Bite Club mv-10 Read online

  Blood.

  Oh, crap. That was never a good sign in Morganville (or, Claire thought, anywhere else, either). She came to a sudden stop and sent Larkin a wide-eyed look. The rest of the class was piling in behind her, talking in low tones; she knew Doug had arrived because of the blanket of body smog that settled in around her. Of course, Doug took the lab stool beside her. Dammit. That blew, as Shane would have said; Claire covered her discomfort by sending him a small, not very enthusiastic smile as she dropped her backpack to the ground, careful of the laptop inside. She hated sitting on lab stools; they only emphasized how short she was. She felt like she was back in second grade again, unable to touch the floor from her chair.

  Larkin assumed his position in the center of the lab tables and grabbed a small stack of paper from his black bag. He passed out the instructions, and Claire read them, frowning. They were simple enough—place a sample of the “fluid” on a slide, turn on the full-spectrum lighting, observe, and record results. Once a reaction was observed, mix the identified reactive blood with control blood until a nonreaction was achieved. Then work out the equations explaining the initial reaction and the nonreaction, to chart the energy release.

  No doubt at all what this is about, Claire thought. The vamps were using students to do their research for them. Free worker bees. But why?

  Larkin had a smooth patter, she had to admit; he joked around, said that with the popularity of vampires in entertainment it might be fun to apply some physics to the problem. Part of the blood had been “altered” to allow for a reaction, and part had not. He made it all seem very scientific and logical, for the benefit of the eight out of ten non-Morganville residents in the room.

  Claire caught the eye of Malinda, the other one in the room who was wearing a vampire symbol. Malinda’s pretty face was set in a worried, haunted expression. She opened her eyes wide and held up her hands silently as if to say, What do we do?

  It’ll be okay, Claire mouthed. She hoped she wasn’t lying.

  “Cool,” said Stinky Doug, leaning over to look at the paper. Claire’s eyes watered a little, and she felt an urge to sneeze. “Vampires. I vant to drink your bloot!” He made a mock bite at her neck, which creeped her out so much, she nearly fell off the stool.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” she said. Doug looked a little surprised at her reaction. “And by the way, showers. Look into them, Doug!”

  That was a little too much snark for Claire’s usual style, but he’d scared her, and it just came out. Doug looked wounded, and Claire immediately felt bad. “I’m sorry,” she said very sincerely. “It’s just…you don’t smell so great.”

  It was his turn now to look ashamed. “Yeah,” he said, looking down at the paper. “I know. Sorry.” He got that look again, that secret, smug look. “Guess I need to get rich enough nobody cares what I smell like.”

  “That, or, you know, showering. That works better.”

  “Fine. Next time I’ll smell just like a birthday bouquet.”

  “No fair just throwing on deodorant and aftershave or something. Real washing. It’s a must.”

  “You’re a tough sell.” He flashed her a movie-star grin that looked truly strange with the discoloration around his eyes. “Speaking of that, once I take that shower, you interested in going out for dinner?”

  “I’m spoken for,” she said. “And we have work to do.”

  She prepped the slide, and Doug fired up the lamp. The instant the full-spectrum lighting hit the fluid, there was a noticeable reaction—bubbling under the glass, as if the blood were carbonated. It took about thirty seconds for the reaction to run its course; once it had, all that was left was an ashy black residue.

  “So freaking cool,” Doug said. “Seriously. Where do you think they get this stuff? Squeeze real vampires?” There was something odd about the way he said it—as if he actually knew something. Which he shouldn’t, Claire knew. He definitely shouldn’t.

  “It’s probably just a light-sensitive chemical additive,” Claire said. “Not sure how it works, though.” That was true. As much as she’d studied it, she didn’t understand the nature of the vampire transformation. It wasn’t a virus—exactly. And it wasn’t a contaminant, either, although it had elements of that. There were things about it that, she suspected, all their scientific approaches couldn’t capture, try as they might. Maybe they were just measuring the wrong things.

