Lord of Misrule

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

“Well?” Ha

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,” Ha

“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 Ha

5

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,” Ha

Claire could see how Ha

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. Ha

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,” Ha

“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 Ha

“Gone,” Ha

“Super. So, we’re wi

“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—u

That was, Claire thought, a pretty fantastic idea, because the vampires on the curb were now in the street, and following. There was a kind of manic glee to how they pursued the car, but not even a vamp could keep up with Eve’s driving for long; they fell back into the dark, one by one. The last one was the fastest, and he nearly caught hold of the back bumper before he stumbled and was left behind in a black cloud of exhaust.

“Damn freaks,” Eve said, trying to sound tough but not quite making it. “Hey, Ha

“Right now?” Ha

“Oh, we’ll make it,” Eve said, with a confidence Claire personally didn’t feel. “Look, it’s already four a.m. Another couple of hours, and we’re fine.”

Claire didn’t say, In a couple of hours, we could all be dead, but she was thinking it. What about Amelie? What were they going to do to rescue her?

If she’s even still alive.

Claire’s head hurt, her eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and she just wanted to curl up in a warm bed, pull the pillow over her head, and not be so responsible.

Fat chance.

She wasn’t paying attention to where Eve was going, and anyway, it was so dark and strange outside she wasn’t sure she’d recognize things, anyway. Eve pulled to a halt at the curb, in front of a row of plate glass windows lit by candles and lanterns inside.

Just like that, they were at Common Grounds.

Eve jumped out of the driver’s side, opened the back door, and grabbed Myrnin under the arms, all the while muttering, “Ick, ick, ick!” Claire slid out to join her, and Ha

Claire found herself shoved immediately out of the way by two vampires: Oliver and some woman she didn’t know. Oliver looked grim, but then, that wasn’t new, either. “Put him down,” Oliver said. “No, not there, idiots, over there, on the sofa. You. Off.” That last was directed at the frightened humans who were seated on the indicated couch, and they scattered like quail. Eve continued her ick mantra as she and Ha

Oliver crouched next to him, looking at the stake in Myrnin’s back. He steepled his fingers for a moment, and then looked up at Claire. “What happened?”

She supposed he could tell, somehow, that it was her stake. Wonderful. “I didn’t have a choice. He came after us.” The us part might have been an exaggeration; he’d come after Ha

Oliver gave her a moment to squirm while he stared at her, and then looked back at Myrnin’s still, very corpselike body. The area where the stake had gone in looked even paler than the surrounding tissue, like the edge of a whirlpool draining all the color out of him. “Do you have any of the drugs you have been giving him?” Oliver asked. Claire nodded, and fumbled in her pocket. She had some of the powder form of the drug, and some of the liquid, but she hadn’t felt confident at all that she’d be able to get it into Myrnin’s mouth without a fight she was bound to lose. When Myrnin was like this, you were going to lose fingers, at the very least, if you got anywhere near his mouth.