by Rachel Caine
“You really think I’m going to leave you out here, alone? You really believe that? Hannah?”
I looked up, and found him watching me with that strange mix of vulnerability and frustration that I’d come to know over the past few months. We’d been at this relationship a while. It had started in a frenzy of frustration and need, not love maybe but something close. It could have been love, in time, but there was just something not quite clicking between us. Some hidden switch that didn’t trip.
I wished it was different. I wanted to be in love. He was worth it. Hell, I was worth it, too.
But it just wasn’t the way it was going to be, and deep down I think we both knew it.
“Richard,” I said, in my best commanding officer voice, “we do not have time for this. Take the cruiser and get us help, now. Go.”
He wasn’t used to taking orders, particularly; that’s what happens when you grow up in the richest, most powerful human family in Morganville. He still thought of me as a girl from the wrong side of town, not somebody who’d been to hell, kicked ass, and come home alive.
That was a mistake. He was starting to realize it, finally. And revise his attitude.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll go. But you stay safe.”
I gave him a little smile, but it was my battle smile, without humor. “Always,” I said. I was a survivor. Hell, I’d survived worse than this. Supernatural horrors were bad, but they were nothing to the burning hatred and viciousness that humans could visit on each other. I hadn’t lived through segregation, but my dear, sweet, tough old Gramma Day had; she’d been born in the days when colored couldn’t eat in the same restaurants, dance in the same clubs, drink from the same fountains, or pee in the same toilets as whites. Humans were capable of a whole lot worse than vampires, in my experience.
Maybe they just inherited their viciousness from us.
The rain was letting up, but where it hit bare skin it burned like stings, or bites. Cannibal rain. I’d seen a lot of crap, but this was weird even for Morganville. As Richard headed for the cruiser, I resisted the urge to tell him to be careful. He was a Morganville native; he understood the rules. He was tough, deep down, too. He’d be all right.
I had a split second to wish I’d said it.
A sudden gush of water came off the top of the looming roof of the building, splatting down over Richard and in front of him, and in the next second it was forming arms that weren’t arms, a body that was more boneless worm than human form, and my brain refused to process what that was, that face—
I yelled and brought the shotgun up but Richard was right in front of it, held as a shield. It knew. It knew what it was doing.
It grinned at me, some horrible and incredibly wrong configuration of teeth and tongue and lips, and its eyes were melting and forming and bulging and I felt an utterly strange impulse to scream and hide my eyes, like a child, as if that would stop what was about to happen.
Then it enveloped Richard. Dragged him into its own body. The thick, heaving mass closed around him, and I heard him scream. Just once, before his mouth disappeared.
If I fired, I’d hurt the draug, but I’d kill Richard.
“Shoot it!” Captain Obvious was screaming at me. I recognized the voice, heard the buzz of the words, but I was completely focused on what was in front of me. “God, shoot it now!”
It won’t hurt him much, I told myself. They had Shane for hours, submerged in that tank. It can’t hurt him so much; it’s just trying to force me to shoot and kill Richard.
He was struggling inside it, like a bug caught in molasses.
The watery, sticky form of the draug was taking on a pinkish tint.
Do something!
I left Captain Obvious and his yelling, raced to the cruiser, and pulled open the back door. Claire was pounding on the window, reaching across Shane to do it. She was holding out a bag of white powder, and for an insane second I thought drugs, which was always a problem in any small town, but as I hesitated she screamed, “Throw it at the draug!”
I emptied the whole bag, flinging the contents at the creature.
The scream drilled into my head like a laser, and I dropped the shotgun and fell down, stunned, instinctively pulling into a fetal position and covering my ears, but that shriek plunged deeper and deeper into my head, whiting out every thought, every instinct except the purest, to hide.
And then it started to fade.
