by Rachel Caine
Neither was he. Stand-off. It couldn’t last, because his reinforcements were coming at speed, and ours – well. We didn’t actually have any that I knew about. Our only chance was to make it outside to the van, hope the car keys were on the ring Eve had appropriated, and drive like holy hell.
That also meant leaving Claire behind, though. And while I wouldn’t shed much of a tear for the vampires with her, there was no way I was leaving this damned farm without my girl.
I didn’t have to, as it turned out.
The front door opened behind Dr Douche Bag, and Claire stepped inside. She looked tired, stressed, roughed up, and anxious, and her eyes skimmed over us, cataloguing the situation and resting for a long second on mine. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or feeling, but my God, I loved her when she took one long step forward, pressed the gun in her hand into Dr Davis’s back, and said, very calmly, ‘Let her go.’
I would have probably added, you giant bag of dicks, but that worked just fine. Davis looked as surprised as Wile E. Coyote suspended over a canyon, and he dropped his weapon and let Liz go, fast. Liz lurched away a step or two, then came back and grabbed the gun, which she pointed right at the good doctor’s face.
Yow. That did not look friendly. For a sick, breathless second, I really thought the girl was going to do it … and then she backed off, shaking.
Davis sank down to a crouch, hands up, clearly full of surrender.
‘Come on,’ Claire said. ‘Come on, we have to go. Right now!’
She didn’t need to issue a formal invitation. We all bolted to follow her as she left. The farmhouse behind us was ringing with shouts, and I heard the steel door scrape open; we didn’t have long before they had us in their crosshairs. To add more trouble, there were three guards coming out of the barn across the gravel yard.
They were dragging three limp vampires by their feet.
I don’t know why, but that sight shocked me. Myrnin, Oliver, Jesse – not just vampire-pale, but blue-white. Dead white. My God, what had happened in there?
The guards yelled when they saw us, dropped their cargo, and went for their weapons. We made it to the shelter of the van before they were able to draw and fire, and I slid the door back to let Michael in first – he was already burning in the sunlight – and Eve, Pete and Liz piled in next.
Claire didn’t get in. She put her back against the cold metal, breathing hard, and she seemed to feel as sick as I did. Seriously, my whole bloodstream was on fire, and if we hadn’t been in a live-or-die situation, I probably would have been collapsing under the pain … but for now, that had to go away. Better to burn than eat bullets.
‘I killed them,’ she told me. She sounded devastated. ‘I thought – I thought I was saving them. But I think I just killed them.’
She was right. The three vampires lay in the sun, not moving. Oliver’s skin had started to smoke a little, like mist coming off a lake. It wouldn’t take long for him to blacken, and then to start to burn. The others would follow. Myrnin was old, Jesse might be even older, I wasn’t sure. But in the end, they’d be ashes and bones.
It was going to kill her, knowing she was the cause of all this.
‘Get in,’ I told her. Eve had already scrambled into the driver’s seat and was trying keys from the ring; one worked, and the engine caught. ‘We have to go. Right now.’
And we tried. We really did. I got Claire into the van, piled in after, slid the door shut, and Eve gunned it in a tight, gravel-spewing circle to head for the exit.
Another van accelerated forward to block us in.
She backed up, yelled, ‘Hang on,’ and busted through the white rail fence next to the barn, bumping and churning through the dry furrows of a field and heading at an angle for the farm road that had led us here.
We didn’t get far before the van – no off-roader – bogged down. The tyres spun dirt but couldn’t find purchase, and as Eve rocked it back and forth, she just dug us in deeper.
Stuck.
We had a grand total of four guns, one half-empty, one almost gone, two nearly full. We had a vampire who was looking a little more himself, but still operating at about a quarter speed, at best.
We had me, who was shaking with the need to shoot his best friend and rip his dead body apart, for absolutely no logical reason that I could think of … and it terrified me. It was as if I was possessed.
I looked at Claire, hoping that she had some miracle up her sleeve, some genius move that would get us out of this.
