by Rachel Caine
“You’re not Morganville,” Claire said. Kim, draped over Shane’s shoulder, had caught sight of Ada, and she was thrashing wildly, screaming. It was all Shane could do to hold on to her. “You’re just a science project. One that doesn’t work right.”
“I am the force that holds this lie of a town together,” Ada said, and glided closer, so close Claire could feel the cold chill generated by her image projection. “As far as Morganville is concerned, I am its goddess.”
“Word of advice,” Eve said. “It’s time for a change of religion.”
Ada’s image became distorted again, and she stretched out a hand. Claire controlled the natural impulse to flinch. She’s not real. She’s just a ghost—
Ada’s fingers touched her face. Not quite real, but almost.
Claire jumped back. “Outside!” she yelled. “Get outside!”
Ada smiled. “I’ll see you soon.”
They made it outside, into the faint hint of sunrise, without anyone jumping them again.
Claire flagged down a passing police cruiser and got them to take Kim, who shrieked and fought so hard they had to use a taser on her. Eve winced, and so did Shane.
Claire didn’t. She felt bad about it, but she just couldn’t bring herself to really feel sorry for Kim. Karma, she thought. They’d end up putting her in a padded cell, and eventually maybe Kim would recover enough to function as a normal person. Maybe even a better one. Claire didn’t even resent that, so long as she never, ever had to talk to her again.
Ever.
By ten a.m. they were back at the Glass House, and Michael was waiting. “Where were you?” he demanded as soon as they opened the door. Claire said nothing; he was focused on Eve, anyway. “I’ve been calling; it went straight to voice mail.”
“I turned it off,” Eve said. “We were kind of being stealthy.”
“Since when do you turn off a phone?” Michael put his arms around her, and Eve relaxed against him, and for just a moment, it looked like everything was the same again.
Then Eve pulled free and walked away down the hall, head down.
Michael looked awful. “What do I have to do—?”
Shane slapped his shoulder as he passed. “Give her space,” he said. “It’s been a hard couple of days. Where’s Myrnin?”
“He never showed at the rendezvous,” Michael said. “I wasn’t really worried about him. More about you.”
“Yeah, about that—we kind of had to make a deal with Morley. You know, Graveyard Guy?”
“What kind of deal?”
“The kind where we don’t want to pay up,” Shane said. “Ask Claire.”
She shook her head, walking on. “Ask Shane,” she said. “I’m not done yet.”
“What?” Shane grabbed her wrist, pulling her to a stop. His face was tense and pale. “You can’t be serious. Not done with what? We’ve got the videos, the cameras, Kim. What else?”
“Myrnin,” she said. “He didn’t show up at the rendezvous.”
“And? Dude’s crazy, in case you didn’t notice recently. He probably went off to chase butterflies or something”
“He’d have been there. Something happened to him.” Claire knew already, knew it all the way down to her bones. “Ada did something. She sent us to Morley, thinking he’d kill us. She’d go after Myrnin, too. I have to find him.”
“Not by yourself.”
“No,” Michael agreed.
“Ditto,” Eve said, and picked up a fresh weapons bag from the closet to sling over her shoulder. “Definitely not by yourself.”
Claire looked at each of them in turn, saving Shane for last. “You’re sure. Because it’s going to be dangerous.”
“You’re going after Ada, right?” Eve put stakes in her pockets, then tossed a crossbow to Shane, who caught it in midair. “You’re going to need backup. Especially if she’s got Myrnin. Besides, if we just sit here and wait, she can get us anytime she wants.”
“We should take the car,” Claire said, heading toward the closet to get her own weapons stash. “It’s not safe now going through the portals anymore. . . .”
A black hole formed in the wall next to her, and Claire felt the storm of force rip through the house. The portal wavered as the house itself fought back, trying to heal the rift, but whatever was tearing the entrance held firm. Ada.
Claire didn’t have time to run.
Ada’s blue-white hands came out of the darkness, grabbed Claire by the shirt, and dragged her into the portal.
It snapped shut on the shocked, angry faces of her friends.
She heard Shane scream her name.
So, Ada really could touch things. Claire kind of wished she’d taken that idea more seriously.
Claire woke up lying on cold, damp stone, feeling damp little feet skittering over her arm—rats, probably. She hoped it wasn’t roaches. She’d just die if it was roaches.
She was in the dark—utter, velvety darkness that pressed in on her like smothering cloth. When she moved, she heard the scrape of her shoes echo off into the distance.
Cave. Probably not Ada’s cave, because Claire couldn’t hear the distinctive hissing and clanking that came from Ada’s gears and pipes. It doesn’t have to be her cave, Claire reminded herself. Ada could open any portal, anywhere within Morganville—or under it. From the ragged, crude way she’d done it at the Glass House, though, she might not be able to keep up that sort of thing for long.
She was unraveling in control, even while she was getting stronger in raw power.
“Ada,” a voice said in the distance—weak and faint. “Ada, you must let me go. I order you to let me go.”
