by Rachel Caine
But no opponents presented themselves. It was just pipes and conduits, control panels, softly glowing indicators and lights, and not much else. It wasn’t even dusty. Claire did spot a rat staring at them in surprise (and probably outrage) from the top of one cluster of conduits; it ran off as soon as she looked at it, probably to spread the word among the Kingdom of Rats that probably existed down here … and her chattering brain was momentarily distracted by the image of a King Rat sitting on a throne, with a giant crown, surrounded by a bunch of other rats all secretly plotting to kill him and take his place. Because if she’d learnt anything from being in Morganville, it was that a ruler could never, ever relax.
Oliver suddenly paused, and so did Jesse, who’d moved up next to him; her pale, slender hand came up in a clenched fist, in a gesture that Claire knew from hanging out with Shane meant stop right now and hold. She and Eve paused and stood ready for anything, and after a moment Jesse nodded to Oliver and pointed to her own chest, then off to the right. He nodded back. She flitted away into the shadows.
Oliver turned and pointed to Claire, then gestured imperatively for her to go ahead of him.
As bait?
It didn’t seem like the moment to have an argument, since everything was being done in such silence. Claire edged out ahead of him with her LED light pointed down toward her feet; it served only to make the darkness around her seem more dense and choking. She narrowly avoided a dangerous eye-level collision with a protruding metal corner, ducked, and crept forward. The ceiling was getting lower, it seemed, and she could hear a faint squeaking sound that she assumed was more rats sounding an alarm.
Claire swept the light forward, trying to see where she was going, and … and there was Derrick.
Derrick was dead. Drained white. And there were huge, unreal puncture marks in his neck, and ragged skin around them. One single drop of red had trailed down his neck and dripped on the concrete underneath, and his eyes were open, wide and surprised. They’d gone dull and filmed with grey – dried out from exposure to the air.
Claire gasped and jumped backward. She couldn’t help it; coming up on a dead man here, in the creepy zone, was something that woke instincts she couldn’t control no matter how hard she tried. She almost banged her head on the sharp metal corner she’d avoided, but Oliver’s outstretched hand stopped her cold. ‘Quiet,’ he whispered, and his voice was about as sharp and uncaring as the metal. ‘He’s been dead for hours, beyond anyone’s help. There’s something in here with us.’
‘Something?’
‘Yes. It doesn’t smell like a vampire, though it moves like one.’ That sounded … ominous. Claire paused to unzip her backpack and take out the sharp, shiny knife that Dr Anderson had given her. She wished she had something more long-range, like Shane’s flamethrower, but she stopped the thought almost immediately; Shane had always told her, you fight with what you’ve got, not what you want to have. ‘There’s a door beyond the body. Go open it. We may need to move through quickly.’
Again, she was bait – warm, pulsing bait that anything even remotely like a vampire would find tastily attractive. And she knew that he meant her to be just exactly that, but at the same time, it was a decent strategic move. Jesse was somewhere in the shadows with her own killer knife; Oliver was a deadly force even without a weapon. And Eve, somewhere beyond him, was more than capable of helping out, even unarmed. It wasn’t just her wit that could be deadly.
Claire stepped carefully over Derrick’s body – and didn’t that give her a nightmare flash from every horror movie, ever – and moved toward the single, small door that was set low in the wall. It was too small to go through standing up. She put the flashlight in her teeth and pulled the door handle, and it protested – not locked, just a tight fit. Her second yank got it free, and it swung open with surprising silence. She’d expected an appropriately eerie creak, at the very least, but someone had – ominously – oiled it to ensure it didn’t make noise.
And then something hit her, hard and stunningly without warning, from the left, and the flashlight spun away.
