by Rachel Caine
“It does,” she admitted. “But there are a few hundred vampires trapped in that mall on the edge of town, and they can’t stay there forever. What do you think the Daylighters intend to do with them long term?”
“Fallon says he’s going to make sure they’re safe, and I believe him,” Simonds said. “Look, I worked with some vampires, and they were good people—okay, blood drinkers, but they never hurt anybody. In fact, the ones I worked with sometimes put their lives on the line to save regular people. I know vampires aren’t just monsters; they can be good or bad, just like us. But fact is, they’re not natural, and a good percentage of them don’t have any kind of conscience. You can’t argue with that.”
She couldn’t. She knew a lot of the vamps were dangerous; some were outright awful and needed to be locked up forever. Some were self-interested to a sociopathic degree, and many of them wouldn’t see much wrong with killing someone who was in their way. Vampires didn’t become vampires by being squeamish . . . or selfless.
But that didn’t mean they deserved death. And she suspected—no, really, she knew—that ultimately that was the answer Fallon had. Death. Ridding the world of vampires forever—and everything supernatural, like the Founder Houses. Like Miranda.
“You want some more coffee?” Claire asked. He’d drained his cup quickly. Simonds nodded, his expression still and unreadable. He had a nice face, long and thin, with a smooth dark chocolate skin tone and warm brown eyes, and under other circumstances he might have been a friend.
But not now.
She filled his mug again, and realized that she’d been avoiding looking at the kitchen pantry. That was probably the kind of giveaway he was watching for, she thought, so she put the coffeepot back on the burner, walked to the pantry, opened it, and got out another bag of coffee beans. She put it up in the cabinet above the coffeemaker.
“How old is this house?” he asked her. She could hear rummaging upstairs now—Kentworth, going through her bedroom. Claire felt an angry flush in her cheeks, and sat down hard in her chair to clutch her coffee mug. She didn’t like the idea of someone pawing through her things, meager as they might be. And ridiculously, she hated the idea of him seeing the still-messy bed where she and Shane had spent the night. That felt really intrusive and creepy. “This is one of the Founder Houses, right?”
“One of the original thirteen,” she said. “I think only a few of them are still left now.”
“Beautiful place,” he said. “All original construction?”
She immediately felt as if a trap was looming, and covered her pause with a sip of coffee. “No idea,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t been here that long, you know.” She knew that people tended to underestimate her—she was small, and young, and could look very innocent when she wanted to . . . and Simonds didn’t know her very well.
But she could tell that he wasn’t buying it, and as he opened his mouth to ask her something else, probably something a lot more intrusive, he was interrupted by Halling’s sharp voice on the other side of the kitchen door. “Detective! Better come see this!”
He got to his feet fast, the friendly surface of him immediately gone; what was left was all serious business. He pointed at her. “Stay here,” he said, and shoved through the door to join Officer Halling. There was muffled conversation. Claire tried to listen, but she couldn’t quite make anything out . . . and then she heard his footsteps coming back and she retreated fast, to stand next to the kitchen table.
Simonds shoved the door open and gestured for her to join him. She didn’t like the grim look on his face—not at all.
Halling had found something in the basement. As Simonds led the way down the narrow steps into the chilly concrete room where they kept the washer and dryer and the dust-shrouded shelves of storage from generations back, Claire’s mind raced. What could they have forgotten? Shane and Eve were both known to stash things and forget them; what if Shane had overlooked a cache of weapons he’d meant to hide? That wouldn’t be good.
And then she spotted what Halling had found. It wasn’t weapons.
There was a dead body on the floor of their basement.
It was one of the mall cops that had let them in to see Michael. There was a knife sticking out of his chest, a silver-coated one—and it looked familiar. They had lots of those around the house; Shane silver-plated everything for use as anti-vamp weapons.
