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more than usual. "Did you win?"He smiled, but it was a private, almost cynical kind of smile--a joke she couldn't share. "Oh, I will," he said. "Big-time."The door banged open at the far end of the room, and the prof stalked in. He was a short, round man with mean, close-set eyes, and he liked Hawaiian shirts in obnoxiously loud colors--in fact, she was relatively sure that he and Myrnin shopped at the same store. The Obnoxious Store."Settle down!" he said, even though they weren't exactly the rowdiest class at TPU. In fact, they were perfectly quiet. But Professor Larkin always said that; Claire suspected he was actually deaf, so he just said it to be on the safe side. "Right. I hope you've all done your reading, because today you get to do some applications of principles you should already know. Everybody stand up, shake it off, and follow me. Bring your stuff."Claire hadn't bothered to unpack anything yet, so she just swung her backpack onto her shoulder and headed out in Professor Larkin's wake, happy to be temporarily out of the Doug fug. Not that Larkin was any treat, either--he smelled like old sweat and bacon--but at least he'd bathed recently. She glanced down at the professor's wrist. On it was a braided leather band with a metal plate incised with a symbol--not the Founder symbol Claire wore as a pin on the collar of her jacket, but another vampire's symbol. Oliver's, apparently. That was a little unusual; Oliver didn't personally oversee a lot of humans. He was above all that. He was the don in the local Morganville Mafia. Larkin saw her looking and sent her a stern frown. "Something to say, Miss Danvers?""Nice bracelet," she said. "I've seen only one other like it." The one she'd seen had been around the wrist of her own personal nemesis, Monica Morrell, crown princess (she wished!) of Morganville. Once the daughter of the mayor, now the sister of the new mayor, she thought she could do whatever she wanted...and with Oliver's Protection, she probably could, even if her brother, Richard, wasn't quite as indulgent as Daddy had been. Larkin just...didn't seem the type Oliver would bother with, unless he wasn't what he seemed. Larkin clasped his hands behind his back as they walked down the wide, almost empty hallway, the rest of the class trailing behind. "I ought to give you a pass from today's experiment," he said. "Confidentially, I'm pretty sure it's child's play for you, given your...part-time occupation."He knew about Myrnin, or at least he'd been told something . There weren't many people who actually knew Myrnin, and fewer still who'd been to the lab and had any understanding of what went on in there. She'd never seen Larkin there or heard his name mentioned by anybody with clout. So she was careful with her reply."I don't mind. I like experiments," she said. "Providing they're not the kind that try to eat me or blow me up." Both of which, unfortunately, she'd come across in her job at the lab."Oh, nothing that dramatic," Larkin said. "But I think you might enjoy it."That scared her a bit. As she arrived at the lab room, though, there didn't seem to be anything worth breaking a sweat over. Some full-spectrum incandescent lights like you'd use to keep reptiles warm; on each table, some small, ranked vials of what looked like......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 creped 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.

chapter 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 mid afternoon. 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