by Rachel Caine
Empty.
“Michael?” Eve called. “Michael!”
“Hush,” Myrnin said sharply, and flashed supernatu rally fast across the open space to grab the knob of a door Claire could barely see. It sagged open, and he disappeared inside.
“Wait!” Claire blurted, and darted after him. She switched on the flashlight as soon as she reached the door, but all it showed her was an empty hallway, with peeling paint and a floor covered in mud from some old flood. “Myrnin, where are you?”
No answer. She yelped when Shane’s hand closed over her shoulder; then she pulled in a breath and nodded. Eve crowded in behind them.
Down the hallway was a dead end, with more hallways stretching left and right. The fading paint had some kind of mural on it, something West Texas-y with cows and cowboys, and the letters KVVV in big block capitals.
The whole place smelled like mold and dead animals. “This way,” Myrnin’s voice said quietly, and with a hum, electricity turned on in the hall. Some of the bulbs burned out with harsh, sizzling snaps, leaving parts of the space in darkness.
Claire followed the hall to the end, which took a right turn into a small studio with some kind of engineering board. The equipment looked ancient, but clean; somebody had been here—presumably Kim—and had taken care to put everything in working order. Microphones, a chair, a backdrop, lighting . . . everything in the studio needed for filming, including a small digital video camera on a tripod.
On the other side of the room was a complicated editing console, which had a bank of monitors set up. They obviously weren’t original to the setup—decades more modern than the soundboard—and Claire identified different components that had been Frankensteined into the system.
These included an array of fat black terabyte drives, all portable.
Michael was sitting at the console. “Michael!” Eve blurted, and threw herself on him; he stood up to catch her in his arms, and hugged her close. “You incredible jerk!”
He kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know.”
She smacked his arm. “Really. You are a jerk!”
“I get that.” He pushed her off a little, to look at her. “You’re okay?”
“No thanks to you. You had to go running off in the middle of the night and not even say boo . . .”
“I should have known you guys wouldn’t stay put.”
“Where’s Detective Hess?” Claire asked. “I thought you were meeting him here.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Where did he go?”
“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Michael seemed preoccupied, as if he were trying to figure out how to tell them something they weren’t going to like at all. “This is Kim’s data vault. At least, most of it. Claire, that’s a router, right? I think this is her receiving station for the signals.”
“She’s using the tower to amplify the signals,” Claire said. “Did you find—?” She didn’t want to get more specific than that. Michael shook his head, and her heart fell. “What about the other ones?”
“She’s been a busy girl,” Michael said. “There are video files there from City Hall, Common Grounds, spots all over town. It will take hours, maybe weeks, to look at everything, but she’s done a rough cut.” He hit some controls, then pointed at the central monitor. “This is the raw file.”
After some old-fashioned leader signals, there was a shot of the Morganville town limits sign, creaking in the wind . . . and then, in special effects, the word Vampires appeared in bloody streaks right below the sign.
“Subtle.” Eve snorted. “She’s got a future in Hollywood.”
Kim’s voice came on, breathlessly narrating. “Welcome to Morganville, the town with bite. If you’ve ever driven across the barren landscape of West Texas, you may wonder why people live out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, wonder no more. It’s because they can’t live anywhere else without people knowing what they are.”
The visuals cut to a montage of Morganville daily life—normal, boring stuff.
And then a night-vision shot of a vampire—Morley, Claire realized with a shock—sucking the blood out of someone’s neck. It was an extreme close-up. His eyes were like silver coins, and the blood looked black.
Cut to Eve, working the counter at the coffee shop in all her Goth glory. Eve sucked in a quick breath, but said nothing. More shots of Morganville, some handheld. Claire saw footage of students, and remembered Kim running around the campus with her digital camera, asking people stupid questions.
It was in there, and so was Claire, saying, “I have two words for you, and the second one is off. Fill in the blank.”
Claire covered her mouth with both hands. God, she looked so angry. And kind of bitchy.
