Morganville - 10 - Bite Club (4 page)

Hug her. Make her feel safe again, just for a little while. Because that was what parents did, or at least what they were supposed to do. Eve hadn't had that privilege, because her home life had been crap, and neither had Shane, who'd had the worst dad in the world. But Claire's family had been great, and she hadn't even known how much she missed it until...well, now.

While they waited for the sirens to arrive, Claire pulled out her phone and dialed her dad's cell phone number. He answered on the third ring.

"Hey, sweetheart," he said. He sounded better than he had before, almost normal.

Strong. Considering that he'd left Morganville in an ambulance and had almost died -- not from the vampires, but from his own bad heart -- it was so good to hear him be more like himself. The connection crackled and hissed. "Sorry for the noise.

I'm out walking. It's getting windy."

"Here, too. Looks like it might rain."

"We had some rain earlier this morning. Cooled things down quite a bit. How are you, Claire?"

"Good," Claire said, and swallowed. "I...just wanted to see how you were doing, Dad."

"Doing great. They've got me walking a lot, trying to build up the old cardiovascular health again. I have to say, I'm glad I finally got that surgery. I didn't realize how bad I'd been feeling until I felt better." He paused, and, with that Dad radar she'd always both loved and dreaded, said, "You didn't just call to say hello, honey. What's wrong?"

"Nothing." The concern in his voice turned her all trembly again, and made her want to cry, but she couldn't do that. Wouldn't. "It's pretty much the same here; you know how it is. How's Mom?"

"She's joined some kind of scrapbooking club. I never knew you could spend so much time and money on sticking photos in albums, but that's your mom. Once she gets excited about something..."

"I know, she's a madwoman," Claire finished, and smiled a little. She could just see her mother coming home with bags and bags of stuff to hot-glue into memories.

"How's the new house?"

"Embarrassingly large. With a yard, too. I may have to learn how to garden."

"Grow me something. Irises. I like irises."

"Purple ones, right?"

"Yeah, purple's good."

"Honey, are you sure you're all right? You sound odd."

"Just...allergies," she said, and wiped her leaking eyes. "You take care, Daddy. I'll see you soon, okay?"

"Okay," he said, doubtfully. "Call tomorrow. Your mother will hate me if she doesn't get her turn."

"I will. Bye."

Eve had turned away, watching the dorm, but she'd been paying attention. As Claire finished her call, she said, "Feel better?"

"Yeah," Claire said. She did. Still shaky, but steadier inside, where it counted.

"I wish I could do that," Eve said. "Call my mom. But no. Whiny, self-absorbed bitching from her probably wouldn't have the same effect, although it definitely would make me forget about Doug for a second."

Michael held out his hand, and Eve took it, and their eyes met for a second before Eve looked away.

"Yeah," she said. "Life sucks, we die, or not. Mom is the least of my problems, right?"

"Right at the moment? Yeah," Michael said. "And now I want to call my parents."

Claire thought he might be joking, but with Michael, you never could tell. His parents were cool; she'd met them once, but they didn't live in Morganville anymore, and they weren't even nearby. Like Claire's parents, they'd been given permission to move because of medical problems. Michael didn't say much about them, but then, Michael was the quiet type.

In any case, he didn't have time to do anything, because a police car, siren blasting and lights flaring, pulled up in front of the dorm in the parking lot, where a crowd of students was gathering. Almost all the students promptly pulled their cell phones out and began busily clicking pictures and taking videos of the police presence. Next stop: the Internet. "Worst inventionever," Claire muttered. Myrnin was already talking about how to disable the features on all cell phones inside of Morganville. At times such as this, she kind of saw his point.

Hannah Moses was second to arrive on the scene, looking crisp and starched in her police uniform; she'd tucked her corn-rowed hair up under her cap, and apart from the gold bar on the lapel of her blue shirt, she looked exactly like the other police, who got busy cordoning off the scene. Two other men got out of a plain gray car that pulled up behind hers. Claire recognized the men with a little start, because she hadn't seen them in a while.

