Lord of Misrule

And people were down, lying motionless among the wreckage. Ha

There were no vampires in the coffee bar, and there was no sign of Eve.

Claire ducked behind the curtain. More signs of a struggle. Nobody left behind, alive or dead. She sucked in a deep breath and opened up the giant commercial refrigerator.

It was full of blood bags, but no bodies.

“Anything?” Ha

“Nobody here,” Claire said. “They left the blood, though.”

“Huh. Weird. You’d think they’d need that more than anything. Why attack the place if you’re not taking the good stuff?” Ha

With a black, heavy feeling gathering in her stomach, Claire swung the refrigerator door shut. “You think the vampires fought to get out.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Oliver, too.”

“Oliver, Myrnin, all of them. Whatever bat signal was calling them got turned up to eleven, I think.”

“Then where’s Eve?” Claire asked.

Ha

Some, like the policeman Claire had seen burn up in front of her, would already be gone. “You think it’s Mr. Bishop?” she asked, in a very small voice.

“I hope so.”

Claire blinked. “Why?”

“Because if it’s not, that’s got to be a whole lot worse.”

8

Three hours later, they didn’t know much more, except that nothing they tried to do to keep the vampires from leaving seemed to work, apart from tranquilizing them and locking them up in sturdy cells. Tracking those who did leave wasn’t much good, either. Claire and Ha

Richard Morrell arrived, along with a few others, and set up shop in the kitchen. Claire was trying to figure out what to do to feed everybody, when there was another knock at the door.

It was Gramma Day. The old woman, straight-backed and proud, leaned on her cane and stared at Claire from age-faded eyes. “I ain’t staying with my daughter,” she said. “I don’t want any part of that.”

Claire quickly moved aside to let her in, and the old lady shuffled inside. As Claire locked the door behind her, she asked, “How did you get here?”

“Walked,” Gramma said. “I know how to use my feet just fine. Nobody bothered me.” Nobody would dare, Claire thought. “Young Mr. Richard! Are you in here?”

“Ma’am?” Richard Morrell came out of the kitchen, looking very much younger than Claire had ever seen him. Gramma Day had that effect on people. “What are you doing here?”

“My fool daughter’s off her head,” Gramma said. “I’m not having any of it. Move out of the way, boy. I’m making you some lunch.” And she tapped her cane right past him, into the kitchen, and clucked and fretted over the state of the kitchen while Claire stood by, caught between giggles and horror. She was just a pair of hands, getting ordered around, but at the end of it there was a plate full of sandwiches and a big jug of iced tea, and everybody was seated around the kitchen table, except for Gramma, who’d gone off into the other room to rest. Claire had hesitantly taken a chair, at Richard’s nod. Detectives Joe Hess and Travis Lowe were also present, and they were gratefully scarfing down food and drink. Claire felt exhausted, but they looked a whole lot worse. Tall, thin Joe Hess had his left arm in a sling—broken, apparently, from the brace on it—and both he and his rounder, heavier partner had cuts and bruises to prove they’d been in a fight or two.

“So,” Hess said, “any word on where the vampires are heading when they take off?”

“Not so far,” Richard said. “Once we started tracking them, we could keep up only for a while, and then they lost us.”

“Aren’t they hurt by the sun?” Claire asked. “I mean—”

“They start smoking, not in the Marlboro way, and then they start crisping,” Travis Lowe said around a mouthful of turkey and Swiss. “The older ones, they can handle it okay, and anyway, they’re not just charging out there anymore. They’re putting on hats and coats and blankets. I saw one wrapped up in a Sponge-Bob rug from some kid’s bedroom, if you can believe that. It’s the younger vamps that are in trouble. Some of them won’t make it to the shade if they’re not careful.”

Claire thought about Michael, and her stomach lurched. Before she even formed the question, Richard saw her expression and shook his head. “Michael’s okay,” he said. “Saw to it myself. He’s got himself a nice, secure jail cell, along with the other vampires we could catch before it was too late. He’s not as strong as some of the others. He can’t bend steel with his bare hands. Yet, anyway.”

“Any word on—” Claire was wearing out the question, and Richard didn’t even let her finish it.

“No sign of Eve,” he said. “No word from her. I’d try to put a GPS track on her phone, but we’d have to bring the cell network up, and that’s too dangerous right now. I’ve asked the guys on the street to keep an eye out for her, but we’ve got a lot of things going on, Claire.”

“I know. But—” She couldn’t put it into words, exactly. She just knew that somewhere, somehow, Eve was in trouble, and they needed to find her.

“So,” Joe Hess said, and stood up to look at a blown-up map of Morganville taped to the wall. “This still accurate?” The map was covered in colored dots: blue for locations held by those loyal to Amelie; red for those loyal to Bishop; black for those burned or otherwise put out of commission, which accounted for three Founder Houses, the hospital, and the blood bank.

“Pretty much,” Richard said. “We don’t know if the vampires are leaving Bishop’s locations, but we know they’re digging in, just like Amelie’s folks. We can verify locations only where Amelie’s people were supposed to be, and they’re gone from just about every location we’ve got up in blue.”

“Where were they last seen?”

Richard consulted notes, and began to add yellow dots to the map. Claire saw the pattern almost immediately. “It’s the portals,” she said. “Myrnin got the portals working again, somehow. That’s what they’re using.”

Hess and Lowe looked blank, but Richard nodded. “Yeah, I know about that. Makes sense. But where are they going?”

She shrugged helplessly. “Could be anywhere. I don’t know all the places the portals go; maybe Myrnin and Amelie do, but I don’t think anybody else does.” But she felt unreasonably cheered by the idea that the vampires weren’t out wandering out in the daylight, spontaneously combusting all over the place. She didn’t want to see that happen to them . . . not even to Oliver.

Well, maybe to Oliver, sometimes. But not today.

The three men stared at her for a few seconds, then went back to studying the map, talking about perimeters and strategies for patrols, all kinds of things that Claire didn’t figure really involved her. She finished her sandwich and walked into the living room, where tiny, wizened little Gramma Day was sitting in an overstuffed wing chair with her feet up, talking to Ha

Claire perched, looking around the room. Most of the vampires were gone, either confined to cells or locked away for safety; some, they hadn’t been able to stop. She couldn’t seem to stop anxiously rubbing her hands together. Shane. Shane was supposed to be here. Richard Morrell had said that they’d arranged for the Bloodmobile to switch drivers, and that meant Shane would be coming soon for his rest period.