It got worse, with the voice-over. “Even the normal people of Morganville aren’t so normal. Take my friends who live in this house.”
A shot of the Glass House, full daylight. Then some kind of hidden-camera thing of Kim knocking on the door, Eve answering.
A shot of Shane. One of Michael.
“Living in a town full of terror doesn’t mean you can’t find true love—or at least, real sex.”
The video morphed into Claire and Shane in his bedroom. Oh God no . . . Claire felt sick and hot and breathless, full of horror at seeing herself there on that screen. She stumbled away and almost threw herself into Shane’s arms. He, lips parted, was staring at the picture, looking just as horrified as she felt. But he couldn’t look away, while she simply couldn’t watch.
“Goodness,” Myrnin said quietly. “I don’t think I should be watching this. I don’t think I’m old enough.”
“Turn it off,” Shane said. “Michael.”
Instead of turning it off, Michael hit FAST FORWARD. He slowed it down as the scene changed. More Kim voyeur porn, this time Michael and Eve. No voice-over. Claire couldn’t imagine what she was intending to say, but it couldn’t have been good.
“I’ll kill her,” Eve said. It sounded calm, but it really wasn’t. “Why are you showing me this?”
Michael looked at her, and Claire’s stomach did a little flip at the grimness in his expression. “Sit down,” he said, and wheeled the chair closer to Eve. She looked at it, then at him, frowning. “Trust me.”
She did, still frowning, as the scene changed on-screen.
It was some dark-paneled room, with a big wooden round table, an ornate flower arrangement in the middle. Of the several people around the table, Claire recognized three immediately, with a shock. “Amelie,” she blurted. Amelie clearly had no idea she was being filmed; the camera was high up, at an angle, but it caught their faces clearly. Next to her at the table was Richard Morrell, the mayor, neat and handsome in a dark suit. At his right sat Oliver, looking—as usual—angry. Several other people around the table were talking at once, arguing, and finally Oliver slammed his hand down on the wood with so much force it silenced them all.
Then came Kim’s voice-over. “Morganville is ruled by a town council, but one not like any other. Nobody elects these people. That’s Amelie, Founder of Morganville. She’s more than a thousand years old, and she’s a ruthless killer. Oliver’s not much younger, and he’s even meaner. The mayor, Richard Morrell, he’s new, but his family has ruled the humans of Morganville for a hundred years. Richard’s the only human on the council. And he gets outvoted . . . constantly.”
She cut back to the sound as Richard was saying, “. . . want to revisit the decision we made earlier, about Jason Rosser.”
“What about him?” Oliver asked irritably. “We’ve heard your arguments. Let’s move on.”
“You can’t execute him. He gave himself up. He tried to save the girl.”
“He did not try to save Claire,” Amelie said. “He left her to die. Granted, he did turn himself in to the police and told us about his accomplice in these murders, but we must be clear: he is far from innocent, and his history tells us he can’t be trusted.”
“He’s still a kid,” Richard said, “and you ca
n’t just arbitrarily decide to execute him. Not without a trial.”
“With a majority vote, we can,” Oliver said. “Two for, one against. I believe that is a majority. It won’t be a public event. He’ll just quietly—disappear.”
Eve’s mouth dropped open. She leaned forward, frantically searching the screen for a clue. “When was this? Michael? When did she record this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you should know. Your brother’s been sentenced to death.”
“Oliver—he didn’t even—he didn’t say anything.”
“Well,” Myrnin said, “I don’t suppose he felt it was necessary. I expect they were planning to arrange something quiet, perhaps an accident. Or suicide.”
Eve fell into the chair, and blindly reached out for Michael, who took her hand. “They can’t just kill him. Not like some—rat in a cage. Oh God, Michael . . .”
“I told you Detective Hess was here. He left right after we found that. He’s going straight to the jail to be sure Jason’s okay. He’ll put him in protective custody, okay? Don’t worry.”
She gave out a breathless, broken laugh.“Don’t worry? How do I not worry after you show me things like this?”
