by Rachel Caine
Claire was about to hiss something really unpleasant at her, but froze as another voice came bouncing through the vast room—Shane’s voice. “Claire?”
“Here!”
“Stay there! And shut up!”
He sounded frantic enough to make Claire wish she’d stuck with the whole quiet-time policy, and then Monica stopped breathing and went very, very still next to her. Her hands closed around Claire’s arm, squeezing bruises again.
Claire froze, too, because something was coming out of the mouth of that painted clown—something white, ghostly, drifting like smoke. . . .
It had a face. Several faces, because it was a group of what looked like vampires, all very pale, all very quiet, all heading their way.
Staying put was not such a great plan, Claire decided. She was going to go with run away.
Which, grabbing Monica’s wrist, she did.
The vampires did make sounds then, as their quarry started to flee—little whispering laughs, strange hisses, all kinds of creepy noises that made the skin on the back of Claire’s neck tighten up. She held the glass vial in one hand, running faster, leaping over junk when she could see it coming and stumbling across it when she couldn’t. Monica kept up, somehow, although Claire could hear the tortured, steady moaning of her breath. Whatever she’d done to her right leg must have hurt pretty badly.
Something pale landed ahead of her, with a silent leap like a spider pouncing. Claire had a wild impression of a white face, red eyes, a wide-open mouth, and gleaming fangs. She drew back to throw the vial . . . and realized it was Myrnin facing her.
The hesitation cost her. Something hit her from the back, sending her stumbling forward across a fallen iron beam. She dropped the vial as she fell, trying to catch herself, and heard the glass break on the edge of the girder. Silver dust puffed out. Monica shrieked, a wild cry that made the birds panic again high up in heaven; Claire saw her stumble away, trying to put distance between herself and Myrnin.
Myrnin was just outside of the range of the drifting silver powder, but it wasn’t Myrnin who was the problem. The other vampires, the ones who’d come out of the clown’s mouth, leaped over stacks of trash, running for the smell of fresh, flowing blood.
They were coming up behind them, fast.
Claire raked her hand across the ground and came up with a palm full of silver powder and glass shards as she rolled up to her knees. She turned and threw the powder into the air between her, Monica, and the rest of the vampires. It dispersed into a fine, glittering mist, and when the vampires hit it, every tiny grain of silver caught fire.
It was beautiful, and horrible, and Claire flinched at the sound of their cries. There was so much silver, and it clung to their skin, eating in. Claire didn’t know if it would kill them, but it definitely stopped them cold.
She grabbed Monica’s arm and pulled her close.
Myrnin was still in front of them, crouched on top of a stack of wooden pallets. He didn’t look at all human, not at all.
And then he blinked, and the red light went out in his eyes. His fangs folded neatly backward, and he ran his tongue over pale lips before he said, puzzled, “Claire?”
She felt a sense of relief so strong it was like falling. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Oh.” He slithered down off the stacked wood, and she realized he was still dressed the way she’d seen him back at Common Grounds—a long, black velvet coat, no shirt, white pantaloons left over from his costume. He should have looked ridiculous, but somehow, he looked . . . right. “You shouldn’t be here, Claire. It’s very dangerous.”
“I know—”
Something cold brushed the back of her neck, and she heard Monica make a muffled sound like a choked cry. Claire whirled and found herself face-to-face with a red-eyed, angry vampire with part of his skin still smoking from the silver she’d thrown.
Myrnin let out a roar that ripped the air, full of menace and fury, and the vampire stumbled backward, clearly shocked.
Then the five who’d chased them silently withdrew into the darkness.
Claire turned to face Myrnin. He was staring thoughtfully at the departing vamps.
“Thanks,” she said. He shrugged.
“I was raised to believe in the concept of noblesse oblige,” he said. “And I do owe you, you know. Do you have any more of my medication?”
She handed him her last dose of the drug that kept him sane—mostly sane, anyway. It was the older version, red crystals rather than clear liquid, and he poured out a dollop into his palm and licked the crystals up, then sighed in deep satisfaction.