Claire stopped on the steps and grabbed for the handrail; she felt light-headed, and suddenly needed to sit down and just breathe. It seemed impossible. It was impossible. How in the hell had this man gotten here, gotten in, been killed? She hadn’t done it, and she knew Shane and Eve hadn’t. Couldn’t have.
“He wasn’t killed here. There’s not enough blood,” Halling said, crouching down next to the corpse. The man’s eyes were open and covered with a gray film, and he looked unreal, like a department store dummy. “He’d been dead a few hours, at most.”
“Find out how long he’s been missing,” Simonds said. “And make sure the other guards on the vampires at the mall are still safe. Go!”
Halling headed for the stairs, and Claire scrambled out of the way as the officer’s long legs pushed past. She felt sick and weightless, as if she were falling into an endless black hole. What the hell was going on?
She took out her phone as Simonds moved to inspect the body, and quietly texted Shane not to come home. He sent back a question mark. She replied with an exclamation point, and then quickly put the phone away before Simonds caught sight of it.
“Do you know this man?” he asked her. She shook her head.
“I’ve seen him,” she said. “I saw him at the mall, where they were keeping the vampires. But I don’t know him.”
“Any explanation for why he’d be dead in your basement, Miss Danvers?”
She could only shake her head again. She didn’t have any idea what else to say. Simonds sighed, stood up, and took out his cell phone to make a call. He requested additional units, and a forensic kit—Morganville wasn’t big enough to have an actual forensic team—and then looked up at her. He seemed sorry, she thought. But not very.
“Stand up,” he told her. “Come down to the floor.”
She did stand up, but in that moment she realized that if she let him arrest her, she’d have no chance at all to clear herself. Fallon might well have arranged this—a plot to put them all behind bars and get them out of his way.
She couldn’t take that chance.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached in her pocket and brought out the round shape in her pocket. She yanked the pull ring and tossed the thing down the stairs toward where he stood. “Grenade!”
Shane was right. Nobody waited to see what happened when they heard that word.
She dashed up the steps, and hit the door at the top just as there was a muffled whump below. She looked down to see a cloud of thick white powder spreading over everything, as if she’d thrown a giant bag of flour. Simonds, who’d taken cover at the far end of the basement in a crouch behind an old freezer, coughed and fanned the air as the stuff settled on him.
He was okay.
“Danvers!” he yelled, and drew his pistol from under his coat as he swiped at his face to clear his eyes. “Stop where you are!”
She was committed now, and she ran.
The house slammed and locked the basement door for her; she headed toward the front door, but heard footsteps ahead—one of the other cops. It didn’t really matter which anymore; either one would probably shoot her as a fleeing suspect.
She crashed through the kitchen door, heading straight for the back entrance; it flew open ahead of her, and she felt a giant shove at her back as if the house itself was pushing her out.
She felt the bullet pass by her before she actually heard the shot. It was a tiny shock wave beside her waist, close enough that it left her feeling scorched.
The door slammed behind her and locked tight before the officer—whichever one it was—could draw a bead f
or a second shot.
She tumbled down the steps and rolled to her feet, then ran for the back fence. She knew it was wobbly at the corner, and she shoved it out, then squeezed through into the narrow, dirty alley. A lady watering plants in another yard gaped at her, and asked her something in a sharp, urgent voice, but Claire didn’t pause.
She just ran.
She made it as far as the end of the alley before a police cruiser blocked her off with a burst of flashing lights and a sharp blare of siren. Claire skidded to a halt, backpedaled, and turned to flee the other way, but it was cut off, too.
A dusty Detective Simonds was squeezing through the hole in the fence, and he had his gun aimed right at her. “Stop,” he said. “Claire, don’t make this ugly. You’ve got nowhere to go.”
He was right. It could only go wrong now.
She put her hands up.
“Walk to the fence. Lean against it, hands above your head.”
She thought she was going to be sick, but she did it, and he at least warned her before he put his hands on her and began patting her down for any weapons. She answered his questions about concealed weapons and sharp objects without really noting what she said; her mind was racing in a blinding blur, and she thought she was probably just a couple of breaths away from passing out. He read her some rights, and she numbly agreed that she understood.