“No.” Ada’s voice came from nowhere, and everywhere ; not out of Claire’s speakerphone this time. Claire slapped at her pockets, but she had nothing—no weapons, no phone; Ada had taken everything. “You’re going nowhere. I’ve waited all these years, you know. So many years for you to love me.”
“Ada, please.” Myrnin sounded very weak; Claire could hardly believe it was really him. “I do love you. I always have. Please stop this. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not well. Let me help—”
He broke off with a strangled gasp. She’d hurt him, and it took a lot to hurt Myrnin.
Claire slowly climbed to her feet, put her hands on the nearest stone wall, and began to feel her way through the darkness.
“Going somewhere?” Ada’s voice asked from right behind her, as if the computer was leaning over her shoulder. Claire yelped and flailed out a hand, but there was nothing there. “I brought you here so that I can get rid of you once and for all, and you can help me make Myrnin better at the same time. Isn’t that clever of me?”
Her voice was breaking up into strange harmonics, not really a voice at all—mere noise. “How are you talking?” Claire asked. “You’re not using my phone.”
“Does it matter?”
“No,” Claire said. She sounded a lot less scared than she actually was, which she supposed was a good thing. “I’m just curious.”
“You’d be curious at your own autopsy,” Ada said, and broke into distorted laughter that reeled wildly out of control. “I’d like to see that.”
“Where’s Myrnin?”
“Don’t you dare try to take him away from me!” Ada shrieked. The echoes filled the cave, bounced, magnified until Claire had to clap her hands over her ears. She could feel the sound waves on her skin, like speakers booming at a rave. “He is mine; he’s always been mine; I will never give him up, never!”
“I’m not trying to take him away!” Claire shouted. “I just want to be sure he’s all right!”
The sound cut off, just like that. Even the echoes. Claire slowly lowered her hands and touched the wall again; she was afraid to try to move without keeping it under her fingers, because there was no possibility of seeing a thing. Not with human eyes.
“Claire?” Myrnin’s voice again, coming from ahead of her and to the right. He sounded weak, and concerned. “You hav
e to get out of here. Please go away.”
“Kind of not an option,” she said. “Unless Ada wants to open me a portal . . . ?”
Ada laughed softly.
“Guess not.” Claire took a couple of more steps forward, but it took her off the angle toward Myrnin’s voice. “Myrnin, I can’t see. I’m going to try to get to you, but you have to keep talking, okay?”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t try to reach me. Claire, I’m asking you, please stay where you are. Get out if you can. Do not come near me.”
She was ignoring that, mostly because the idea of staying alone in this darkness, listening to Ada do bad things to him, was worse than anything he could do to her himself. “Keep talking,” she said. She heard him take in a deep breath, then let it out. He didn’t say a word. She guessed he thought that if he didn’t encourage her, maybe she’d give up.
He should have known better.
“Stop!” Myrnin’s voice suddenly rang out of the black, urgent and sharp, and Claire paused with her right foot still raised. “Back up. Slowly. Two steps. Do it, Claire!”
She did, putting one foot carefully behind the other, and stopped. “What is it?”
“The floor isn’t stable. If you try to cross that way, it’ll break through under your weight. You must stay where you are!”
“So concerned for the new girl,” Ada’s voice said, vibrating out of the cave walls. “Never so concerned for me, were you? Even though you always knew how much I loved you. How much I wanted to be with you. I let you drink my blood, Myrnin. I let you take everything. And then you did this to me.”
“Oh, stop whining,” Myrnin snapped. “You were grateful enough to become a vampire, and it had nothing to do with your being a lovesick schoolgirl. You wanted a thousand lifetimes to explore the world, to discover, to learn. I gave you that, Ada.”
“You were supposed to take care of me.”
“According to whom?”
“According to me!” The echoes built again, bouncing wildly, and Claire crouched down in place, hands firmly over her ears again. This time, the echoes died gradually. Once it was quiet, Claire rose to her feet and started moving carefully forward at an angle to her original course, testing the floor before putting her full weight on the stone.
It felt solid.
“Claire, please stop,” Myrnin said raggedly. “You can’t see. You don’t know how dangerous this is.”
“Describe it to me. Help me! If you don’t, I’ll just keep walking.”
“That’s exactly what she wants. She wants you to try to reach me—” Myrnin broke off with a small cry of pain.
“Myrnin?” Claire forgot all about being careful, and took a step forward. Too fast. She felt the stone snap and crumble and fall away, dark on dark, and she teetered off balance over the edge of a hole that led to the center of the world, apparently. She didn’t even hear the falling rocks hit bottom.
Claire slowly shifted her weight to her back foot and stepped back to solid stone again. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt, and she couldn’t seem to slow down her panicked breathing.
“Myrnin, you have to help me,” she said. “Tell me which way to go. We can do this.”
“Even if you reach me, it’s no help to either of us,” he said. “She has me. There’s no point in your dying, as well.”
“Just tell me how to get there.”
After a few silent seconds, Myrnin said, “Two steps to your right, then one forward.” As she accomplished that, he said, “Claire, she’s right. I did take advantage of her. She did love me. I used that to get what I wanted from her.”
