by Rachel Caine
Neither of them moved. There was some struggle going on, but Claire couldn’t tell what it was, or what it meant.
Gérard reached out and grabbed her arm, and Hannah’s, and held them in place. “No,” he said sharply. “Don’t go near them.”
“Problem, sir, that’s the way out,” Hannah said. “And the dude’s alone.”
Gérard and the Texan sent her a wild look, almost identical in their disbelief. “You think so?” the Texan said. “Humans.”
Amelie took a step backward, just a small one, but a shudder went through her body, and Claire knew—just knew—it was a bad sign. Really bad.
Whatever confrontation had been going on, it broke.
Amelie whirled to them and screamed, “Go!” There was fury and fear in her voice, and Gérard let go of both girls and dumped Myrnin off his shoulder, into their arms, and he and the Texan pelted not for the exit, but to Amelie’s side.
They got there just in time to stop Bishop from ripping out her throat. They slammed the old man up against the wall, but then there were others coming out into the hall. Bishop’s troops, Claire guessed.
There were a lot of them.
Amelie intercepted the first of Bishop’s vampires to run in her direction. Claire recognized him, vaguely—one of the Morganville vamps, but he’d obviously switched sides, and he came for Amelie, fangs out.
She put him down on the floor with one twisting move, fast as a snake, and looked back at Hannah and Claire, with Myrnin’s body sagging between them. “Get him out!” she shouted. “I’ll hold the way!”
“Come on,” Hannah said, and shouldered the bulk of Myrnin’s limp weight. “We’re leaving.”
Myrnin felt cold and heavy, like the dead man he was, and Claire swallowed a surge of nausea as she struggled to support his limp weight. Claire gritted her teeth and helped Hannah half carry, half drag Myrnin’s staked body down the corridor. Behind them, the sounds of fighting continued—mainly bodies hitting the floor. No screaming, no shouting.
Vampires fought in silence.
“Right,” Hannah gasped. “We’re on our own.”
That really wasn’t good news—two humans stuck God knew where, with a crazy vampire with a stake in his heart in the middle of a war zone.
“Let’s get back to the door,” Claire said.
“How are we going to get through it?”
“I can do it.”
Hannah threw her a look. “You?”
It was no time to get annoyed; hadn’t she just been thinking that being underestimated was a gift? Yeah, not so much, sometimes. “Yes, really. I can do it. But we’d better hurry.” The odds weren’t in Amelie’s favor. She might be able to hang on and cover their retreat, but Claire didn’t think she could win.
She and Hannah dragged Myrnin past the symbol-marked doorways. Hannah counted off, and nodded to the one where they’d entered.
Not too surprisingly, it was marked with the Founder’s Symbol, the same one Claire wore on the bracelet on her wrist.
Hannah tried to open it. “Dammit! Locked.”
Not when Claire tried the knob. It opened at a twist, and the single candle in the corner illuminated very little. Claire caught her breath and rested her trembling muscles for a few seconds as Hannah checked the room and pronounced it safe before they entered.
Claire let Myrnin slide in a heap to the floor. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to him. “It was the only way. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”
She had no idea if he could hear her when he was like this. She wanted to grab the stake and pull it out, but she remembered that with Amelie, and with Sam, it had been the other vampires who’d done it. Maybe they knew things she didn’t. Besides, the disease weakened them—even Myrnin.
She couldn’t take the risk. And besides, having him wake up wounded and crazy would be even worse, now that they didn’t have any vampires who could help control him.
Hannah returned to her side. “So,” she said, as she checked the clip on her paintball gun, frowned, and exchanged it for a new one, “how do we do this? We got to go back to that museum first, right?”
Did they? Claire wasn’t sure. She stepped up to the door, which currently featured nothing but darkness, and concentrated hard on Myrnin’s lab, with all its clutter and debris. Light swam, flickered, shivered, and snapped into focus.
No problem at all.
“Guess it’s only roundabout getting here,” Claire said. “Maybe that’s on purpose, to keep people out who shouldn’t be here. But it makes sense that once Amelie got here, she’d want to take the express out.” She turned back. “Shouldn’t we wait?”
