Free Kiss of Death by Rachel Caine

ten bucks.” Monica’s glare reached nuclear levels, but since Oliver was still sitting there, she dug in her tiny purse, found a crumpled ten-dollar bill, and flung it over the table to Claire. She smoothed it out, smiled, and put it in her pocket.
    “If you’re quite finished,” Oliver said. “Leave. Monica, go first. I won’t have you doing anything messy. I’m not your maid.”
    Monica sent him a look that was definitely not a glare; it was much more scared than angry. She picked up her purse, the coffee, and stalked to the door. She didn’t look back as she piled into her convertible and burned rubber pulling out.
    “One of these days,” Oliver said, still looking toward the street, “you’re going to be too clever for your own good, Claire. You do realize that.”
    She did, actually. But sometimes, it was just impossible to do anything else.
    “I guess you’re coming with us tonight?”
    Oliver turned his head to look at her this time, and there was something so cold and distant in his eyes that she shivered. “Did you hear me when I told you to leave? I don’t like being used to settle your problems.”
    She swallowed, picked up her stuff, and left.
    The afternoon was spent with Myrnin at his freaky mad-scientist lab, which was actually much nicer after the renovations he’d done: new equipment; computers; nice bookcases; decent lighting instead of crazy turn-of-last-century things that emitted sparks when you tried to turn them off or on.
    Still, no matter how nice the decor, Myrnin was never less than half crazy. He was under pressure from Amelie, Claire knew; with the death—could computers die?—of Ada, the town’s master computer; he was struggling to figure out a way to make a replacement, but without putting a human brain into it, which Claire strongly discouraged, seeing how well that had worked out with Ada, and the fact that Claire herself was almost certainly the next candidate.
    “Computers,” Myrnin said, then shoved the laptop she’d put out for him aside and glared at it as if it had personally insulted him. “The technology is entirely idiotic. Who built this? Baboons?”
    “It works fine,” Claire said, and took command of the computer to bring up the interface she’d designed. “All you have to do is explain to me how Ada was connected into the portal and security systems, and I can build some kind of connector. You can run it right from this screen. See?” She’d even gotten an art student at the school to design the interface in a steampunky kind of way, which she thought would make him feel more at home. Myrnin continued to frown at it, but in a less aggressive way. “Try it. Just touch the screen.”
    He reached out with one fingertip and pressed the screen over the icon of the shield. The security screen came up, all rusted iron and ornamental gears. He made a humming sound in the back of his throat and pressed again. “And this would control the programming.”
    “Yeah, it’s GUI—a graphic user interface.”
    “And this program would be able to detect vampires and humans, and treat them differently?”
    “Yeah. We just use heat-sensing technology. Vampires have a lower body temperature. It’s easy to tell the difference.”
    “Can it be cheated?”
    Claire shrugged. “Anything can be cheated. But it’s pretty good.”
    “And the memory alteration?”
    That was a problem—a big problem. “I don’t think you can actually do that with a computer. I mean, isn’t that some kind of vampire mind thing?” Because Ada had, in fact, been a vampire. And the machine that Myrnin had built to keep her brain alive had somehow allowed her to broadcast that vampire power on a wide field. Claire didn’t really understand it, but she knew it worked— had worked.
    “That’s a rather large failure. What’s this?” Myrnin tapped an icon that had a radar screen icon. Nothing happened.
    “That’s an early-warning system, to monitor approaches to town. In