Authors: Rachel Caine
Bitter Blood (2 page)
No more.
“No more,” Oliver said aloud, and rose to take the decree from my hand. “No more will these vassals think they can slip away in secrecy from their crimes. It’s our time, my queen. Our time to ensure our final survival.” And he captured my hand in his, bent, and touched his cool lips to my equally cool skin.
I shivered.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I believe it is.”
His lips traveled up my arm, in slow and gentle kisses, and found my neck; he unpinned my hair from its heavy crown and let it fall loose. His strong hands went around me and pulled me to him. He was as irresistible as Newton’s gravity, and I gave up politics and pride and status for the sheer, novel joy of being wanted.
And if there was a part of me, a small and hidden part, that questioned all this and understood that the more power I took for the vampires, the more the humans would rebel…well, I buried it with ruthless efficiency. I was tired of being alone, and what Oliver drew from me was pleasant, and in some measure necessary.
The old ways of Morganville…They were my past.
Oliver was my future.
ONE
CLAIRE
C
laire Danvers was in a rare bad mood, and nearly getting arrested didn’t improve it.
First, her university classes hadn’t gone well at all, and then she’d had a humiliating argument with her “adviser” (she usually thought of him that way, in quotes, because he didn’t “advise” her to do anything but take boring core subjects and not challenge herself), and then she’d gotten a completely unfair B on a physics paper she knew had been letter perfect. She would have grudgingly accepted a B on something unimportant, like history, but no, it had to be in her major. And of course Professor Carlyle wasn’t in his office to talk about it.
So she wasn’t fully paying attention when she stepped off the curb. Traffic in Morganville, Texas, wasn’t exactly fast and furious,
and here by Texas Prairie University, people were fully used to stopping for oblivious students.
Still, the screech of brakes surprised her and sent her stumbling back to the safety of the sidewalk, and it was only after a couple of fast breaths that she realized she’d nearly been run over by a police cruiser.
And a policeman was getting out of the car, looking grim.
As he stalked over to her she realized he was probably a vampire—he was too pale to be a human, and he had on sunglasses even here in the shade of the building. Glancing at the cruiser to confirm, she saw the extreme tinting job on the windows. Definitely vampire police. The official slogan of the police was
to protect and serve
, but her boyfriend called the vampire patrol the
to protect and serve up for dinner patrol.
It was unusual to see one so close to the university, though. Normally, vampire cops worked at night, and closer to the center of town, where Founder’s Square was located, along with the central vamp population. Only the regular residents would see them there, and not the transient—though pretty oblivious—students.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and swallowed a rusty taste in her mouth that seemed composed of shock and entirely useless anger. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Obviously,” he said. Like most vamps, he had an accent, but she’d long ago given up trying to identify it; if they lived long enough, vampires tended to pick up dozens of accents, and many of them were antique anyway. His facial features seemed…maybe Chinese? “Identification.”
“For walking?”
“Identification.”
Claire swallowed her protest and reached in her backpack for her wallet. She pulled out her student ID card and Texas driver’s
license and handed them over. He glanced at them and shoved the cards back.
“Not those,” he said. “Your town identification.”
“My…what?”
“You should have received it in the mail.”
“Well, I haven’t!”
He took off his sunglasses. Behind them, his eyes were very dark, but there were hints of red. He stared at her for a moment, then nodded.
“All right. When you get your card, carry it at all times. And next time, watch your step. You get yourself hit by a car, I’ll consider you roadkill.”
With that, he put the sunglasses back on, turned, and got back in his car. Before Claire could think about any way to respond, he’d put the cruiser in gear and whipped around the corner.
It did not improve her mood.
Before she could even think about going home, Claire had a mandatory stop to make, at her part-time job. She dreaded it today, because she knew she was in no shape to deal with the incredibly inconsistent moods of Myrnin, her vampire mad-scientist boss. He might be laser focused and super-rational; he might be talking to crockery and quoting
Alice in Wonderland
(that had been the scene during her last visit). But whatever he was doing, he’d have work for her, and probably too much of it.
But at least he was never, ever boring.
She’d made the walk so often that she did it on autopilot, hardly even noticing the streets and houses and the alley down which she had to pass; she checked her phone and read texts as she jogged down the long marble steps that led into the darkness of his lab, or lair, whichever mood he was in today. The lights were on, which was nice. As she put her phone away, she saw that
Myrnin was bent over a microscope—an ancient thing that she’d tried to put away a dozen times in favor of a newer electronic model, but he kept unearthing the thing. He stepped away from the eyepiece to scribble numbers frantically on a chalkboard. The board was
covered
in numbers, and to Claire’s eyes they looked completely random—not just in terms of their numerical values, but in the way they’d been written, at all angles and in all areas of the available space. Some were even upside down. It wasn’t a formula or an analysis. It was complete gibberish.
So. It was going to be one of those days. Lovely.
“Hey,” Claire said with fatalistic resignation as she dumped her backpack on the floor and opened up a drawer to retrieve her lab coat. It was a good thing she looked first; Myrnin had dumped an assortment of scalpels in on top of the fabric. Any one of them could have sliced her to the bone. “What are you doing?”
