Bitter Blood (3 page)

“Claire?”

Myrnin’s voice came from
right behind her
, way too close. She whirled, and her finger accidentally hit the switch on top as she fumbled her hold on the machine, and suddenly there was a live trial in action…on him.

She saw it work.

Myrnin’s eyes widened, turned very dark, and then began to shimmer with liquid hints of red. He took a step back from her. A large one. “Oh,” he said. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”

She shut it off, fast, because she wasn’t sure what exactly had just happened.
Something,
for sure, but as live trials went, it was…inconclusive. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, and put the device down with a
clunk
on the marble top of the lab table. “I didn’t mean to do that. Um…what did you feel?”

“More of what I already felt,” he said, which was uninformative. He took another step backward, and the red didn’t seem to be fading from his eyes. “I was going to ask you if you’d send over some type AB from the blood bank; I seem to be running low. And also, I wanted to ask if you’d seen my bag of gummi worms.”

“You’re hungry,” Claire guessed. He nodded cautiously. “And it…made it
stronger
?”

“In a way,” he said. Not helpful. “Never mind the delivery from the blood bank. I believe I shall…take a walk. Good night, Claire.”

He was being awfully polite, she thought; with him, that was
usually a cover for severe internal issues. Before she could try to figure out exactly what was going on in his head, though, he’d headed at vampire-speed for the stairs and was gone.

She shook her head and looked at the switched-off device in irritation. “Well, that was helpful,” she told it, and then rolled her eyes. “And now I’m talking to equipment, like him. Great.”

Claire threw a sheet over the machine, made notes in the logbook, turned off the lab’s lights, and headed home.

Arriving home—on Lot Street—didn’t do much for her mood, either, because as she stomped past the rusty, leaning mailbox on the outside of the picket fence, she saw that the door was open and mail was sticking out. It threatened to blow away in the ever-present desert wind. Perfect. She had three housemates, and all of them had somehow failed to pick up the mail. And that was not her job. At least today.

She glared up at the big, faded Victorian house, and wondered when Shane was going to get around to painting it as he’d promised he would. Never, most likely. Just like the mail.

Claire readjusted her heavy backpack on one shoulder, an automatic, thoughtless shift of weight, snatched the wadded-up paper out of the box, and flipped through the thick handfuls. Water bill (apparently, saving the town from water-dwelling draug monsters hadn’t given them any utility credits), electric bill (high, again), flyers from the new pizza delivery place (whose pizza tasted like dog food on tomato sauce), and…four envelopes, embossed with the Founder’s official seal.

She headed for the house. And then the day took one step further to the dark side, because pinned to the front door with a cheap pot-metal dagger was a hand-drawn note with four tombstones on
it. Each headstone had one of their names. And below, it said,
Vampire lovers get what they deserve.

Charming. It would have scared her except that it wasn’t the first she’d seen over the past few weeks; there had been four other notes, one slipped under the door, two pinned on it (like this one), and one slipped into the mailbox. That, and a steady and growing number of rude storekeepers, deliberate insults from people on the street, and doors slammed in her face.

It was no longer popular being the friend of the only mixed-marriage vampire/human couple in Morganville.

Claire ripped the note off, shook her head over the cheap dagger, which would snap in a fight, and unlocked the front door. She hip-bumped it open, closed it, and locked it again—automatic caution, in Morganville. “Hey!” she yelled without looking up. “Who was supposed to get the mail?”

“Eve!” Shane yelled from down the hall, in the direction of the living room, at the same time that Eve shouted, “Michael!” from upstairs. Michael said nothing, probably because he wasn’t home yet.

“We
really
need to talk about schedules! Again!” Claire called back. She briefly considered showing them the flyer, but then she balled it up and threw it, and the dagger, in the trash, along with the assorted junk mail offering discount crap and high-interest credit cards.

It’s just talk,
she told herself. It wasn’t, but she thought that eventually, everyone—human and vampire—would just get their collective panties unbunched about Michael and Eve’s getting married. It was nobody’s business but their own, after all.

