by Rachel Caine
Kim laughed, and Eve walked her to the door. Claire said to Shane, “Anniversary?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Depends on how you count things,” he said. “Yeah. It’s got to be some kind of anniversary. Probably of one of us not getting killed.”
Michael said, “Speak for yourself, man.” He picked up the controller and restarted the game. “I can’t believe you almost let her win.”
“Man, I almost let you win sometimes,” Shane said, and dropped into his spot on the other end of the couch. “Game on.”
7
The next day, Claire sat through classes without any real sense of accomplishment, took a quiz—which she aced—and dropped in on Myrnin’s lab around noon. It looked neat and clean again, which was two miracles in a row as far as she was concerned. She went to the bookshelves and started looking over journals, trying to find the most recent ones, although those would be the most difficult to figure out, given that most of his notes would have been taken when he was sick, and mostly crazy.
But she was curious.
She was struggling through last summer’s book when Myrnin popped in through the portal, wearing a big floppy black hat and a kind of crazy/stylish pimp coat that covered him from neck to ankles, black leather gloves, and a black and silver walking stick with a dragon’s head on it.
And on his lapel was a button that said, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THANK A TEACHER.
It was typical Myrnin, really. She was surprised the bunny slippers were absent.
“I didn’t know you were coming today,” he said, and draped his hat, coat, and cane on a nearby coat rack. “And I assume it isn’t just a random occurrence, like gravity.”
“Gravity isn’t random.”
“So you say.” He came to the opposite side of the table and looked at the book, then turned his head weirdly sideways to read the title. “Ah. Some of my best work. If only I could figure out what it actually meant.”
“I was trying to figure out if you ever met a girl named Kim. Kim—” What the hell was her last name? Had anybody even told her? “Kim, something. Kind of Goth?”
“Oh, her,” Myrnin said. He didn’t sound too impressed, which made Claire just a little happy. “Yes, Kimberlie’s known to us. She asked permission to film some of us, for the archives—a sort of permanent record of our histories. As you know, we do value that sort of thing. Many have agreed. She’s been named our video historian, I believe.”
“You haven’t done it, though?”
“I write my own history. I see no reason to entrust it to a human with a video camera. Paper and ink, girl. Paper and ink will always survive, when electronic storage becomes random impulses lost to the ages.”
“But the vampires do know her.”
“Yes. She’s a bit of a pet for the older ones. Besides me, of course. I don’t like pets. They bite—ah! I almost forgot! Time to feed Bob.” And Myrnin bustled off to another part of the lab, where presumably he’d stashed Bob the spider.
Or possibly Bob the auto mechanic—Claire wouldn’t put anything past him. He seemed slightly manic today, from the glitter in his eyes. It made her nervous.
She was about to close the book, when she saw, in his spiky black handwriting, something about her: New girl. Claire something. Small and fragile. No doubt they believe that will make me protective of her. It only makes me think how easy it is to destroy her. . . .
She shuddered, and decided she didn’t really want to read the rest.
She left Myrnin making little weird kissy faces to Bob the spider as he shook a container of flies into Bob’s plastic case, and went to the archives.
Since the first time she’d seen the Vampire Archives—which had been on the run, in a time of war, and it had been a place they’d hit up for weapons—she’d been fascinated by the idea. The vampires were packrats, no doubt about it; they loved things—historical things. Also—apparently—junk, because there were entire vaults of stuff that nobody had gotten around to categorizing yet, and probably never would. But the upper floors were amazing. The library was meticulous, and there was an entire section that contained every known book, magazine, and pamphlet with anything about vampires in it, cross-referenced by accuracy.
Dracula scored only about a six, apparently.
Apart from that, the vampires had donated, bought, or stolen six floors of historical texts, in a wide variety of languages. There were even ancient scrolls that looked too delicate to properly handle, and a few wax tablets that Amelie had told her dated from Roman times.
The audiovisual area was new, but it contained everything from samples of the flickers made for penny arcades in the early 1900s to silent film, sound film, color film, all the way up to DVDs. Again, most of it was concerned somehow with vampires, but not everything. There seemed to be an awful lot of costume drama. And, for some reason, musicals.
Claire found the digital video interviews on the computer kiosk, listed by the vampire’s name and date of—birth? Making? What did they call it? Anyway, the date they got fanged.
The newest one was Michael Glass.
Claire brought up the player and blinked as Michael fidgeted in front of the camera. He wasn’t comfortable. This wasn’t being onstage for him, obviously. He messed with the clip-on microphone until Kim’s off-screen voice told him to cut it out, and then he sat, looking like he wished he’d never agreed to any of this, until the questions started. The first ones were obvious—name, current age, age at death, original birthplace.
Then Kim asked, “How did you become a vampire?” Michael thought about his answer for a few seconds before he said, “Total stupidity.”
“Yeah? Tell me.”
“I grew up in Morganville. I knew the rules. I knew how dangerous things were, but when you grow up with Protection, I think you get careless. I’d just turned eighteen. My parents had already left town, my mom was sick and needed cancer treatments, so I was on my own. I wanted to sell the house and get on with my life.”
“How’s that going for you?”
