"Not those," he said. "Your town identification."
"My...what?"
"You should have received it in the mail."
"Wel , I haven't!"
He took off his sunglasses. Behind them, his eyes were very dark, but there were hints of red. He stared at her for a moment, then nodded.
"Al right. When you get your card, carry it at alltimes. And next time, watch your step. You get yourself hit by a car, I'll consider you roadkil ."
With that, he put the sunglasses back on, turned, and got back in his car. Before Claire could think about any way to respond, he'd put the cruiser in gear and whipped around the corner.
It did not improve her mood.
Before she could even think about going home, Claire had a mandatory stop to make, at her part-time job. She dreaded it today, because she knew she was in no shape to deal with the incredibly inconsistent moods of Myrnin, her vampire mad-scientist boss. He might be laser focused and super-rational; he might be talking to crockery and quoting Alice in Wonderland (that had been the scene during her last visit). But whatever he was doing, he'd have work for her, and probably too much of it.
But at least he was never, ever boring.
She'd made the walk so often that she did it on autopilot, hardly even noticing the streets and houses and the alley down which she had to pass; she checked her phone and read texts as she jogged down the long marble steps that led into the darkness of his lab, or lair, whichever mood he was in today. The lights were on, which was nice. As she put her phone away, she saw that Myrnin was bent over a microscope-an ancient thing that she'd tried to put away a dozen times in favor of a newer electronic model, but he kept unearthing the thing. He stepped away from the eyepiece to scribble numbers frantically on a chalkboard. The board was covered in numbers, and to Claire's eyes they looked completely random -not just in terms of their numerical values, but in the way they'd been written, at allangles and in allareas of the available space. Some were even upside down. It wasn't a formula or an analysis. It was complete gibberish.
So. It was going to be one of those days. Lovely.
"Hey," Claire said with fatalistic resignation as she dumped her backpack on the floor and opened up a drawer to retrieve her lab coat. It was a good thing she looked first; Myrnin had dumped an assortment of scalpels in on top of the fabric. Any one of them could have sliced her to the bone. "What are you doing?"
"Did you know that certain types of coral qualify as immortal? The definition of scientific immortality is that if the mortality rate of a species doesn't increase after it reaches maturity, there is no such thing as aging...black coral, for instance. Or the Great Basin bristlecone pine. I'm trying to determine if there is any resemblance between the development of those cel ular colonies with the replacement of human cel s that takes place in a conversion to vampirism...." He was talking a mile a minute, with a fever pitch that Claire always dreaded. It meant he was in need of medication, which he wouldn't take; she'd need to be stealthy about adding it to his blood supply, again, to bring him down a little into the rational zone. "Did you bring me a hamburger?"
"Did I- No, Myrnin, I didn't bring you a hamburger." Bizarre. He'd never asked for that before.
"Coffee?"
"It's late."
"Doughnuts?"
"No."
"What good are you, then?" He finally looked up from the microscope, made another note or two on the board, and stepped back to consider the chaos of chalk marks. "Oh dear. That's not very-is this where I started? Claire?" He pointed at a number somewhere near the top right corner.
"I wasn't here," Claire said, and buttoned up her lab coat. "Do you want me to keep working on the machine?"
"The what? Oh, yes, that thing. Do, please." He crossed his arms and stared at the board, frowning now. It was not a personal-grooming highlight day for him, either. His long, dark hair was in tangles and needed a wash; she was sure the oversized somewhat-white shirt he was wearing had been used as a rag to wipe up chemical spil s at sometime in its long life. He'd had the presence of mind to put on some kind of pants, though she wasn't sure the baggy walking shorts were what she'd have chosen. At least the flip-flops kind of matched. "How was school?"
"Bad," she said.
"Good," he said absently, "very good...Ah, I think this is where I started.... Fibonacci sequence-I see what I did...." He began drawing a spiral through the numbers, starting somewhere at the center. Of course, he'd be noting down results in a spiral. Why not?
Claire felt a headache coming on. The place was dirty again, grit on the floor that was a combination of sand blown in from the desert winds, and whatever Myrnin had been working with that he'd spil ed liberally allover the place. She only hoped it wasn't too toxic. She'd have to schedule a day to get him out of here so she could get reorganized, sweep up the debris, stack the books back in some kind of order, shelve the lab equipment.... No, that wouldn't be a day. More like a week.
She gave up thinking about it, then went to the lab table on the right side of the room, which was covered by a dusty sheet. She pulled the cover off, coughed at the bil ows of grit that flew up, and looked at the machine she was building. It was definitely her own creation, this thing: it lacked most of the eccentric design elements that Myrnin would have put into it, though he'd sneaked in a few flywheels and glowing liquids along the way.
It was oblong, practical, bel -shaped, and had oscil ation controls along the sides. She thought it looked a bit like an old-fashioned science fiction ray gun, but it had a very different use...if it had ever worked.
Claire hooked up the device to the plug-in analyzing programs, and began to run simulations. It was a project Myrnin had proposed months ago, and it had taken her this long to get even close to a solution.... The vampires had an ability, so far mysterious and decidedly unscientific, to influence the minds and emotions of others-humans, mostly, but sometimes other vampires. Every vampire had a different set of strengths and weaknesses, but most shared some kind of emotional-control mechanism; it helped them calm their prey, or convince them to surrender their blood voluntarily.
What she was working on was a way to cancel that ability. To give humans-and even other vampires-a way to defend themselves against the manipulation.
Claire had gone from building a machine that could pinpoint and map emotions to one that could build feedback loops, heightening what was already there. It was a necessary step to get to the control stage-you had to be able to replicate the ability to negate it. If you thought of emotion as a wavelength, you could either amplify or cancel it with the flick of a switch.
"Myrnin?" She didn't look up from the analysis running on the laptop computer screen. "Did you mess with my project?"
"A little," he said. "Isn't it better?"
It was. She had no idea what he'd done to it, but adjusting the controls showed precise calibrations that she couldn't have done herself. "Did you maybe write down how you did it?"
"Probably," Myrnin said cheerfully. "But I don't think it wil help. It's just hearing the cycles and tuning to them. I don't think you're capable, with your limited human senses. If you'd become a vampire, you'd have so much more potential, you know."
She didn't answer that. She'd found it was really best not to engage in that particular debate with him, and besides, in the next second he'd forgotten allabout it, focused on his enthusiasm for black coral.
On paper, the device they'd developed-wel , she'd developed, and Myrnin had tweaked-seemed to work. Now she'd have to figure out how to test it, make sure it exactly replicated the way the vampire ability worked...and then make sure she could cancel that ability, reliably. It might even have other applications. If you could make an attacking vampire afraid, make him back off, you could end a fight without violence.
That alone made the work worthwhile.
And what happens when someone uses it the other way? she wondered. What happens if an attacker gets hold of it, then uses it to make you more afraid, as a victim? She didn't have an answer for that. It was one of the things that made her feel, sometimes, that this was a bad idea-and that she ought to simply destroy the thing before it caused more trouble.
But maybe not quite yet.
Claire unhooked the machine-she didn't have any kind of cool name for it yet, or even a project designation-and tested the weight of it. Heavy. She'd built it from solid components, and it generated considerable waste heat, but it was a prototype; it'd improve, if it was worthwhile. She tried aiming it at the wal . It was a little awkward, but if she added a grip up front, that would help stabilize it-