I checked the door and the ceiling and the corners. I didn’t see any cameras watching us, but I didn’t think I could rely on privacy; tech had gotten way too good for that. We’d been spied on once by someone we’d thought of – wrongly – as a friend, and I wasn’t about to spill my plans, such as they were, to Douche Bag Davis and his friends.

I was scared for Claire. Heart-stoppingly scared. She was all alone, surrounded by wolves who could take her down at any time, and the only thing she had to use was her guts, and her wits.

Fully armed, then. But it still scared me.

I put my hands in my pants pockets and slouched, like any street corner punk. Give me a backward cap and saggies and a sports jersey, and I’d have nailed the whole look. But it wasn’t just attitude. It gave me the chance to figure out what Eve had managed to shove down my pants – a thing that I wasn’t going to tell Claire about, incidentally.

It was a piece of rusted metal, probably some kind of flange to hold the sink drain in. About four inches long, jagged on the end. As weapons went, it was jailhouse-nasty. Pretty much perfect, actually. Too bad I hadn’t gotten a bathroom trip; there must have been plenty of other opportunities in there for fun mayhem-makers. You could kill somebody with a bar of soap, if you tried hard enough.

‘So,’ Eve murmured, head down so any cameras wouldn’t see her talking. ‘What’s our play, then?’

‘Still hating me?’ I talked to my shoes, too, and kept it quiet, in case there were microphones as well as cameras.

‘It’ll take a little bit longer for the burn to go away, yeah. Why? Am I hurting your little tender feelings?’

Yes, I thought, but I said, ‘Bitch, please. You know I ain’t got no feelings.’

‘About that plan?’

‘Yeah, about that,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’re going to have to kill me.’

‘Goody.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

What have I done?

It kept running through Claire’s mind at breakneck speed, over and over … that moment when Anderson had pulled the trigger, and the Myrnin she knew had just disappeared. What was left was a crying, shaking wreck of a man who didn’t even seem to be a vampire, just a shattered relic of a human being. If she’d passed him in a doorway, she would have assumed he was a homeless, mentally disturbed wreck.

Which, technically, she guessed he was. And she’d done it to him.