by Rachel Caine
“Aw, that’s cute. Who grew up and got all butch? Doesn’t suit you, Glass. You’re the sensitive musician type, remember?” The bitter mockery in his voice was about as subtle as a rock to the head.
One thing about me—I am a musician, but I grew up in Morganville, and here, sensitive types don’t last long unless they have steel underneath. So I was never the weak pushover Shane’s dad had always assumed I was. Shane had known that, but his dad had always wanted him to make friends with real guys.
Honestly, smashing his brain would solve so many problems right now, for all of us, because the idea of Frank Collins continuing to throw his weight around when Claire was lying dead in our house . . . it really reeked of irony.
I turned around and said, “Black leather bag. Where is it?”
Collins had upgraded his image a little; he seemed younger, and he’d made himself look more badass at the same time. Sad. “Feel free to look around,” he said.
“Myrnin needs it.”
“You think that cuts any ice with me, Goldilocks? He didn’t exactly ask me before he wired me into his Frankenmachine. I don’t run his errands.”
I kept opening cabinets and pulling drawers. The clock was ticking away on me, and I was well aware that I still had to get back to the house before the deadline with Shane and Eve. If Amelie’s search team showed up here, I’d be screwed.
“Warmer,” Frank said. “Oooh, nope, wrong, cooler.”
“Shut up.”
“Tell me one thing and I will.”
“Or I could go pull your tubes—that’d work, too.”
“What do you think would happen if I told Shane about you and Claire?”
I froze. It was like a two-by-four hitting me in the head, and for a few seconds I couldn’t even organize a response . . . and then I had to fight back the red splash of rage that flooded over me.
I turned to look at him. Pretty sure my eyes were glowing a bright, angry crimson. “You fucking liar.”
He laughed. “Oh, come on, Michael. She’s a pretty girl; she’s living in your house.... Are you telling me you never even thought about it? You think Shane would believe that, either? If I told him?”
It was a lie, a complete and total bullshit lie, but he was right about one thing: I had thought about it. Not after Shane had started falling for her, but before, a little. Just a little.
One thing about Frank, he’d always known how to see the cracks in your armor, and just where to hit. My friendship with Shane would always be strong, and it would always be fragile, too; he didn’t trust vampires, but he trusted me, and all that noise in his head over that made it harder than it should have been.
Any hint about Claire and me . . . that would shatter it all over again.
“What do you want, Frank?” I slammed one drawer and opened another one. Damn, I was getting hungry, spurred on by all the anger he was pulling out of me. I had a sports bottle at home filled with type O that I’d chug down, but it was distracting, feeling that jittery need at a time like this. I wondered where Myrnin kept his snacks. Then again, knowing Myrnin’s general whackitude, I wouldn’t have tried anything out of his refrigerator anyway.
“I want you to stop Amelie,” Frank said.
That made me turn around. All the bullying was gone now, all the crap, and this was the real Frank Collins. The one who still had a streak of—well, I wouldn’t call it humanity, exactly—honor left in him.
“Stop her from doing what, exactly?”
“Destroying this town and everybody in it.”
“Not the vampires,” I said. “And she said she’s handing over power to the humans.”
Frank laughed, a tangle of electronic noise from the speakers across the room. “You really believe she’d ever do that? Even at the end? She’s one of those who’d kill you to save you. Vampires get to leave. Humans get to die, all together, right in Founder’s Square—just like scientists humanely get rid of lab animals when they’re done with the experiment. And I’m the one who has to pull the pin.”
Part of me insisted that he was lying, again, because that was Frank’s deal. He lied. He bullied. He manipulated people to do what he wanted.
But the other part warned me that he just might be telling the truth. I’d heard Amelie and Myrnin talking. What he’d just said fit with what I knew from the two of them—although they’d left out the part about humans dying.
Of course.
“Tell me where the bag is,” I said.
“Only if you tell me you’re going to stop this thing.”
I opened another drawer and slammed it so hard the wood splintered. “Don’t be an ass—of course I’m going to stop it. Do you really think I’d let Amelie do a thing like that?”
“Maybe. Vampires are all about self-preservation.”
“All right, then suck on this: I’m staying here. I’m not going with the others. So she’d have to kill me, too.” I threw a stack of books out of the way and uncovered another set of drawers built into the bottom of the lab table I was searching.
And inside was a dusty black leather bag. Exactly like what I was searching for.
I pulled it out and opened it. Medical equipment. Things I didn’t recognize, but it looked like what Myrnin would want.
“Told you that you were getting warm,” Frank said.
“Game’s over, Frank.” I snapped the catches shut again and picked up the bag, along with the shopping bag of chemicals. “You lose.”
His voice came out of my cell phone speaker as I climbed the steps, heading out. “Do we have a deal?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t make deals with you.”
But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be stopping the massacre. If he hadn’t been lying about that, too.
Frank said, “What if I told you Claire was still alive in your house?”
And how Frank Collins it was, to save that as his last bargaining chip.
I held up the phone and said, very clearly, “I already know, dip-shit. And we’re going to get her back without any help from you.”