But Claire looked, in that moment, like a vulnerable eighteen-year-old girl, scared and numbed and overwhelmed, and I dragged her into my arms and held her because that seemed like the only thing I could do, hold her. Try, in that last desperate moment, to keep her safe. Because any second now, they were going to surround this van and riddle it with enough bullets to make us look like a drug cartel piñata. They had nothing to lose. We’d proved we weren’t going to be useful to them, and Dr Anderson didn’t need Claire any more if she’d just destroyed their vampire stock of lab rats.
And Michael would live through that. Sadly.
‘I killed them,’ she whispered to me. Her voice was shaking, and I felt hot tears wet against my skin. ‘Oh God, Shane, I killed them …’
I couldn’t do anything but hold her. I don’t know if it helped her, but it helped me push back the violent impulses inside of me that said I ought to take out the only remaining vampire among us, before it was too late.
The gunfire started, and I flinched and threw Claire to the van floor, covering her. I heard the others hitting the deck, too. I waited for the sound of metal punching in, glass breaking … but it didn’t come.
Whatever they were firing at, it wasn’t us.
I waited for a few more seconds, then carefully rose to a crouch. I couldn’t see a thing out the front windows, because we were pointed the wrong way, but if nobody was firing at us, it was giving us a chance we couldn’t waste.
I opened the van’s side door. ‘Out! Everybody out! Run for it!’
I didn’t even know where we’d go, but staying where we were wasn’t an option. Being out in the sun was going to be hell for Michael, though, and I looked around for something to help him. I found a plastic tarp rolled up in a bin behind the driver’s seat, and I tossed it to him; he broke the rope that held it closed and draped the thing around him like a portable tent.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Watch Eve.’
I nodded. With him so close to me, it was hard not to do something violent. The conflict inside was tearing me apart, but I tried not to let it show; even so, Michael gave me a weird look before he bailed out, blue tarp flapping around him like the world’s most heavily waterproofed cloak. Pete and Liz followed, then Eve.
Claire and I were the last ones out.
‘What are you doing?’ I yelled. ‘Move—’ Because the rest had stopped dead where they were, only a few feet from the van.
And then I saw why.
The guards were down. Well, one was still running and firing wildly, but as I watched, Jesse – Lady Grey – took a running leap that crossed at least twenty feet of space. She landed flat-footed in front of him, grabbed him by the throat, and tossed him twenty feet back, to Oliver, who caught him and – well, broke him. I tried not to see more of that than I had to.
Myrnin was up, too, although all I saw of him was a flicker of motion as he disappeared into the barn. Oliver finished up with the guard, nodded to Jesse, and he followed Myrnin.
She went into the farmhouse. And then there was screaming.
There was a lot of screaming.
‘Jesus,’ Eve whispered. She crossed herself, an involuntary motion dragged up from childhood habit; what we were seeing was something that not even I had seen before: vampires let loose from all their inhibitions. The purest expression of predator.
It was bloody terrifying.
‘They’re – they’re killing—’ Claire was shaking now, and her face was blank. ‘They’re ki
lling everyone.’
I put my arms around her and didn’t say anything. I concentrated on breathing, on trying to cool the fire in my blood; it wasn’t getting easier. In fact, now that the three older vamps were back in the game – and sweeping the table clean – it was actually worse. These instincts were screaming at me to do something.
Kill them. Kill them all.
I dropped the gun I was holding. I was afraid to keep holding it. I wasn’t sure I could control this thing inside me too much longer.
Myrnin emerged from the barn. He was still icy pale, like a walking corpse, and he was holding two big, clumsy guns – the things that Claire had developed and used to bring down vampires. One of them was trailing wires and broken circuitry.
I thought we could use the one of those that still worked just now, because Jesse came out of the farmhouse, and she looked unholy. I didn’t think anything could be left alive in there. There was just that vibe coming off of her – one of dark, total destruction.
Oliver came out of the barn as well. I’d seen him in relaxed moods, almost in good ones; I’d known him as a pseudo-friendly hippie coffee-shop owner, and as a snarky, superior man with a violent edge.