“You mean, like a guy?” Claire counted steps carefully, then stopped. “Next.”
“One step forward, then one diagonally to your left. What I did was considerably worse than you think. I made her a vampire so I could have a reliable assistant, one who loved me and would never betray me. I made her a slave.”
“Next. And one thing I can tell you about Ada, she was never a slave, not to you or anybody else. And you really did love her, or you wouldn’t have kept her locket all these years.”
“Another step straight to your left, then six forward. And don’t be daft. I keep gum wrappers. It doesn’t mean I love the gum that was once in them.”
She counted. He didn’t say anything else. Once she got to the end of the directions, she said, “Next. I’m not wrong about Ada. You did love her.”
“Straight ahead, one step.”
“You’re not going to tell me I’m wrong?”
“What’s the point? Three steps to your right.”
“The point is to keep us talking so I’m not so terrified out of my mind,” she said. “What are we going to do about her?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I’m there. Next? Also, there’s got to be something. What about—” She was about to say the reset code, and he must have known it, because he let out a sharp hiss for silence. She swallowed the words.
“Focus,” Myrnin said. “Forward three small steps. Be careful not to overshoot.”
She found out why when she took the steps; her toes overhung what felt like another sinkhole.
Myrnin’s voice was close now, very close. “Next,” she said.
“This is the difficult part,” he said. “You’re going to have to jump.”
“Jump?” She wasn’t sure he was thinking straight. “I can’t jump. I can’t see!”
“You wanted to get to me, and this is what it takes. If you want to stay where you are—”
“No. Tell me.”
“Two steps to your left, and jump straight forward, hard. I’ll catch you.”
“Myrnin—”
“I’ll catch you,” he whispered into the dark. “Jump.”
She took two running steps and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, dug in her toes and leaped forward.
She crashed into Myrnin’s solid body, his cold arms wrapped around her, and for a few breaths he held her close as she shivered. He smelled like metal. Like cold things.
He didn’t let go.
“Myrnin?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And then he bit her.
13
When Claire came awake again, there were lights in the cave—diffuse and dim, but enough to make things out. Like Myrnin, sitting huddled against the cave wall. She must have made some noise, because his head came up, and he looked straight at her.
She didn’t think she’d ever seen anybody look so miserable in her life, and for a moment she couldn’t think why he would look that way, and then it all came crashing back.
The throbbing in her neck.
The hollow, disconnected feeling inside her.
The panicked thudding of her heart trying to speed too little blood through the racetrack of her veins. Yeah, she recognized that feeling all too well.
“You bit me,” she said. It came out surprised, and a little sad. She started to sit up, but that didn’t go so well; she sank back to the cold stone floor, feeling sick and vague, as if she were fading out of the world.
“Don’t move,” he said softly. “Your pressure is very low. I tried—I tried to stop, Claire. I did try. Please give me the credit.”
“You bit me,” she said again. It still sounded surprised, although she really wasn’t anymore. You can’t trust him. Shane had said that. And Michael. And Eve. Even Amelie.
You can’t trust me.
Myrnin had told her that, too, from the very first. She’d just never really, really believed it. Myrnin was like a thrill ride, one of those dark carnival tracks where scary things swooped in close but never quite touched you.
Now she knew better.
“I told you I’d kill you if you did that. I promised.”
“I am so sorry,” Myrnin said, and lowered his head.
“Lie still. It won’t be so bad if you keep yourself flat.” He sounded tired and defeated. Claire blinked back gray fog, fighting
her way back into the world, and almost wished she hadn’t when he shifted a little, and she saw—really saw—what had happened to him.
There was a silver bar through his left arm, driven in between the two bones. On either side of it hung silver chains that rattled on the stone and were fixed to a silver-plated bolt. The wound continued to drip red down his arm and hand, to patter into a large puddle around him.
Claire had a flash of Amelie at Sam’s grave, silver driven into the wounds to keep them from closing. But Amelie had chosen to do that. This had been done to keep Myrnin here, pinned and helpless.
He shuddered, and the chains rattled. Even as old as he was, the silver must have been horribly painful to him; she could see tendrils of smoke coming from his arm, and he was careful to keep his hand away from the chains. His skin was covered with thick red burns.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I tried to warn you, but I couldn’t—I needed—”
“I know,” Claire said. “It’s—” What was it? Not okay, okay would be a real stretch. Understandable, maybe. “It’s not so bad.” It was, though. Still, Myrnin looked a little relieved. “Who did this to you?”
The relief faded from his face, replaced with a blank, black rage. “Who do you think?” he asked.
And from all around them, from the faint shimmer of crystal embedded in the walls, came a soft, smoky laugh.
“She touched me,” Claire said, remembering. “She dragged me here. I didn’t think she could do that.”
“No,” Myrnin agreed. “I didn’t think she could do a great many things, although she was capable of them on a purely theoretical level. I’ve been a fool, Claire. You tried to warn me—even Amelie warned me, but I thought—I thought I understood what I’d created. I thought she was my servant.”