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I carried her out of the refrigerator, through the lab room, up the stairs, and out through the broken front door. Outside it was still raining, in chilly little fits, as if the sky were shivering in the cold. I bowed my head over her, somehow not wanting her to get wet, and ran for home.
I made it only as far as the end of the block before a police cruiser turned the corner, and its blue and red lights suddenly popped on and flashed. It nosed in to the curb, and a bright light focused on me.
"Hold up," called a familiar voice. I squinted against the light, and it was redirected to glow on my feet instead of my eyes.
Hannah Moses closed her car door and walked toward me, settling her nightstick in its loop on her belt. "Michael Glass," she said. "You planning on explaining to me why you're stealing a dead girl out of the mortuary?"
"To tell you the truth," I said, "I'm not exactly sure I know why I'm doing it."
She was staring at me - no, she was looking at Claire, with grim sadness grooving lines on her face around the prominent scar. "Never thought I'd see her go down," she said. "I honestly didn't."
"The thing is, she may not be gone."
Her eyebrows rose, then fell. "The house."
"You know?"
"I've got relatives in the Day House, Michael. And I spent time there. There's something not quite right about those things. Ghosts. I heard them growing up."
"I think Claire's still in there," I said. "And we're going to get her back."
"Just you."
"Myrnin," I said. "And me, yeah. And Eve, and Shane. So you have to let me go. You have to let me try."
She looked tired, and the sadness wasn't all for Claire. She seemed . . . beaten down. "This whole town's dying," she said. "Did you know that? It's our home, and it's being taken apart around us. What difference does one girl make, against all that?"
"I don't know. Maybe none at all. But she matters, Chief. She matters to us."
Hannah was silent again, for a long moment, and then she sighed and said, "Put her in the back and get in there with her. I'll drive you home."
"Uh, I'm not exactly supposed to be doing this - "
"Amelie gave orders to grab you on sight, stun you, and drag you back to Founder's Square by any means necessary," she told me. "I'm not supposed to be doing this, either. But I'm damned tired of doing what people tell me."
"Me, too," I said. "Thanks."
She drove fast, but carefully. We passed a few cruising police cars, and she told me to get down, but nobody tried to stop us. Why would they? She was chief of police, and as far as anyone could tell, the back of the car was empty. A fugitive vampire wasn't likely to be escaping in a police car.
Claire's body felt loose and relaxed where it rested on my knees. I was holding her neck and head still. In the passing flashes of streetlights - where they were still working - she looked not so much peaceful as just . . . vacant. She still had that fragile look to her, that pretty shape to her face, but everything that had been Claire was missing now. She could have been anybody.
"They'll be watching your house," Hannah said. "I'll park, pop your door, and go to the front to talk to Shane. They'll watch me do it. You take her and go around back." She put on her cap with its plastic covering and looked at me in the rearview mirror. "Stay out of sight of the windows once you're in there. Amelie will be checking the house as soon as she realizes you aren't in any of the other spots. I'll try to warn you if I can."
"Thank you," I said.
She shrugged. "Tomorrow I'm out of a job," she said. "Might as well go out flipping the bird to the powers that be killing us."
It occurred to me to wonder what she meant by that, but then she was out of the car, and my back door was open just a crack, and I had to get moving, fast, with Claire balanced in my arms. Good thing I was a vampire. Running with a second person's weight while in a crouch, keeping to the shadows, wasn't a job for a human.
I made the back door and got inside. I could hear Hannah saying something, and then the front door closed while I locked the back behind me.
I paused for a moment. Eve and Shane were talking out in the hallway, and I realized that there was no way around it: this was going to come as a shock.
Better, I thought, to get it over with fast.
I expected Eve to scream when I stepped out with Claire's body in my arms, but she just stared at me, eyes gone wide and strange, and then she turned and looked at Shane, lips parting.
He froze, and I saw all the color drain out of his face. He braced himself by slapping a hand against the wall, and blurted, "What in the hell are you doing?"
I couldn't tell him, because I didn't know. "Draw the shades," I told Eve. "Go. All of them. We can't let anyone see me."
"Where's Myrnin?"
"He's coming," I said, and hoped like hell I was right. "Help me put her on the couch in the living room."
Shane ran on ahead, tossing pillows and game controllers to the floor, and then he took a deep breath and helped guide her legs as I eased her down. "Why did you do this?" He sounded shaken. I'd have been surprised if he wasn't, honestly. "They took her away."
"Myrnin gave me a list. She was on it." I took one of the afghans Eve kept draped on the back of the couch and put it over Claire, then folded it carefully up to conceal her face. "Just leave her where she is. I have to go get the rest of what he wrote down. I'll be back."
"Wait!" Shane grabbed my arm as I started to head for the back door again. "Amelie's guys were just here. They tossed the place looking for you."
"Good. Then they won't be looking here again for a while."
Eve was standing off to the side. She hadn't said a word until now. "Michael - they told us we had to call when you came back. If we don't, they said - " She darted a look at Shane. "They said they'd come back and kill us all. I think they meant it."
"They did seem pretty serious about their mayhem," Shane said. "Screw it. Go, Mike. If they want to give it a try, they'll get a fight. I'm not ready to give it up, not as long as there's a chance we get her back."
I nodded. "Have you seen her again?"
"Yeah," he said, and cleared his throat. "She's okay." Shane wasn't, I realized. He looked . . . really tired. Dark circles under his eyes, an unhealthy color to his skin.
"I hope so," I said. Hope. I'd thought of Claire before as Shane's hope, and here I was, carrying corpses in the hope that Myrnin - professional lunatic - would show up and work some kind of weird magic and bring my friend back to life. That was, all things considered, a pretty good definition of hope, too. "Take care of them. I'll be back."
"Wait. Give me half the list. I can help." Shane had real passion in him now - a purpose. I knew it was dangerous. Then again, from the few hints Amelie had dropped back in her office, being a vampire was no longer any protection against the perils of the night, either.
I folded the paper in half, tore it, and handed him his portion. "Three items on there," I said. "One hour. Understood?"
"Got it," he said. "Watch your back, bro."
"You, too," I said.
"Wait," Eve said, and stepped forward. "Seriously, you two are not going out in the middle of the night and leaving me here with - " She didn't look directly at Claire's body, lying covered on the couch. Instead, she took a deep breath and plunged gamely on. "With the possibility of those vamp ass**les coming back to kill us - "
She was right about that. "No," I said. "You go with Shane. Nobody should be here alone."
"Claire's alone," Shane said. He'd pulled an olive green canvas bag out from under a cabinet on the other side of the room and unzipped it, and was checking the contents. "I hope she understands why we have to do this." He looked up. "Stay strong, Claire. We'll be back for you. I promise."
"I'd like to go with you," Eve said to me, in a close whisper.
"I know." I took her hands and kissed them, then her lips. She could always bewitch me that way, just with a kiss, all over again, and it was hard to break away from the taste of raspberries and chocolate and the sweet, delicious, spicy flavor that was all Eve. "I'm going to be moving fast, and on foot. You and Shane get the hearse. Meet you back here in one hour. If you're late, I'll find you."