  Doug dropped the uncomfortable speculation. He wasn’t so bad as a lab partner, if you forgot the stinky part; he was a good observer, and not half bad with calculations. She let him do most of the work, because she’d already done much of this with Myrnin. It was interesting that Doug came up with a slightly different formula in the end than she had on her own, and, she thought, his was a little more elegant. They were the first to come up with a stable mixture of the blood, and the second to come up with calculations—but Doug’s, Claire was confident, were better than the other team’s. You didn’t have to finish first to win, not in science. You just had to be more right than the other guys.

  All was going okay until she caught Doug trying to pocket a sample of the blood. “Hey,” she said, and caught his wrist. “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not? It would be awesome at parties.”

  Again, there was that unsettling tone, a little too smug, a little too knowing. Whatever it was he intended to do with it, she doubted he was going to show off at parties with it.

  “Just don’t.” Claire met his eyes. “I mean it. Leave it alone; he might be checking. It might be…toxic.” Fatal, she meant, because if the vamps discovered that Doug was sneaking out samples…Well, accidents happened, even on the TPU campus. Stupidity wasn’t covered by the general Protection agreement, and Doug seemed to have caught a little bit too much of a clue.

  Doug grudgingly dropped it back to the table. Professor Larkin came around, checked out the sample bottles, and recorded them against a master sheet. As he walked away and she and Doug packed their bags, Claire said, “See? I told you he’d be checking.”

  “Yeah,” Doug whispered back. “But he already checked us out.”

  And before she could stop him, he grabbed a couple of the vials, stuck them in his bag, and took off.

  Claire swallowed the impulse to yell, and a second one, to kick the table in frustration. She didn’t dare tell Larkin; he was Protected, and Doug had no idea what he was getting into. She had to get him to give the vial back. Dumb-ass wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it, anyway.

  She hoped.

  TWO

  Unfortunately, Stinky Doug wasn’t that easy to find. For one thing, she’d never learned his last name. Hacking into Professor Larkin’s class records would be easy enough, but Claire had other classes, one after another, right up through midafternoon. Then she was scheduled for the lab—the real one. And an evening of weird science with the weirdest boss ever.

  Myrnin, she hoped, wouldn’t notice if she was a little late. He had a pretty flexible concept of time.

  Claire stopped off in the University Center, which had Wi-Fi, and claimed a table in the coffee bar area. Her housemate Eve must have finally dragged herself out of bed, because she was behind the counter, yawning and sipping a massively large cup of what, knowing Eve, must have been pure espresso.

  “Hiya, cutie,” Eve said, and leaned on the bar to smile at Claire. “Mornings are hard.”

  “It isn’t morning,” Claire said, straight-faced.

  Eve made a tragic face. “I stand corrected. Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don’t do them anymore.” She took a gulp from her cup, shuddered, and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. Caffeinate me. So, Beautiful Brainiac, what can I do for you?”

  “The usual, I guess.”

  “One piping-hot mocha, extra large, coming up!” Eve rang it up and took Claire’s money. As she counted out change, she shook her newly shag-cut black hair back from her pale face and grinned. The grinning didn’t really go
with the whole Goth thing, but that was Eve. She didn’t do labels. “Hey, did you get how excited Shane was about that martial arts thingy? He almost ran me over when I came downstairs. I never saw somebody so thrilled to be invited to an ass kicking.”

  “He was pretty stoked,” Claire agreed. “How about you? Are you going?”

  “Take classes? That I actually pay for? What do you think I am—a college girl or something? Besides, I defend myself just fine.” She did, actually. Eve not only made her own stakes, but she also blinged them out with crystal designs. The wooden ones were sort of like stun guns for vamps; wood couldn’t kill most of them, just immobilize them, unless the vamps were very young, like Michael.

  But Eve also made silver ones, and those were deadly. Claire felt a shiver along her spine as she remembered just how deadly they could be. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d destroyed one vampire that way. Nasty. And even though she’d done it in self-defense, she hadn’t felt good about it.

  “Hmmm,” Eve was saying now, in a contemplative kind of way. She tapped her lip with one black fingernail and smiled. “There could be a use for that gym after all, now that I think about it. You know, there is one martial art I like.”