“Good point,” Shane said. “Michael, Kim bugged the council meeting. How could she possibly do that?”
“She couldn’t,” Myrnin said. “The human parts of town, yes, of course, but not the vampire parts. She has no excuse to be there, and she’d be caught if she’d gone anywhere near the official chambers. Or Amelie’s house.” He held up another black hard drive, which was clearly labeled in silver ink. “Or Oliver’s, for that matter.”
Claire caught her breath. “Your lab?”
“No. Oddly enough, nothing. But the evidence she has here is damning enough, I would say.”
“But nobody would believe it,” Eve said. “I mean, sure, she might get some off-brand cable station to air it, but everybody would think it was some kind of hoax.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Claire said. “Even if nobody does, tourists will come flocking to town, and how long do you think things will hold together once that happens?”
“I’d give it a week,” Myrnin said. He sounded quiet, and not at all amused. “This is our refuge, Claire. Our last safe place in this world. Don’t be fooled; we might be willing to compromise, but we are territorial. Kim has violated the deepest covenant of Morganville. She can’t survive this.”
“She didn’t do it alone; you said so yourself. It took a vampire to bug the council, let alone Amelie’s house.”
“And we will find them,” Myrnin said. “And we will destroy them. There are rules to Morganville, and Kim and this vampire have shattered them beyond all repair. Amelie must never know of this. I’m afraid what she would do.”
That seemed a strange left turn. “Why? We’re going to catch them, right? We’ve got the video.”
“Do we?” Myrnin looked at the array of hard drives. “You spoke of more than seventy cameras, but I see only sixty or so hard drives. What’s missing, Claire? You know Amelie. You know that her first concern is for her people. If she believes that we’ve been compromised here, she will cut our losses.”
“Losses being humans,” Shane said.
“She’d rather move us and destroy all evidence we were ever here. It’s always been her final option. You have no idea how many times she’s come close recently.”
Claire swallowed. “We can’t let her do that.”
“We cannot stop her,” Myrnin said. “Not even I can do that. But what we can do is remove the evidence.”
He crushed the hard drive he was holding into junk and dropped it to the floor, then moved on to the next, and the next.
Michael helped Eve out of the chair, picked it up, and smashed it into the editing station. He ripped out the hard drive from the video editing system and smashed it against the wall.
Claire and Eve backed up against the wall, holding hands, as the two vampires systematically destroyed every bit of data storage in the place. It took a while, but they were thorough, and when the last piece of equipment was broken into random parts, Shane said, “I thought that would feel better, somehow.”
“We’re not finished,” Myrnin said. “We need to find every camera and destroy those, as well. And we must find Kim and force her to tell us who helped her. This is not negotiable. A vampire traitor is far too dangerous to live.”
Kim had kept records—a hard copy printout stuffed in a cabinet drawer next to the wrecked editing machine. It listed a total of seventy-four cameras, all over Morganville. “She must have added a couple at the last minute. This is going to take hours,” Eve said. “We’ll have to split up, each take ten or so. Myrnin and Michael, you’ve got the Vamptown cameras. Claire, Shane, here you go. Knock yourselves out.”
“What about Kim?” Claire asked, taking the page of locations. “We still need to find her.”
“I will ask Ada to locate her,” Myrnin said.
“She can do that?” Claire asked, and then blinked. “Of course she can. Will she do that?”
“Possibly. If she’s in a good mood, which is never certain, as you know. But I assure you, Ada is no longer angry at you, so don’t be worried about that.” Myrnin checked a gleaming gold pocket watch he kept in his vest pocket, some complicated dragon-shaped thing. “We must meet back before sunrise. Where?”
“Someplace deserted,” Claire said. “Much as I hate it, how about German’s? I don’t want anybody overhearing us.”
“Paranoid much?” Eve asked. “Yeah, me too. I’m never taking my clothes off again, I swear.”
“German’s it is,” Myrnin said. “You know the portal frequency. Be there before sunrise, and do try to avoid getting yourself killed, if at all possible.”