"Hey," said Detective Travis Lowe, nodding to her. He'd lost weight, she thought, and he looked a little bit grayer than before. Detective Joe Hess hadn't changed at all, except that his smile was more guarded as he nodded, too. "I heard you found yourself a genuine dead person."

"Travis," Hannah said, frowning at him. "Go easy on the kid."

"Her? Listen, I know her. She's tough. She can take it. Right, Claire?"

She nodded, because what else did you do when someone said something like that?

But she didn't feel tough. Not right at this moment. As if he sensed that, Detective Hess cut in front of his partner and came to talk to her. He had a soothing sort of manner, and the gentle tone of voice he used made her feel a little less...lost.

"Someone you knew, right?" Hess said. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"I -- " Claire suddenly realized that she had a decision to make: tell about the whole reason she and Eve and Michael had come over, or lie and pretend like it was just another of those wacky Morganville coincidences. She didn't feel like lying, though.

Not to Detective Hess. "It's Doug -- Doug Legrande. He was my lab partner in Professor Larkin's class. He took something he shouldn't have, and I came to ask him to give it back."

Detective Hess was a hell of a lot sharper than most people in Morganville, and he gave her a sideways look as he said very casually, "Would that thing be something that some people in town wouldn't want to get out?"

"Blood," she said, keeping her voice in a whisper. "You know what kind of blood."

"I do. So, tell me what happened when you got here." And he slowly walked her through it, step by step, from the beginning. He'd also walked her off a little from her friends, and Claire saw that Detective Lowe was talking to Eve, while Michael had Hannah as a conversational partner. Double-checking facts, Claire guessed. The low-key way it was done made her feel a lot less nervous. By the time she was finished, Detective Lowe had finished up with Eve and was sitting on the back bumper of the gray car, making notes with a pad and pen as he talked to Chief Moses. Hannah had notes, too.

"Did we do anything wrong?" Claire finally asked, as Hess jotted down something, as well. "I mean, we tried to do the right thing. For Doug."

"You probably would have been better off reporting it immediately," Hess said. That was one thing she liked a lot about him: he was kind about it, but he told her the truth, no matter how difficult it was to hear it. "I can't say this wouldn't have still happened, because we can't jump to the conclusion that his theft had anything to do with his murder, but you need to understand that if it did, Doug didn't have to die. He might have been in jail, but he would have been safer. Understand?"

She did, and she felt miserable...but, oddly, also more centered. It was what she'd been thinking, anyway. Hearing him say it didn't make her feel any worse; it made it real enough that she could move on, accept it as a mistake, and plan to never let it happen again.

"I'm sorry," she said. She wasn't sure if Hess understood, but she thought he probably did.

"You're learning," he said. "Sometimes those lessons come harder than others. I'm glad you're all right."

"Thank you." She cleared her throat. "Um, how have you been? I haven't seen you since, you know..."

She didn't know how to put it. They all avoided talking about Mr. Bishop, definitely the coldest vampire she'd ever met; he'd been cruel, calculating, and way too powerful. The fact that they'd survived his attempt to take over Morganville had been amazing...but nobody wanted to risk going through that again.

"Yeah, since that," Hess said. "We've been working. Travis took a vacation for six months, out of town. Other than that, the usual. This is the first outright murder we've had in a while, though."

He didn't sound either bothered or excited about it. Just businesslike. Claire didn't know what to say to that, but it didn't seem to matter. He walked her back over to the police cars and went to consult with Hannah and his partner.

"You take me the most interesting places," Eve was saying to Michael when she rejoined them. "Murder scenes, interrogations..."

He hugged her silently. Overhead, thunder boomed and the first drops of rain began to fall.

A police officer brought them a collapsible umbrella from his squad car, and the three of them stood in its shelter as the rain poured down and the police started their investigation. By the time it let up, Hannah said they could leave.

Claire said good-bye to her friends, picked up her backpack from the coffee shop, and then went straight to Myrnin.

"It's possible," Myrnin was muttering to himself as he paced the floor of the lab.

"Entirely possible. Likely, even."

Claire, coming down the steps from the entrance, dumped her book bag at the usual strategic location -- meaning it was equally accessible whether she needed to defend herself or make a quick exit.

She was used to coming into the middle of Myrnin's conversations with himself.