“Much better,” he said, and pocketed the rest of the bottle. “Now. Why are you here?”
Claire licked her lips. She could hear Shane—or someone—coming toward them through the darkness, and she saw someone in the shadows behind Myrnin. Not vampires, she thought, so it was probably Hannah, flanking Shane. “We’re looking for my friend Eve. You remember her, right?”
“Eve,” Myrnin repeated, and slowly smiled. “Ah. The girl who followed me. Yes, of course.”
Claire felt a flush of excitement, quickly damped by dread. “What happened to her?”
“Nothing. She’s asleep,” he said. “It was too dangerous out here for her. I put her in a safe place, for now.”
Shane pushed through the last of the barriers and stepped into a shaft of light about fifty feet away. He paused at the sight of Myrnin, but he didn’t look alarmed.
“This is your friend as well,” Myrnin said, glancing back at Shane. “The one you care so much for.” She’d never discussed Shane with Myrnin—not in detail, anyway. The question must have shown in her face, because his smile broadened. “You carry his scent on your clothes,” he said. “And he carries yours.”
“Ewww,” Monica sighed.
Myrnin’s eyes focused in on her like laser sights. “And who is this lovely child?”
Claire almost rolled her eyes. “Monica. The mayor’s daughter.”
“Monica Morrell.” She offered her hand, which Myrnin accepted and bent over in an old-fashioned way. Claire assumed he was also inspecting the bracelet on her wrist.
“Oliver’s,” he said, straightening. “I see. I am charmed, my dear, simply charmed.” He hadn’t let go of her hand. “I don’t suppose you would be willing to donate a pint for a poor, starving stranger?”
Monica’s smile froze in place. “I—well, I—”
He pulled her into his arms with one quick jerk. Monica yelped and tried to pull away, but for all his relatively small size, Myrnin had strength to burn.
Claire pulled in a deep breath. “Myrnin. Please.”
He looked annoyed. “Please what?”
“She’s not free range or anything. You can’t just munch her. Let go.” He didn’t look convinced. “Seriously. Let go.”
“Fine.” He opened his arms, and Monica retreated as she clapped both hands around her neck. She sat down on a nearby girder, breathing hard. “You know, in my youth, women lined up to grant me their favors. I believe I’m a bit offended.”
“It’s a strange day for everybody,” Claire said. “Shane, Hannah, this is Myrnin. He’s sort of my boss.”
Shane moved closer, but his expression stayed cool and distant. “Yeah? This the guy who took you to the ball? The one who dumped you and left you to die?”
“Well . . . uh . . . yes.”
“Thought so.”
Shane punched him right in the face. Myrnin, surprised, stumbled back against the tower of crates, and snarled; Shane took a stake from his back pocket and held it at the ready.
“No!” Claire jumped between them, waving her hands. “No, honest, it’s not like that. Calm down, everybody, please.”
“Yes,” Myrnin said. “I’ve been staked quite enough today, thank you. I respect your need to avenge her, boy, but Claire remains quite capable of defending her own honor.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” she said. “Please, Shane. Don’t. We need him.�
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“Yeah? Why?”
“Because he may know what’s going on with the vampires.”
“Oh, that,” Myrnin said, in a tone that implied they were all idiots for not knowing already. “They’re being called. It’s a signal that draws all vampires who have sworn allegiance to you with a blood exchange—it’s the way wars were fought, once upon a time. It’s how you gather your army.”
“Oh,” Claire said. “So . . . why not you? Or the rest of the vampires here?”
“It seems as though your serum offers me some portion of immunity against it. Oh, I feel the draw, most certainly, but in an entirely academic way. Rather curious. I remember how it felt before, like an overwhelming panic. As for those others, well. They’re not of the blood.”
“They’re not?”
“No. Lesser creatures. Failed experiments, if you will.” He looked away, and Claire had a horrible suspicion.
“Are they people? I mean, regular humans?”