Michael didn’t smile. “Not like I’d hoped. I got careless. I met a guy who wanted to buy the house, somebody new in town. It never occurred to me he was a vampire. He—didn’t come across that way. But the second he crossed the threshold, I knew. I just knew.”
He shook his head. Kim cleared her throat. “Can I ask who . . . ?”
“Oliver,” Michael said. “He killed me his first day in town.”
“Wow. That sucks completely. But you didn’t become a vampire then, right?”
“No. I died. Sort of. I remember dying, and then . . . then it was the next night, and I couldn’t remember anything in between. I was fine. No holes in the neck, nothing. I figured maybe I’d dreamed it, but then—then I tried to leave the house.”
“What happened?”
“I started to drift away. Like smoke. I got back inside before it was too late, but I realized after a few more tries that I couldn’t leave. Didn’t matter which door, or how I did it. I just—stopped being me.” Michael’s eyes looked haunted now, and Claire saw a shiver run through him. “That was bad enough, but then morning came.”
“And what happened?”
“I died,” Michael said. “All over again. And it hurt.”
Claire turned it off. There was something wrong about hearing this, seeing him let down his guard so completely. Michael had always tried to make it all okay, somehow. She hadn’t known how much it had freaked him out. And, she found, she didn’t really want to know how it had felt when he’d been made a real vampire by Amelie, in order to be able to live outside of the house.
She knew too much already.
There were about twenty other video interviews in the folder, but there was one that made Claire hesitate, then double-click the icon.
The camera zoomed in, steadied focus, and then the lights came up. “Please give us your name, the date you became a vampire, your birthplace, and your death age.” It was Kim’s voice, but this time she sounded nervous,
not at all the smart-ass Claire knew. “Please.”
Oliver leaned back in his chair, looking like he’d smelled something nasty, and said, “Oliver. I will keep my family name to myself, if you please. I was made vampire in 1658. I was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, East Anglia, England, in 1599. So as you see, I was not a young man when I was turned.”
“Was it your choice?”
Oliver stared at Kim, off camera, for so long that even Claire felt nervous. Then he said, “Yes. I was dying. It was my one chance to retain the power I’d attained. The thieving trick of it was that once I’d made my devil’s bargain, I couldn’t hold the power I sought to keep. So I gained new life, and lost my old one.”
“Who made you?”
“Bishop.”
“Ah—do you want to say anything about Bishop—”
“No.” Oliver suddenly stood up, fire in his eyes, and stripped the microphone off in a hail of static. “I’ll do no more of this prying. Past is past. Let it die.”
Kim, very quietly, said, “But you killed him. Didn’t you? You and Amelie?”
Oliver’s eyes turned red. “You know nothing about it, little girl with your foolish toys. And pray to God you never will.”
Oliver knocked the camera over, and Kim yelped, and that was it.
Fade to black.
“Enjoying yourself?” Oliver’s voice said, and for a second Claire thought it was on the computer screen, then realized that it came from behind her. She turned her head, slowly, to find him standing near the door of the small room, leaning against the wall. He was wearing a T-shirt with the Common Grounds logo on it, and cargo pants, and he didn’t look like a five-hundred-year-old vampire. He even had a peace-sign earring in one ear.
“I—wanted to know about the historical interview project, that’s all. Sorry.” Claire shut down the kiosk and stood up. “Are you going to try to kill me again?”
“Why? Do you want to be prepared?” He cocked his head at her.
“I’d like to see it coming.”
That got her a thin smile. “Not all of us have that luxury. But no. I have been schooled by my mistress. I won’t raise a finger to you, little Claire. Not even if you ask me to.”
Claire edged slowly toward the door. He smiled wider, and his gaze followed her all the way . . . but he let her go.
When she looked back, he was at the kiosk, clicking the mouse. She heard his interview start, and heard his nonrecorded voice murmur a curse. The recording cut off.
Then the entire kiosk was ripped out and smashed on the floor with enough force to shatter a window three feet ahead of her.
Somebody wasn’t happy with how he looked on camera.
Claire broke into a run, dodged around another row of books, turned left at the German books to make for the exit—
And tripped over Kim, who was sitting on the floor of the library, staring down at the screen of her cell phone as if it held the secrets of the universe.
“Hey!” Kim protested, and Claire pitched headlong to the carpet. She caught herself on the way down, kicked free of Kim’s legs, and crawled backward. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Claire said, and got up to dust herself off. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Research,” Kim said.
“In German?”
“I didn’t say I was looking at the books, dummy. But I could read German. It’s possible.”
“Do you?”
Kim grinned. “Just curse words. And where’s the bathroom, in case I get stuck in Berlin. Hey, what was the crash?”
“Oh. Oliver. He just found the interview you did with him.”
Kim’s grin left the building. “He killed my computer, right? He just went all Hulk Smash on it.”
“He wasn’t happy.”
“No,” Oliver said, and rounded the corner of the aisle. There were flickers of red in his eyes, and his bone-pale hands were curled into fists. “No, Oliver isn’t happy at all. You told me you’d destroyed the interview.”
“I lied,” Kim said. “Dude, I don’t work for you. I was given a job to do by the council, with a grant and everything. I’m doing it. And now you owe me for a new computer. I’m thinking maybe a laptop.”
She looked way too calm. Oliver noticed it, too. “That wasn’t the only copy.”
“Digital age. It’s a sad, sad world, and it’s just full of downloadable copies.”
“You’re going to bring them all to me.”
“Duh, no,” Kim said, and closed up her phone. “I’m pretty sure I’m not. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to just get over it, because this is Amelie’s pet project. We didn’t even get that far, anyway. It’s not like you told me you collect Precious Moments figures or something embarrassing. Get over it.” She checked the big, clunky watch on her wrist, and rolled to her feet. “Whoops, time to go. I have rehearsal in half an hour. And hey, so do you, Mitch. No hard feelings, okay?”
Oliver said nothing. Kim shrugged and headed for the exit.
“I don’t like her,” Claire offered.
“At last, we have something in common,” Oliver said. “But she is right about one thing: I have to get to rehearsal.”
That sounded very—normal. More normal than most things Oliver said. Claire felt some of her tension slip away. “So how’s that going? The play thing?”
“I have no idea. I haven’t done a play in a hundred years, and the idea of Eve and Kim being our leading ladies doesn’t fill me with confidence.” That just dripped with sarcasm, and Claire winced a little.
“A hundred years. What was the last thing you performed?”
“Hamlet.”
Of course.
How rehearsal went Claire didn’t know; she headed for Common Grounds, where she was set to meet up with (ugh) Monica. At least it was profitable.
“Money up front,” she said, as she slid into the seat across from the mayor’s favorite—and only—sister. Monica had done something cute with her hair, and it framed her face in feathered curves. For once, she was alone; no sign of Gina and Jennifer, not even as coffee fetchers.
Monica sent Claire a dirty look, but she reached into her designer backpack, got out her designer wallet, and counted out fifty dollars that she shoved across the table. “Better be worth it,” she said. “I really hate this class.”
“Then drop it.”
“Can’t. It’s a core class for my major.”
“Which is?”
“Business.”
It figured. “So where do you want to start? What’s giving you the most trouble?”
“The teacher, since he keeps giving these stupid pop quizzes and I keep flunking them.” Monica dug in her backpack and tossed over three stapled tests, which were marked up in green—the teacher must have read somewhere that red made students nervous or something, but Claire thought that with this many marks, the color of the pen was the least of Monica’s problems.
“Wow,” she said, and flipped the pages. “So you really don’t get economics at all.”
“I didn’t pay fifty dollars for the pleasure of hearing you state the obvious,” Monica pointed out. “So yeah. Don’t get it, don’t really want to, but I need it. So give me my fifty bucks’ worth of a passing grade already.”
“Well—economics is really game theory, only with money.”
Monica just stared at her.
“That was going to be the simple version.”
“Give me my money back.”
Actually, Claire needed it—well, she needed to have had Monica pay it to her, really—so she came up with a few kind of cool explanations, showed Monica the way to memorize the formulas and when to use them . . . and before it was done, there were at least ten other students leaning in to listen and take notes at various points. That was cool, except that Monica kept demanding five bucks from each one of them, which meant that she got a free lesson.
Still, not a bad afternoon’s work. Claire finished feeling a little happier; teaching—even te
aching Monica—always made her feel better.
She felt much better when she saw that Shane had come to walk her home.
“Hey,” he said as she fell in beside him. “Good day?”
She considered exactly how to answer that, and finally said, “Not bad.” Nobody had gotten killed so far. In Morganville, that was probably a good day. “Monica paid me fifty for a private lesson.” Shane held up his hand, and she jumped up to smack it without breaking stride. “And yours?”
“There was meat. I sliced it with a big, sharp knife. Very manly.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Of course you are. So, it’s our anniversary—”
“It’s not!”
“Well, I told Kim it was, and then I promised to take you out to a nice restaurant.”
“With tablecloths,” Claire agreed. “I distinctly remember tablecloths.”
“The point is, I’m taking you out. Okay?”
“I don’t think so. My face is just starting to heal. I’ve got bruises all over my throat. The last thing I want to do is go to a nice restaurant and have everybody stare at us and wonder if you’re abusing me. I wouldn’t enjoy my food at all.”
“You think too much.”
She took his hand. “Probably.”
“Okay then. How about a sandwich offered up on a nice, clean napkin, in my room?”
“You’re such a romantic.”
“It’s in my room.”
They were about two blocks along from Common Grounds—about halfway home—when the streetlights began to go out, one after another, starting behind them and zooming past as each clicked off. It wasn’t quite full dark yet, but it was getting there fast as the last hints of red sunset faded from the horizon.
“Claire?” Shane looked around, and so did she, feeling her instincts start to howl a warning.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Something’s here.”
A bloody form lurched out of the darkness toward them, and Shane shoved Claire behind him. It was a vampire—red eyes, fangs down, blood splashed on the pale face and hands.
Claire knew him, she realized after a second of pure adrenaline and shock. He was wearing the same ragged, greasy clothes from the last time she’d seen him: Morley, the graveyard vampire who’d tried to ambush Amelie.