“Did you know that certain types of coral qualify as immortal? The definition of scientific immortality is that if the mortality rate of a species doesn’t increase after it reaches maturity, there is no such thing as aging…black coral, for instance. Or the Great Basin bristlecone pine. I’m trying to determine if there is any resemblance between the development of those cellular colonies with the replacement of human cells that takes place in a conversion to vampirism….” He was talking a mile a minute, with a fever pitch that Claire always dreaded. It meant he was in need of medication, which he wouldn’t take; she’d need to be stealthy about adding it to his blood supply, again, to bring him down a little into the rational zone. “Did you bring me a hamburger?”
“Did I— No, Myrnin, I didn’t bring you a hamburger.” Bizarre. He’d never asked for that before.
“Coffee?”
“It’s late.”
“Doughnuts?”
“No.”
“What good are you, then?” He finally looked up from the microscope, made another note or two on the board, and stepped back to consider the chaos of chalk marks. “Oh dear. That’s not very—is this where I started? Claire?” He pointed at a number somewhere near the top right corner.
“I wasn’t here,” Claire said, and buttoned up her lab coat. “Do you want me to keep working on the machine?”
“The what? Oh, yes, that thing. Do, please.” He crossed his arms and stared at the board, frowning now. It was not a personal-grooming highlight day for him, either. His long, dark hair was in tangles and needed a wash; she was sure the oversized somewhat-white shirt he was wearing had been used as a rag to wipe up chemical spills at sometime in its long life. He’d had the presence of mind to put on some kind of pants, though she wasn’t sure the baggy walking shorts were what she’d have chosen. At least the flip-flops kind of matched. “How was school?”
“Bad,” she said.
“Good,” he said absently, “very good…Ah, I think this is where I started…. Fibonacci sequence—I see what I did….” He began drawing a spiral through the numbers, starting somewhere at the center. Of course, he’d be noting down results in a spiral. Why not?
Claire felt a headache coming on. The place was dirty again, grit on the floor that was a combination of sand blown in from the desert winds, and whatever Myrnin had been working with that he’d spilled liberally all over the place. She only hoped it wasn’t too toxic. She’d have to schedule a day to get him out of here so she could get reorganized, sweep up the debris, stack the books
back in some kind of order, shelve the lab equipment…. No, that wouldn’t be a day. More like a week.
She gave up thinking about it, then went to the lab table on the right side of the room, which was covered by a dusty sheet. She pulled the cover off, coughed at the billows of grit that flew up, and looked at the machine she was building. It was definitely her own creation, this thing: it lacked most of the eccentric design elements that Myrnin would have put into it, though he’d sneaked in a few flywheels and glowing liquids along the way. It was oblong, practical, bell-shaped, and had oscillation controls along the sides. She thought it looked a bit like an old-fashioned science fiction ray gun, but it had a very different use…if it had ever worked.
Claire hooked up the device to the plug-in analyzing programs, and began to run simulations. It was a project Myrnin had proposed months ago, and it had taken her this long to get even close to a solution…. The vampires had an ability, so far mysterious and decidedly unscientific, to influence the minds and emotions of others—humans, mostly, but sometimes other vampires. Every vampire had a different set of strengths and weaknesses, but most shared some kind of emotional-control mechanism; it helped them calm their prey, or convince them to surrender their blood voluntarily.
What she was working on was a way to
cancel
that ability. To give humans—and even other vampires—a way to defend themselves against the manipulation.
Claire had gone from building a machine that could pinpoint and map emotions to one that could build feedback loops, heightening what was already there. It was a necessary step to get to the
control
stage—you had to be able to replicate the ability to negate it. If you thought of emotion as a wavelength, you could either amplify or cancel it with the flick of a switch.
“Myrnin?” She didn’t look up from the analysis running on the laptop computer screen. “Did you mess with my project?”
“A little,” he said. “Isn’t it better?”
It was. She had no idea what he’d done to it, but adjusting the controls showed precise calibrations that she couldn’t have done herself. “Did you maybe write down how you did it?”
“Probably,” Myrnin said cheerfully. “But I don’t think it will help. It’s just hearing the cycles and tuning to them. I don’t think you’re capable, with your limited human senses. If you’d become a vampire, you’d have so much more potential, you know.”
She didn’t answer that. She’d found it was really best not to engage in that particular debate with him, and besides, in the next second he’d forgotten all about it, focused on his enthusiasm for black coral.
On paper, the device they’d developed—well, she’d developed, and Myrnin had tweaked—seemed to work. Now she’d have to figure out how to test it, make sure it exactly replicated the way the vampire ability worked…and then make sure she could cancel that ability, reliably.
It might even have other applications. If you could make an attacking vampire afraid, make him back off, you could end a fight without violence. That alone made the work worthwhile.
And what happens when someone uses it the other way?
she wondered.
What happens if an attacker gets hold of it, then uses it to make
you
more afraid, as a victim?
She didn’t have an answer for that. It was one of the things that made her feel, sometimes, that this was a bad idea—and that she ought to simply destroy the thing before it caused more trouble.
But maybe not quite yet.
Claire unhooked the machine—she didn’t have any kind of cool name for it yet, or even a project designation—and tested the
weight of it. Heavy. She’d built it from solid components, and it generated considerable waste heat, but it was a prototype; it’d improve, if it was worthwhile.
She tried aiming it at the wall. It was a little awkward, but if she added a grip up front, that would help stabilize it—