But I didn’t know this version of him. It was all vampire, all the time. A god of death.
He stood there in full sun, white as marble, staring at us with eyes red as rubies, and slowly smiled. His fangs were out, and it was incredibly creepy. He was burning, turning black in the sun. And he didn’t even care.
Michael stepped forward, hidden under the tarp, and said, ‘Are you finished?’ He didn’t sound spooked, or bothered. I guessed that all this was normal to him, on some really horrible level. He understood. ‘Because all that’s left here are friends. Understand?’
Oliver nodded.
I wasn’t at all sure it was anything but a gesture, and I braced myself for the attack.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Seeing Oliver, Jesse and Myrnin that way – reduced to their purest hunting instincts – had terrified Claire on a very deep level, but the scariest moment was at the end, when Oliver had no one left to fight.
No one but them.
For a long, long few seconds Claire was convinced he was about to take them out too … and then he just turned and walked away.
‘Wait,’ Claire said. Shane tried to hush her, probably scared that attracting Oliver’s attention was a very bad idea – and he was likely right about that – but she had to know. ‘Did you kill them all?’
‘What did you expect us to do?’ he snapped without turning toward her.
Claire felt numbed by it all now; she knew on some level that killing all these people had been necessary, because they’d been doing their level best to kill her friends, but … but she couldn’t face it. She started for the barn, but Shane held her back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Claire, don’t. You don’t need to see that.’
‘What about Dr Anderson?’
‘Ah,’ Myrnin said. ‘I almost forgot.’ He flashed back inside the barn, and when he came out, he was dragging Dr Anderson by the collar of her lab coat.
She was alive. Bruised, battered, but alive. He’d put her into one of the straitjackets they’d used on him and Oliver, and strapped it too tightly for her to move, though she was trying to fight her way free. He’d also gagged her.
Good. Claire couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to hear from her right now. She was overwhelmed by the conviction that if she hadn’t started all this by her stupid little project, those stupid VLAD guns, then none of it would have had to happen.
None of those people would be dead right now.
Oliver and Jesse, meanwhile, walked out to the van that lay stranded and stuck in the field. The two of them easily picked it up and carried it back to the gravel. ‘We need to go,’ Oliver said. Dr Anderson was screaming behind the cloth, and trying to kick at Jesse, who ignored her. ‘We’ll take both vans. Myrnin will ride with you. Michael …?’
‘We’ll come with you,’ Michael said, and Eve nodded. He turned to Shane, and something strange passed between the two of them that Claire couldn’t understand. She’d thought they were good, but there was some kind of caution there, some wary distance. ‘See you back home?’
Shane nodded. ‘Be safe, man. You okay?’
‘Better,’ Michael said. He sounded more like himself, at least; he wasn’t as pallid as the other vampires, and he seemed less … alien, somehow. What did I do to them? Claire wondered. She’d had to make guesses about how to adjust VLAD’s settings, and she hadn’t been at all sure that it would be enough to reverse the effects of the first blasts … she’d been right about the reversal, but it seemed to have done something else, too. Something scarier. It was as if their essential humanity had been stripped away. Even Myrnin’s. She couldn’t meet his gaze; it was too strange, too … too frightening.
‘We can’t just leave all this here,’ Shane said. ‘For one thing, our DNA’s all over the place.’
‘What do you propose?’ Oliver asked.
‘Well, it’s a farm. There’s gasoline and fertiliser.’
Pete nodded, suddenly looking a lot steadier than he’d been. ‘I’ll help you,’ he said. He and Shane moved to a storage building next to the barn, and began rolling out drums and equipment. It didn’t take long, with vampire help, to wire up improvised bombs – something Shane had learnt from his dad, Claire assumed – and set them in both the barn and farmhouse.
‘What was this?’ Claire asked numbly. ‘I – who are they?’
‘Were,’ Myrnin said. ‘They were from the Daylight Foundation.’
‘But what do they want?’ She was shivering now, shuddering, and she half expected Myrnin to notice, to ask if she was all right.
