Both Richard and Hannah looked at him with identical expressions of What did you just say? “Well,” Hannah said, “I know we can hurt them with silver, but—”

“Not silver,” Myrnin said. “Silver only wounds them, and it can’t kill Magnus, though it can certainly make him very unhappy. No indeed. The boy’s right. We can kill them.” He dashed off, and came back with his hands full of the blackened mass—well, not his hands, because even Myrnin wasn’t nuts enough to actually pick up the draug with his bare skin. It was actually dumped into Claire’s abandoned cowboy hat. He shook it, and it jiggled like gelatin.

Lifelessly. Bits of it flaked away.

“What the …?” Hannah bent forward over the hat, then reeled back, hand to her nose. “Oh, man. That smells like a weeklong floater.”

Claire looked at Shane. “What’s a floater?”

“Dead body,” he said. “You don’t want to know, trust me.” His gaze lingered on her, as if he was still in doubt that she was okay.

Or there.

She stripped off the nitrile gloves and gripped his hand tight and fast. He sent her a fast, unsteady smile.

“What is it?” Richard asked. He was staying well back from what was in the hat, but he took a pen from his pocket and poked it into the mass. No reaction. “I mean, what caused this?”

“Chemicals. Janitorial chemicals, to be precise. Young Shane here thought of it.” That was generous of Myrnin to say so, Claire thought; Shane seemed surprised, too. “It’s led me to think of a few other things that might work as well, but this is surprisingly effective.”

Shane’s pride, however cautious and concealed, was catching; Claire caught the gleam of it in Hannah’s face, and Richard’s, too. No, not pride. Hope. A rare commodity in Morganville.

“There’s a full barrel of it in the trunk of the sedan,” Myrnin said. “We’ll need to get it in yours, quickly.” As if to emphasize that, the clouds overhead gave another ominous rumble; he flinched, moved vampire-speed to the black sedan, and popped the trunk open by breaking the lock with a sharp pull of his fingers. He and Michael wrestled the barrel out, but allowed Shane and Hannah to help him roll it over to the police car.

Richard stayed with Claire. He glanced at her, raised his eyebrows, and said, “What’s with the biohazard suit?”

Oh. She’d forgotten about it, actually. “The sprinklers were on,” she said. “The draug were waiting out here for us. I had to have some kind of protection.”

“Good thinking.” Richard wasn’t really listening to her, though; he was watching Hannah as she helped Myrnin and Michael muscle the drum into the trunk of the police car. It didn’t fit quite as well as it had in the vampmobile. There was something kind of sad about the way he was looking at Hannah … as if he wanted something he knew he could never really have. Though he did have her, didn’t he? Maybe?