Rachel Caine - [The Morganville Vampires 05]

by Lord of Misrule (lit)

  Not so much an issue now, she supposed. She handed over the vials to Oliver, who turned them over in his fingers, considering, and then handed back the powder. “The liquid absorbs into the body more quickly, I expect.”

  “Yes.” It also had some unpredictable side effects, but this probably wasn’t the time to worry about that.

  “And Amelie?” Oliver continued turning the bottle over and over in his fingers.

  “She’s—we had to leave her. She was fighting Bishop. I don’t know where she is now.”

  A deep silence filled the room, and Claire saw the vampires all look at one another—all except Oliver, who continued to stare down at Myrnin, no change in his expression at all. “All right, then. Helen, Karl, watch the windows and doors. I doubt Bishop’s patrols will try storming the place, but they might, while I’m distracted. The rest of you”—he looked at the humans and shook his head—“try to stay out of our way.”

  He thumbed the top off the vial of clear liquid and held it in his right hand. “Get ready to turn him faceup,” he said to Hannah and Claire. Claire took hold of Myrnin’s shoulders, and Hannah his feet.

  Oliver took the stake in his left hand and, in one smooth motion, pulled it out. It clattered to the floor, and he nodded sharply. “Now.”

  Once Myrnin was lying on his back, Oliver motioned her away and pried open Myrnin’s bloodless lips. He poured the liquid into the other vampire’s mouth, shut it, and placed a hand on his high forehead.

  Myrnin’s dark eyes were open. Wide-open. Claire shuddered, because they looked completely dead—like windows into a dark, dark room . . . and then he blinked.

  He sucked in a very deep breath, and his back arched in silent agony. Oliver held his hand steady on Myrnin’s forehead. His eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, and Myrnin writhed weakly, trying without much success to twist free. He collapsed limply back on the cushions, chest rising and falling. His skin still looked like polished marble, veined with cold blue, but his eyes were alive again.

  And crazy. And hungry.

  He swallowed, coughed, swallowed again, and gradually, the insane pilot light in his eyes went out. He looked tired and confused and in pain.

  Oliver let out a long, moaning sigh, and tried to stand up. He couldn’t. He made it about halfway up, then wavered and fell to his knees, one hand braced on the arm of the couch for support. His head went down, and his shoulders heaved, almost as if he were gasping or crying. Claire couldn’t imagine Oliver—Oliver—doing either one of those things, really.

  Nobody moved. Nobody touched him, although some of the other vampires exchanged unreadable glances.

  He’s sick, Claire thought. It was the disease. It made it harder and harder for them to concentrate, to do the things they’d always taken for granted, like make other vampires. Or revive them. Even Oliver, who hadn’t believed anything about the sickness . . . even he was starting to fail.

  And he knew it.

  “Help me up,” Oliver finally whispered. His voice sounded faint and tattered. Claire grabbed his arm and helped him climb slowly, painfully up; he moved as if he were a thousand years old, and felt every year of it. One of the other vampires silently provided a chair, and Claire helped him into it.

  Oliver braced his elbows on his thighs and hid his pale face in his hands. When she started to speak, he said, softly, “Leave me.”

  It didn’t seem a good idea to argue. Claire backed off and returned to where Myrnin was, on the couch.

  He blinked, still staring at the ceiling. He folded his hands slowly across his stomach, but didn’t otherwise move.

  “Myrnin?”

  “Present,” he said, from what seemed like a very great distance away. He chuckled very softly, then winced. “Hurts when I laugh.”

  “Yeah, um—I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” A very slight frown worked its way between Myrnin’s eyebrows, made a slow V, and then went on its way. “Ah. Staked me.”

  “I . . . uh . . . yeah.” She knew what Oliver’s reaction would have been, if she’d done that kind of thing to him, and the outcome wouldn’t have been pretty. She wasn’t sure what Myrnin might do. Just to be sure, she stayed out of easy-grabbing distance.

  Myrnin simply closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. He looked old now, exhausted, like Oliver. “I’m sure it was for the best,” he said. “Perhaps you should have left the wood in place. Better for everyone, in the end. I would have just—faded away. It’s not very painful, not comparatively.”

  “No!” She took a step closer, then another. He just looked so—defeated. “Myrnin, don’t. We need you.”

  He didn’t open his eyes, but there was a tiny, tired smile curving his lips. “I’m sure you think you do, but you have what you need now. I found the cure for you, Claire. Bishop’s blood. It’s time to let me go. It’s too late for me to get better.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  This time, his great dark eyes opened and studied her with cool intensity. “I see you don’t,” he said. “Whether or not that assumption is reasonable, that’s another question entirely. Where is she?”

