Rachel Caine: Lord of Misrule

She couldn’t take the risk. And besides, having him wake up wounded and crazy would be even worse, now that they didn’t have any vampires who could help control him.

Hannah returned to her side. “So,” she said, as she checked the clip on her paintball gun, frowned, and exchanged it for a new one, “how do we do this? We got to go back to that museum first, right?”

Did they? Claire wasn’t sure. She stepped up to the door, which currently featured nothing but darkness, and concentrated hard on Myrnin’s lab, with all its clutter and debris. Light swam, flickered, shivered, and snapped into focus.

No problem at all.

“Guess it’s only roundabout getting here,” Claire said. “Maybe that’s on purpose, to keep people out who shouldn’t be here. But it makes sense that once Amelie got here, she’d want to take the express out.” She turned back. “Shouldn’t we wait?”

Hannah opened the door and looked out into the hall. Whatever she saw, it couldn’t have been good news. She shook her head. “We bug out, right now.”

With a grunt of effort, Hannah braced Myrnin’s deadweight on one side and dragged him forward. Claire took his other arm.

“Did he just twitch?” Hannah asked. “ ’Cause if he twitches, I’m going to shoot him.”

“No! No, he didn’t; he’s fine,” Claire said, practically tripping over the words. “Ready? One, two . . .”

And three , they were in Myrnin’s lab. Claire twisted out from under Myrnin’s cold body, slammed the door shut, and stared wildly at the broken lock. “I need to fix that,” she said. But what about Amelie? No, she’d know all the exits. She didn’t have to come here.

“Girl, you need to get us the hell out of here, is what you need to do,” Hannah said. “You dial up the nearest Fort Knox or something on that thing. Damn, how’d you learn this, anyway?”

“I had a good teacher.” Claire didn’t look at Myrnin. She couldn’t. For all intents and purposes, she’d just killed him, after all. “This way.”

There were two ways out of Myrnin’s lab, besides the usually-secured dimensional doorway: steps leading up to street level, which were probably the absolute worst idea ever right now, and a second, an even more hidden dimensional portal in a small room off to the side. That was the one Amelie had used to get them in.

But the problem was, Claire couldn’t get it to work. She had the memories clear in her head—the Glass House, the portal to the university, the hospital, even the museum they’d visited on the way here. But nothing worked.

It just felt . . . dead, as if the whole system had been cut off.

They were lucky to have made it this far.

Amelie’s trapped, Claire realized. Back there. With Bishop. And she’s outnumbered.

Claire double-checked the other door, too, the one she’d blocked.

Nothing. It wasn’t just a malfunctioning portal; the whole network was down.

“Well?” Hannah asked.

Claire couldn’t worry about Amelie right now. She had a job to do—get Myrnin to safety. And that meant getting him to the only vampire she knew offhand who could help him: Oliver. “I think we’re walking,” she said.

“The hell we are,” Hannah said. “I’m not hauling a dead vampire through the streets of Morganville. We’ll get ourselves killed by just about everybody. ”

“We can’t leave him!”

“We can’t take him, either!”

Claire felt her jaw lock into stubborn position. “Well, fine, you go ahead. Because I’m not leaving him. I can’t.”

She could tell that Hannah wanted to grab her by the hair and yank her out of there, but finally, the older woman nodded and stepped back. “Third option,” she said. “Call in the cavalry.”

It wasn’t quite the Third Armored Division, but after about a dozen phone calls, they did manage to get a ride.

“I’m turning on the street—nobody in sight so far,” Eve’s voice said from the speaker of Claire’s cell phone. She’d been giving Claire a turn-by-turn description of her drive, and Claire had to admit, it sounded pretty frightening. “Yeah, I can see the Day House. You’re in the alley next to it?”

“We’re on our way,” Claire said breathlessly. She was drenched with sweat, aching all over, from the effort of helping drag Myrnin out of the lab, up the steps, and down the narrow, seemingly endless dark alley. Next door, the Founder House belonging to Katherine Day and her granddaughter—a virtual copy of the house where Claire and her friends lived—was dark and closed, but Claire saw curtains moving at the upstairs windows.

“That’s my great-aunt’s house, Great-Aunt Kathy,” Hannah panted. “Everybody calls her Gramma, though. Always have, as far back as I can remember.”

Claire could see how Hannah was related to the Days; partly her features, but her attitude for sure. That was a family full of tough, smart, get-it-done women.

Eve’s big, black car was idling at the end of the alley, and the back door kicked open as the two of them—three? Did Myrnin still count?—approached. Eve took a look at Myrnin, and the stake in his back, sent Claire a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look, and reached out to drag him inside, facedown, on the backseat. “Hurry!” she said, and slammed the back door on the way to the driver’s side. “Damn, he’d better not bleed all over the place. Claire, I thought you were supposed to—”

“I know,” Claire said, and climbed into the middle of the big, front bench seat. Hannah crammed in on the outside. “Don’t remind me. I was supposed to keep him safe.”

Eve put the car in gear and did a ponderous tank-heavy turn. “So, who staked him?”

“I did.”

Eve blinked. “Okay, that’s an interesting interpretation of safe. Weren’t you with Amelie?” Eve actually did a quick check of the backseat, as if she were afraid Amelie might have magically popped in back there, seated like a barbarian queen on top of Myrnin’s prone body.

“Yeah. We were,” Hannah said.

“Do I have to ask? No, wait, do I want to ask?”

“We left her,” Claire said, miserable. “Bishop set a trap. She was fighting when we had to go.”

“What about the other guys? I thought you went with a whole entourage!”

“We left most of them. . . .” Her brain caught up with her, and she looked at Hannah, who looked back with the same thought in her expression. “Oh, crap. The other guys. They were in Myrnin’s lab, but not when we came back. . . .”

“Gone,” Hannah said. “Taken out.”

“Super. So, we’re winning, then.” Eve’s tone was wicked cynical, but her dark eyes looked scared. “I talked to Michael. He’s okay. They’re at the university. Things are quiet there so far.”

“And Shane?” Claire realized, with a pure bolt of guilt, that she hadn’t called him. If he’d called her, she wouldn’t have known; she’d turned off the ringer, afraid of the noise when creeping around on a rescue mission.

But as she dug out her phone, she saw that she hadn’t missed any calls after all.

“Yeah, he’s okay,” Eve said, and steered the car at semihigh speed around a corner. The town was dark, very dark, with a few houses lit up by lanterns or candles or flashlights. Most people were waiting in the dark, scared to death. “They had some vamps try to board the bus, probably looking for a snack, but it wasn’t even a real fight. So far they’re cruising without too much trouble. He’s fine, Claire.” She reached over and took Claire’s hand to squeeze it. “You, not so much. You look awful.”

“Thanks. I think I earned it.”

Eve took back her hand to haul the big wheel of the car around for a turn. Headlights swept over a group on the sidewalk—unnaturally pale. Unnaturally still. “Oh, crap, we’ve got bogeys. Hang on, I’m going to floor it.”