The rain stopped, as suddenly as the cutoff of a faucet. The puddles underneath me seemed to actually crawl, as if they were trying to get away, and I thought I was going insane, again, as I flopped over on my back and saw the silvery streams of drops going up into the air against the law of gravity, shimmering and weirdly, horribly beautiful in their sinuous curves.
The clouds were smaller overhead, I realized. They’d risked a lot to do this, and it had cost them. This was dry country, arid and unforgiving, and water got trapped quickly in the loose, sandy soil. Not all the draug’s—cells? whatever it was—could survive this process of rain and reclamation.
I was just getting to my feet when I caught sight of Captain Obvious, staggering to his feet. He was cradling his badly broken arm close to him, but he’d picked up a rifle from the wreckage of the truck.
I looked where he was aiming.
The draug was—I didn’t know what to call it. Misshapen, because it had tried to flee back into liquid form, but frozen into something that was misty, gelatinous, and shot through with thick black lines like veins. It was horrifying, and inside it, Richard was still trapped.
“No!” I screamed, and grabbed for my shotgun.
I wasn’t fast enough.
Captain Obvious fired twice, directly into the dead, rubbery body of the draug. His eyes were wild and crazy, driven insane by the shriek and the utter wrongness of what we’d seen, and I understood that, I understood the impulse to smash that evil, horrific shape into bits.
But Richard was inside it.
I somehow managed not to shoot Captain Obvious. I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I was standing over him, and I dimly remember clubbing him with the heavy stock of the shotgun in my hands. He was down again, senseless. I resisted the urge to kick him in the broken arm.
Michael Glass had gotten out of his side of the cruiser and was standing there, pale and still. He was staring at me as if he’d never seen me before. Well, he hadn’t. Not like this. Not on full auto.
I tossed him my shotgun on the run, and he caught it, and then I was plunging both hands deep into that awful, cold, thick substance that had been the draug.
Elbow-deep.
I got hold of one of Richard’s arms and pulled him out. It was like hauling someone out of deep, heavy mud; it took every ounce of my strength and leverage to wrestle his hand free, then his elbow, then his shoulder—and then the draug’s dead, solidified form slumped away from him as gravity dragged its boneless body down, and he came completely loose.
He was covered in wet, stinking clumps of black matter. Whatever the powder had done to the draug, it had certainly killed it, because that was the smell of dead things rotting on beaches.
Richard pulled in a deep, bubbling gasp and opened his eyes. His skin was sunburn-red, stung all over from the draug’s grip, and there were red flecks of hemorrhage in the whites of his eyes. He’d almost suffocated.
One of the bullets Captain Obvious had fired had hit him in the side, probably in the liver; that was bad, but the one that had hit him square in the chest was worse. The wound in front was pumping out bright red arterial blood, and the second I saw it a queer sense of calm settled over me. I knew that sensation. It was my emotions shutting down to protect me from what was coming.
I lowered Richard to the damp pavement and tried putting pressure on the wound, but it was useless. That was a major arterial tear, too close to his heart. I packed the hole with wadded-up ripped pieces of his shirt, but that couldn’t stop it. I was only keeping the blood inside, where it would fill up his chest cavity an
d kill him from suffocation if his heart didn’t stop first.
“Hannah?” Michael’s uncertain voice from behind me. “We can put him in the back …”
“No,” I said. Richard’s eyes were open, fixed on mine. I could see the stark terror in them, and the knowledge. “No, we can’t move him.” I wouldn’t say, It wouldn’t do any good, he won’t last long, but I could see Richard already knew it. I could feel it in the crushing strength of his grip on my hand. He was trying by sheer will to hold himself here, with me.
He was a good man. A very good man. Brave and kind, and better than Morganville had ever deserved out of the Morrell family.
I should have been able to truly love him. In this moment, at least, I finally did. Completely.
I bent forward and kissed him, very lightly, and whispered, “I’m sorry I wasn’t what you needed me to be. I love you, Richard. You hear me? I love you. I’m sorry I never said it.”
