'And a rarer one that sees you brought low, Lady Grey. A brave act. Very brave.'

'Foolish, if the boy doesn't make it,' she said. 'Oh, bother it, leave my hand alone. The silver's still burning, but it'll pass. I'm too old for it to do much more damage.'

'You don't look a day over a thousand,' Myrnin said. My God, Claire thought. Was he actually flirting? Well, if he was, she couldn't really blame him. Jesse was ... kind of a stunner.

Michael was trying to sit up on the sofa, something Shane and Eve were trying to prevent; Claire joined them, and when it became clear that 'no' was not a viable option, she helped prop him upright. 'Hey,' she said to him, 'weren't you supposed to stop trouble, and not be so much in the middle of it?'

'Best laid plans,' Michael said, and coughed. It had an alarmingly wet sound. Eve grabbed a handful of tissues from a box on the coffee table, and when he stopped coughing and took them away from his mouth, they were soaked in fresh, red blood. But he seemed to be feeling better. 'I think that might have been about as close as I could have come to dead.'

'Just about,' Shane agreed. 'You ever heard of someone putting a silver injector inside a stake before?'

'Never,' Michael said, 'but it seems like a damn great idea, except when it's in my chest.'

'Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking.' Shane squeezed his shoulder and crouched down to eye level. 'You good, bro?'

'I'm good. And it's good to see you've kept up the tradition of getting the holy shit beat out of you, even when you're in a nice, civilised place.'

'It was not my fault.'

Michael just shook his head. He still looked very pale, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He was holding Eve's hand, and he tugged on it, bringing her down to whisper in her ear. She nodded and turned to Pete - who was still standing exactly where he'd been, looking utterly overtaken by what had crashed in on them. As well he might, Claire thought. He'd been worried about sexed-up sheets, and suddenly there were wounded vampires and a big splash of silver dripping down his brick wall. Even for someone who'd known Jesse, this sudden onslaught of the undead might be a little tough to handle.

'Excuse me,' Eve said to him. 'Do you have any, ah, plasma? In bags?'

Pete gave her a blank look, and finally just turned around and walked to the armchair. He sat down, put his head in his hands and checked out of the current reality.

'Guess that's a no,' Eve said. 'All right. Sorry, you guys, but he needs to feed, and I'm going to volunteer a vein. So if you're squeamish, turn around.'

Claire did, not so much because she was faint at the sight of blood, but because it seemed uncomfortably intimate to her. Shane turned, too, and took a look around the room. Oliver was examining the remains of the wooden stake, though he was being very careful not to touch any of the remaining silver leaking out of it. Myrnin and Jesse seemed to be very cosy. 'Well,' Shane said, 'at least we're not alone on the run any more. Apparently, the cops may be the least of our worries right now.' He put his arm around her waist and pulled her closer, and she willingly went. 'You all right?'

'Fine,' she said, and shivered. 'That was sudden. And intense.'

'I think Pete's having a migraine. And I'm not sure the silver's coming out of his rug, either.'

Jesse had climbed to her feet before he'd finished the sentence, and she walked to the small bathroom and came back in a moment with a thick roll of gauze bandage. She carried it to Myrnin and held it out with her eyebrows raised. 'Do you mind?' she asked him.

He bowed a little, took the gauze, and held her hand steady as he wrapped the bandages. He was good at it, Claire realised; he'd definitely had lots of practice at treating injuries, and for this one, it didn't matter whether it was a vampire or human. The bandages were all the same. He ripped one end of the gauze in two, wrapped it snugly, and tied it off; that, Claire was sure, came from experience in eras where such things as sticky tape had yet to be invented. Once he was done, he smoothed the bandages down, and his hand lingered on hers.

Jesse gave him a slow, bright smile, and Myrnin's pale cheeks reddened, just a touch. He let go. 'All better,' he said. 'My lady.'