Then he took her wrists down from the prickly wooden fence and clicked on handcuffs, and she caught her breath on a sob.
But I didn’t do anything.
Shane would have warned her that for people who lived in the Glass House, that hardly ever mattered.
FIVE
It took half an hour for her head to clear, and by that time she’d been taken in the back of a squad car from the house to City Hall. The jail was one floor down in the basement of the Gothic castle structure, where they booked her with calm efficiency. She didn’t talk. She didn’t really think she could, honestly. There was no one else in the cells with her, but Simonds posted a uniformed guard outside her bars anyway—as a precaution, he said, though he wasn’t specific about what he was expecting.
“I didn’t do anything,” she finally told him, as he got ready to leave her. “Detective, I didn’t. None of us even knew that man was down there!”
“I’ll take your statement later,” he told her. It wasn’t unkind, just calm and brisk and a little disinterested, as if he’d already written her off as a lost cause. “Tell me where your boyfriend and Eve have gone, and we can talk about how I can help you out.”
“I don’t know where they are.” She didn’t, actually. The police had taken her cell, and she hoped Shane had heeded her text, run for cover, and turned off his phone. She desperately hoped he’d thought to warn Eve, too. Miranda could conceal herself easily, but Eve stood out like a sore thumb, and so did Shane in his muscle car. Both knew Morganville well, so they’d have places to go to ground. But still—she worried.
Simonds said, “I hope you think hard about telling me where they are, because if we can’t find them, you’re on the hook by yourself, Claire. I don’t want to see that happen any more than you do. Fact is, you saw the victim alive, and just a few hours later he was stabbed, moved, and dumped in your own basement. Seems pretty straightforward. Maybe you thought you could smuggle Eve’s husband out of the mall and something went wrong. . . . Look, it’s perfectly okay to want to save your friend. Maybe you thought he was in real danger. Maybe Mr. Thackery—that’s his name, by the way, the dead man in your basement—maybe he tried to stop you. Could have been self-defense, I know that.”
She shut up, because his calm, friendly tone frightened her. He was good at drawing things out of people, even things that they didn’t mean; she knew too many things that implicated her already, and one wrong statement could bring Shane and Eve into it, too. Better to be silent until she could figure out what the hell was going on.
He took her silence well enough, brought her some bottled water, promised some food, and left. The policewoman stationed outside the door—not Halling, thankfully, because Claire honestly couldn’t stand the sight of her—had a Daylighter symbol on her collar, but she didn’t seem inclined to chat or judge. She dragged a chair over and sat down to read a magazine instead.
Claire drank her water without tasting it, then stretched out on the narrow, hard bunk. After a few moments, she wrapped the blanket around her shivering body and finally closed her eyes. Just to think.
She woke up in the dark.
Her breath stopped in her throat, because it was too dark, even if she’d slept through sunset. All the lights were off in the hall beyond her cell, and she heard something metallic scrape just before the cell door swung open with a horror-movie creak. Claire fought her way free of the rough blanket and stood up, ready to fight. But she didn’t need to.
She had a visitor.
It was Myrnin.
He was dressed in clean clothes that were at least two sizes too large for him, and probably scavenged from a clothesline or an unattended Laundromat dryer. Even picking from someone else’s clothes, he’d managed to make it a peculiarly Myrnin ensemble of a tie-dyed T-shirt under a bright orange hoodie and khaki cargo shorts. Evidently nobody had been washing shoes, because he was wearing a pair of plastic flip-flops that he must have found in the trash; they looked like they’d seen better days in the previous decade, and they were also too large for his feet. On the plus side, he was at least wearing shoes.
“Well,” he said, and gave her a slow, delighted smile. “This is something I didn’t expect. You, behind bars. What a turnaround.”