He heard me. I saw his pale, already blueing lips shape the words back. His hand on mine was shaking—a little at first, and then more violently. But he wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t look away from me, until the very last second when he squeezed his eyelids shut, and the last warm blood flowed from the wound in his chest, covering my right hand as my left caressed his forehead, pushing the matted hair from his face.
“I love you,” I said again. “And I’m so, so sorry.”
And then he was still, and gone.
Michael was still standing there. I was dimly aware of him, until he finally moved to crouch next to me. “Is he—”
“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded oddly matter-of-fact about it. I couldn’t feel much, not yet. Not here. “Yes, he’s gone.” There was a lot of blood. A lot of it was on my hands, bright and red, still warm. There was a puddle of shallow water in a depression in the pavement near me, and without thinking I rinsed myself off in it; no burning, after. The draug weren’t hiding there, not that I’d have cared in this moment. “We need to get you all back to Founder’s Square now. I’ll come back for him.”
I’d never seen a vampire look so young, and so uncertain. I was completely freaking him out, I realized, and this was a kid who’d grown up with a fair amount of insanity and violence, and had inherited a great deal more when he’d crossed to the other side. I wondered what it was he saw in me that made him look so … tentative. “What about them?” he asked, and nodded toward the wounded by the truck.
I didn’t so much as glance that way again. “They can wait,” I said. “I’ll send help.” Maybe.
I knew that wasn’t logical, or reasonable, or even human, to leave three broken men out there to suffer, or to die, if the draug came back, but I wasn’t feeling logical, or reasonable, or human. Captain Obvious had shot Richard, and he hadn’t needed to do that. I’d already saved him. Ten more seconds, and we’d all have left here alive.
I understood why he’d done it; I’d had to fight not to do the same exact thing.
But I couldn’t forgive.
Michael didn’t argue with me. Maybe he, too, realized that I was in a very dangerous place—dangerous for Captain Obvious, for his men, for me, even for him if he tried to get in my way. He bowed his head, stood up, and went to the car. The sound of the door slamming was as final as the lid on a coffin.
I made sure Richard’s eyes were closed. I straightened him as best I could.
As I stood, suddenly and achingly aware of how very tired I was, how weary, the clouds parted, just a little, and a warm beam of wintry sunlight lanced through to bathe us both. I raised my face to it and closed my eyes for a few seconds. A better person might have thought that God was touching us to remind me that it wasn’t all darkness, that clouds passed, and storms ended.
But for now, it was just sun, and warmth, and it soon was gone as the clouds shifted again. Because just now, I wasn’t a person who believed in the future.
Only in what was right in front of me.
I kicked pieces of jellyfied draug out of my way to the driver’s side door of the cruiser. As I got inside, I heard Claire say, in a choked and very shaky voice, “There he is.”
I looked up and around. I started to ask, not that I was really curious, but Shane did it for me. “Who?” He had his arm around Claire, and she was huddled against him, quietly wiping tears from her face.
She pointed.
Myrnin—who to this point I had honestly forgotten about, because he’d done nothing, said nothing, reacted to nothing—leaned suddenly forward. “Where?”
“Right there,” Claire said. She pointed again, straight over my shoulder through the front window. “Standing on top of that building. Can’t you see him?”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked her. There was nothing on the roof where she was pointing. No—there was a passing shadow, something that shifted when I tried to fix my focus on it. Like fog, disappearing. “There’s nobody.”
“Magnus. That’s him. I swear, he’s right there. Watching us.”
Michael and Shane were both eyeing her oddly. “Claire, there’s nobody there. Nobody,” Michael said. Myrnin said nothing. His dark eyes were intent, staring at the spot where she pointed. After a moment, he silently sat back and folded his arms.
“You think you can see Magnus,” I repeated. “The leader of the draug. But I promise you, there’s nobody there.”
“And I promise you, he is there. I—I can see him.” Claire bit her lip and took a deep breath. “I could always see him. I don’t know why. When he was taking the vampires in the beginning, I saw him a couple of times and tried to follow him. I think that’s why he came for me, in the house. Because I could see him.”
