by Rachel Caine
But she wasn’t so sure. She’d counted on a vampire who’d back down, not one who was the poster child for unbalanced. Time for a shift of strategy.
Claire put down the stake. She needed both hands as she unzipped her backpack and reached inside to the inner pocket.
Jason decided it was the perfect time to make his move. He was fast, she had to give him that, but so was she, and she’d known he’d take the bait; he wasn’t the cautious sort. So when her hand came up out of the bag holding the canister, he laughed, and his hands closed on her shoulders with crushing force.
“What’re you going to do? Perfume me?”
She sprayed liquid silver in his open mouth.
Jason’s shriek almost burst her eardrums, and, coughing and gagging, he staggered backward, smoke pouring from between his lips. His skin was burning from the sunlight. Claire shoved him backward into the shadows, and he stumbled a few steps, kept gagging, and sank down to his hands and knees to cough convulsively.
“It’s just a little,” she told him. “Consider it breath freshener. The next time, I spray it in your eyes, Jason, so keep the hell off me if you like your face.”
He was too busy retching to try to speak, even if he could have managed it. Claire bypassed him and went to Sarah, tugged the ropes free, and let her pull the tape off her mouth. It must have hurt. The skin beneath it looked red and abraded, and Sarah whooped in a deep breath of relief. She fixed a poisonous glare on Jason. “You just wait, you little piece of crap,” she said. “My Protector’s not going to stand for this.”
“Neither will mine,” Professor Carlyle said. He looked pale and shaky, but righteously angry. Claire found paper towels behind the bookstore’s counter and folded some into a thick pad, which she gave him to apply to his head wound. “Thank you, Danvers.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “So…can we talk over that B on the last paper? Because it was really an A effort. I’d take a B if I deserved it, but—”
“Yes, yes, fine, A it is. As far as I’m concerned, you have an A for the rest of the class,” he said. “Sarah, would you like me to call someone, or—”
“Nope,” the woman said, and climbed to her feet. She was small but had a wiry strength that probably came from bench-pressing boxes of textbooks all day. “I’m calling the pound to see if they can come get this damn rabid dog—”
Before she could finish the thought, Jason had scrambled to his feet and was running for the back door. Alleys, Claire thought. Shaded alleys, with sewer access. He’d be gone before anyone could catch him.
“Might want to keep that back door locked from now on,” she said to Sarah as she returned the silver canister to her backpack and picked up the stake to slide it into the holster next to it. “Professor.”
They both nodded, clearly still off-balance from the encounter with their own mortality; Claire felt it, too, a hissing tension running through her body that made her realize how much she’d just taken on herself. Shane would have been livid that she’d tried it without backup.
She went outside and walked fast, all the way home.
Where she was going to have to tell Eve her brother had gone full-on Hannibal Lecter. Fun.
She spotted the shiny black van of the ghost hunters—clearly driven off from their targeted hospital visit, thankfully—cruising slowly down the street. Jenna and Angel were arguing (there was a shocker) and Jenna was consulting a street map. There weren’t many maps of Morganville that the vampires hadn’t, ah, edited, so if the team members were trying to find some “haunted” location, they wouldn’t be finding anything more exotic along the way. Except maybe Jason, who could be on the rampage after not getting his afternoon snack.
Claire swallowed her pride, dialed Amelie’s number, and got the brisk, Irish-accented voice of her assistant, Bizzie. “Please tell Amelie that Jason Rosser’s out here biting people, in public. Protected people. And if she wants those ghost hunters to get a good story, he’s a great way to do it.” She didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. Amelie would shut Jason up; she might shut him up permanently, but that wasn’t Claire’s concern. She was more worried about the ghost hunters.
Nobody had said so, but it had seemed obvious from her conversation with the police that the decision the vampires were considering about the strangers had two outcomes: wiping their memories and dumping them out of town somewhere, or planting them somewhere deep, where no one would ever find the bodies. If they were still here, it was almost as if Amelie (or Oliver) had decided to toy with them, with no intention of letting them ever leave town alive.
