Bitter Blood (23 page)

“Get the bag,” Eve snapped to Claire, and she nodded and dashed back into the kitchen. In seconds, she had hold of one of the black canvas totes they kept ready, but by the time she’d made it back outside, Pennyfeather had yanked the branch free, ripped it to pieces, and was stalking toward Eve with a low, furious growl and one piece still held as a club in his clawed hand.

There was no time to get to Eve. Claire did the next best thing; she spun around and flung the bag. It arced through the air and hit the grass at Eve’s feet, spilling out a confusion of objects, but Eve didn’t hesitate over choices. She grabbed a small bottle, popped the plastic cap, and threw the contents in Pennyfeather’s face.

Silver nitrate.

His growl turned to a howl, rising in volume and pitch until it hurt Claire’s ears, and he sheared off from making his run at Eve to claw at his face. The liquid silver clung like napalm, and burned about as fiercely. Claire grabbed the bag, stuffed items inside as fast as possible, and grabbed Eve’s wrist. “Come on!” she yelled, and they ran around the side of the house, feet sliding on the loose white gravel.

Michael and Shane were at the front, and between the last blast of the fire extinguisher and smothering flaps of the rug, they’d put out a fire that had blackened a ten-foot section of the exterior of the house. Broken glass lay around the base of it, and as they got closer, Claire smelled the sharp, almost-sweet stench of gasoline.

There was something pinned to their front door, too, fluttering pale in the night breeze.

Michael dropped the rug and flashed at vampire-speed to catch Eve in his arms. He must have smelled the blood from her cuts, Claire thought; she could see the faint, iridescent shine of his eyes. “What happened?” he asked, and touched the claw slashes on her kimono. “Who did this?”

“Pennyfeather,” Claire said. Now that the adrenaline rush was passing, she felt weirdly shaky, and she was beginning to realize how many things she’d done that could have gone badly wrong for her. For Eve, too. “It was Pennyfeather. He was—he was going to bite her.”

Michael made a hissing noise, like a very angry and dangerous snake, and blurred out of sight toward the backyard. Shane’s gaze followed him, but he didn’t go along; he reached instead for the bag that Claire held and sorted through the contents. He handed Eve a knife, gave Claire another of the bottles of silver, and for himself, a baseball bat—a regular bat, except that the last six inches of the business end were coated with silver plate. “Been dying to try this out,” he said, and gave them both a tight, wild smile. “Batter up.” He swung it experimentally, nodded, and rested it on his right shoulder. “You good, Eve?”

“This was my favorite robe,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, but it was from rage as much as from fear, Claire thought. “Dammit. It was
vintage
!”

Shane was still watching the side of the house, around which Michael had disappeared. He was clearly wondering if he ought to go back him up. Claire put a hand on his arm and drew his focus, just for a second. “Eve got Pennyfeather with a face full of this,” she said, and held up her bottle. “He’s got a handicap, and Michael’s really pissed off.”

That eased some of the tension in Shane’s back and shoulders, at least. “I don’t want to leave you two alone out here,” he said. “The fire’s out. Get back inside and lock the doors. Go.”

“What about you guys?”

“If you hear us crying for our mommies, you can come rescue us, but hey, Eve’s kinda half naked and bleeding out here.”

Shane had a great point, and as Claire looked over at her, she saw that Eve was gripping the knife in a white-knuckled hand and shivering badly. It was cold out, and the shock was setting in.

Claire took her arm and steered her up the steps. Shane watched them until they reached the door, and then nodded to her and dashed away into the dark, bat held at the ready. She pushed open the door and hustled Eve inside, then paused and looked at what was pinned to the wood.

She supposed it was Pennyfeather’s writing, because it was hard to read, spiky, and had a nasty brownish color to the ink that might well have been blood.

It said,
Done by Order of the Founder
, and it was pinned deeply into the wood by a giant knife, like a bowie knife on steroids.

Claire worked it back and forth until she could pull it out of the door’s surface, folded the piece of paper, and locked up with trembling fingers.

Eve was standing there watching her, an unreadable expression on her face. She was still shaking. “It’s a death sentence, isn’t it?” she said. “Don’t lie, Claire. You’re not good at it.”

