Rationality caught up one step later, as did Shane, who said, "Michael has keys."
I hit the reality wall face-first, and skidded to a stop.
Shane eased the curtain aside. I saw his shoulders stiffen, then slump. He unlocked the door and stepped aside.
And Myrnin swept in, all giant leather swirling coat and dramatic swooping hat. Rain fell off both in a miniature fountain as he shook himself, then took it all off. Despite all that cover, he still looked half-drowned. "We don't have much time," he said. "They're looking for me. Did you get everything?"
"I don't know," Shane said. "It's in here."
He led the way back and indicated the stuff piled on the dining table. Myrnin pushed him out of the way and, with quick, able gestures, opened the doctor's bag and pulled out all kinds of tubing, needles, some kind of pump . . . and made a little aha! sound as he grabbed a gear-studded machine covered with brass. He plugged the end of one tube into it, and the other into the pump.
I watched as he set up a complicated, inexplicable device there on our dining room table, mixed chemicals together into a test tube, and poured the result into a funnel on the brass machine.
It started up with a barely perceptive hum.
"Where is Michael?" Myrnin asked, as he fitted a needle on the end of one of the tubes. "He should be here. I will need his help."
"He - " Shane cleared his throat, and didn't look at me. "He didn't make it back. We don't know where he is."
Myrnin's hands stilled for a second, and then he nodded. "Very well," he said. "I have a blood connection to Claire, but none to the house; this will be trickier without that. You two are residents, so you have some standing. I'll need vials of your blood." He grabbed syringes and those rubbery tie things, which he pitched to each of us. "It's best if you draw it yourself."
I held the capped needle - at least he was using a modern syringe - and the tourniquet and glared at him. "I'm sorry? What?"
"Apparently I have not made myself clear," he said, speaking the way vampires did when they thought you were drunk, stupid, or just deeply worthy of a smack. "If I do not have the blood of someone attuned to this house, then all this is busywork and window dressing. So please, stop following your usual extremely useless agenda of jabbering questions and put the needle in your arm!"
"Are you high?" I blurted it out spontaneously, because the light had caught his eyes, and they looked seriously weird, in a medically induced kind of way.
Myrnin blinked. "Amelie thought it best to calm me," he said. "Given my distress." His gaze darted toward Claire's body on the couch, and suddenly I did understand. Of course he'd been distressed - too rattled to work. So Amelie had given him happy pills.
Lovely.
I wanted to catch Shane's attention and get some solidarity going on this, but he had quietly, without fuss, dropped his coat and rolled up his sleeve, and was fastening a tourniquet around his arm.
"Here," I said. "Let me help."
"Got it," he said, and tightened the rubber strap with his teeth in a way that made me wonder if that was actually the first time he'd tried it. Probably not. Shane had done some bad things out there on the road with his dad. "Let me do yours."
I didn't want to - boy, did I not want to - but I stripped off my coat, sat down in a chair, and shivered while he rolled up my sleeve, fastened the tourniquet, and told me to work my fist. I have good veins - not a major plus, in Vamptown - and it took only about half a minute for him to find one, slip the needle in, and fill up the tube. "Just one?" he asked Myrnin, without looking up.
"Two would be better," Myrnin said. "Three would be extremely nice."
Shane silently pulled the crimson-sloshing tube from the syringe and slotted another one in. It hurt, and he touched my hand in silent apology as the blood bubbled up. He was better on the third vial, and then we were done.
Myrnin reached in the bag and found a couple of premoist-ened antiseptic swabs and cotton balls. Shane finished me up and sat down next to me. His arm was turning red from the tourniquet, and it must have hurt, but he didn't seem to mind. I could see the veins standing out in the bend of his elbow from three feet away.
"Need me to - "
"No," he interrupted me, which was a relief, because I was even more squeamish about putting needles into people than I was watching them stick into my own skin. He rested his forearm on the table, palm up, and did the whole thing with his left hand, including changing tubes, which was . . . scary impressive, really.
He smiled a little, while he was doing it.
"What?" I asked him. "You're freaking me out now."
"Claire," he said. "She had to come with me to the blood bank so I wouldn't freak out and leave. And here I am, drawing my own blood and handing it to a vamp. She'd appreciate the crazy."
Myrnin was waiting impatiently on us, and when Shane handed him the blood, he gave us a quick nod, ripped the plastic diaphragms off the ends of the tubes, and poured them one by one into his weird little spinning machine.
The house took on an absolutely horrible smell that burned my eyes and made me cough. Shane, too.
Then Myrnin took a syringe and vials and - without bothering with a tourniquet - drew some paler-than-normal blood out of his own veins. He put two vials of it into the machine, but kept the third attached to the syringe, which he capped and put in his pocket.
"Right," Myrnin said. "Sit her up."
Shane gave me a confused look.
"Not her, her! Idiot. Never mind." Myrnin stalked to the couch, pulled the afghan away, and . . . stopped. Just for a second. His back was to us, so I couldn't see his expression, but I didn't really need that to understand what he was feeling. I felt the same thing every time I so much as glanced toward her body - the black, horrible knotting inside, dread and anxiety and grief and horror all tied up together.
He picked Claire up and moved her limp form into a sitting position on the couch. Her head tried to roll off to the side, and he carefully, gently adjusted it. Then he took one of the tubes, the one he'd fitted the needle to, and deftly inserted it into her forearm, like an IV. He flicked a switch on the machine on the table, and a sickly greenish liquid began flowing through the tubes, and into her arm.
Nothing happened.
"All right," he said. "What I'm about to attempt is - dangerous. Very dangerous, not only for me and for the two of you, but also for Claire. If her spirit has been trapped by the house, it's as if the house is a filter, but the pressure on her spirit remains, trying to pull her free and out to - whatever comes beyond this. We have to break the filter, and grab her spirit as it flies, and pull it back into her body. It will not be easy."
"But - " I licked my lips and risked a quick look at Claire's silent body. God, she looked so pale. "Her neck. What about her neck?"
"What about it?"
"It's broken."
"Ah, that," Myrnin said. "Yes. Well, I can fix that. You won't like how that occurs, but I don't think we have much of a choice." He took the syringe out of his pocket and held it up. The pale, watery blood glimmered in the light. "This will heal her physical damage, and it will also strengthen the bonds between the two of us. It will allow me to try to pull her back."
"Wait, hang on a second," Shane said. "You're putting your blood into Claire? Isn't that how you make someone a vampire?"
"Yes." Myrnin uncapped the needle. "It's exactly how I would make a vampire. The process is the same; those who cross over die, and only their vampire maker can lead them back across that line, back to their bodies. This will let me try to do the same for Claire."
Shane lunged out of his chair and grabbed Myrnin's arm as he positioned the needle over Claire's neck, right where she had two faint, faded scars from where Myrnin had once bitten her. "No! You are not making her into - "
Myrnin shoved him, and Shane went down. It was a gentle push, for a vampire. He didn't even hit a wall. "Do you want her back or not?" Myrnin almost spat it at him. "If there's any chance to reclaim her, any chance, don't you want to take it?"
"No!"
"Oh, you'd rather she was dead and gone forever?"
Shane was chalk white now, as if he'd taken up the Goth lifestyle. He didn't try to get up. It was as if he didn't have the strength, all of a sudden.