He didn’t. There was nothing in him right now that cared.
‘They want vampires dead,’ he said, and the slow, cruel smile on his face chilled her into ice. ‘The war has been coming for a while now. But they’ve chosen the wrong way to start it in earnest.’
Shane came back with Pete, and they all climbed into the van. In this vehicle they had Liz, Pete, Claire, Shane and Myrnin; Eve was the only human in the other van, mainly because Michael could probably protect only one of them at a time.
Myrnin was looking at Liz, and Pete. ‘Now, what shall we do with these two?’
Claire shuddered at the lack of feeling in his words, and quickly said, ‘They’re okay, Myrnin. They’ll be fine.’
‘They are not Morganville,’ he said. ‘And they are not fine.’ He put down the weapons, and before Claire could stop him, he grabbed Liz and pulled her close. Claire and Liz both screamed, and Pete lunged forward. Shane would have, but he’d just climbed into the driver’s seat. None of that mattered. Myrnin ignored Pete’s attempt to pull him off, just as he ignored Claire’s words that tumbled out begging him not to hurt her, and Liz’s struggles to pull free.
Then Liz stopped screaming. She went entirely still in Myrnin’s hands, staring into his eyes, and Claire swallowed and let go. She wanted a weapon – a silver one, preferably – but there was nothing in the van that could really hurt Myrnin.
Nothing but VLAD.
Pete had already thought of it, and he picked one of the two up – the damaged one. God only knew if it would work, but if it did, it would only make things worse. ‘Not that one!’ Claire yelped, and scrambled over to grab the other. ‘Put it down!’ Pete did, and Claire turned VLAD – the original version – on Myrnin. ‘Please. Please don’t make me do this. I don’t want to do this.’
‘Claire,’ Shane said softly. ‘Don’t.’
Because Myrnin’s head had turned toward her, and the look he gave her was bone-chilling. It wasn’t a human sort of expression. She remembered what they used to call him, in the bad old days; what his neighbour in Morganville, Gramma Day, still called him. Trap-door spider. This was the old, worst version of Myrnin, and the most powerful.
‘Put that down, or I’ll snap her head off like a daisy and beat you with
it,’ he said. It was almost a purr. ‘I’m not intending to hurt her. But I’ll happily do it if you try to use that on me again. And I won’t stop with her. Do you really want to be trapped in this van with me in a murder-crazed state?’
He sounded rational, but he wasn’t, and Claire froze. She didn’t dare try to shoot. He was fast, ridiculously so, and he’d move the barrel aside in these close quarters and then … then it would be a bloodbath.
He’d probably be sorry later. Probably.
She put the weapon down.
Myrnin turned his gaze back on Liz, who seemed terrified and mesmerised at the same time. ‘Now,’ he said, in that same warm, terrifying purr. ‘Let’s see what it would be best for you to remember. Ah, I know. You were abducted and held here at this place. You don’t know what their business was, but you believed that they dealt in drugs and slaves.’ He paused and frowned, then looked confused. ‘Do they still have slaves these days?’
‘Sex slaves,’ Shane said. ‘Yeah.’
‘Ah. How unpleasant. Very well, they dealt in drugs and sex slaves here at this place. There was an attack by some rival force. Everyone was killed. Then the farmhouse was destroyed. You were lucky to escape with your life by hiding in the fields.’ He released Liz, who sank back to the floor with her back against the van’s wall. ‘She’ll remember nothing else. Don’t speak to her. She won’t be able to respond, for now.’
Claire had no idea Myrnin could do something like this – though she supposed she should have known. He’d built a machine that could wipe out human memories. He’d have been able to do that only if he’d had the ability to do it himself, and known the techniques. But she’d never really seen him do it, full on.
He looked completely alien to her right now. I’ve turned him up to eleven, she thought, and had to choke back a terrified, completely insane laugh. This was a very bad idea, having Myrnin in a small enclosed space with four tempting pulses. He’d be hungry. He’d have to be hungry.