Claire didn’t even have a chance to cry out; her breath was driven out of her in a soundless burst an instant before her vocal cords responded, and then she was flat on her back with her head ringing from impact with a metal pipe, and she couldn’t understand what had happened, and there was something leaning over her, something pale and naked and awful with eyes like a cesspool on fire, and she felt the cold dribble of its saliva on her throat. It was only an instant, but it was a snapshot of a nightmare: a distorted mirror of a human being, with a hugely exaggerated jaw open far too wide with vampire fangs wider and longer than she’d ever seen extended and ready to cut. The nose was smashed and shrunken like a bat’s, the ears shrivelled little clumps at the sides of the head, and if the thing had ever had hair, it was long gone. Impossible to say if it was male or female; Claire couldn’t even imagine thinking of it that way.
And then it was lunging for her throat.
She reacted instinctively, shoving the knife deep into its chest. That helped – it kept it away from her throat. But it was still snapping at her, not dying nearly fast enough. She shut her eyes convulsively, and that was good, because she didn’t see what happened next, though she inferred it later. Instead of the icy bite on her neck, she felt a sudden chilly splatter of liquid flood over her that smelt rancid, like raw meat left in the fridge for months on end. The weight on her convulsed and fell away, and Claire balled up in a protected fetal curve toward the wall, retching.
The thing’s head bumped against her hip and rolled away. Decapitated, by Jesse’s extremely sharp knife. ‘Claire. Claire!’ Jesse’s calm, cool voice, and her hand on Claire’s shoulder. ‘Up. We need to go, quickly.’
It was almost impossible to shake that horrible event off that easily, but Claire somehow managed … she accepted Jesse’s help in standing and retched again, emptily, at the stench of the dead thing that had tried to kill her. It was a vampire, she guessed, but not any kind of vamp she knew about. Even Myrnin’s lab mistakes – and he’d made more than a few of them – weren’t quite that disgusting. It was like some kind of a bastardised DNA merger of bat, human and spider. She tried not to look at it too closely as Jesse hustled her back to the now-open small door. Thankfully, Jesse didn’t ask her to go first; the vampire woman, although taller, easily bent and moved fluidly through the narrow opening. Claire followed her, scrambling on hands and knees in the claustrophobic concrete space. No conduits in here, at least. Claire realised she’d dropped her flashlight in preference to keeping hold of her knife, but even as she did, Eve moved in behind her and flipped hers on to light the way. ‘You okay?’ Eve mumbled – and when Claire glanced back, she realised Eve was holding the flashlight in her mouth, the better to crawl forward.
‘No,’ Claire said, and coughed again. She couldn’t risk throwing up in here, that would be disgusting for everyone, but the stench … Eve was coughing, too. It wasn’t just her. The vampires seemed immune, and she briefly, violently hated them for it. ‘I will be, though.’
The tiny tunnel seemed unnaturally long, but that was probably just Claire’s nightmarish shock taking hold; she felt weirdly unsteady, and her whole body felt the after-effects. It would hurt later, she assumed, but just now, she mostly felt numb and clumsy. She also knew that there were things in this tunnel she would later regret touching; she could feel tiny bones crunching under the press of her hands and knees, for instance. But right now, she really didn’t care.
The world narrowed to that dark, concrete tunnel, and the rapidly disappearing form of Jesse ahead of her – how did she crawl so fast? – and then, suddenly, it opened up again, into a big, echoing room. Claire heard the harsh scritch of glass embedded in the bottom of her sneakers when she slid out and stood, and for a moment she was blind until Eve crawled out after her, and directed her flashlight around.
‘Wild,’ Eve said, and wiped her mouth with one forearm. ‘Yuck. Drool. What the he
ll is this?’
This, it looked like, was someone’s hack project, long abandoned … in the grand tradition of MIT, someone had discovered this place, and started tiling the big room, which had probably started as some kind of storage area. The mosaic started in the middle of the room in swirls of black misty white, and spun out in a dizzying pattern toward the edges. Claire couldn’t decide if it was meant to be hypnotic, or a representation of a black hole, but it made her feel as if she was standing on stars. It was unfinished toward the corners, and the tools and pieces of cut tiles were untidily stacked next to the large bulk of an ancient bunch of pipes that burst out of the wall like a frozen iron octopus.
