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But the other part warned me that he just might be telling the truth. I'd heard Amelie and Myrnin talking. What he'd just said fit with what I knew from the two of them - although they'd left out the part about humans dying.
Of course.
"Tell me where the bag is," I said.
"Only if you tell me you're going to stop this thing."
I opened another drawer and slammed it so hard the wood splintered. "Don't be an ass - of course I'm going to stop it. Do you really think I'd let Amelie do a thing like that?"
"Maybe. Vampires are all about self-preservation."
"All right, then suck on this: I'm staying here. I'm not going with the others. So she'd have to kill me, too." I threw a stack of books out of the way and uncovered another set of drawers built into the bottom of the lab table I was searching.
And inside was a dusty black leather bag. Exactly like what I was searching for.
I pulled it out and opened it. Medical equipment. Things I didn't recognize, but it looked like what Myrnin would want.
"Told you that you were getting warm," Frank said.
"Game's over, Frank." I snapped the catches shut again and picked up the bag, along with the shopping bag of chemicals. "You lose."
His voice came out of my cell phone speaker as I climbed the steps, heading out. "Do we have a deal?"
"No," I said. "I don't make deals with you."
But that didn't mean I wouldn't be stopping the massacre. If he hadn't been lying about that, too.
Frank said, "What if I told you Claire was still alive in your house?"
And how Frank Collins it was, to save that as his last bargaining chip.
I held up the phone and said, very clearly, "I already know, dip-shit. And we're going to get her back without any help from you."
There was silence for a second, and then Frank said, "You know what, kid? I really hope you can. But the thing is, even if you do . . . you're all going to die. Because I'm going to kill you. I've got no choice."
We'd have to see about that.
But after Claire.
I made it home in an hour and three minutes, unlocked the back door, and raced inside to put my stuff on the table.
The house was silent, except for the dry ticking of the clock in the parlor. Claire's body still lay motionless on the couch, covered with Eve's knit afghan.
I went to the front and carefully checked the window. No sign of the hearse out front.
They were late. Later than me, and that was late.
I waited as the clock ticked, every second winding my nerves tighter. Dammit, Shane, if you got yourself into it . . . If Eve . . . I couldn't finish the thoughts; my brain kept yanking away from it like a hand from a hot stove.
What if Frank wasn't lying about the meeting at Founder's Square? What if Amelie meant to end the Morganville experiment in a blaze of glory? I couldn't understand that, but it all fit. She was scared of something, very scared. And scared people do insane things.
Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and I couldn't wait anymore. The hearse wouldn't be tough to spot. If they needed help, every minute would count.
I left the way I'd come in, through the back, and took shortcuts through neighbors' yards until I was sure it was safe to be on the street.
I was two blocks from Lot Street, passing the shuttered and locked gates of Variety Liquor, when the rain began to fall again. I didn't have a coat, but it didn't matter. I kept moving.
Ahead, someone stepped out of the hissing darkness, and I saw a blur of water, teeth, something wrong, so very wrong, and then there was something in my head, drowning me alive. I felt cold.
The thing facing me looked like a man, but he was all wrong, too. So was his awful slicing smile as he whispered, "Come with me," and I had no choice but to follow him into the dark.
Into the cold.
Drowning.
Dark.
Chapter Fifteen
EVE
"Dammit," Shane said. He'd been saying that for about five minutes straight, like some kind of mantra. "Hand me the wrench. Dammit!"
I crouched down and handed him the tool out of the box in the back of the hearse. Even Shane's strength was having trouble with the bolts on the tire.
The flat one.
So not my fault.
"You know - dammit! - if you actually got these things changed out before the tread is showing - "
"Zip it right there," I told him. "Really not the time to lecture me about my car-maintenance habits. Just get it changed."
"Yeah, working on it," he said. "Dammit. We're late already. Michael's going to freak."
"Hey, good, because if he shows up, we can have this fixed in thirty seconds," I said.
Shane sent me a glare from under his rain-drenched hair, which was ratted around his face. He needed a shave, I thought. And a tranquilizer. "I don't need help," he snapped. He stood up and stamped on the wrench, and the bolt turned with a horrible metallic shriek. Now that he had it started, he was able to muscle it off and start the next one.
At this rate, we'd be thirty minutes in the freezing downpour. Sitting ducks for any passing vamp with a plasma craving.
Or worse, whatever worse was this week in Morganville. One thing was certain: it was not safe to be out with a flat tire after dark, even on the town's best day ever. Which this most assuredly wasn't.
I was trying to be the old Eve. I really was; I'd even zinged Shane a couple of times with wisecracks, but nothing felt the same. I kept seeing flashes in front of me, vivid as camera shots, of how Claire had looked lying there on the floor, her eyes open, head turned to the side.
Of how I'd known, even before I'd touched her, that she was gone.
Nothing was the same now. The rain was all wrong for Morganville; it never poured like this, especially not this time of year. The streets were flooding, again, and even under the hooded jacket I was wearing I felt chilled and soaked. And so many stores were shut - not just closed for the night, closed, with whited-out windows and notices on the doors.
It felt like the whole population was suddenly deciding Morganville was no longer safe.
Which, duh.
I shivered again and stamped my feet, which was a bad idea. I sent splashes of freezing water up my legs.
Shane had moved on from dammit up the cursing food chain as he struggled with the third bolt. Stomping on the wrench wasn't cutting it, but he was doing it with so much enthusiasm I wouldn't have been surprised to hear a bone break. Finally, the bolt creaked over, and Shane collapsed to his knees again to unscrew it.
Three down, three to go, and we really were very late. Michael would be out looking for us, but in this rain, it'd be hard for him.
A bolt of lightning ripped the sky in half, and a couple of blocks down, I saw someone watching us. The flash gave me only impressions - human-shaped, pale, nothing special. But anybody who would be standing idly around in this weather deserved special alarm.
"Speed it up," I told Shane. "Seriously. Go faster."
"Hey, princess, don't make me break a nail."
"I'm not kidding."
He glanced up at me, shook hair out of his eyes, and said, "Yeah, I know. I'm moving it. Get the tire ready."
I didn't like the idea of leaving him alone to go to the back of the hearse and drag the spare out of its compartment, but I really didn't have much of a choice; it would speed things up, and I'd just been ragging on him to count seconds. I waited until the next jagged flash of lightning.
The corner where I'd seen the man standing was empty. Good news? Probably not.
It took thirty seconds to unlatch the compartment, grab the spare, and haul it out. Shane was still unscrewing the last bolt when I rolled it over. He lifted the flat clear and passed it to me, then took the replacement and slotted it on with speed a NAS-CAR pit crew would have envied. "Five minutes," he shouted.
"Less would be better!"
"Just watch our backs."
I was, even while I threw the flat tire into the back of the hearse. The street looked deserted. We'd lucked out in being able to pull under an actual working streetlamp to fix the tire, but that also made us about as obvious as the last pork chop at the all-you-can-eat buffet. I had been given watchdog duty over Shane's precious canvas bag, and now I grabbed out my two favorite weapons - a silver stake, and my slightly upgraded fencing epee, which had a coating of silver on it, too. My coat pockets had two squirt bottles full of silver nitrate.
"Trouble?" he asked me without looking up from screwing on bolts. He was working fast. "Four more minutes."
