Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

Claire had rarely felt so alone. She’d thought coming across the country to MIT was a new start; she’d thought she was here to learn, to grow, to change. But instead, it had been a scam from the start. Anderson had never intended to teach her a thing. She’d just wanted VLAD, and Claire was the means to the end.

Speaking of VLAD, Dr Anderson had been hard at work on it, apparently, and she’d taken it from concept to harsh execution while Claire had been thinking they were going back to basics. All that she’d been doing, she understood now, had just been busy work, so Dr Anderson could perfect what she’d already done.

And test it.

‘Can I see it?’ Claire asked Dr Anderson, who was still holding VLAD; she’d added a much-needed support strap to it, but it was probably starting to feel really, really heavy. ‘I just want to understand what you did. I was thinking of adding a modulator to it, but—’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Anderson said. She adjusted the heavy weight a little, which meant that she was starting to feel the strain, just as Claire had hoped. ‘And we’re not going to talk about the tech.’

‘But I – I thought you wanted me to help you—’

Anderson gave her a brief, cool, impersonal smile. ‘Don’t try it. You may have given Myrnin up, but that doesn’t mean I trust you with the toys yet, Claire. That, you have to earn. I believe you as far as I can throw your boyfriend right now. And he’s a pretty solid-looking guy.’

She looked tired, Claire thought, and a bit shaky herself. She was watching Professor Davis, who was trying to get some kind of blood sample from Myrnin; he was having a time of it, not because Myrnin was fighting him, but because he couldn’t hold still. Finally, it took three armed men to pin Myrnin down flat, and he made a sound halfway between a wail and a sob that tore Claire right down to her soul. I did this. I did all of this .

She swallowed hard. ‘So what now?’ she asked. Her voice had gone harder, and she couldn’t seem to soften it. ‘You’ve got Myrnin, and Oliver, and Jesse, and Michael. You’ve got Shane and Eve. What else do you want?’

‘I want data,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘You’re a scientist, Claire. You realise what a rare opportunity this is, I hope – we have vampires who can be tested in lab conditions. We can break down the biology, which is something Dr Davis has been looking into for some time. We can win .’

‘I didn’t know we were at war.’

‘Of course we’re at war. And we were winning for a while; the vampires were sick when I left Morganville, and getting sicker. If you’d left it alone and let nature take its course, it would have been over by now.’

‘Did you make them sick?’ Claire asked, horrified. Myrnin had never completely believed the idea that Amelie’s vampire father Bishop had developed and spread that disease. Had it happened right in front of him?

But Dr Anderson was shaking her head. ‘No. I can’t claim credit for that. I just made sure that the research went nowhere on how to fight the illness. Seemed like for once, nature was favouring humans instead of vampires.’

Claire shivered. She’d thought she understood Dr Anderson; she’d thought they were alike. But they weren’t, deep down. They’d both survived Morganville, but they’d come out of it completely differently.

‘If you didn’t think we were at war,’ Anderson said, ‘then why did you make this?’ She patted VLAD’s metal frame.

‘I just wanted – I wanted a way for us to stop them if it came to a fight. That’s all. It’s supposed to be for defence.’

‘Well, you know what they say: the best defence is a good offence. We’ve been working on enhanced anti-vampire weaponry for some time. Including biological weapons.’

‘Dr Davis was running experiments,’ Claire said. ‘That bat-thing that killed Derrick. That was his?’

‘Yes,’ Anderson said. She was watching Myrnin, but not with any compassion or regret. It was all clinical, the look in her eyes. Clinical and bitterly cold. ‘He’d made considerable progress, but our samples were degraded. We’d had to rely on what I brought with me out of Morganville, and it wasn’t much. I was working on getting Jesse to cooperate with me, but for all her friendly ways, she’s smarter than that. Too bad. If she’d just done it peacefully, I wouldn’t have had to take the steps I did.’

‘Is Jesse—?’

‘Alive? Yes. Happy?’ Anderson shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to do it. But she pushed me into it. I’ve got a monitor on her. So far, the effects haven’t worn off. I’m starting to wonder if the beam does permanent neural damage.’

‘Permanent? What did you do to VLAD? It was never supposed to be that powerful—’

‘I made it work,’ Anderson snapped. ‘Your job now, if you want to stay on the right side of the fight, is to take the model that Dr Davis was using and make it work as well. I didn’t have time to complete it before this crisis erupted. Myrnin’s arrival pushed us into an accelerated timeline. I think we’ve gotten the situation contained, but if any communications made it back to Amelie, we may have a fight on our hands, and I need at least one more working device to be safe. So, you do that, and I’ll make sure your boyfriend and your other friends get out of this in one piece. Clear?’

‘Clear,’ Claire said. ‘Dr Davis’s gun didn’t work? That was a bluff?’

Dr Anderson shrugged. ‘I thought you’d recognise it, and it would slow you down so I could use the one that did.’

It was good strategy. Shane would have approved.

‘We’re ready here,’ said Dr Davis. His goons were strapping Myrnin into some kind of harness. Oliver had been taken out already, locked in a similar straitjacket. ‘Back to the farm?’

‘As quickly as possible,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘Nobody’s scheduled to come into this building until ten, but an early arrival could compromise everything. Let’s move out. We won’t be coming back here.’

The farm? Claire didn’t know if that was some kind of shorthand code, but it didn’t sound like the MIT lab, anyway. She went along with them quietly, and ended up sitting next to Myrnin. He was wrapped up like a mummy in the thick canvas jacket, and his head lolled forward so his dark hair cascaded down in waves to veil his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She could feel the animal shuddering of his body, wave after wave of what was either pain, or terror, or both. ‘I never meant for this to happen, Myrnin, I swear. I just – I just didn’t see it.’

He turned his head toward her. She saw a red flash from his eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, and felt a brief pulse of something from him – hunger, anger, blind rage. Then he sighed, slipped to one side, and rested against the metal wall of the van. Chains clinked as he shifted. They hadn’t taken any chances, she saw; the chains were coated with silver, and so were the manacles around his wrists and ankles. It was burning him.

Oliver, across from her, was in a similar state, but he wasn’t trembling quite so badly. Maybe he’d just had more practice at handling fear and pain, or maybe he hadn’t gotten quite so bad a dose of VLAD’s medicine. But he didn’t look by any stretch good, either.

Last of all, they loaded Jesse.

She looked awful. Her red hair was tangled into a dry net; her lips were dry and pale and crusted, and her eyes were glowing a pained, painful red. She looked alien and strange and pitiful, all at once, and she, too, was wearing the padded jacket and chains, and they locked her down next to Oliver. She didn’t seem to see Claire, or if she did, to comprehend any of what was going on. And she looked dangerous .