Hannah opened the door and looked out into the hall. Whatever she saw, it couldn’t have been good news. She shook her head. “We bug out, right now.”
With a grunt of effort, Hannah braced Myrnin’s deadweight on one side and dragged him forward. Claire took his other arm.
“Did he just twitch?” Hannah asked. “ ’Cause if he twitches, I’m going to shoot him.”
“No! No, he didn’t; he’s fine,” Claire said, practically tripping over the words. “Ready? One, two . . .”
And three, they were in Myrnin’s lab. Claire twisted out from under Myrnin’s cold body, slammed the door shut, and stared wildly at the broken lock. “I need to fix that,” she said. But what about Amelie? No, she’d know all the exits. She didn’t have to come here.
“Girl, you need to get us the hell out of here, is what you need to do,” Hannah said. “You dial up the nearest Fort Knox or something on that thing. Damn, how’d you learn this, anyway?”
“I had a good teacher.” Claire didn’t look at Myrnin. She couldn’t. For all intents and purposes, she’d just killed him, after all. “This way.”
There were two ways out of Myrnin’s lab, besides the usually-secured dimensional doorway: steps leading up to street level, which were probably the absolute worst idea ever right now, and a second, an even more hidden dimensional portal in a small room off to the side. That was the one Amelie had used to get them in.
But the problem was, Claire couldn’t get it to work. She had the memories clear in her head—the Glass House, the portal to the university, the hospital, even the museum they’d visited on the way here. But nothing worked.
It just felt . . . dead, as if the whole system had been cut off.
They were lucky to have made it this far.
Amelie’s trapped, Claire realized. Back there. With Bishop. And she’s outnumbered.
Claire double-checked the other door, too, the one she’d blocked.
Nothing. It wasn’t just a malfunctioning portal; the whole network was down.
“Well?” Hannah asked.
Claire couldn’t worry about Amelie right now. She had a job to do—get Myrnin to safety. And that meant getting him to the only vampire she knew offhand who could help him: Oliver. “I think we’re walking,” she said.
“The hell we are,” Hannah said. “I’m not hauling a dead vampire through the streets of Morganville. We’ll get ourselves killed by just about everybody.”
“We can’t leave him!”
“We can’t take him, either!”
Claire felt her jaw lock into stubborn position. “Well, fine, you go ahead. Because I’m not leaving him. I can’t.”
She could tell that Hannah wanted to grab her by the hair and yank her out of there, but finally, the older woman nodded and stepped back. “Third option,” she said. “Call in the cavalry.”
5
It wasn’t quite the Third Armored Division, but after about a dozen phone calls, they did manage to get a ride.
“I’m turning on the street—nobody in sight so far,” Eve’s voice said from the speaker of Claire’s cell phone. She’d been giving Claire a turn-by-turn description of her drive, and Claire had to admit, it sounded pretty frightening. “Yeah, I can see the Day House. You’re in the alley next to it?”
“We’re on our way,” Claire said breathlessly. She was
drenched with sweat, aching all over, from the effort of helping drag Myrnin out of the lab, up the steps, and down the narrow, seemingly endless dark alley. Next door, the Founder House belonging to Katherine Day and her granddaughter—a virtual copy of the house where Claire and her friends lived—was dark and closed, but Claire saw curtains moving at the upstairs windows.
“That’s my great-aunt’s house, Great-Aunt Kathy,” Hannah panted. “Everybody calls her Gramma, though. Always have, as far back as I can remember.”
Claire could see how Hannah was related to the Days; partly her features, but her attitude for sure. That was a family full of tough, smart, get-it-done women.
Eve’s big, black car was idling at the end of the alley, and the back door kicked open as the two of them—three? Did Myrnin still count?—approached. Eve took a look at Myrnin, and the stake in his back, sent Claire a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look, and reached out to drag him inside, facedown, on the backseat. “Hurry!” she said, and slammed the back door on the way to the driver’s side. “Damn, he’d better not bleed all over the place. Claire, I thought you were supposed to—”
“I know,” Claire said, and climbed into the middle of the big, front bench seat. Hannah crammed in on the outside. “Don’t remind me. I was supposed to keep him safe.”
