Bite Club

Amelie should have said no. Instead, she looked levelly at Oliver, folded her hands in front of her in a formal kind of way, and said, “So be it. War. Bring me their heads.”

“Wait,” Claire said, and scrambled to her feet. “Wait, you can’t. You can’t kill everybody. I told you, Gloriana was using some kind of—”

“Glamour, yes, so you said,” Amelie interrupted. “But you see, I no longer care. They’ve tried to assassinate me, and attacked and killed my own. There are times when mercy and measured justice is not appropriate. And this is one of those times.”

Oliver inclined his head, turned on his heel, and stalked away, moving quickly in the sun. He was starting to turn a bright, sunburned red, but he was gri

Mr. Martin. Claire looked down and saw that he, too, was burning, turning an alarming lobster shade. She found a piece of tin that was still mostly intact and dragged it over to shade him. He smiled at her gratefully and a little painfully. “I’ll be on my feet in another minute,” he said. “Amelie, I’m sorry. I should have stopped her.”

Amelie gave him a distant look. “Yes,” she said. “But I will overlook it. You are a valuable asset.” She walked away, Oliver’s black coat rippling in the wind, looking like a child dressing up as an old movie detective, but there was nothing soft about her. Small, but very deadly, like a snake. She called back, “Come away, Claire. There’s nothing more for you to do here. I will require you elsewhere.”

Claire looked down at Mr. Martin. He returned the look and shrugged a little. “She’s very angry,” he said. “You’d do well to obey promptly.”

“Will you be okay if I leave?”

His smile faded. He seemed honestly puzzled. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just do, I guess.” Claire ignored Amelie and turned slowly toward the burning wreckage of the building and started to move. She was far enough from Oliver and Amelie at the moment, and their attention wasn’t on her.

Shane.

Claire started to run. She heard someone shouting behind her, but she didn’t stop. She sped up, leaping over a bent piece of metal, then dodging a piece of burning timber.

“Oh, just let her go,” Oliver said. Claire was afraid he’d be after her, but, in fact, he hadn’t left Amelie’s side. “She has a right to see for herself.”

She arrived alone at a ruin of metal. The building had collapsed in on itself where it hadn’t blown out in shreds. One part was sticking up at a strange, awkward angle where the supports were still standing. Claire ran for that, hearing the wreckage creak and shudder under the whipping wind.

She didn’t think about the danger until she was inside, hearing the deep groans of metal shifting overhead. This place was going to come down, all the way down.

But first, she had to find out. She had to find him.

“Shane!” She screamed it, but her ears were still ringing from the blast, and it came out oddly muffled. Maybe he couldn’t hear her, either. Maybe that was why she didn’t hear anything back. “Shane, answer me!”

She almost tripped over the stairway that led down from the cracked concrete floor. It had probably been covered up before, or had some kind of railing around it, but now it was just a dark, open space in the floor. A ray of sunshine pierced the shattered roof and shone down the steps, all the way to the bottom.

She followed.

Down there, the light didn’t go far, but enough that she could make out a few things. The steel bars of a giant cage, for one thing. And the bleacher seats. She’d seen this room before, on the video. Shane had been here, fighting.

Claire edged forward, trying to see if there was anyone here, anyone at all. It looked empty.

She tripped over a piece of fallen metal and went down. She caught herself on the palms of her hands, but they skidded damply over the concrete, and she had to fight not to do a face-plant.

“Shane!” Her voice echoed back wildly from metal and concrete, and she could hear the grief and fear in it. “Shane, please answer me!”

No sound at all, except for the continued crashes and groans of the wreckage overhead. She edged back into the sunlight.

There was blood on her hands, bright and red. And on her pants where she’d fallen on her knees.

Fresh blood.

Claire screamed.

THIRTEEN

It was like CSI: Vampire, only without sunglasses.

The vampires brought lights, although they probably could have gotten along without them. It didn’t take long for them to clear the potentially dangerous wreckage from overhead and get down into the basement, where Claire sat huddled at the foot of the steps. She was still staring at the drying blood on her hands when Oliver stepped down carefully, watching her as he did so.

“It’s blood,” she said, feeling tired and oddly calm now. “Is it going to make you go all crazy and bite me?”

“Do you go insane with hunger when you see an old, decaying hamburger on the ground next to a trash can?” he asked.

“No,” she said. Then, belatedly, “That’s disgusting.”

“Then let me assure you, the idea of ingesting that filthy, contaminated blood has no appeal to me whatsoever.” His voice was oddly quiet, and he looked from her to the pool of blood near the cage. “You’re afraid it’s Shane’s.”

She swallowed and managed to whisper, “Is it?”

“No,” Oliver said. He crouched down and touched the blood, rubbed it between his fingers, and cautiously sniffed it. “Doesn’t smell like his. It’s human, but not of the Collins bloodline.” He lifted his head again and surveyed the room. More of his people came down the steps, bringing portable lights with them that they set up and turned on, bathing the room in merciless white light. The blood looked almost insanely red, drying to brown patches at the edges. Oliver stood up and stalked over to another spot, then another. “It’s also not alone. There are many bloodstains here. Some older; some only a few days old.” He walked to the cage and swung open the unlocked door, which creaked like a haunted house. Claire shivered. It felt like that high-pitched squeal had gone straight through her head.

It isn’t Shane’s blood. She felt an immense, late-breaking wave of relief, and her hands, the hands she’d been holding so rigidly out from her, fell back to her sides. She wanted to cry, but she wasn’t sure she had it in her.

“More in here,” Oliver said. “A lot more. Many different donors, and vampire blood, as well, as you’d expect from the fight recordings we saw.”

“It’s barbaric,” Amelie said. Claire hadn’t heard her arrive, but suddenly she was there, like a white and tattered ghost, glowing in the brilliant lights. If the sun hurt here, why didn’t those bright lights? Maybe not the right spectrum. Claire’s brain felt sluggish and too tired to work it all out. “Pitting men against each other like fighting dogs in a pit. I can smell the stink of fear and violence here.”

Oliver nodded slowly and got to his feet from where he’d been kneeling, examining something Claire couldn’t see. “They’ve been here very recently,” he said. “Recently enough to kill someone and set the traps outside. Pressure mines, presumably, triggered when your guards advanced into the shadows. Someone knew precisely what you’d do when you arrived.”

“They only misjudged how many I’d bring with me,” she said. She seemed all bone and muscle now, and her eyes glittered like ice. “They’ve made a fatal error. They should have made sure to kill me.”

“I’m sure they’ll take that to heart,” Oliver said. “They knew we were coming. That much is quite obvious.”

Amelie turned. Claire thought at first that she was getting her attention, but no, the gray eyes were staring out at something else.

“They’ve moved operations,” she said. “And we have no way of knowing where that is at present. But we will find them, and when we do…when we do, no one will be exempt. No one.”