Claire didn’t even try. She held up the knife. “On the plus side,” she said, “they left us another weapon. And it’s sharp.”

Truthfully, that was cold comfort indeed. And in the end, after Michael and Shane came back in without Pennyfeather, who’d managed to run for his life despite taking a pretty good battering from both of them, nobody much felt like celebrating.

Or sleeping.

Morning brought light and warmth, but not much in the way of reassurance; the cops came and took statements, looked over the damage to the house, and photographed the slashes on Eve’s arms (which, upon inspection at the hospital, fortunately turned out not to be as deep as they’d looked).

The police declined to include the destruction of her vintage robe as a separate charge of vandalism. They also played dumb about who Pennyfeather was, or even that vampires existed at all, even though both men were plainly wearing Protection bracelets in full view. Typical. Once upon a time, Claire could have called on some Morganville police detectives who had reputations for impartiality…but they were all gone now. Richard Morrell had been police chief before he’d been mayor, and he’d been fair about it; Hannah had been great in the same role, but now Richard was dead, and Hannah was helpless to act.

Done by Order of the Founder
. That said…everything, really. It meant that whatever tenuous claim the four of them had to safety in Morganville was officially cancelled.

Claire stayed with Eve as long as she could, but classes were calling, and so was her in-jeopardy grade point average; she grabbed her book bag, kissed Shane quickly, and dashed off at a jog to Texas Prairie University. Nothing was going to happen
during the day, at least from the vamp quarter. Morning was well advanced over the horizon, and she had to skip her normal stop for coffee and flat-out race the last few hundred yards to make it into the science building, up the stairs, and down the long, featureless hall to her small-group advanced study class. Today was thermodynamics, a subject she normally loved, but she wasn’t in the mood for theory today.

It was more of an applied sciences day—such as the amount of fuel required to burn down a house. Claire slipped into her classroom seat, earning a dirty look from Professor Carlyle, who didn’t pause in his opening remarks.

Pennyfeather had been the one who’d attacked them, but that didn’t mean he’d been acting alone; he
could
have thrown the Molotov cocktails at the front of the house and then jumped up on the roof to wait for them to exit the back, but somehow, Claire thought there was more to it. Someone in the front, and Pennyfeather waiting for Eve, specifically. And while it was a little bit of a relief not to be the main target, it was unsettling. Eve wasn’t helpless, but somehow she was more vulnerable. Maybe it was just that Claire wanted desperately for Michael and Eve to somehow work out, and for the town to stop hating them, and…

“Danvers?”

She looked up from consideration of her closed textbook; she didn’t even remember getting it out of her bag. She’d lost track of time, she guessed, and now Professor Carlyle—a severe older man with a close-cropped brush of gray hair and eyes the color of steel—was staring at her with a displeased expression, clearly waiting for something.

“Sorry?” she said blankly.

“Please provide the equation for the subject on the board.”

She focused behind him. On the chalkboard, he’d written
Harmonic Oscillator Partition Function
.

“On the board?”

“Unless you’d like to perform it in interpretive dance.”

There was a stir of laughter and smirking from the ten other students, most of whom were master’s candidates; they were at least five years older than she was, every one of them, and she wasn’t popular.

Even here, nobody liked a smart-ass.

Claire reluctantly rose from her desk, went to the chalkboard, and wrote
zHO = 1/(1-e-a/T
).

“Where?” he asked, without a trace of satisfaction.

Claire dutifully wrote down
where a=hv/k.

Carlyle stared at her in silence for a moment, then nodded. Apparently, that was supposed to make her feel insecure. It didn’t. She knew she was right; she knew he’d have to accept it, and she waited for that to happen. Once he’d given her the signal, she put down the chalk and walked back to her desk.

But Carlyle wasn’t done with her quite yet. “Since you did so well with that, Danvers, why don’t you predict the following for me?” And he scribbled on the board another equation:
K
_p
=P
_b
/P
_a
-[B]/[A]
. “What happens if T is infinitely large?” T was completely missing from that equation, but it didn’t really matter. T was an implied variable, but that was misleading. It was a trick question, and Claire saw many of the others open their books and begin flipping, but she didn’t bother. She met Carlyle’s eyes and said, “K
_p
equals two.”