Eve put the car in gear and did a ponderous tank-heavy turn. “So, who staked him?”
“I did.”
Eve blinked. “Okay, that’s an interesting interpretation of safe. Weren’t you with Amelie?” Eve actually did a quick check of the backseat, as if she were afraid Amelie might have magically popped in back there, seated like a barbarian queen on top of Myrnin’s prone body.
“Yeah. We were,” Hannah said.
“Do I have to ask? No, wait, do I want to ask?”
“We left her,” Claire said, miserable. “Bishop set a trap. She was fighting when we had to go.”
“What about the other guys? I thought you went with a whole entourage!”
“We left most of them. . . .” Her brain caught up with her, and she looked at Hannah, who looked back with the same thought in her expression. “Oh, crap. The other guys. They were in Myrnin’s lab, but not when we came back. . . .”
“Gone,” Hannah said. “Taken out.”
“Super. So, we’re winning, then.” Eve’s tone was wicked cynical, but her dark eyes looked scared. “I talked to Michael. He’s okay. They’re at the university. Things are quiet there so far.”
“And Shane?” Claire realized, with a pure bolt of guilt, that she hadn’t called him. If he’d called her, she wouldn’t have known; she’d turned off the ringer, afraid of the noise when creeping around on a rescue mission.
But as she dug out her phone, she saw that she hadn’t missed any calls after all.
“Yeah, he’s okay,” Eve said, and steered the car at semihigh speed around a corner. The town was dark, very dark, with a few houses lit up by lanterns or candles or flashlights. Most people were waiting in the dark, scared to death. “They had some vamps try to board the bus, probably looking for a snack, but it wasn’t even a real fight. So far they’re cruising without too much trouble. He’s fine, Claire.” She reached over and took Claire’s hand to squeeze it. “You, not so much. You look awful.”
“Thanks. I think I earned it.”
Eve took back her hand to haul the big wheel of the car around for a turn. Headlights swept over a group on the sidewalk—unnaturally pale. Unnaturally still. “Oh, crap, we’ve got bogeys. Hang on, I’m going to floor it.”
That was, Claire thought, a pretty fantastic idea, because the vampires on the curb were now in the street, and following. There was a kind of manic glee to how they pursued the car, but not even a vamp could keep up with Eve’s driving for long; they fell back into the dark, one by one. The last one was the fastest, and he nearly caught hold of the back bumper before he stumbled and was left behind in a black cloud of exhaust.
“Damn freaks,” Eve said, trying to sound tough but not quite making it. “Hey, Hannah. How’s business?”
“Right now?” Hannah laughed softly. “Not so fantastic, but I’m not bothered about it. Let’s see if we can make it to the morning. Then I’ll worry about making ends meet at the shop.”
“Oh, we’ll make it,” Eve said, with a confidence Claire personally didn’t feel. “Look, it’s already four a.m. Another couple of hours, and we’re fine.”
Claire didn’t say, In a couple of hours, we could all be dead, but she was thinking it. What about Amelie? What were they going to do to rescue her?
If she’s even still alive.
Claire’s head hurt, her eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and she just wanted to curl up in a warm bed, pull the pillow over her head, and not be so responsible.
Fat chance.
She wasn’t paying attention to where Eve was going, and anyway, it was so dark and strange outside she wasn’t sure she’d recognize things, anyway. Eve pulled to a halt at the curb, in front of a row of plate glass windows lit by candles and lanterns inside.
Just like that, they were at Common Grounds.
Eve jumped out of the driver’s side, opened the back door, and grabbed Myrnin under the arms, all the while muttering, “Ick, ick, ick!” Claire slid out to join her, and Hannah grabbed Myrnin’s feet when they hit the pavement, and the three of them carried him into the coffee shop.
Claire found herself shoved immediately out of the way by two vampires: Oliver and some woman she didn’t know. Oliver looked grim, but then, that wasn’t new, either. “Put him down,” Oliver said. “No, not there, idiots, over there, on the sofa. You. Off.” That last was directed at the frightened humans who were seated on the indicated couch, and they scattered like quail. Eve continued her ick mantra as she and Hannah hauled Myrnin’s deadweight over and settled him facedown on the couch cushions. He was about the color of a fluorescent lightbulb now, blue-white and cold.