She focused instead on the four identical envelopes.

They were made of fancy, heavy paper that smelled musty and old, as if it had been stored somewhere for a hundred years and someone was just getting around to opening the box. The seal on
the back of each was wax, deep crimson, and embossed with the Founder’s symbol. Each of their names was written on the outside in flowing, elegant script, so even and perfect, it looked like computer printing until she looked closely and found the human imperfections.

Her instincts were tingling danger, but she tried to think positively.
C’mon, this could be a good thing,
she told herself.
Maybe it’s just a thank-you card from Amelie for saving Morganville. Again. We deserve that.

Sounded good, but Amelie, the Founder of Morganville, was a very old vampire, and vamps weren’t in the business of thanking people. Amelie had grown up royalty, and having people do crazy, dangerous (and possibly fatal) things on her slightest whim was just…normal. It probably didn’t even call for a smile, much less a note of gratitude. And, to be honest, Claire’s once almost-friendly status with the Founder had gotten a bit…strained.

Morganville, Texas, was just about the last gathering place for vampires in the world; it was the spot that they’d chosen to make their last stand, to forget their old grudges, to band tightly together against common threats and enemies. When Claire had first arrived, the vampires had been battling illness; then they’d been after one another. And four months ago, they’d been fighting the draug, water creatures that preyed on vampires like delicious, tasty snacks…and the vampires had finally won.

That left them the undisputed champions of the world’s food chain. In saving Morganville, Claire hadn’t really stopped to consider what might happen when the vamps no longer had something to fear. Now she knew.

They didn’t exactly feel grateful.

Oh, on the surface, Morganville was all good, or at least getting better…. The vamps had been fast on the trigger to start repairing the town, cleaning up after the demise of the draug, and getting all
of their human population settled again in their homes, businesses, and schools. The official PR line had been that a dangerous chemical spill had forced evacuations, and that seemed to have satisfied everybody (along with generous cash payments, and automatic good grades to all of the students at Texas Prairie University who’d had their semesters cut short). Claire also suspected that the vampires had applied some psychic persuasion, where necessary—there were a few of them capable of doing that. On the surface, it looked like Morganville was not only recovering, but thriving.

But it didn’t feel right. On the few occasions that she’d seen Amelie, the Founder hadn’t seemed right, either. Her body language, her smile, the way she looked at people…all were different. And darker.

“Hey,” her housemate Eve Rosser—
no
, it was Eve
Glass
now, after the wedding—said. “You going to open those or what?” She walked up beside Claire, set a glass down on the kitchen counter, and poured herself a tall glass of milk. Her ruby wedding ring winked at Claire as if inviting her to share a secret joke. “Because the last time I saw something looking that official, it was inviting me to a party. And you know how much I love those.”

“You almost got killed at that party,” Claire said absently. She passed over Eve’s envelope and picked up her own.

“I almost get killed at most parties. Hence, you can tell that’s how much I love them,” Eve said, and ripped open the paper in a wide, tearing swath. Claire—who was by nature more of a neat gently-slice-the-thing-open kind of person—winced. “Huh. Another envelope inside the envelope. They do love to waste paper. Haven’t they ever heard of tree-hugging?”

As Eve extracted the second layer, Claire had a chance to do the usual wardrobe scan of her best friend…and wasn’t disappointed. Eve had suddenly taken a liking to aqua blue, and she’d
added streaks of it in her black hair, which was worn today in cute, shiny ponytails on the sides of her head. Her Goth white face was brightened by aqua eye shadow and—where did she find this stuff?—matching lipstick, and she had on a tight black shirt with embossed crosses. The short, poufy skirt continued the blue theme. Then black tights with blue hearts. Then, combat boots.

So, a typical Wednesday, really.

Eve pulled the inner envelope free, opened the flap, and extracted a folded sheet of thick paper. Something fell out to bounce on the counter, and Claire caught it.