Despite herself, Claire admired the ghost hunters’ determination, a little. She recognized the curiosity, and the blind stubbornness; she had loads of that in her own character. She hated to see them punished for it.
But that, like so much in Morganville, was probably out of her hands.
Claire’s adrenaline had finally stopped buzzing in her ears by the time she walked up the steps to the front door of the Glass House, and luckily, it seemed there was no emergency in progress. There was lunch being contemplated, and as she walked into the kitchen, Eve, Michael, and Shane were arguing the relative merits of hot dogs versus grilling hamburgers outside.
“Hot dogs are faster,” Michael pointed out. “Microwave.”
“Ugh, that’s disgusting. Also, we don’t make mac and cheese in there, either. That’s just wrong,” Eve said, and poured herself a tall glass of Coke. “Hey, college girl. Drinky?”
“Yes.” Claire collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. Eve gave her a quick look that let her know she’d picked up on her tension, then got down another glass from the cabinet. “The Apocalypse must be near, because a guy is arguing against grilling. That’s just un-Texan, Michael.”
“Vampire,” he pointed out. “If I went out there, the only thing barbecuing would be me. And hot dogs are all-American. All-American trumps Texan.”
“You’re brainwashed by commercials about cars and baseball,” Eve shot back, and handed Claire a fizzing glass. “Hot dogs are made of pig butts and the parts nobody in his right mind would eat. Yes, I used to like them. Don’t judge me, okay?”
Shane was clearly Team Grill; he’d already gotten out the burger-flipping utensils and put them on the counter, and now he was digging sauces out of the fridge. “We’re not even having this discussion,” he said. “Eve’s unemployed. The least she can do is help me grill burgers. And you two can chop veg—” He paused, looking straight at Claire. “What the hell happened?”
“Monica got creamed in the election?”
“We’ll throw the party later. And?”
She really didn’t want to say it. “I saw Jason. He was kind of…attacking people. So I stopped him. By the way, the silver pepper spray? Works great.”
Eve had gone completely still. She stared at Claire for a moment, then said quietly, “Is he okay?”
“I didn’t get him too badly. He’s okay. Just less bitey for a while. Eve—he’s not, ah—”
“Not wound too tight,” Eve supplied, and lowered her gaze to fix on the bubbles in her Coke. “Yeah, copy that. He’s always been off. You know that.”
Off didn’t really describe the feeling she’d had with Jason today. “I think it’s worse than that,” she said, as gently as she could. “He’s really—vicious.”
Michael stepped in, then. “It’s not unexpected that would happen,” he said. “Look, becoming a vampire—it’s complicated, what it does to you, but it does kind of amplify whatever bad impulses you already had. It’s tough to hang on to the good stuff, but easy as hell to bring the bad with you. I knew he’d be…” Michael shook his head. “Anyway. I’ll let Oliver know. He’s in charge of Jason.”
“From what Oliver’s doing now, he won’t really care,” Claire said. “He’s gone a little power crazy. You might have noticed.”
“Okay, so Jason Rosser is evil, and Oliver’s power hungry. This is not breaking news that should keep us from grilling burgers,
” Shane said. “Can I get an amen?”
Eve and Michael chimed in, but Claire kept her head down. She was feeling pretty low. She’d spent a lot of energy this morning running down the portals and coming up empty, and then there had been the excitement of the rally, and Jason…. She was drained—not even hungry, actually, which was surprising.
She was also worried, really worried, about Myrnin. She’d thought that by now she’d have gotten some word from him. Bob was sitting upstairs in her room, contentedly spinning webs around flies that she’d caught for him, and she couldn’t believe that even at his craziest, Myrnin would have left his pet to starve. He was careless of assistants, but never of his spider.
So…where was he? And if he couldn’t communicate, how was she supposed to even begin to find him? It made her head hurt, and her stomach churn, and suddenly all she wanted was to finish her cold, sweet soda and crawl upstairs to sleep.