He led them out of the studio, out into the night. Michael took his car, heading off with his list of camera locations. At German’s, Myrnin stepped through the dark clown-mouth doorway and was gone on his own errands, leaving Shane, Eve, and Claire standing there in the dark, in a fragile circle of flashlight.
“So?” Eve prodded. “Fire it up, Teleport Girl. I want this over with.”
Claire checked the list. “Right. The first twenty are easy—all in common areas. Eve, I’ll send you and Shane to the alley behind Common Grounds. I’ll take the university.”
“Hey,” Shane said. “Wait a minute. I don’t want you out there alone.”
“University,” Claire reminded him. “Protected ground. Besides, I’m the one with the bracelet.” She flashed the gold at him, and he didn’t look happy, but he did look resigned. “Also, we’ve got no time to argue. Go.”
Shane looked back at her before he stepped through the portal, and Claire felt a moment’s sick fear that she’d never see him again. Morganville was a dangerous place. Every good-bye could be the last.
We’ll get through this.
She focused on the portal, shifted frequencies, and started on her camera-destroying mission.
She hoped Myrnin was right about Ada.
Four hours later, it was approaching sunrise, Claire was bone-tired, and she’d bagged all of the cameras on her list, including the one in the football team’s shower room, which was an interesting experience. Kim had clearly been combining business with personal pleasure. She took the portal back to the alley behind Common Grounds, intending to pick up Shane and Eve, but they were nowhere in sight. She called Shane’s cell, and heard it ringing, but it was distant and muffled.
She found him standing braced against the wall, holding Eve’s ankles as she stood on his shoulders to reach a camera set on top of the roof of a shed. “Got it!” Eve called, and nearly overbalanced. Shane staggered around, got his equilibrium again, and helped her down to the pavement. “We should totally join the circus.”
“One of us already looks like a clown.”
“Hi guys,” Claire said, and they both jumped and turned her way. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Shane hug
ged her. “How’d you do?”
“Twenty cameras. There was one missing. I think somebody found it and swiped it from the University Center. You?”
“That was the last one on the list,” he said. “Guess it’s time to see how Team Vampire did.”
Claire opened the portal to German’s Tire Plant, and stepped through, with Shane and Eve right behind her. The portal snapped shut as soon as they were inside, and Claire flipped on her flashlight.
“Um . . .” Eve turned on her light, as well. “Okay. Wrong number, Claire.”
“No,” Claire said. “That can’t happen. I mean, it’s the right frequency. I don’t know what happened, but we should be at German’s.”
“Well, we’re not,” Shane said, and shone his light around. They were in an underground tunnel. It was damp and dark and it smelled really foul—much worse than most of the vampire highway tunnels under Morganville. This one didn’t look like it had been used for a road, either. “Wrong turn.”
Eve said, in an entirely different voice, “Really wrong turn.” She pointed off down the tunnel, and Claire saw shapes moving in the darkness. Pale skin. Shining red eyes. “Oh man. Dial us out, please.”
The only problem was that the portal system refused to pick up. They were locked out.
Claire looked at Shane and Eve and shook her head. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute, and she could see the light trembling from the force of her pulse beats. “We’re stuck,” she said.
Shane dropped the bag he was carrying, unzipped it, and passed weapons to Eve, then took out a wicked-lethal crossbow with silver-tipped bolts. “Somebody up there doesn’t like you, Claire.”
Claire primed the Super Soaker. “It’s Ada,” she said. “This time, I’m not letting Myrnin talk me out of it.”
The vampires—well, vampirelike things, sort of like Myrnin’s experimental attempts to turn humans back in his crazy days—hurled themselves out of the darkness with high-pitched, batlike squeals. Claire resisted the urge to scream, and let loose with the water gun. A blast caught three of them in midleap, and they shrieked even louder, hit the ground, rolled, and kept rolling. She could see the ghostly blue flare of flames around them as the silver ate into their exposed skin—which was most of it, because these things were more like tunnel rats than anything approaching human. Giant undead tunnel rats.