“Your reasoning?”

“If T is infinitely large, all the states of energy are equal and occupied. So there are twice as many states in B as A. K
_p
equals two. It’s not really a calculation. It’s just a logic exercise.”

She was taking advanced thermodynamics purely to help her understand some of what Myrnin had accomplished in building his portal systems in Morganville…. They were doorways that warped space, and she knew there had to be
some
explanation for it in physics, but so far, she’d found only pieces here and there. Thermodynamics was a necessary component, because the energy produced in the transfer had to go somewhere. She just hadn’t figured out where.

Carlyle raised his eyebrows and smiled at her thinly. “Someone ate her breakfast this morning,” he said, and turned his laser focus on another hapless student. “Gregory. Explain to me the calculation if T equals zero.”

“Uh—” Gregory was a page flipper, and Carlyle waited patiently while he looked for the answer. It was blindingly obvious, but Claire bit her tongue.

It took Gregory an excruciating four minutes to admit defeat. Carlyle went through three other students, then finally, and with a sigh, turned back to Claire. “Go ahead,” he said, clearly irritated now.

“If there isn’t any T, there isn’t any B,” she said. “So it has to be zero.”

“Thank you.” Carlyle glared at the others in the class. “I weep for the state of engineering, I truly do, if this is the best you can do with something so obvious. Danvers gets bonus credit. Gregory, Shandall, Schaefer, Reed, you all get failing pop quiz scores. If you’d like to solve extra-credit equations, see me afterward. Now. Chapter six, the residual entropy of imperfect crystals…”

It was a grim thing, Claire thought, that even when she got the high grade
and
dirty looks from her fellow students, she still felt bored and underchallenged. She wished she could go talk to Myrnin for a while. Myrnin was always unpredictable, and that
was exciting. Granted, sometimes the problem was to just stay alive, but still; he was never boring. She also didn’t have to sit through the incredibly dense (and wrong) explanations from other students when she was at his lab. If he’d ever had assistants that dumb, he’d have eaten them.

Somehow, she made it through the hour, and the next, and the next, and then it was time to run to the University Center and grab a Coke and a sandwich. It wasn’t Eve’s day to work the counter at the coffee shop, so after gulping down lunch, Claire—done at school for the day—walked to Common Grounds, just to check in on her.

It was only lightly occupied just now, thanks to the vagaries of college schedules; there were a few Morganville residents in the house, and a group of ten students very seriously arguing the merits of James Joyce. Claire claimed a comfortably battered armchair and dumped her bag in it; the chair and everything else smelled like warm espresso, with a hint of cinnamon. Common Grounds, for all its flaws, still had a homey, welcoming atmosphere.

But when she turned to the counter, she saw a sullen young man in a tie-dyed apron and red-dyed emo hair, who glared at her as she approached. He yawned.

“Hi,” she said. “Um, where’s Eve?”

“Fired,” he said, and yawned again. “They called me in to take her shift. Man, I’m fried. Forty-eight hours without sleep—thank God for coffee. What’s your poison?”

At Common Grounds, that
might
be literal, Claire thought. “Bottled water,” she said, and forked over too much cash for it. Nobody drank Morganville’s tap water. Not after the draug invasion. Sure, they’d cleared the pipes and everything, but Claire—like most of the residents—couldn’t shake the idea that something had once been alive in there.

Better to pay a ridiculous amount for water bottled out of Midland.

“So, what happened this morning to get her fired? Because I know she was planning to come in.”

Counter Guy wasn’t chatty enough to come up with an answer; he just shrugged and grunted as he rang up her purchase and handed over the cold bottle. He had tattoos running up and down his arms, mostly Chinese symbols. Claire considered asking him what they meant, but in her experience he probably didn’t have a clue. He did have one thing in common with Eve: black-painted fingernails.

“Is Oliver here?”

“Office,” Counter Guy said. “But I wouldn’t if I was you. Boss ain’t in a good mood.”

He was probably right, Claire thought, but she knocked anyway, and received a curt, “In,” a command she followed. She shut the door behind her. Counter Guy and the other residents out there wouldn’t come to her rescue if things went badly, and she didn’t want the clueless students involved. They were having enough trouble with James Joyce.