It was a card. A plastic card, like a credit card, but this one had the Founder’s symbol screened on the back, and it had Eve’s picture in the upper right corner—taken when she’d been without the full Goth war paint, which Eve would despise. It had Eve’s name, address, phone number…and a box at the bottom that read
Blood Type: O Neg
. Across from it was a box saying
Protector: Glass, Michael
.

“What the…?”
Oh,
Claire thought, even before she’d finished the question. This must have been what the vampire cop was asking her for. The identification card.

Eve plucked the card from her fingers, stared at it with a completely blank expression, and then turned her attention to the letter that had come with it. “‘Dear Mrs. Michael Glass,’” she read. “
Seriously?
Mrs. Michael? Like I don’t even have a name of my own? And what the hell is this about his being my Protector? I never agreed to that!”

“And?” Claire reached for the letter, but Eve hip-checked her and continued reading.

“‘I have enclosed your new Morganville Resident Identification Card, which all human residents are now required to carry at all times so that, in the unlikely case of any emergency, we may
quickly contact your loved ones and Protector, and provide necessary medical information.’” Eve looked up and met Claire’s eyes squarely. “I call bullshit.
Human
residents. With blood type listed? It’s like a shopping list for vamps.”

Claire nodded. “What else?”

Eve turned her attention back to the paper. “‘Failure to carry and provide this card upon request will result in fines of—’ Oh, screw this!” Eve wadded up the paper, dropped it on the floor, and stomped on it with her boots, which were certainly made for stomping. “I am
not
carrying around a Drink Me card, and they
can’t
ask for my papers. What is this, Naziland?” She picked up the card and tried to bend it in half, but it was too flexible. “Where did you put the scissors…?”

Claire rescued the card and looked at it again. She turned it over, held it under the strongest light available—the window—and frowned. “Better not,” she said. “I think this is chipped.”

“Chipped? Can I eat it?”

“Microchipped. It’s got some kind of tech in it, anyway. I’d have to take a look to see what kind, but it’s pretty safe to say they’d know if you went all paper dolls with it.”

“Oh great, so it’s not just a Drink Me card; it’s a tracking device, like those ear things they put on lions on Animal Planet? Yeah, there’s no way that can go wrong—like, say, vampires being issued receivers so they can just shop online for who they want to target tonight.”

Eve was right about that, Claire thought. She
really
didn’t feel good about this. On the surface, it was just an ID card, perfectly normal—she already carried a student ID and a driver’s license—but it
felt
like something else. Something more sinister.

Eve stopped rummaging in drawers and just stared at her. “Hey. We
each
got one. Four envelopes.”

“I thought they were only for human residents,” Claire said. “So what’s in Michael’s?” Because Michael Glass was definitely
not
human these days. He’d been bitten well before Claire had met him, but the full-on vampire thing had been slow-building; she saw it more and more now, but deep down she thought he was still the same strong, sweet, no-nonsense guy she’d met when she’d first arrived on the Glass House doorstep. He was definitely still strong. It was the sweetness that was in some danger of fading away, over time.

Before Claire could warn Eve that maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea, Eve shredded open Michael’s envelope, too, yanked out the inner one, and pulled out his letter. Another card fell out. This one was gold. Shiny, shiny gold. It didn’t have any info on it at all. Just a gold card, with the Founder’s symbol embossed on it.

Eve went for the letter. “‘Dear Michael,’” she said. “Oh, sure, he gets
Michael
, not
Mr. Glass
…. ‘Dear Michael, I have enclosed your card of privilege, as has been discussed in our community meetings.’” She stopped again, reread that silently, and looked down at the card she was holding in her fingers. “
Card of privilege?
He doesn’t get the same treatment we do.”

“Community meetings,” Claire said. “Which we weren’t invited to, right? And what kind of privileges, exactly?”

“You’d better believe it’s a whole lot better than a free mocha at Common Grounds,” Eve said grimly. She kept reading, silently, then handed the paper stiff-armed to Claire, not saying another word.

Claire took it, feeling a bit ill now. It read: