Daylighters tmv-15

by Rachel Caine

  The lock broke free with a snap, and the drawer slid smoothly open, revealing a whole collection of neatly ranked files. They all had printed labels, and Claire recognized every single name in there.

  Every one was a vampire.

  She grabbed Amelie’s, Myrnin’s, Oliver’s, and Michael’s and spread them out on the desktop. Amelie’s was thicker than the others, and she quickly flipped through it, looking for clues. What she found instead was history—in-depth history that she’d never seen before, about Amelie’s birth, her death, her resurrection. Her parentage, both human and vampire. A list of all those she’d made vampire in the years after—a long list, but the intervals between making new ones got longer and longer in the most recent hundred years, until there was only Sam Glass, and then his grandson Michael.

  In strangely loopy, antique handwriting, someone—probably Fallon—had left a note beneath Michael’s name that said, end of line. That seemed ominous.

  At the back of the file was a page, all handwritten, with Fallon’s observations about Amelie—strengths and weaknesses. Claire scanned it quickly and felt a real chill crawl over her, because her own name was in it. Under both columns.

  Under strengths she was listed as Strong human advocate and ally. That wasn’t how Claire would have described her relationship with Amelie. But under weaknesses, he’d written Amelie shows a great fondness for the girl, and threats to her may be successful in weakening A.’s resolve.

  Claire really doubted that, but she also thought it was a very bad thing for her that he might try it.

  Michael was in there, too, under weaknesses. Fallon had written, Threats to Michael Glass may prove effective, as he is the only relative of Samuel Glass left in Morganville, and her attachment to Samuel is well known.

  Definitely ominous.

  Myrnin’s folder would have been interesting reading, in the historical section, but she skipped it and went straight for the strengths and weaknesses section. She was in it again, but she’d expected that. Apparently Fallon thought threatening her would get Myrnin in line.

  He was probably right on that. Probably.

  She didn’t even appear on Oliver’s lists. The only one who did was Amelie . . . as a weakness. Under strengths there wasn’t a person’s name at all. Only one word.

  Ruthless.

  Michael’s folder had a red stamp on the front page that said CURE.

  Claire stared at it, frowning. The stamp had the Daylighters symbol beneath it, and she didn’t entirely understand what it meant, but it didn’t look good, she thought.

  She wanted to take all of the folders, but there were too many, and they were too heavy. She just ripped out Fallon’s notes on each person and made a sheaf of paper that she stuck into Eve’s coffin purse. Then she slammed the drawer shut and started to get up.

  Something caught her eye as she did . . . another folder, lying in the tray on top of the desk. This one also had a CURE stamp on the outside. She pulled it over and found that it belonged to a vampire she knew a little: Mr. Ransom. Ransom was an old, ghostly man who ran the local funeral home.

  There were, she realized, little boxes under the CURE stamp. She hadn’t noticed them before. One said VOLUNTARY. The other said INVOLUNTARY.

  The INVOLUNTARY box was checked on Ransom’s.

  She opened it, and found the history again, and the strengths and weaknesses analysis page . . . in Ransom’s case, not very informative. He was too much of a loner, hardly interacting with even other vampires, much less humans.

  But there was another page, a new one. There was a photo of Mr. Ransom.

  He looked . . . dead.

  It was a very clinical kind of picture, taken from above; Ransom’s body was lying on a steel table mostly covered by a thin white sheet. No wounds. He looked old and withered and pathetic, and she couldn’t imagine anything that would have kept a vampire lying there like that, being photographed, except a stake in the heart . . . but there was no stake in Ransom’s heart. No wound at all.

  He just looked dead.

  She flipped the page. It was a medical report, tersely worded.

  Subject Ransom received the Cure in the appropriately measured dose as established in Protocol H, as determined by age, height, and weight. After a brief period of lucidity, his mental state rapidly declined, and he lapsed into a comatose state. He roused from this upon three occasions and indicated significant pain and distress. Recordings were made of his vocalizations, but the language was not familiar to any of the observers.

  After the third period of partial lucidity, Subject Ransom experienced a rapid mental and physical decline, as has been previously documented in the trials; this decline fell within the boundaries of the approximately 73% failure rate. He evidenced a brief period of reversion to True Human before experiencing a fatal ischemic event. Time of death: 1348 hours.

  May God have mercy on his soul.

  Mr. Ransom was dead. Because of their so-called cure.

  It couldn’t be called a cure if there was a seventy-three percent failure rate, could it?

  She opened the drawer and checked Michael’s file again. The box was marked for an involuntary cure.

  What had happened to Mr. Ransom— they meant to do it to Michael, too.

  Claire ripped the information out of Ransom’s folder and added it to her stash, then quickly made her way back to the storage closet and out through the window. No sign of Fallon and Eve, but she saw a car’s taillights disappearing around the corner.

  Claire ran for Eve’s hearse, digging the keys out of the purse.

  She’d rarely driven the thing, but it couldn’t be much tougher than Shane’s beast of a muscle car; this was more of an ocean liner, with all the problems of maneuvering it around corners. Claire started the engine and did a super-wide turn in the nearly empty parking lot, heading for the street. She was just pausing to check directions when a voice way too close to her ear said, “So where are we going, then?”

  Myrnin. She got a grip on herself after the first, uncontrollable flail of shock, and turned to glare at him. He was leaning over her seat, cheek almost pressing hers, and his eyes reflected red in the dashboard lights.

  “Would you please sit back?” she said, once she had control of her voice again—though it stayed up in the higher registers. “You just scared ten years off of me.”

  “Only ten? I’m losing my touch.”

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Hiding,” he said. “You might have noticed that Fallon’s got his very own vampire-hunting pack of human hounds. Unfortunately, they had my scent for a while. I think I’ve thrown them off, but I thought it wise to go to ground for a while. You know that I’m clever as a fox.”

  “Crazy like one, too,” she said. “Where’s Jenna?”

  “Gone home,” he said. “She took me to my laboratory, but I found it in less than salutary condition. I got what I need, however.” He patted lumps under his shirt absently. “I do hope you’re going my way.”

  “I’m following Fallon. I think he’s taking Eve to the mall.”

  “Ah. Perfect, then. That will be fine. Proceed.” He sat back, as if she were his private limo driver, which made her grit her teeth, but she concentrated on driving for a minute, until she had Fallon’s taillights in sight again. He was, indeed, heading for Bitter Creek Mall, it seemed.

  She said, “Fallon thinks he has some kind of a cure for vampirism. Did you know?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I know all about Fallon and his misguided quest to become our once and future savior. It’s never worked. It’s never going to work.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Yes. I plan to kill Fallon and destroy everything he’s built.”

  “I think Shane would say that’s a goal, not an actual plan. How exactly are you going to do that?”

  “Fangs in his throat,” Myrnin said. “To be specific. I am going to take a great deal of pleasure in draining that man to the very last drop. Again.�
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  “Again?” Claire hit the brakes and held them, staring at Myrnin in the rearview mirror. “What are you talking about?”

  Myrnin clambered over the seat and dropped into the front next to her. He fussed with his clothes—still mismatched, of course—and finally said, “Fallon, of course. I killed him once. I brought him over as a vampire some, oh, two hundred years ago or more—it’s difficult to be exact about these things. I didn’t much care for him even then. He was a bit of a morose and morbid sort, but—well, circumstances were different. Let’s just leave it there.”

  “He’s not a vampire!”

  “Well, not now, obviously. But he most certainly was once. Didn’t love the life I’d given him, Fallon. Thought he was so much better than the rest who did.” Myrnin shrugged. “He might have been right about that, of course. But the point is that he devoted all the time I’d given him to finding a way to reverse the process and make himself human again.”

  “He found one,” Claire said. “He cured himself. That’s what this cure is he wants to give Michael . . . the same one.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a cure,” Myrnin said. “He’s simply no longer dependent on blood.”