“A failed experiment,” he repeated. “You’re a scientist, Claire. Not all experiments work the way they’re intended.”
Myrnin had done this to them, in his search for the cure to the vampire disease. He had turned them into something that wasn’t vampire, wasn’t human, wasn’t—well, wasn’t anything, exactly. They didn’t fit in either society.
No wonder they were hiding here.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Myrnin said. “It’s not my fault the process was imperfect, you know. I’m not a monster.”
Claire shook her head.
“Sometimes, you really are.”
Eve was fine—tired, shaking, and tear streaked, but okay. “He didn’t, you know,” she said, and made two-finger pointy motions toward her throat. “He’s kind of sweet, actually, once you get past all the crazy. Although there’s a lot of the crazy.”
There was, as Claire well knew, no way of getting past the crazy. Not really. But she had to admit that at least Myrnin had behaved more like a gentleman than expected.
Noblesse oblige. Maybe he’d felt obligated.
The place he’d kept Eve had once been some kind of storage locker within the plant, all solid walls and a single door that he’d locked off with a bent pipe. Shane hadn’t been all that happy about it. “What if something had happened to you?” he’d asked, as Myrnin untwisted the metal as though it were solder instead of iron. “She’d have been locked in there, all alone, no way out. She’d have starved.”
“Actually,” Myrnin had answered, “that’s not very likely. Thirst would have killed her within four days, I imagine. She’d never have had a chance to starve.” Claire stared at him. He raised his eyebrows. “What?”
She just shook her head. “I think you missed the point.”
Monica tagged along with Claire, which was annoying; she kept casting Shane nervous glances, and she was now outright terrified of Myrnin, which was probably how it should have been, really. At the very least, she’d shut up, and even the sight of another rat, this one big and kind of albino, hadn’t set off her screams this time.
Eve, however, was less than thrilled to see Monica. “You’re kidding,” she said flatly, staring first at her, then at Shane. “You’re okay with this?”
“Okay would be a stretch. Resigned, that’s closer,” Shane said. Hannah, standing next to him with her shotgun at port arms, snorted out a laugh. “As long as she doesn’t talk, I can pretend she isn’t here.”
“Yeah? Well I can’t,” Eve said. She glared at Monica, who glared right back. “Claire, you have to stop picking up strays. You don’t know where they’ve been.”
“You’re one to talk about diseases,” Monica shot back, “seeing as how you’re one big, walking social one.”
“That’s not pot, kettle—that’s more like cauldron, kettle. Witch.”
“Whore!”
“You want to go play with your new friends back there?” Shane snapped. “The really pale ones with the taste for plasma? Because believe me, I’ll drop your skanky butt right in their nest if you don’t shut up, Monica.”
“You don’t scare me, Collins!”
Hannah rolled her eyes and racked her shotgun. “How about me?”
That ended the entire argument.
Myrnin, leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, watched the proceedings with great interest. “Your friends,” he said to Claire. “They’re quite . . . colorful. So full of energy.”
“Hands off my friends.” Not that that statement exactly included Monica, but whatever.
“Oh, absolutely. I would never.” Hand to his heart, Myrnin managed to look angelic, which was a bit of a trick considering his Lord-Byron-on-a-bender outfit. “I’ve just been away from normal human society for so long. Tell me, is it usually this . . . spirited?”
“Not usually,” she sighed. “Monica’s special.” Yeah, in the short-bus sense, because Monica was a head case. Not that Claire had time or inclination to explain all the dynamics of the Monica-Shane-Eve relationship to Myrnin right now. “When you said that someone was calling the vampires together for some kind of fight—was that Bishop?”
“Bishop?” Myrnin looked startled. “No, of course not. It’s Amelie. Amelie is sending the call. She’s consolidating her forces, putting up lines of defense. Things are rapidly moving toward a confrontation, I believe.”
That was exactly what Claire was afraid he was going to say. “Do you know who answered?”