There was silence for a second, and then Frank said, “You know what, kid? I really hope you can. But the thing is, even if you do . . . you’re all going to die. Because I’m going to kill you. I’ve got no choice.”
We’d have to see about that.
But after Claire.
I made it home in an hour and three minutes, unlocked the back door, and raced inside to put my stuff on the table.
The house was silent, except for the dry ticking of the clock in the parlor. Claire’s body still lay motionless on the couch, covered with Eve’s knit afghan.
I went to the front and carefully checked the window. No sign of the hearse out front.
They were late. Later than me, and that was late.
I waited as the clock ticked, every second winding my nerves tighter. Dammit, Shane, if you got yourself into it . . . If Eve . . . I couldn’t finish the thoughts; my brain kept yanking away from it like a hand from a hot stove.
What if Frank wasn’t lying about the meeting at Founder’s Square? What if Amelie meant to end the Morganville experiment in a blaze of glory? I couldn’t understand that, but it all fit. She was scared of something, very scared. And scared people do insane things.
Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and I couldn’t wait anymore. The hearse wouldn’t be tough to spot. If they needed help, every minute would count.
I left the way I’d come in, through the back, and took shortcuts through neighbors’ yards until I was sure it was safe to be on the street.
I was two blocks from Lot Street, passing the shuttered and locked gates of Variety Liquor, when the rain began to fall again. I didn’t have a coat, but it didn’t matter. I kept moving.
Ahead, someone stepped out of the hissing darkness, and I saw a blur of water, teeth, something wrong, so very wrong, and then there was something in my head, drowning me alive. I felt cold.
The thing facing me looked like a man, but he was all wrong,
too. So was his awful slicing smile as he whispered, “Come with me,” and I had no choice but to follow him into the dark.
Into the cold.
Drowning.
Dark.
FIFTEEN
EVE
“Dammit,” Shane said. He’d been saying that for about five minutes straight, like some kind of mantra. “Hand me the wrench. Dammit!”
I crouched down and handed him the tool out of the box in the back of the hearse. Even Shane’s strength was having trouble with the bolts on the tire.
The flat one.
So not my fault.
“You know—dammit!—if you actually got these things changed out before the tread is showing—”
“Zip it right there,” I told him. “Really not the time to lecture me about my car-maintenance habits. Just get it changed.”
“Yeah, working on it,” he said. “Dammit. We’re late already. Michael’s going to freak.”
“Hey, good, because if he shows up, we can have this fixed in thirty seconds,” I said.
Shane sent me a glare from under his rain-drenched hair, which was ratted around his face. He needed a shave, I thought. And a tranquilizer. “I don’t need help,” he snapped. He stood up and stamped on the wrench, and the bolt turned with a horrible metallic shriek. Now that he had it started, he was able to muscle it off and start the next one.
At this rate, we’d be thirty minutes in the freezing downpour. Sitting ducks for any passing vamp with a plasma craving.
Or worse, whatever worse was this week in Morganville. One thing was certain: it was not safe to be out with a flat tire after dark, even on the town’s best day ever. Which this most assuredly wasn’t.
I was trying to be the old Eve. I really was; I’d even zinged Shane a couple of times with wisecracks, but nothing felt the same. I kept seeing flashes in front of me, vivid as camera shots, of how Claire had looked lying there on the floor, her eyes open, head turned to the side.
Of how I’d known, even before I’d touched her, that she was gone.
Nothing was the same now. The rain was all wrong for Morganville; it never poured like this, especially not this time of year. The streets were flooding, again, and even under the hooded jacket I was wearing I felt chilled and soaked. And so many stores were shut—not just closed for the night, closed, with whited-out windows and notices on the doors.
It felt like the whole population was suddenly deciding Morganville was no longer safe.
Which, duh.
I shivered again and stamped my feet, which was a bad idea. I sent splashes of freezing water up my legs.
Shane had moved on from dammit up the cursing food chain as he struggled with the third bolt. Stomping on the wrench wasn’t cutting it, but he was doing it with so much enthusiasm I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a bone break. Finally, the bolt creaked over, and Shane collapsed to his knees again to unscrew it.
Three down, three to go, and we really were very late. Michael would be out looking for us, but in this rain, it’d be hard for him.
A bolt of lightning ripped the sky in half, and a couple of blocks down, I saw someone watching us. The flash gave me only impressions—human-shaped, pale, nothing special. But anybody who would be standing idly around in this weather deserved special alarm.
“Speed it up,” I told Shane. “Seriously. Go faster.”
“Hey, princess, don’t make me break a nail.”
“I’m not kidding.”
He glanced up at me, shook hair out of his eyes, and said, “Yeah, I know. I’m moving it. Get the tire ready.”
I didn’t like the idea of leaving him alone to go to the back of the hearse and drag the spare out of its compartment, but I really didn’t have much of a choice; it would speed things up, and I’d just been ragging on him to count seconds. I waited until the next jagged flash of lightning.
The corner where I’d seen the man standing was empty. Good news? Probably not.
It took thirty seconds to unlatch the compartment, grab the spare, and haul it out. Shane was still unscrewing the last bolt when I rolled it over. He lifted the flat clear and passed it to me, then took the replacement and slotted it on with speed a NAS-CAR pit crew would have envied. “Five minutes,” he shouted.