“Hey,” Michael said as he took out tomatoes, lettuce, onions and pickles from the refrigerator. “Hand me a knife, would you?”
She pulled one off the magnetic strip Shane had installed on the wall—easier access, he’d said, in case it came down to that kind of a fight. Shane always thought ahead that way. She gave the blade to Michael without comment and watched as he chopped stuff up. He was neat, fast, and accurate. Vampire senses apparently made for great prep cooks. “Michael,” she said as he finished slicing pickles into quarters, “do you know what bloodline Myrnin comes from?”
“I’m guessing you don’t mean Welsh,” he said. “Vampire bloodline?”
She nodded.
“No. Why?”
“Because I need to track him, and I remember Naomi could, you know, drink a sample of another vampire’s bloodline to find him. She did it with Theo. Maybe—maybe you could do it to find Myrnin?”
“Maybe,” Michael said, but he sounded doubtful. “I heard there’s a blood record somewhere, but I have no idea where it is. Or if Myrnin’s in it. From what I heard, he’s the only one still living out of his line. It’s pretty ancient, and he didn’t make any others who survived long, so there may not be a record.”
“But could you ask? Maybe look around? I need to find him, Michael. I think—I think he’s in trouble.”
“Why?” He put down the knife and looked at her directly. “Did he say something?”
“Only that he didn’t like the way things were going in town,” she admitted. “And that he was planning to leave. But you know how he is. I don’t think he really would have run away. Not like that. You saw the lab!”
He shrugged. “The lab’s always a mess; you know that. It’s impossible to tell whether there was a struggle, or he just didn’t like the latest newspaper he read and decided to trash the place.”
“He left Bob! And how did Pennyfeather get in? He didn’t have authorization.”
“You don’t know that. And maybe he just forgot about Bob. It’s not like he’s an exciting pet.”
“Bob’s cool, and Myrnin loves him like any other pet. He’d never just abandon him to starve,” Claire said. “But…I just have the feeling, okay? So would you? For me?”
Michael ruffled her hair. “Yeah, sure. For you. Here. Chop some onions.”
“Hey!”
“Consider it prepayment.”
Lunch cheered her up—as did Michael’s promise—and Claire actually enjoyed the burgers, which Shane had cooked pretty much to perfection. Eve and Shane got into it over the age-old mustard versus mayonnaise debate, but they had a nice time, even with that controversy devolving to tossing packets of condiment at each other. Even better, since it was Shane’s turn to clean up.
After lunch, Claire went upstairs to her room while Michael and Shane settled in to try out a new first-person shooter game, and Eve shopped online; she stretched out on the bed and fell immediately, deeply asleep.
For a while she was too tired to dream, but finally she dreamed, and it was…odd.
At first, she didn’t really understand. She was someplace dark and very, very quiet, except for the steady hiss of water dripping. She was cold and felt a gnawing, desperate hunger.
Then she heard a voice out of that dark whisper, “Claire?” It was as if she were torn out of her body and thrown violently up through the dark in a blur, and everything in her wanted to scream but she didn’t actually have lungs or a body to use to do that, only a pure, condensed feeling of real terror….
And from a great height, she looked down into a very deep, narrow pit, and far below, a starkly pale face upturned to her in the moonlight.
The voice.
It had sounded like Myrnin’s voice, but it couldn’t have been; it couldn’t. There was no sense to this dream, because what would Myrnin be doing at the bottom of a hole, and why wouldn’t he just jump out?
“Help,” he said, from very far below, very far away. “Help me.”
“I don’t know how!” she called down, at least in the dream, and because it was just a dream, it made sense that he could hear her, somehow, and that even though she was very far away, she could see the desperation in his expression.
“Come for me,” Myrnin said, and it sounded like a ghost, like Shane’s sister whispering out there in that eerie vacant lot, like Miranda being torn to shreds of fog.
It sounded like someone who was already gone.