  “Which is?”

  “A surprise, Claire Bear. Yeah, that might definitely be some fun. You might even enjoy it, too.” A cute, tiny frown line slowly appeared between her eyebrows. “You okay? You look kind of spooked.”

  “Yeah, coming from someone who looks like an actual ghost.…..”

  “Respect the awesome look, girlfriend. Okay, if you don’t want to talk, don’t. One mocha, coming up! Sit down; I’ll bring it over. It’s slow, anyway.”

  It wasn’t just slow; this hour of the day, it was deserted. Claire left Eve to the espresso construction (something Eve was amazingly good at, actually) and flipped open her laptop. It took her exactly seven minutes to hack into Larkin’s class roster and discover that Stinky Doug’s full name was Doug Legrande. Larkin, creepily enough, even had all their addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails, although Claire was pretty sure she’d never provided him with any of that intel. Either the university was really free with their personal details, or Larkin had connections.

  Duh, she already knew that. He had a bracelet from Oliver. Connections didn’t quite cover it.

  “You gonna drink that?”

  Claire looked up. Eve was sitting across from her, slumped in the rickety plastic chair, sipping her massive cup of whatever—it was Eve’s own cup, with a cartoony got blood? on the side. On campus, it was funny. Off campus…not so much.

  As Claire stared blankly at her, Eve nodded to the mocha that had magically appeared next to her laptop. “The whipped cream is getting all melty,” Eve said. “Whipped cream is a terrible thing to waste. Oh, except it’s not real whipped cream—it’s that canned stuff, which is kind of nasty, so there’s that. Maybe a good choice after all, letting it melt. Whatcha doing?”

  That was Eve, through and through, even when she was sleepy. Keeping up with her required a healthy gulp of the mocha and a very active brain. “I’m trying to find Stinky Doug,” Claire said. “He lives on campus, in Lansdale House, I guess.”

  “Stinky Doug? Oh, God. Please tell me you’re going to do everyone a public service and deliver him some shower gel. The last time he came in here, I thought I was going to have to call those biohazard guys. Although if this is some weird and inconceivable college-crush thing, I don’t want to know. Let me have my fragile illusions.”

  Claire rolled her eyes. “Trust me, I wouldn’t kiss Doug even after the shower gel and decontamination. No, he did something stupid, and I need to convince him not to make it worse—that’s all.” She explained about the experiment, the blood, and Doug’s boneheaded move. Eve kept steadily drinking her coffee, eyes half closed.

  “You considered snitching on him?” she asked. “Because, honestly, wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. Just make sure Larkin knows you didn’t take it. Let him draw his own conclusions.”

  “That’s the same thing as throwing Doug under the bus,” Claire said. “Look, he’s just dumb, that’s all. And he doesn’t know about”—Claire waved vaguely around, indicating Morganville—“all this.” Well, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that, actually, but he shouldn’t know. That counted.

  “If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? Caught dead? I crack myself up.” Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn’t need. “So you’re visiting Stinky Doug and warning him off, without explaining why. Is that your whole plan?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Awesome. Let me know how it goes, Plan Girl.”

  “You have any better ideas?”

  Eve took another delicate swallow of coffee. “Well,” she said, “Stinky Doug has a lot of classes. If you’ve got his dorm room address, how difficult would it be to toss the place, find the stuff, and get rid of it? Nobody has to know.”

  “Great. And do you actually know a ninja?”

  “Yep,” Eve said, and gave her a sleepy, luminous smile. “He’s my boyfriend.”

  Hmmm. Claire had to mull that over for a few seconds, because technically vampires were like ninjas—quiet, sneaky, fast, and deadly. And when they wanted to be, they could be disturbingly invisible. “Would he do it?” she asked. That wasn’t what she wanted to ask, actually; she wanted to ask, Will he tell Oliver?

  Because, like it or not, Michael was a vampire in equal measure to being her friend, and even though he tried to stay on the human side, sometimes he had to be a vamp first. Maybe this was one of those times.

  Eve jacked up her black eyebrows another half inch in answer.

