked different, lighter, and between blinks Claire saw them quickly shifting to yellow.
“Crap,” Shane said. He took hold of Hannah’s arm and held it steady. “He’s activated her. Do it fast.”
“In the bite?” Because Hannah’s bite was raised and inflamed and prominent, just as Shane’s had been.
“Yes! Go!” Shane yelled, just as Hannah let out a vicious snarl.
Claire jammed the needle home, and depressed the plunger— but only about a third of the way. She hoped Myrnin was right about the dosage; if she undermedicated Hannah, that might be worse than not doing it at all.
Hannah’s snarl turned to a startled yip, and then she was col- lapsing to her knees, trembling, mouth open in a silent scream.
Her eyes were wild and yellow, but only for a moment. Then her skin took on a muted silvery glow as the cure took hold.
Claire held her breath. Myrnin had adapted this from Fallon’s cure, but what if it had the same shortcomings? What if it only worked part of the time?
It seemed to take forever. Hannah never quite collapsed com- pletely, but she trembled, clearly very ill, and as the silvery glow finally faded under her skin, she looked up at Claire. Her eyes, after one last acidic pulse of yellow, settled back to their normal human brown color.
Hannah pulled in a few hard, quick breaths, and nodded.
Shane let go of her. She made a face. “Tastes funny,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse. “Aches, too.”
“It’ll pass,” he said, and helped her up. “You took it a lot better than I did.” He wasn’t looking at her face, though, he was examin-ing her arm. The bite was looking a little better. “I think I screamed like a baby.”
“Give me a minute and I might just get there,” Hannah said, and attempted a smile. It wasn’t quite right, but it was brave. “Let’s get out of here.”
Claire would have, but as they turned for the stairs, she caught sight of a fuzzy black spider about the size of her palm sitting on top of a book, watching her with eight bright, beady eyes. He looked almost cute.
“Hey, Bob,” she said. She reached down, and he climbed up on her hand. “Let’s get you back in your tank, okay?”
He didn’t seem unhappy with that. She carried him back over the rubble, and he clung to her hand easily, riding all the uneven progress without much concern. She righted his tank and held out her hand, and he scuttled off and settled into the gauzy webs, looking perfectly comfortable.
She resisted the urge to pat him on the head. Thorax. What- ever. “Good boy, Bob. I’ll be back soon.”
He hopped up and down a little in the webs, then turned his attention to one of his stored insects.
She was happy to skip that part, actually.
As she came back to them, Hannah already seemed much bet- ter, and Shane looked relieved. “Swear to God, I don’t get you and that spider,” he said. “But if you’re done playing Dr. Doolittle . . .”
“I know where they’ll have Jesse,” Claire said. “Let’s go.”
But she was wrong.
The asylum— mental hospital— whatever the current politi- cally correct term might be— was closed and locked. Nobody there.
Claire went around back to check windows, but she didn’t find any- thing. Just to be thorough, Hannah broke in (though according to her it was an emergency entry), but she came back shaking her head.
She looked disturbed, though. “Bodies,” she said. “Quite a few. He’s been processing vampires through his conversion faster than I thought. But Jesse’s not in there.”
“Then where?” Shane asked.
Claire thought frantically. It could be anywhere, absolutely anywhere in Morganville, but Fallon seemed to be a man who en- joyed sticking the knife in and twisting it just a little bit more.
That meant if he’d moved Jesse, he’d moved her for a reason.
“I think he’s got her with him,” Claire said. “At Founder’s Square. Don’t you?”
“Well,” Hannah said, “we have to go there anyway. Hop in.”
The ride back to Founder’s Square wasn’t as easy as leaving, mainly because the alerts about Hannah had gone out; they heard it on the police radio in the car when the news dropped. Chief Hannah Moses to be arrested on sight. Armed and dangerous.
“That,” Hannah said, “is code for Kil ing her would be just fine.
Most of my folks won’t feel that way. I hire good people, mostly, though some of them got forced on me, like Sullivan. But Fallon’s Daylighters will be out for blood, and they won’t hesitate.”
Not good news, Claire thought. They needed Hannah by their side. “So how are we going to get there?”
“On foot,” Hannah said. She stopped the car and parked it in front of the City Lights Washateria, where only a couple of people sat inside, looking depressed and watching the dryers spin. “Give me two minutes.”