‘I’m not sure it does. I mean, it does something, but not necessarily what I want it to do, yet. The goal is to be able to tune in to a specific vampire broadcast emotion – like hunger – and cancel it out. Make the vampire not hungry. Theoretically, it could stop an attack, or at least drastically slow it down and lessen the intensity.’ She swallowed hard, because she had Anderson’s full and unwavering attention now. ‘In theory, it should also be able to cancel out the specific projections that vampires can do to make other people obey them on command, wipe out memories, etc. It levels the playing field. That’s why I called it VLAD.’

‘You think that it would stop them from attacking someone.’

‘Or at least slow them down – at the very least, it would throw them off balance. And it’s possible that it would seriously disable them.’

‘Permanently?’

‘I don’t know about that. Probably temporary?’

‘What trials have you run?’

‘Not many,’ Claire admitted. ‘I used it on Myrnin kind of accidentally, but he didn’t give me a lot of feedback about it. I think it disturbed him, though. Right now, I’m just calibrating the device to try to locate the specific wavelengths where vampire powers resonate. If I can pin that down, the theory is that I can then create a counter-wave to cancel them.’

‘So when a vampire projects fear at his prey – which is one of their key hunting abilities – it would nullify that.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t stop you from being afraid. I mean, vampires are scary all on their own. But they have a way of pushing you from fear into panic.’

‘And their mental abilities – to conceal themselves, to cloud memories, to compel people to do things …’

Not every vampire had any of those abilities, and as far as Claire had been able to tell, none of the vampires, not even the very strongest like Amelie, had all of them in equal measure. But she nodded. ‘Theoretically, it should work,’ she said. ‘But there’s a power problem to solve, and right now VLAD is way too heavy and bulky. Some of that is Myrnin’s attempt to help me. He likes – gears.’

‘Always has,’ Anderson agreed, with a smile that was almost fond. ‘First things first – we deconstruct, we test each piece of it, design more streamlined versions … and we construct a simulation to run in the array to show us exactly what the response is. Once we do that, we test it on a live subject, but not before.’

‘On a vampire? For that, we’d have to go back to Morganville.’