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The shopkeeper, whose name she vaguely remembered as Sarah something-Sarah Brooke, that was it-was sitting on the floor. Her wrists and ankles had been tied together, and her eyes were so wide that she was likely screaming under the duct tape that covered her mouth.
Professor Carlyle was kneeling beside her. He'd been blitz-attacked, apparently; he had a cut on the side of his head that was bleeding freely in shocking red streams, and he was holding a trembling hand to his neck. More blood trickled out of that wound, but it wasn't gushing. "Danvers?" he said, in blank astonishment.
"You okay, sir?"
"He-he bit me-but I'm Protected!" He held up the hand that wasn't clamped over his throat, and Claire saw the silvery glint of a bracelet. "This can't happen!"
Sarah was Protected, too-she was wearing a similar bracelet that guaranteed her safety from vampire attack, at least theoretically. Obviously, it wasn't a magic shield.
The vampire, who'd backed away from Claire temporarily, took another run at her, and this time, she skipped backward and ripped down the curtains over the big front window, framing herself in bright daylight. "Come on, if you're coming," she said, but the vamp skidded to a halt right at the edge where shadow met sun.
And she got her first good look at him. "Jason?" she blurted in horror.
The vampire who was trying to kil her-and Sarah, and Professor Carlyle-was Jason Rosser, Eve's brother.
He'd wanted to be a vampire-had actively campaigned for it-and she'd been afraid he'd be even worse as a person if he grew fangs; here it was, proof positive, that if you had creepy violent tendencies as a human, you felt free to indulge them as a new vampire. The only good thing about the situation was that he was really new, and super allergic to the sun. In fact, today's attack might have been his first try at hunting.
If so, it wasn't going extremely well.
"Get out of here," Jason said. His voice was low, rough, and ugly with fury. "I don't want you. Get out."
"Too bad, you've got me, jackass. What the hel are you doing?"
"What does it look like, bite bait?" He flashed his teeth at her, which might have scared her, oh, years ago.
"Failure? And don't drop fang at me, Jason. It's not polite. Ah! Watch it!" He'd made a move, and although she didn't think he'd charge into the sunlight to grab her, she wasn't assuming anything. She brought the stake to an easy-stabbing position. He already had a blackened, sizzling hole in his side that wasn't healing fast. He wasn't eager to take another hit. "These people are Protected, idiot. They're off the menu. Go to the blood bank if you need your fix of B positive or whatever it is you're jonesing for." Besides causing pain and terror, she thought, but didn't say. Clearly, that was a big part of it for Jason. Most of the other vampires were more clinical about their feeding, but he'd brought allhis weird, twisted baggage over with him.
In some ways, he and Eve were mirror images of each other-both fascinated by the darkness. Only Eve had chosen to manifest hers outwardly, and Jason...Jason had taken it alldeep inside. For a while, Claire had been convinced there was something in him more than that.
Something better. But over time, he'd proven her wrong.
And now, here he was, bloody-mouthed, grinning at her like Batman's Joker, if the Joker had fangs.
"Protection's a joke," Jason told her. He prowled the line of shadow, staring at her with dark, angry eyes that looked unsettlingly like his sister's.
"Always has been; it's a racket, and the vampires laugh about it over their drinks. You know what the penalty is for me draining these two? I have to pay a fine. It's like a note in your file at school. I can do what I want. Nobody's going to care. Nobody's going to stop me."
"Oliver might. Or Amelie. They kind of like vampires to stay in line around here. Makes things easier for everyone."
He made a harsh buzzer sound. "Sorry, wrong answer," he said. "Old pioneer days, Claire. You're not keeping up. We've got privileges now. You can't keep us walking around on leashes anymore like tame dogs."
His pacing reminded her of a caged animal, too. Creepy. "Don't make me stake you, Jason. I'd have to tellyour sister, and I don't want to do that."
"As usual, it's allabout Eve. Why is it her business what I do?"
"She still cares about you, you know."