Thoughts began sparking in my head, igniting into a fuse that burned directly to a very dangerous conclusion. “You can tell him from the others? The ones we can see?”
“The rest of the draug? Yeah. They’re copies of him, but they’re not as … as present, if that makes any sense. They’re just reflections. Pieces of him that have split off. I think somehow they’re all … connected.”
“She’s correct,” Myrnin said. “I tell you now what only Amelie and I know about the draug …. The master draug is the seed from which all others spring, and they are his thralls. Not mindless, but close to it. He is the thinker. The planner. He is the one we have to stop. We have to find a way to trap and kill him. Once we do, the others will fall. They cannot exist long without a master.”
He met my eyes, and that was when I realized that Myrnin was thinking exactly the same thing that I was. That as pathologically cold as I was right now, he was there ahead of me.
Vampires ain’t like most of us, I heard my grandmother whisper in the back of my mind. Cold ones. Cold at heart. Selfish. They don’t survive all this time otherwise.
I wondered what she’d say about me, now.
I exchanged a look in the rearview mirror with the vampire, and held it. Then I said, “We’ll talk about this later.”
He blinked, and inclined his head.
And just like that, we were partners in something that was going to have catastrophic consequences if it went wrong. Funny. I should have worried about that. But all I felt was a sense of savage relief, because I had an objective. Something to do. Something to plan.
And I could see, from the red sparks gathering in Myrnin’s eyes, that he felt exactly the same way.
Michael shifted uncomfortably next to me. “I’m sorry, but we can’t wait here. We really need to get to Founder’s Square. This stuff in the trunk—”
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”
And I drove them back, as I thought about traps, and the draug, and revenge.
It was the only thing I could think of now.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EVE
The vampire library was not my thing. It was maybe Claire’s thing, but I like current novels. Freaky ones, preferably, with black covers and red type on the front. My idea of research is looking at take-out menus.
So it was kind of iron
ic that Naomi’s concept of how to discover why Claire could see Magnus was … searching the library. The idea of me, sitting at a table, leafing through books that had been old before Columbus sailed was so very not right. Also, probably not very useful. But I didn’t much mind. Letter of the agreement, and all that. The worst that could happen was a paper cut—of course, any blood drawn around a hungry vampire was, by definition, a worst-case scenario in the making.
“Honestly,” I said as Naomi dropped another armload on the table, which was already overloaded with big, leather-bound selections, “I can’t read this. And I’m not even sure that this is written in English, anyway.”
“It is English. Middle English,” she said. “Don’t they teach Chaucer these days?”
“Well, they teach him,” I said. “I didn’t exactly learn him. Or, you know, translating. Isn’t there software for this or something? Don’t you digitize?”
Naomi had always struck me as calm. That had been her first characteristic: calm, then pretty. She was still pretty, but that was mostly an involuntary thing; she looked as tired as any vampire I’d ever seen. The calm was completely missing. She seemed just … focused. And annoyed.
“All you need do is look for one word,” she said. “If you find it, I will read the section. Or do you want me to reconsider our agreement? Your choice.” She pulled up a chair on the other side of the table and began scanning another book. Somehow she made it look effortless and graceful.
For me, it was very heavy lifting. We’d already been at it for an hour, and my eyes ached. So did my back. I went back to the stiff pages of the book I’d been examining—I wouldn’t say reading, really. The words were strangely formed, much more vertical than I was used to seeing. It wasn’t even typeset. Someone had actually written this out by hand. A copy of a book back in those days was just that: copied. By hand. With a pen.
Talk about carpal tunnel.
And then, to my shock, I focused in on a word.
The word. “Uh, I think I have something.”
“Good,” Naomi said, and was around the table in a flash, reading where I pointed. “That is not what I am looking for, but it does pertain to the draug. Keep searching.”