The other man went down.
Oliver held the pose for a long second, watching the man to be sure he wouldn’t get up, and then the tension released and he stum- bled sideways. He crashed into another vampire’s bed and grabbed for support, but couldn’t hold himself upright. He slipped to his knees, tangled in sheets, and as Claire watched in horror, he began to convulse.
“Oliver!” She dropped down next to him in a crouch, not sure what to do, whether she could do anything. “Oliver, can you hear me? Oliver! ”
It went on a long time, but he finally went limp. “I hear you,”
he said. His voice sounded raw and strange, and it sounded . . .
afraid. He opened his eyes then, and they weren’t vampire- red any- more. They were a plain, unremarkable brown. His skin had taken on an odd shimmer, as if it was shifting colors. “You must stop them, Claire. Don’t let them destroy everything we—” He stopped and let out a cry of pain, real pain, and flung out his hand. She didn’t think twice, even given what she’d just seen him do. She grabbed his fingers and held them, felt him shaking as if he were flying apart. His hand closed over hers with crushing strength, but it was only human strength now, not vampire strength.
His skin was glowing underneath, as if something was burning inside him. Or, as if something was being burned out of him.
Whatever was happening to him, it was painful. The breaths he was pulling in sounded tortured and strangled, and his pulse . . .
His pulse? Breaths?
Claire’s eyes widened.
Oliver was, before her eyes, turning human. And she knew, somehow, that this was the very last thing he would want.
“No,” he said, and it burst up out of him like a growl, a primal and furious snarl. His convulsions jerked his back into a tight bow, and Claire gasped and had to pull her hand free as his grip grew tighter and tighter around hers. “No! I wil not!”
It was almost a chant, or a prayer, but she couldn’t imagine God listening to anything that savage, that angry. The rage that fueled it seemed totally beyond the capacity of any human body to create, much less contain.
And suddenly, the glow inside him died, leaving his skin that chalky, translucent white again, as if he was made of milky, empty glass.
He let out a sigh, and his muscles went limp. The brown, suf- fering eyes drifted shut.
She was terrified to touch him, but she put her fingers on his wrist.
Silent. No pulse. No rise and fall of his chest.
But he didn’t look quite as dead as the corpses in the morgue on the other side of the building. Not yet, anyway. He looked— comatose. Suspended between life and death, vampire and human.
She supposed he would have to fall one direction or the other.
Claire dragged him to a more comfortable position— more for herself than him, really— and raced to the other side of the lab.
There were manuals there, chemicals, ranks of IV bags, checklists and protocols.
She grabbed the protocol manual and feverishly slid her finger down the table of contents. Outcomes.
The section was a dry, clinical table of results. Seventy- three percent average deaths, which Claire already knew. But, strangely, only a flat twenty percent human conversion score.
Which left seven percent . . . REV? The code didn’t mean any- thing to her, and she scanned the rows of legends until she found it. REV meant reverted.
Seven percent of those treated with the cure reverted to vam- pire. The line was marked with a footnote symbol, and she scanned down to read it.
Immediate resolution of all REV subjects using Protocol D.
Protocol D, Claire discovered, had an illustration of one of the Daylighters’ special liquid- silver- filled stakes being plunged into a vampire’s chest, then removed to release the liquid.
In other words, they euthanized any vampires who survived their cure and stayed vampire.
Claire let out a slow, shaking breath. She felt numbed, reading it; if she’d wondered before whether she was on the right side, she didn’t now. If Amelie was the devil she knew, Fallon was far, far worse.
As she was closing the book, a word caught her eye, and she flipped back to it.
The last section was labeled Counteragent.
There was a whole chapter, and she skimmed it as fast as pos- sible, raking her gaze down the thick columns of dryly written ex- planations.
The counteragent was designed to halt the process of the cure.
They’d originally developed it so that they could study the effects while in process— part of their live experiments, and Claire really didn’t want to think too hard about that. She found a handwritten notation to the side.
COMB 733118.
It was a combination, so there had to be a safe. Somewhere, there had to be a safe . . .
She spotted it, finally, half hidden beneath the counter— a small gray thing, digital keypad. She crashed to her knees in front of it and jammed in the numbers. 733118.
The pad beeped, and the door clicked open.
But there was nothing inside it. Nothing at all.
“No!” She screamed it out loud and smashed her palm into it with all the anguish inside her. She could hear the cries coming from the vampires on the other beds now, and she could hear Eve calling her name with frantic desperation.
If the counteragent still existed, they’d moved it. There was nothing here. Nothing to reverse the effects of Fallon’s cure. He’d taken it somewhere she couldn’t find it.
Not in time.
For a moment, Claire thought she just couldn’t do it . . . just couldn’t get up. Couldn’t rise to meet another challenge, face more pain. She just wanted to lie down, curl up, put her hands over her ears and hide, just this once. She’d faced it all, as directly as she could. She’d fought and planned and tried.
But that open safe, that was the end of all her plans. All her hopes.
And now there was nothing left but to hold on to Eve, and Mi- chael, while everything fell apart.
I ne d you, she thought. Shane, please, I ne d you, please be here, please . . .
But she knew in her heart that he couldn’t be here. Not this time.
When she turned to focus on Eve and Michael, she realized that Eve hadn’t gone to Michael’s side. She was standing with her back pressed against the far wall . . . watching the vampires with frantic, horrified eyes. Gagging. Doubling over.
She tried to get closer, but she faltered, and backed up again, covering her face.
“Take it out!” Eve yelled to Claire. “Help him!” She pointed to the IV needle, and Claire yanked it free— but she knew, from the chalky glow of his skin, that it was already too late. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t responding.
Eve was weeping now, and she slammed her palm into the wall hard, over and over. She tried again to come toward him, but what- ever they’d loaded into her blood made her sick, physically sick, the closer she got. “Come on, you’re the brain, you’re the smart one, you can fix everything, do something!” The horror and anguish in her friend threatened to knock down Claire’s shocked numb- ness, and she squeezed her eyes shut to block it out. “Do some- thing, Claire!”
And then Michael screamed. It was a sound that sliced through Claire’s blanket of shock and stabbed her right in the heart, and her eyes flew open of their own accord to fix on his tense, suffering face, his glowing face, on the shimmering, flickering light gliding beneath his skin, tracing veins and arteries, centering in his heart . . .
And regardless of her pain, of the drug, of all that they’d done to make her loathe and fear the sight of a vampire, Eve shoved her- self bodily off the wall and lunged forward to grab his hand in hers. She was gagging and shaking, but she grimly held on, even though every fiber of her body was trying to make her run away.
Michael was breathing in deep, agonizing gulps, and Claire could see his pulse pounding hard in the vein at his throat. His eyes were wide open, so blue, blue as the Texas sky, and he was staring mutely at Eve, shaking and trembling and staring . . .
“Live,” Claire said. She whispered it under her breath, a chant, a prayer, a desperate plea. “Live, live, live!”
And then the light in him went out, and Michael went com- pletely, utterly still.
Ten
He’s dead, Claire thought numbly. I kiled him. It was an incoherent thought, and it had a sound to it like ashes falling, a taste like bitter acid at the back of her throat.
I kil ed him. She hadn’t, but it felt that way. She should have been faster. Better. Stronger.