"What's possible?" she asked.

"Anything," he said absently. "But that's not what I was talking about. Oh, hello, Claire. You're in good time. I need an extra pair of hands."

"As long as I keep them attached," she said, which earned her a startled stare.

"The things you say to me, you'd think I was some sort of monster. Oh, here, help me with this." He gestured to one of the lab tables, which held some gleaming new device with brass fittings and -- as always with Myrnin -- pipes, wires, and some kind of strange-looking vacuum tubes. "I need it over there." He pointed to an empty table across the room. And then he kept on pacing, his white lab coat (a recent discovery of his; he thought it made him look more official) flaring around him. It was somewhat spoiled by the flopping bunny slippers, their fangs showing with every step.

Oh. He wasn't going to help her move it. Well, of course he wasn't. Myrnin could have picked it up with one hand and carried it easily from one spot to another, but he was busy thinking. Carrying things was her job. Today, anyway.

Claire picked up the engine -- if that was what it was -- and staggered with it over to the other table. It felt as if he'd packed it with lead, and knowing Myrnin, that wasn't much of a stretch. It smelled like blood and flowers, and she hesitated to even guess what its purpose might have been.

"What's possible?" she asked again, leaning against the table and trying to work the kinks out of her arms after stretching them about six inches with the weight of that stupid thing , whatever it was.

Myrnin was muttering under his breath, but he paused and glanced at her, even though he kept pacing.

"That your friend was murdered by someone who believed he had a drug. Perhaps he was trying to sell the blood."

"How did you hear about that already?" She was surprised, because she'd meant to tell him all about it.

Myrnin waved that away.

"Interesting news travels quickly in a town as boring as this," he said. "Also, I tend to monitor police broadcasts. Your name was mentioned in connection with the investigation. I made a few calls to find out the rest. So, do you think he was trying to develop some sort of drug?"

"Myrnin, Doug was stinky, but he wasn't crazy. There may be people in Morganville who will just take any old thing to see if it gets them high, but he just saw that bloodboil under the lights. He wasn't not going to try to sell it as a drug."

"You'd be very surprised what people get up to. But, in any case, it's possible someone else understood the potential of it, and Doug was simply collateral damage."

Myrnin sighed. "I understand it was quite bloody. What a terrible waste."

He didn't mean of Doug, of course. He didn't know Doug, and Claire doubted he would have really cared. No, Myrnin was talking about the waste of plasma. Which made Claire shiver, and reminded her again that no matter how cute and cuddly Myrnin could sometimes be, there was something about him that just...wasn't quite right.

Not for a human, anyway.

"Frank!" Myrnin yelled, making her jump. "Do you have any insights to share? At all?"

Frank Collins's voice came out of every speaker in the room -- the old radio set in the corner, the newer TV mounted on the wall, the computer on the antique desk, and Claire's own cell phone in her pocket.

"You don't have to yell. Believe me, I can hear you. Wish to hell I could shut you off."

"Well, you can't, and I need your particular expertise," Myrnin said. He sounded smug and a little bit vindictive; Myrnin didn't like Frank, Frank didn't like anybody who drank plasma, and the whole thing was just plain weird.

Because Frank Collins, Shane's dad, had once been a badass vampire-hunting criminal, and then Mr.Bishop had made him a self-loathing vampire, and now he was...dead. She was listening to a dead man speaking over the radio.

Well, not dead , exactly. After Frank had died saving Claire and Shane, Myrnin had scooped out his still-sort-of-living brain, stuck it in a plasma bath, and hooked it up to a computer. Frank Collins was now the brain that ran Morganville, and, thankfully, Shane didn't know.

Claire could honestly not imagine how that conversation was going to go when he found out. It made her ill to even try to imagine it.

"This would go easier if you'd show your face," Myrnin said. "Please. You may be assured that by please, I mean do it, or I'll put an injection of something nasty in your plasma."

"Myrnin!" Claire blurted, wide-eyed. He shrugged.

"You have no idea how difficult he's been lately. I thought Ada was a problem, but she was positively the model of decorum next to this one," he said. "Well? I'm waiting, Frank."