She woke up with a pounding heart and a nauseating headache bad enough to drive her to the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen, which she washed down with handfuls of bottled water in frenzied gulps. Somewhere in there, she noticed she’d managed to sleep away the rest of the day; it was already approaching sunset. What the hell was that? she wondered. She’d had anxiety dreams before, lots of them, but they usually involved being naked in a crowd, or running in slow motion, or taking a test unprepared. Nothing like this.
This was awfully—suspiciously—specific. If she was going to dream about Myrnin, why have him stuck deep in a hole in the ground?
Trap-door spider, something whispered in the back of her mind. Gramma Day always called him that. So did you, once.
Yes, but she hadn’t meant it literally.
Maybe you just want him to need you, that awful, calm voice said. Maybe you just like it that he depends on you so much.
The thought unsettled her. She decided to put it out of her mind, all of it, especially the dream, because it was just her imagination working out her anxieties, just as it ought to do.
Maybe.
She went downstairs and found the video game amazingly still in progress, but on pause, as Michael and Shane argued the finer points of how the weapons array worked, and which would be a smarter choice with which to attack some kind of fortified position. It was confusing, and she still felt weird and sick. Downing a glass of milk helped settle her stomach, though, and she was just rinsing out the glass when the doorbell rang. The ring was followed up by knocking.
Michael had gotten up from the sofa, but Shane, still locked in his game world, was not paying much attention to anything else. Claire came out of the kitchen and met Eve coming down the stairs.
“Mail call?” Eve guessed.
“Not unless the postal service is starting night runs,” Michael said. “I’ll get it.” The unspoken implication of that was that if it was something bad, he’d at least have a decent shot at fighting it. He went down the hall and opened the door. Beyond it, the sunset was burning the horizon a bright orange, but it wasn’t quite evening yet.
“Who is it?” Claire asked, and craned to look.
“Can’t tell,” Eve said. “Oh, wait—it’s—” She didn’t finish the sentence. She broke free and raced down the hall.
Claire, instantly scared and imagining all kinds of mayhem, pelted after her. She almost immediately skidded to a halt in the suddenly crowded hallway; Shane had somehow managed to cut in front of both her and Eve. Being shortest sucked; she couldn’t see over Eve’s shoulder, never mind Shane’s broad back.
But she heard a frantic, female vo
ice say, “Close it—please close it, fast!”
Miranda’s voice. But Mir was gone—disappeared out in the darkness. Dissolved into mist.
And now, apparently, she was back.
And, from the sound of it, very, very scared.
Eve turned, ran into Claire, and shooed her backward; Claire took several steps down the hall, and the party spilled out after her and into the living area. Between Shane and Michael came—yes!—Miranda, but a different one than before. This Miranda was translucently pale as a glass copy of herself, and she seemed terrified.
Everybody was trying to talk at once, except her. Ghost-Girl leaned up against a handy wall (why didn’t she fall through?) and closed her eyes as if she were exhausted (could ghosts even get tired?). Eve finally got the upper hand, conversationally speaking. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”
“Away,” Miranda said faintly. “So tired. Need energy.” But the fact she was visible at all, before sunset, was odd and impressive. “I feel better here.” She was looking better, too—already taking on a bit more form and substance. It wasn’t a real body, but it had faint traces of color in it now. “They were after me. I had to keep running, find a safe place.”
“Who was?” Shane asked. She’d just said the magic words to make him really pay attention. “Vamps? Why would vamps want a ghost?”
“She’s not a ghost all the time,” Michael said. “Remember, when she has a body, it comes complete with blood. Just like mine did. And since she can’t be killed…”
“Oh, right,” Eve said faintly, and her eyes widened. “They could keep her and keep, ah, draining her dry….”
“Not the vampires,” Miranda said. “I can handle the vampires. It’s the rest of them. They won’t leave me alone. They keep—” She was interrupted by another doorbell chime, followed by knocking. “Don’t!” she said, and grabbed at Michael’s sleeve, but her hand swiped through him. “Don’t answer it yet—not yet!”