Oliver crouched next to him, looking at the stake in Myrnin’s back. He steepled his fingers for a moment, and then looked up at Claire. “What happened?”
She supposed he could tell, somehow, that it was her stake. Wonderful. “I didn’t have a choice. He came after us.” The us part might have been an exaggeration; he’d come after Hannah, really. But eventually he would have come after Claire, too; she knew that.
Oliver gave her a moment to squirm while he stared at her, and then looked back at Myrnin’s still, very corpselike body. The area where the stake had gone in looked even paler than the surrounding tissue, like the edge of a whirlpool draining all the color out of him. “Do you have any of the drugs you have been giving him?” Oliver asked. Claire nodded, and fumbled in her pocket. She had some of the powder form of the drug, and some of the liquid, but she hadn’t felt confident at all that she’d be able to get it into Myrnin’s mouth without a fight she was bound to lose. When Myrnin was like this, you were going to lose fingers, at the very least, if you got anywhere near his mouth.
Not so much an issue now, she supposed. She handed over the vials to Oliver, who turned them over in his fingers, considering, and then handed back the powder. “The liquid absorbs into the body more quickly, I expect.”
“Yes.” It also had some unpredictable side effects, but this probably wasn’t the time to worry about that.
“And Amelie?” Oliver continued turning the bottle over and over in his fingers.
“She’s—we had to leave her. She was fighting Bishop. I don’t know where she is now.”
A deep silence filled the room, and Claire saw the vampires all look at one another—all except Oliver, who continued to stare down at Myrnin, no change in his expression at all. “All right, then. Helen, Karl, watch the windows and doors. I doubt Bishop’s patrols will try storming the place, but they might, while I’m distracted. The rest of you”—he looked at the humans and shook his head—“try to stay out of our way.”
He thumbed the top off the vial of clear liquid and held it in his right ha
nd. “Get ready to turn him faceup,” he said to Hannah and Claire. Claire took hold of Myrnin’s shoulders, and Hannah his feet.
Oliver took the stake in his left hand and, in one smooth motion, pulled it out. It clattered to the floor, and he nodded sharply. “Now.”
Once Myrnin was lying on his back, Oliver motioned her away and pried open Myrnin’s bloodless lips. He poured the liquid into the other vampire’s mouth, shut it, and placed a hand on his high forehead.
Myrnin’s dark eyes were open. Wide-open. Claire shuddered, because they looked completely dead—like windows into a dark, dark room . . . and then he blinked.
He sucked in a very deep breath, and his back arched in silent agony. Oliver held his hand steady on Myrnin’s forehead. His eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, and Myrnin writhed weakly, trying without much success to twist free. He collapsed limply back on the cushions, chest rising and falling. His skin still looked like polished marble, veined with cold blue, but his eyes were alive again.
And crazy. And hungry.
He swallowed, coughed, swallowed again, and gradually, the insane pilot light in his eyes went out. He looked tired and confused and in pain.
Oliver let out a long, moaning sigh, and tried to stand up. He couldn’t. He made it about halfway up, then wavered and fell to his knees, one hand braced on the arm of the couch for support. His head went down, and his shoulders heaved, almost as if he were gasping or crying. Claire couldn’t imagine Oliver—Oliver—doing either one of those things, really.
Nobody moved. Nobody touched him, although some of the other vampires exchanged unreadable glances.
He’s sick, Claire thought. It was the disease. It made it harder and harder for them to concentrate, to do the things they’d always taken for granted, like make other vampires. Or revive them. Even Oliver, who hadn’t believed anything about the sickness . . . even he was starting to fail.
And he knew it.
“Help me up,” Oliver finally whispered. His voice sounded faint and tattered. Claire grabbed his arm and helped him climb slowly, painfully up; he moved as if he were a thousand years old, and felt every year of it. One of the other vampires silently provided a chair, and Claire helped him into it.