Handcuffed to the pipes was Liz. Unlike Derrick, she was still alive, but she looked pale and terrified, and there was an open wound on her throat – not as bad as Derrick’s, but it was still trickling blood, and there was a lot spread around her. She was shivering and only half-conscious. Eve rushed over to her and clamped a hand over the wound, and Jesse used her knife to cut a piece from her shirt to use as a bandage.
‘Can you break these?’ Eve asked, and pointed at the cuffs. Jesse nodded and snapped the metal apart without too much of an effort; whoever had put them on hadn’t taken the precaution of coating them with silver, which was lucky. ‘Okay, let’s get her up.’
Claire took Liz’s other side, and working together she and Eve managed to lift the third girl up. Jesse could have helped, but at this point, Claire preferred to have her free and ready to fight.
Because there was no way this was so easy.
Sure enough, there was a heavy, metallic sound from behind them, and as Eve turned the flash that way, Claire saw that a solid grating had come down over the doorway to the narrow little tunnel out – a heavy barrier, coated with a nice, shiny layer of silver. Jesse and Oliver wouldn’t be moving that one, not easily, anyway. And Jesse was already at a disadvantage, since her burnt hand couldn’t have healed so quickly.
‘Stay with her,’ Claire said to Eve, and took the flashlight to look around the rest of the room. It was pretty bare: concrete walls, the explosion of piping where they’d found Liz, and some concrete cubicles off to one side. Nothing they could use. ‘Maybe the other guys can get to us and help us out of here.’
‘Assuming that the bad guys aren’t already on them,’ Jesse said. ‘And since I doubt all of this was run remotely, I can almost guarantee you they’ve got troubles of their own. We need to get out on our own.’
‘Bugger this,’ Oliver growled, and stripped off his shirt. He wrapped it tightly around his hands and moved to the silver grate, took hold, and tried to force it upward. As he did, though, a jet of liquid silver activated, and sprayed over him.
His bare chest took the brunt of the attack, and he spun away with a cry; in the glare of Claire’s flash, his chest looked bone white, then spotted with red flares and blisters as the silver ate into him. It wasn’t fatal, but it had to be really painful. He scrubbed the shirt over his skin to get the liquid off before more damage was done, but it seemed pretty obvious that the booby trap wasn’t done yet; another try would only douse him further, unless they could find a way to block the jet set somewhere above. Claire angled the light up and found the canister and jet, and traced the activation circuit.
She pulled the wire out from the dull mud that had been smeared over it to conceal it, and quickly cut it in two with her knife. ‘Safe,’ she said.
‘Again, then,’ Oliver said. His chest looked scarred, and from the red glimmer in his eyes it still hurt incredibly badly, but he stepped up, wrapped his hands, and took hold again of the silver-coated grate.
It groaned, and strained, and shook, but it didn’t move. He was forced to back off and let his stinging hands recover.
Claire stared at the grate, then used her flashlight to get up close. It had come down on tracks. Was there some kind of release? There had to be, probably on the other side where it couldn’t be seen. Somebody had come in here to work; they wouldn’t want to risk being sealed in with no way out.
‘Eve,’ she said. ‘I need something stiff, but flexible. Do you have anything that can—’ Before Claire finished the sentence, Eve was holding something out to her – the leather collar she’d been wearing around her throat, studded with silver. Basic anti-vamp defence stuff. Claire dashed over to get it and came back to the grate. If I designed this, where would I put the trigger? She imagined it as a design in her head, then spun it around. Right. Back of the track, where it would be hidden from view, but reachable. Not easily reachable, because that would defeat the whole purpose. But Claire took hold of the collar – which was perfect, really – and carefully ran it down one side of the track.
One of the studs caught on something – just a slight break in the friction, but enough to tell her where the release could be. Claire reversed her hold on the collar and used the buckle this time. It took six tries before the silver hooked on, but she got a firm contact, and yanked straight down.
Something clicked.
Claire took hold of the bars and tried to raise them. They slid up an inch, then two, before her trembling muscles gave up the fight. She felt something pull in her back, and winced.