  “What is he dependent on, then?”

  “What are any of you? Air, water, food, the kindness of random strangers.” Myrnin shuddered, and it looked genuine. “I’d much rather be dependent on blood. Much simpler and easier to obtain in times of chaos. Never rationed, blood. And very often freely donated.”

  “But he’s—he’s human.”

  “Well, yes. Heartbeat and all.”

  “Is he still immortal?”

  “No one is immortal.” Myrnin sounded quite serious when he said that, and he looked away, out the window. “Certainly no vampire. We are as vulnerable as humans to the right forces. Only gods and demons are immortal, and we are neither of those things, though we’ve been called one or the other.”

  “I mean—does he age now?”

  “Yes. The instant he gave up his vampire nature, he began the slow march to death again. I expect after all that time with his heart stilled in him, he thinks of each beat as a tick off his mortal clock. I certainly would.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Myrnin said. He sounded sober and thoughtful, and rested his head on one hand as he continued to stare out at the night. “I really have no earthly idea. He was desperate to find some kind of cure when I lost track of him. He’d employed physicians, scientists, even sorcerers, to try to break what he saw as his curse. Until I saw him again here, I’d have sworn that such a thing was completely impossible. There is still much to learn in the world, as it turns out. The problem is that some lessons are very, very unpleasant, Claire. I hope this isn’t one of them, but I very much fear it will be.”

  She thought of the stamp on Michael’s folder. INVOLUNTARY. “Mr. Ransom is dead,” she said. “According to the notes in the file in Fallon’s desk, this cure of his—it’s only about twenty-five percent successful.”

  “Unsurprising. The Daylight Foundation—which Fallon created, of course—has from the very beginning been intent on stopping vampires, eradicating them through whatever means necessary. He’d see a cure as a humane way to do it, wouldn’t he? Even if three-quarters of those were put through such agony that they perished of it.” He let out a sigh. “A humane process, after the word human. But in my experience, humans are capable of such spectacularly awful things.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that, not at all, nor the thought of Fallon, with his calm, gentle manner and his fanatic’s eyes, having control of Eve, and Michael, and all of the vampires imprisoned back at the mall. “How did he get Amelie to surrender?” she asked. Myrnin didn’t answer. “He threatened someone, didn’t he?”

  “He threatened the people she least wanted to lose,” he replied. “One of them was Michael, of course, but before our little party arrived back in town, Fallon had Oliver, and he used him against her.”

  “He used you, too, didn’t he?” Nothing. She took that as confirmation. “Myrnin, he’s got Eve now. And from what I saw written on Michael’s file, Fallon’s going to use her to make Michael take his cure or something.”

  “Well, that would be a problem,” he said. “I quite like the boy. And Fallon’s cure is certainly horrifyingly painful, even if one survives it, and as you know, the odds are against it. I’ve no idea what kind of damage it might leave in its wake on a vampire as young as Michael. Nor does Fallon, I suspect. Not that it would stop him.”

  Claire could see the mall ahead, its bulk lit up outside with harsh industrial lamps that made it look ever more like a prison, if prisons had abundant parking. “We have to do something.”

  “Oh, I fully intend to, and I will need you to make it happen. You are my assistant, after all. I pay you.”

  “Amelie pays me. I don’t think you have the slightest idea of how to work a bank account.”

  “True,” he said cheerfully. “It was much easier in the days when you could pay someone in food and a roof over his head, and the richness of knowledge. All this moneygrubbing is simply annoying. Do you still use gold? I think I have some of that.”