“Less would be better!”
“Just watch our backs.”
I was, even while I threw the flat tire into the back of the hearse. The street looked deserted. We’d lucked out in being able to pull under an actual working streetlamp to fix the tire, but that also made us about as obvious as the last pork chop at the all-you-can-eat buffet. I had been given watchdog duty over Shane’s precious canvas bag, and now I grabbed out my two favorite weapons—a silver stake, and my slightly upgraded fencing épée, which had a coating of silver on it, too. My coat pockets had two squirt bottles full of silver nitrate.
“Trouble?” he asked me without looking up from screwing on bolts. He was working fast. “Four more minutes.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s just real exposed out here.”
“Yeah.” He tightened bolt two and went on to three. “Believe me, I’m feeling it.”
Lightning stabbed again, so bright it practically sizzled my eyeballs. Close, too, real close. It must have struck a transformer about a block away; I saw something flare up in hot blue sparks.
Our streetlight went dead with a sad little fizzle and zap.
“Shit,” Shane said. “Can’t see a thing! Flashlight!”
I grabbed one from the back, but that meant dropping one of my two weapons. I debated, then left the stake on the seat. The flashlight worked, at least, and I focused it so he could continue bolt three.
By bolt five, I was feeling pretty good. We were almost back on the road. Yes, we were—yikes—half an hour late, but at least we were in one piece....
I felt something brush past me.
The wind was blowing, and rain was thrashing, and the feeling was so subtle, I shouldn’t have been able to pick it out of the general chaos around us, but there was something about that touch. Something very bad.
I spun around, throwing the light all directions, but I didn’t see a thing.
“Sorry,” I said, and turned back toward the car, and Shane, who was—against all character points—waiting patiently for me to stop freaking out.
Only he wasn’t waiting.
He was standing up. The light hit his face, and it was pale, dead pale, his brown eyes almost all pupil.
I yelped and scuttled back, and the light slipped and lit up someone standing behind him.
My mind fried, just like the streetlight, as if it couldn’t make that work, couldn’t process, couldn’t deal. It was like a shadow, but—
“Hey!” I shook it off, mostly by refusing to look at whoever that was behind Shane. “Shane, get out of the way. What the hell are you doing?”
He just stared at me. It was as if he was gone, like Claire had been gone, only he was still standing there.
Then he turned and started to walk away. He passed the shadow, which rippled black like a standing-up puddle of oil, and I felt something horrible and cold well up inside me.
Whatever this thing was, it had Shane, and now it was taking me, too.
Hell with this.
I yelled, closed my eyes, and lunged.
It was a perfect lunge, the fencing move of a lifetime—razor-straight extension, weight balanced, every bit of my reach forward into the silver-coated steel of the sword.
And it caught the thing dead center.
Problem was, it didn’t feel like I’d punctured anything real. It was more as if I’d hit a balloon, one filled with gelatin and water. The give was way too easy, way too wrong, and I snapped my head up to see the thing—because it damn sure wasn’t a man, and wasn’t a vampire—collapsing in on itself.
Whatever was inside it splashed to the wet ground a second before the thin, empty oil-black skin collapsed.
I shrieked and scrambled backward, s
haking my sword free of the ick. There was no sign of blood on there, or anything I could see in the dim light from my fallen flashlight.
The black stuff was flooding away in the water.
Shane had fallen face-first to the street, as if he’d just been turned completely off. I gave that dead skin a wide margin of respect as I ran for him and grabbed his arm. “Shane! Shane!” God, flashbacks, I couldn’t lose him, too. I couldn’t. . . .
And I didn’t, because in the next instant he coughed, spraying water, and rolled up to his feet. He almost went down again, so I steadied him. “What the hell was that?” He vomited, and way too much water came out of him. It was as if he’d been drowning, which he couldn’t have been, could he? No way.
“I don’t know what that was,” I said. “But I like it like cancer. Come on, we have to get out of here!”
Shane definitely didn’t argue. I dragged the skin-heap over to the side, well away from us, using only the point of my épée. That was more sickening than your average vomit-inducing event. Seriously, I would rather kiss Monica, or lick a toilet bowl, than ever, ever do that again.
Shane tightened the fifth bolt and got the sixth in and tightened in less than a minute, hit the release on the jack, and thumped the car back to the pavement, fast. He grabbed all the tools and tossed them in the back, yelled, “Go!” and I didn’t wait for a second opinion. I was in and starting up the hearse before his door was closed.
And now I could hear something. It sounded like—singing? Confused, I fiddled with the stereo, but it was off. Nothing coming out of it.
I realized, as I accelerated, that Shane was trying to get out of the car. Holy floating Moses, that was—insane. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled, hard, and he yelped and slammed his door again and turned to glare at me. “What?”
“You were leaving!” I shouted back. He looked utterly lost for a second, then nodded, as if he’d just realized something. “God, what is going on? Because even for Morganville, this is totally whacked!”
Shane, ever practical, reached in the glove compartment, pulled out some tissues, and tore them into strips. “Can you hear it? The music?”