‘Here,’ Oliver growled, and bumped her aside. ‘Leave it to those with the power to manage it, for God’s sake.’ His hands were burnt, she could see the lurid red streaks vivid in the glow of the flash, but he used his shirt again as a cushion and grabbed on. One strong heave, shoulders bunching and a surprising number of muscles flexing under the paper-white skin, and the grate shrieked slowly upward. It got to the top, and there was a second click. He let go. It held in place, concealed with just the sharp tips of it sticking down. If she hadn’t known it was there, she wouldn’t have known to look.
Oliver fell back, chest heaving as he pulled in breath after unneeded breath; the burns had gone all the way up to his shoulders, and the bright red flesh looked unhealthy and extremely tender. But Oliver was old. Why was it so hard on him? Amelie could handle the stuff, after all. Then again, Jesse had been badly burnt, too. Was it just that some vamps were less sensitive to it than others? Or maybe even something in the lineage – Bishop’s bloodline being more resistant. Interesting problem, and part of her brain chewed away on it even as she asked him, ‘What can I do?’
‘Go away,’ he snapped, and shut his eyes. His face was taut with effort, and Claire backed off. Most vampires with silver burns had to have blood, quickly. She didn’t necessarily want to be Oliver’s portable life support unit.
Jesse moved forward with her arm around the still-almost-limp Elizabeth. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You can collapse later, but for now move your ass, Oliver. Help will be on the other side, if our friends aren’t in bigger trouble than we are. Claire, you go first. I’ll take care of your friend. But we can’t stay here. You don’t build a trap unless the hunter comes to take his prize, sooner or later.’
Claire dived into the narrow, concrete tunnel. Her knees and elbows and palms were already abraded from the earlier journey, and this time it hurt like hell. She, or all of them, had shed little slivers of door glass along the way, and she could feel the shards stabbing into her skin. One big exercise in pain, and exhaustion, and claustrophobia, and she was very glad to see the metal of the door at the end.
Wait.
We didn’t close that, she thought, and put the flashlight in her mouth so she could lean forward and throw her weight against it. Nothing. Not even a budge. No handle to turn on this side, and even if there was, Claire thought that it might have been nearly impossible to get the right amount of leverage at the awkward, bent-over angle she had to use. She remembered it had been tough to open before.
Staying where she was didn’t seem like much of an option. Neither was backing up; behind her, Jesse was somehow managing to balance Liz’s head and shoulders and crawl backward, dragging the girl with her; Eve must have been trying to support Liz’s legs.
Which, from the length of the tunnel, would hav
e left Oliver either in the other room, or dangerously close to those silver spikes on the gate.
Claire lunged forward and slammed her shoulder into the door – once, twice, three times … and it suddenly gave, spilling her out into the other room. She rolled through a pool of congealing, rotten blood, and the nausea welled up again as she spotted the severed head of the bat-thing, and Derrick’s body … and then a brilliant beam of light swept over her, blinding her, and she heard Shane say, ‘Claire!’ in a breathless tone that made her shiver from the bottom of her soul. Next thing she knew, she was swept up in his arms, and lost in a strong, enveloping hug. ‘God, the blood—’
‘Not mine,’ she said. ‘And it smells disgusting.’
‘I wasn’t going to mention it,’ he said, and laughed a little, holding her close. ‘I’m guessing it came courtesy of that thing there?’
‘Yeah. Whatever it is.’
‘Nasty. Did you kill it?’
‘That would have been awesome, but Jesse did the honours …’ Claire’s voice faded as she pulled back, and she glanced back at the tunnel. Jesse was out, and Myrnin was helping her pull Liz free. Michael, standing ready, grabbed Eve’s reaching, flailing hand and yanked her out, too, and straight into his arms.
Nobody hugged Oliver. Not surprisingly. Although Michael did frown at the sight of him. ‘What the hell happened to you?’
‘What does it seem?’ Oliver growled, as he settled his shirt back on over his silver-abraded arms. It must have hurt. ‘Someone built a very nice rat trap with the girl as its cheese. And although it pains me to admit it, without Claire’s cleverness we might have been stuck there.’