  “Let’s not get off track,” Claire said, although she was thinking, You’ve got gold? Where do you keep it? “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “I need a second pair of hands—human hands, as it turns out, and quite clever ones—to help me sabotage those damnable collars. Dr. Anderson is no fool, and although I’ve worked out how to do it, it does require nerve and someone with a pulse; two vampires simply can’t manage it. Speaking of our dear, traitorous Irene, she’ll be working around the clock to mass-produce your anti-vampire weapons, and once that happens, they will have absolutely everything they need to control, corral, and herd us to our destruction. We can’t allow that to happen, Claire. So I need you to go into the prison with me and help me disable the collars.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “They’re killing us when we fight back,” Myrnin said. “They already know how to do it, of course. Very effectively, I might add, and quite painfully. The methods they use last long enough to be a very instructive lesson to others, and I might admire their ruthlessness if it didn’t come at the cost of my old friends. This is a situation that cannot hold for long, and we must, absolutely must, free the vampires before it’s too late.” He eyed her sideways, then said, “I don’t think you’ll be in too much danger. Oliver and Lady Grey and I can ensure your safety. Almost certainly.”

  That didn’t sound quite as positive as Claire would have preferred, really, but she couldn’t expect much better. “How do we get inside?”

  “Same way I got out,” Myrnin said. “Through the waste chute. Come on, then. Park this ridiculous thing and let’s make all haste. I do hope those aren’t your best clothes.”

  She should have known it would be something horrible.

  * * *

  Getting in by the waste chute was even worse than Claire had expected. When the mall had been abandoned, the chute—leading from the second floor through a claustrophobic metal tube that angled down at a ridiculous slope straight into a long-neglected, rusted-out trash bin—the chute had apparently never been cleaned. The layers of ancestral rotten food, decay, and generally horrible filth were enough to make her seriously reconsider going at all, but Eve was inside, and she needed help. “I can’t,” Claire said. She wasn’t talking about the slime, though. “I’m only human, Myrnin. I can’t climb up that!”

  “You won’t need to,” he said, and offered her a cool, strong hand. “Up you go. I’ll push.”

  He shoved her up into the tiny, tinny opening without giving her time to get ready, and she felt a moment of utter panic and nausea that almost made her scream—and then his palm landed solidly on her butt as she started to slide backward. “Hey!” she whispered shakily, but he was already pushing her steadily forward, up the angle. One thing about all the awful slime, it did make her progress
faster. She tried not to think about what she might be sliding through. Really, really tried. The smell was indescribable. “Watch the hands!”

  “It’s entirely propulsional,” he whispered back. “Quiet, now. Sound carries.” She had no idea how he was managing to climb, or to push her ahead of him, but she thought that he sank his nails deep into the ooze and anchored them in the metal to do it—like climbing spikes. Each push drove her steadily on. She gave up futilely trying to feel for handholds and instead focused on keeping her hands outstretched ahead, to shove utterly unknown and very disturbing blockages out of the way before she met them face-first. It was both the shortest and longest minute of her life, and she had to hang on tight to all of her self-control to keep herself from caving in under the stress and giving away their position with helpless, girlie shrieks of revulsion.

  And then it was over, and she slid at an angle out of the metal pipe, and a pair of strong, pale hands grabbed her flailing wrists to pull her up and onto her feet. Claire blinked and in the dim light made out the glossy red hair and razor-sharp smile of her friend from Cambridge, Jesse. Lady Grey, as Myrnin called her. She’d been a bartender when Claire had met her, but that was before Claire had realized she was a vampire. She’d probably been a lot of things during her long, long life, and nearly all of them interesting.

  “Well,” Jesse said, raising her eyebrows to a skeptical height. “I admit I didn’t really expect this.” She let Claire go, and turned toward the pipe again to offer a helping hand to Myrnin, who was clambering out under his own power. Claire was sorry to lose the support, because her legs were still shaking, and she grabbed for a handy plastic chair to collapse into. What did I just crawl through? She supposed it really was better that she didn’t know, but she desperately needed a shower, a scrub brush, and some bleach. And new clothes, because no matter how hard she washed these, she would never, ever wear them again.

  Jesse was talking as Myrnin came sliding the rest of the way out of the pipe. “You brought her here? I have to ask, did you just crave a snack, or do you have some clever plan to save her life? Because you know the mood in here.”