'My lord,' she said, and did a pretty fair curtsy, considering she was wearing blue jeans and a low-cut black knit shirt. Her dark red braid swung forward over her shoulder in a thick rope, and as she looked up through her eyelashes at him, Claire thought that Jesse had probably practised the art of flirting for at least a few hundred years. Poor Myrnin.

He was definitely outclassed, and way out of practice, because he cleared his throat and turned his back on her - not the most graceful end to that conversation - and said, 'Claire. With me.'

She automatically moved to follow him as he headed for the kitchen, but Shane didn't let go of her; his strong grip pulled her to a halt, and Claire looked up at him, frowning.

'I'll be okay,' she said. What she saw in his face was not jealousy, or worry, or anything like that; it was caution, pure and simple. This was all wildly strange, today. She understood exactly how he felt, wanting to slow it down and make things a little more understandable. 'Let me talk to him and see if I can make sense of any of this.'

'You're talking to Myrnin,' Shane said. 'I think that might be a little too much to ask.' But he let her go, and she followed her friend, her boss and her headache into the little kitchen area. She glanced over at Michael and Eve as she did so; he'd finished drinking from Eve's wrist, and was using the leftover gauze from Jesse to put a neat bandage around the small wound. The look in his eyes as he watched Eve's face was vulnerable, grateful and more than a little heartbreaking.

Anybody who believed vampires couldn't feel things like living people did had never met Michael Glass.

They got as far from the others as it was possible to be, within the walls of Pete's small apartment, and Claire tried to put at least a few feet between her and Myrnin. Ugh. Where had he been hanging out, the city dump? But it was clear that hygiene wasn't his biggest issue at the moment, from the fiery intensity of his gaze on her. 'You and Irene,' Myrnin began. 'What have you done?'

Claire was taken aback, because she hadn't expected him to accuse her like that. 'Nothing!' she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. She knew it looked defensive, and she didn't care. 'You're the one who told me to work with her, Myrnin, so don't blame me if something's gone wrong in all this. I just wanted to come to college!'

'And it's working out so well!' he said. 'I trusted Irene implicitly. She has been my agent here in the world for some time, and she has helped conceal our true nature from those who come looking.'

'Like the government?'

Myrnin didn't answer that. He couldn't stand still, and now he stopped moving uneasily from one foot to another to move toward the counter and restlessly open and close the drawers. Claire caught a glimpse of random junk in one, forks and spoons in another. He wasn't looking for anything, he just needed to fidget. 'Irene has always had ties to the federal government,' he said. 'But that never concerned us directly, until recently.'

'Just tell me what happened! What made you leave Morganville and come all the way out here in the first place? I know Oliver was already on the road - did you run into him, or did he find you?'

'That is a great many questions in a row. Oh, look, he has peanut butter. Do you like peanut butter?'

'Myrnin!'

'But it's crunchy ...' She stared at him with inarticulate frustration, and he put the jar back in the pantry and closed the door. There were some rubber bands dangling from the knob, so he picked a couple off and began playing with them. That was good. It would be less distracting, for both of them. 'I left Morganville because I intercepted a communication that claimed to be able to prove, without any doubt, the existence of vampires in the world.'

'Oh, God, Myrnin, did you find this on the Internet? Because you can't believe everything that's on there.'

'I know that! And no, I did not believe it. Not at first. But this was no excitable fan of films posting to his friends; it was a doctor, who was preparing a scholarly paper. It was a Google alert, by the way.' He seemed ridiculously pleased that he had figured out how to set one. 'He was located in Boston. I felt there had to be some reason that such a revelation would be located so close to Irene, and I phoned her. She did not answer.'

'People do that sometimes. It doesn't mean-'

'I sent you here, Claire. I sent you to Irene, for safety. And I was afraid ... I was afraid that she might have betrayed us. Perhaps even accidentally. If word of vampires was out, and taken seriously, then it would only be a matter of time before word of Morganville would be circulated as well. We control these kinds of events; we must, or be wiped from the earth. Normally Oliver would have dispatched agents to see to it, but Oliver was, ah, indisposed ...'

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