  “Okay,” Claire finally said. “I admit, he has significant ninja qualities.”

  “Booyah. I will summon the ninja. Oh, and take a lunch break while we burgle.”

  “You’re going, too?”

  “Am I not ninja enough? Are you saying that I lack ninja?”

  “No, I was just thinking you’re a little, uh, recognizable, maybe?”

  Eve batted her thick eyelashes. “Why, thank you, sweetie. That’s the nicest insult I’ve had today, not counting the jock who said he’d date me but he had a restraining order out for necrophilia. I promise, I’ll dowdy up for the occasion. It’ll take me five minutes.” She took her cell out of her pocket and texted as she spoke. “Promise me you won’t leave without me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Want me to organize Shane into this posse, too?”

  “He’s at work.” Claire sighed. She would have gladly had Shane added to the mix at this point, but he was already on fragile ground at work, considering he’d ditched twice this month—once for a legitimate sick day, but the other had been just plain boredom. “Next time we commit crime, we’ll make sure to include him.”

  Eve held up one fist while she kept typing with one thumb, and Claire tapped it. Eve finished with a flurry of keystrokes, snapped the phone shut, and drained her coffee. “Right. Mikey’s on the way. I’ll be anti-Eve in five. Enjoy your mocha.”

  Claire did, drinking fast. It was a good thing she did, because in just about five minutes, Michael was walking through the big UC open hall outside the coffee area, a guitar case slung over his back. He should have drawn attention—Michael was just plain gorgeous, and girls looked—but he was walking with his shoulders slumped, hands in his pants pockets, looking down, and the whole aura just projected Don’t look at me so strongly that Claire couldn’t see a single person other than herself actually taking notice of him.

  He slid onto a seat next to her, leaning the guitar case against the table. “So, now we’re going to be actual criminals,” he said.

  “And, see, you brought a guitar.”

  He gave her a look. “I was on my way to practice.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks.”

  “Sounds like I didn’t have much of a choice. This guy has vampire blood?”

  “I guess so.
Larkin was using it for some experiment. I suppose it was authorized.”

  “Larkin? Had to be. He wouldn’t dare do it on the side.” Michael nudged her empty mocha cup with a fingertip. “Where’s Eve?”

  “Right here, Ninja with Fangs.” Eve leaned over behind him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him right over the cool blue veins. “Claire said I had to go in disguise as a regular person.”

  And she had. Eve had scrubbed off every trace of her Goth persona and tied her black hair back in a tight ponytail. She’d changed into a plain black hoodie—one without skulls or symbols, so Claire could only figure she’d raided someone else’s locker for it. The only thing left to indicate she wasn’t like every other college-age girl on campus were the thick-soled boots she was wearing. Still, those weren’t all that noticeable. She’d even thrown on an old pair of blue jeans.

  “Wow. We really are stealthy now,” Claire said, and shut her computer. “Can we store stuff in the back?”

  “Sure, my locker has an actual lock.”

  Claire raised her eyebrows and tugged the cord of the black hoodie. “And you keep this in it?”

  “I didn’t say that the locks couldn’t be picked. But actually my good buddy Edie never locks hers, anyway. Come on, let’s get the storage taken care of.”

  In the end, they left Michael’s guitar, Claire’s backpack (with laptop), and pretty much everything else behind, as Eve set up the lunch break sign on the counter and locked up the register. In a surprisingly short time, they were headed out again. Michael had brought a leather hat, which looked kind of sloppy-cool and shaded his face and neck. He kept his hands in his pockets.

  “You’re not as sensitive anymore,” Claire said. “To the sun, I mean.” Because when Michael had first been venturing out, he’d had to drape himself in a blanket to keep from burning.

  “Well, it’s cloudy,” he pointed out. It was; there were ominous dark masses in the sky, and the sun had disappeared behind the curtain. “And I’ve got on two layers. But, yeah, it’s better now than it was.” He said it as if he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, which was strange. Claire supposed that becoming more stable meant he also felt more like a vampire. “I’ll be okay unless the sun comes out full strength again.”