“How did you get out?” Her eyes widened, because he was still wearing the shock collar around his neck, like a particularly ugly statement necklace. “Didn’t they stun you?”
“Oh, yes, many times,” he said. “Some of us don’t really mind that sort of thing as much. If they’d been equipped with your devious little invention, then that would have been a different story altogether.” The weapon he was talking about had the ability to destroy a vampire’s ability to fight back, and she hated the thought that she was responsible for creating it. She was, and she had to own it, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. “I presume Fallon is still having our traitorous friend Dr. Anderson construct new models, so they haven’t had a chance to fully outfit their guards quite yet. Lucky for me.”
“Are you—are you the only one who—”
“Got out?” Myrnin finished. He leaned against the bars as if they had all the time in the world. She remembered the cop stationed outside the door, and in the faint emergency lighting she made out the shape of the woman crumpled on the floor next to her overturned chair. “I fear so. Oliver has made several brave attempts, but he doesn’t really have the skill at ignoring pain that I do. I think it’s bothering him a delightful amount. He did cover for my escape, though, for which I suppose I have to be grateful.”
She couldn’t really keep track of what he was saying, because she was now worried about the policewoman. He’d moved so fast and decisively, and the woman wasn’t moving. “Did you—is she—?”
“Oh, bother, don’t make that face, Claire. No, I didn’t kill the wretched woman, I only knocked her out. I know how you feel about such things. Though she does smell delicious.”
“No biting,” she warned him.
“As always, I am at your command.” He said it in a way that made it very clear he wasn’t, not at all. “Come on, then, unless you enjoy being put on trial for a murder you did not commit.”
“How do you know about the murder?”
There was a tiny shift of his balance, but his expression didn’t change. “I’ve spoken to Shane. He witnessed you being taken away by our overenthusiastic detective. Lucky for your young man, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor.”
“Is he okay?”
“Well, I’m fairly sure our definitions of that word vary considerably, dear Claire, but he seemed to be breathing and ambulatory, though
understandably angry.”
She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of the ugly, blocky shock collar around his neck. “Does it hurt?”
“This?” He touched the shock collar, eyebrows raised. “I’m out of range. It does chafe a bit, if that doesn’t make me seem pathetic.”
“Do you want me to—take it off?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll need it later, and if you break the seal it will sound a very noisy alert and activate an explosive that would remove both my head and your hands, which I think we can both agree would be undesirable.”
“Wait, what? Explosives?”
“Don’t worry, they won’t go off unless they’re triggered by someone trying to remove it without the appropriate tools. Besides, I must go back tonight before they miss me, which means the collar must be intact. Oh, and my head. They’d notice.”
“But—”
“We are in the middle of a prison break! Come on, now, don’t dally. Do you have any baggage?”
“It’s a prison, Myrnin, not a hotel.”
“Well, modern prisons are so much nicer these days, one never knows,” he said, and marched out of the cell and down the corridor, stepping over the fallen policewoman with his oversized flip-flops dangling precariously. “Come on, then.”
She hesitated for a second, because as bad as her situation was, she wasn’t sure that going with Myrnin wouldn’t end up worse . . . but there wasn’t much choice, really.
She stepped outside the cell, and became a fugitive.
Myrnin led her to the stairs, bypassing the elevator. As they jogged up, he said, “I’ve cut the power to the building, by the way. Oh, come now, move along—your somewhat strange little friend is anxiously waiting.”
“My—wait, who?”
He shrugged. “The ghost girl. She seems to find me quite alarming, and she was hardly able to manifest herself at all to explain to me where to find you. I think she’s afraid I’ll try to bite her. I believe she may have, you know, mental issues.” He made an unmistakable circle at his temple, and Claire just stared at him in dumb amazement. That isn’t just pot, meet kettle, she thought. That’s the whole chef’s rack. “Oh, and I also knocked out several people on several different floors, including Mayor Ramos and her assistant. I thought that might nicely confuse the issues while we make our clever escape.”