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The impulse felt like a string tied around her guts, pulling relentlessly. It was annoying at first. Then it hurt. Finally, she pulled free of Shane's embrace and walked in circles around the open space of the warehouse they'd used for the bus staging area, making wider and wider arcs. He intercepted her when she came close to the door, and she looked at him in silent misery. "I hate this!" she blurted. "I want this thing out!" And she burst into tears, because it felt overwhelming to her, this feeling of despair and anguish, of not being where she was supposed to be. This time, even Shane's presence couldn't help. The misery just came in waves, crushing her underneath. She heard Shane yelling at Richard Morrell, and then Hannah was there, saying something about helping.
Claire felt a hot sting in her arm, and then calm spread like ice through her veins. It was a relief, but it didn't touch the burning on her arm, or the anxiety boiling in her stomach. Her body still wasn't her own.
"She'll sleep for a while," Hannah said, from a long way off. "Shane, I need you."
Claire couldn't open her eyes, or tell them that she wasn't really asleep at all. She seemed to be - she got that - but she was desperately awake underneath. Painfully awake.
Shane kissed her, warm and gentle, and she felt his hand smooth her hair and trace down her cheek. Don't leave me, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn't make herself move or speak.
Her heartbeat thudded, slow and calm, even though she felt the panic building inside her.
She felt herself carried somewhere, tucked into a warm bed and piled with blankets.
Then silence.
Her eyes opened, as if someone else was controlling them, and as she sat up, she saw someone standing in the corner of the darkened room where they'd left her.
Ada.
The ghost put a pale, flickering finger to her lips and motioned for Claire to sit up. She did, although she had no idea why.
Ada drifted closer. Once again, she wasn't three-dimensional at all, just a flat projection on the air, like a TV character without the screen. She didn't really look human; in fact, she looked more like a game character, all smoothness and manufactured detail.
Somewhere in the dark, a cell phone rang. Claire walked over to a pile of boxes labeled EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION EQUIPMENT and ripped away tape to retrieve a cell phone. Fully charged, from the battery icon on the display. She lifted it to her ear.
"Bishop is trying to pull you to him," Ada's tinny, artificial voice said. "But I need you elsewhere."
"You need me."
"Of course. With Myrnin deactivated, I require someone to assist me. Take the portal to reach me."
"There's a portal?" Claire felt slow and stupid, and she didn't think it was the drugs that Hannah had given her. Ada's ghostly representation gave her a scorching look of contempt.
"I have made a portal," she said. "That's what I do, you silly fool. Take it, now. Six steps forward, four to your right. Go!"
The connection died on Claire's borrowed phone with a lost-signal beep. She folded the clamshell and slid it back in her pocket, and realized that someone - Shane, she guessed - had taken her shoes off for her. She put them on and walked six paces forward into the dark, then four steps to the right.
Her fourth step sent her falling through freezing-cold blackness, and then her foot touched ground, and she was someplace she recognized.
She came out in the cells where Myrnin and Amelie had confined the vampires who had become too sick to function on their own. It was an old prison, dark and damp, built out of solid stone and steel. The tornado that had raged through Morganville a few months back had damaged part of the building; Claire hadn't been involved in tracking down the escaped patients, but she knew it had been done, and the place repaired. Not that Bishop had cared, of course. Amelie had done that.
But all the cells were empty now.
Claire stumbled to a halt and wrapped her arms around her stomach, where the tug from Bishop's will felt like a white-hot wire being pulled through her skin. She braced herself against the wall, breathing hard. "I'm here," she said to the empty air. "What do you want me to do, Ada?"
Ada's ghost glided down the corridor ahead of her - still two-dimensional, but this time the view was from the back. Her stiff belled skirts drifted inches above the stone floor, and she looked back over her shoulder toward Claire in unmistakable command. Great, Claire thought. It's not bad enough that Bishop has his hooks in me; now it's Myrnin's nutty computer, too. I have way too many bosses.
Eve would have told her she needed a better job, which would include sewage treatment.
"Where are we going?" she asked Ada, not that she expected an answer. She wasn't disappointed. The prison was laid out in long hallways, and the last time Claire had been here, most of the cells had been filled with plague victims. She'd delivered their food - well, blood - to them to make sure they hadn't starved. Some had been violent; most had just been lying very still, unable to do much at all.
Where were they now?
At the end of the line was the cell where Myrnin had spent his days, off and on, when he was too dangerous to be in the lab or around anybody - even other vampires. It had been furnished with his home comforts, like a thick Turkish rug and a soft pile of blankets and pillows, his ragged armchair, and stacks of books.
No sign of Myrnin, either.
Ada glided to the end of the hall, then turned to face Claire, flickering from a back view to a front view like a jump cut in a movie.
"That's really creepy," Claire said. "You know that, right?"
Her phone rang. She opened the clamshell. "You were seeking Dr. Mills," Ada said. "He is here."
"Where?"
"Follow. He requires assistance."
Claire kept the phone to her ear as Ada turned around again and misted right through the stone wall. Claire stopped, her nose two inches away from the surface of the barrier. She slowly reached out, and although the stone looked utterly real - it even smelled real, like dust and mold - there was nothing under her hand but air. Still, her brain stubbornly told her not to take another step, or she'd end up with a bruised face at the very least. In fact, her whole body resisted the order to walk on.
Claire forced her foot to rise, inch forward, and step into the stone. Then the other foot, shuffling forward to match it. It didn't get any easier, not for five or six tor-turous inches, and then suddenly the pressure was gone, and she stepped through into a large, well-lit room.
A room full of vampires.
Claire froze as dozens of pallid faces turned toward her. She'd never gotten to know the inmates - they'd mostly been anonymous in the shadows - but she recognized a few of them. What were they doing out of their cages?
The voice on the phone at her ear snapped, impatiently, "Would you come, then?"
Claire blinked and saw that Ada was drifting in the middle of the room, staring at her in naked fury. "They're not going to - "
"They will not hurt you," Ada said. "Don't be absurd."
It really wasn't all that absurd. Claire had seen some of these same vampires clawing gouges in stone with their fingernails, and gnawing on their own fingers. She was like a doggie treat in a room full of rabid rottwei lers.
None of them lunged at her. They stared at her as if she was a curiosity, but they didn't seem especially, well, hungry.
She followed Ada's image across the room to a small stone alcove, where she saw Dr. Mills lying very still on a cot.
"Oh no," Claire whispered, and hurried over to him. "Dr. Mills?"
He groaned and opened reddened eyes, blinking to focus on her face. "Claire," he croaked, and coughed. "Damn. What time is it?"
"Uh - almost five, I think. Why?"
"I just went to sleep at four," he said, and flopped back to full length on his cot. "God. Sorry, I'm exhausted. Forty-eight hours without more than a couple of hours down. I'm not a med student anymore."
She felt a wave of utter relief. "They didn't, you know - "
"Kill me? Other than by working me half to death?" Dr. Mills groaned and sat up, rubbing his head as if he was trying to shove his brains back inside. "Amelie wanted to use the serum to treat the worst cases first. I got everyone housed here, except for Myrnin. I have two doses left. There won't be any more if we don't get blood from Bishop to culture."
She'd almost forgotten about that. "Have you seen Myrnin?"
"Not since Amelie brought me here," Dr. Mills said. "Why?"