“Anyone in Morganville with a blood tie to her,” he said. “Except me, of course. But that would include almost every vampire in town, save those who were sworn through Oliver. Even then, Oliver’s tie would bind them in some sense, because he swore fealty to her when he came to live here. They might feel the pull less strongly, but they would still feel it.”
“Then how is Bishop getting an army? Isn’t everybody in town, you know, Amelie’s?”
“He bit those he wished to keep on his side.” Myrnin shrugged. “Claimed them from her, in a sense. Some of them went willingly, some not, but all owe him allegiance now. All those he was able to turn, which is a considerable number, I believe.” He looked sharply at her. “The call continued in the daytime. Michael?”
“Michael’s fine. They put him in a cell.”
“And Sam?”
Claire shook her head in response. Next to Michael, his grandfather Sam was the youngest vampire in town, and Claire hadn’t seen him at all, not since he’d left the Glass House, well before any of the other vamps. He’d gone off on some mission for Amelie; she trusted him more than most of the others, even those she’d known for hundreds of years. That was, Claire thought, because Amelie knew how Sam felt about her. It was the storybook kind of love, the kind that ignored things like practicality and danger, and never changed or died.
She found herself looking at Shane. He turned his head and smiled back.
The storybook kind of love.
She was probably too young to have that, but this felt so strong, so real. . . .
And Shane wouldn’t even man up and tell her he loved her.
She took a deep breath and forced her mind off that. “What do we do now?” Claire asked. “Myrnin?”
He was silent for a long moment, then moved to one of the painted-over first-floor windows and pulled it open. The sun was setting again. It would be down completely soon.
“You should get home,” he said. “The humans are in charge for now, at least, but there are factions out there. There will be power struggles tonight, and not just between the two vampire sides.”
Shane glanced at Monica—whose bruises were living proof that trouble was already under way—and then back at Myrnin. “What are you going to do?”
“Stay here,” Myrnin said. “With my friends.”
“Friends? Who, the—uh—failed experiments?”
“Exactly so.” Myrnin shrugged. “They look upon me as a kind of father figure. Besides, their blood is as good as anyone else’s, in a pinch.”
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nbsp; “So much more than I wanted to know,” Shane said, and nodded to Hannah. “Let’s go.”
“Got your back, Shane.”
“Watch Claire’s and Eve’s. I’ll take the lead.”
“What about me?” Monica whined.
“Do you really want to know?” Shane gave her a glare that should have scorched her hair off. “Be grateful I’m not leaving you as an after-dinner mint on his pillow.”
Myrnin leaned close to Claire’s ear and said, “I think I like your young man.” When she reacted in pure confusion, he held up his hands, smiling. “Not in that way, my dear. He just seems quite trustworthy.”
She swallowed and put all that aside. “Are you going to be okay here? Really?”
“Really?” He locked gazes with her. “For now, yes. But we have work to do, Claire. Much work, and very little time. I can’t hide for long. You do realize that stress accelerates the disease, and this is a great deal of stress for us all. More will fall ill, become confused. It’s vital we begin work on the serum as quickly as possible.”
“I’ll try to get you back to the lab tomorrow.”
They left him standing in a fading shaft of sunlight, next to a giant rusting crane that lifted its head three stories into the dark, with pale birds flitting and diving overhead.
And wounded, angry failed experiments lurking in the shadows, maybe waiting to attack their vampire creator.
Claire felt sorry for them, if they did.
The mobs were gone, but they’d given Eve’s car a good battering while they were at it. She choked when she saw the dents and cracked glass, but at least it was still on all four tires, and the damage was cosmetic. The engine started right up.
“Poor baby,” Eve said, and patted the big steering wheel affectionately as she settled into the driver’s seat. “We’ll get you all fixed up. Right, Hannah?”
“And here I was wondering what I was going to do tomorrow,” Hannah said, taking—of course—the shotgun seat. “Guess now I know. I’ll be hammering dents out of the Queen Mary and putting in new safety glass.”
In the backseat, Claire was the human equivalent of Switzerland between the warring nations of Shane and Monica, who sat next to the windows. It was tense, but nobody spoke.