"She never really cared. Don't try that on me. If she'd been any kind of a stand-up sister, she'd have watched out for me. She just ran off and left me behind to take my punishment and shacked up with her precious Michael." Jason singsonged the name like a grade-schooler. He's just trying to scare you, Claire told herself, somewhat unconvincingly. You've dealt with Myrnin all this time; you can handle this stupid kid.
But she wasn't so sure. She'd counted on a vampire who'd back down, not one who was the poster child for unbalanced. Time for a shift of strategy.
Claire put down the stake. She needed both hands as she unzipped her backpack and reached inside to the inner pocket.
Jason decided it was the perfect time to make his move. He was fast, she had to give him that, but so was she, and she'd known he'd take the bait; he wasn't the cautious sort. So when her hand came up out of the bag holding the canister, he laughed, and his hands closed on her shoulders with crushing force.
"What're you going to do? Perfume me?"
She sprayed liquid silver in his open mouth.
Jason's shriek almost burst her eardrums, and, coughing and gagging, he staggered backward, smoke pouring from between his lips. His skin was burning from the sunlight. Claire shoved him backward into the shadows, and he stumbled a few steps, kept gagging, and sank down to his hands and knees to cough convulsively.
"It's just a little," she told him. "Consider it breath freshener. The next time, I spray it in your eyes, Jason, so keep the hel off me if you like your face."
He was too busy retching to try to speak, even if he could have managed it. Claire bypassed him and went to Sarah, tugged the ropes free, and let her pul the tape off her mouth. It must have hurt. The skin beneath it looked red and abraded, and Sarah whooped in a deep breath of relief. She fixed a poisonous glare on Jason. "You just wait, you little piece of crap," she said. "My Protector's not going to stand for this."
"Neither wil mine," Professor Carlyle said. He looked pale and shaky, but righteously angry. Claire found paper towels behind the bookstore's counter and folded some into a thick pad, which she gave him to apply to his head wound. "Thank you, Danvers."
"You're welcome," she said. "So...can we talk over that B on the last paper? Because it was really an A effort. I'd take a B if I deserved it, but-"
"Yes, yes, fine, A it is. As far as I'm concerned, you have an A for the rest of the class," he said. "Sarah, would you like me to cal someone, or-"
"Nope," the woman said, and climbed to her feet. She was smal but had a wiry strength that probably came from bench-pressing boxes of textbooks allday. "I'm cal ing the pound to see if they can come get this damn rabid dog-"
Before she could finish the thought, Jason had scrambled to his feet and was running for the back door. alleys, Claire thought. Shaded alleys, with sewer access. He'd be gone before anyone could catch him.
"Might want to keep that back door locked from now on," she said to Sarah as she returned the silver canister to her backpack and picked up the stake to slide it into the holster next to it. "Professor."
They both nodded, clearly still off-balance from the encounter with their own mortality; Claire felt it, too, a hissing tension running through her body that made her realize how much she'd just taken on herself. Shane would have been livid that she'd tried it without backup.
She went outside and walked fast, allthe way home.
Where she was going to have to tel Eve her brother had gone ful -on Hannibal Lecter. Fun.
She spotted the shiny black van of the ghost hunters-clearly driven off from their targeted hospital visit, thankfully-cruising slowly down the street. Jenna and Angel were arguing (there was a shocker) and Jenna was consulting a street map. There weren't many maps of Morganville that the vampires hadn't, ah, edited, so if the team members were trying to find some "haunted" location, they wouldn't be finding anything more exotic along the way. Except maybe Jason, who could be on the rampage after not getting his afternoon snack.
Claire swal owed her pride, dialed Amelie's number, and got the brisk, Irish-accented voice of her assistant, Bizzie. "Please tel Amelie that Jason Rosser's out here biting people, in public. Protected people. And if she wants those ghost hunters to get a good story, he's a great way to do it." She didn't wait for an acknowledgment. Amelie would shut Jason up; she might shut him up permanently, but that wasn't Claire's concern. She was more worried about the ghost hunters.