  He was asking about Amelie. Claire glanced at Oliver, still hunched over, clearly in pain. No help. She bent closer to Myrnin. No way she wouldn’t be overheard by the other vampires, though, she knew that. “She’s—I don’t know. We got separated. The last I saw, she and Bishop were fighting it out.”

  Myrnin sat up. It wasn’t the kind of smooth, controlled motion vampires usually had, as though they’d been practicing it for three or four human lifetimes; he had to pull himself up, slowly and painfully, and it hurt Claire to watch. She put her hand against his shoulder blade to brace him. His skin still felt marble-cold, but not dead. It was hard to figure out what the difference was—maybe it was the muscles, underneath, tensed and alive again.

  “We have to find her,” he said. “Bishop will stop at nothing to get her, if he hasn’t already. Once you were safely away, she’d have retreated. Amelie is a guerrilla fighter. It’s not like her to fight in the open, not against her father.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Oliver said, without taking his head out of his hands. “And neither are you, Myrnin.”

  “You owe her your fealty.”

  “I owe nothing to the dead,” Oliver said. “And until I see proof of her survival, I will not sacrifice my life, or anyone else’s, in a futile attempt at rescue.”

  Myrnin’s face twisted in contempt. “You haven’t changed,” he said.

  “Neither have you, fool,” Oliver murmured. “Now shut up. My head aches.”

  Eve was pulling shots behind the counter, wearing a formal black apron that went below her knees. Claire slid wearily onto a barstool on the other side. “Wow,” she said. “Flashback to the good times, huh?”

  Eve made a sour face as she thumped a mocha down in front of her friend. “Yeah, don’t remind me,” she said. “Although I have to say, I missed the Monster.”

  “The Monster?”

  Eve patted the giant, shiny espresso machine beside her affectionately. “Monster, meet Claire. Claire, meet the Monster. He’s a sweetie, really, but you have to know his moods.”

  Claire reached out and patted the machine, too. “Nice to meet you, Monster.”

  “Hey.” Eve caught her wrist when she tried to pull back. “Bruises? What gives?”

  Amelie’s grip on her really had raised a crop of faint blue smudges on her upper arm, like a primitive tattoo. “Don’t freak. I don’t have any bite marks or anything.”

  “I’ll freak if I wanna. As long as Michael isn’t here, I’m kind of—”

  “What, my mom?” Claire snapped, and was instantly sorry. And guilty, for an entirely different reason. “I didn’t mean—”

  Eve waved it away. “Hey, if you can’t spark a ’tude on a day like this, when can you? Your mother’s okay, by the way, because I know that’s your next question. So far, Bishop’s freaks haven’t managed to shut down the cell network, so
I’ve been keeping in touch, since nothing’s happening here except for some serious caffeine production. Landlines are dead, though. So is the Internet. Radio and TV are both off the air, too.”

  Claire looked at the clock. Five a.m. Two hours until dawn, more or less—probably less. It felt like an eternity.

  “What are we going to do in the morning?” she asked.

  “Good question.” Eve wiped down the counter. Claire sipped the sweet, chocolatey comfort of the mocha. “When you think of something, let us know, because right now, I don’t think anybody’s got a clue.”

  “You’d be wrong, thankfully,” Oliver said. He seemed to come out of nowhere—God, didn’t Claire hate that!—as he settled on the stool next to her. He seemed almost back to normal now, but very tired. There was a shadow in his eyes that Claire didn’t remember seeing before. “There is a plan in place. Amelie’s removal from the field of battle is a blow, but not a defeat. We continue as she would want.”

  “Yeah? You want to tell us?” Eve asked. That earned her a cool stare. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Vampires really aren’t all about the sharing, unless it benefits them first.”

  “I will tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it,” Oliver said. “Get me one of the bags from the walk-in refrigerator.”

  Eve looked down at the top of her apron. “Oh, I’m sorry, where does it say servant on here? Because I’m so very not.”

  For a second, Claire held her breath, because the expression on Oliver’s face was murderous, and she saw a red light, like the embers of a banked fire, glowing in the back of his eyes.

  Then he blinked and said, simply, “Please, Eve.”

  Eve hadn’t been expecting that. She blinked, stared back at him for a second, then silently nodded and walked away, behind a curtained doorway.

  “You’re wondering if that hurt,” Oliver said, not looking at Claire at all, but staring after Eve. “It did, most assuredly.”

  “Good,” she said. “I hear suffering’s good for the soul, or something.”

  “Then we shall all be right with our God by morning.” Oliver swiveled on the stool to look her full in the face. “I should kill you for what you did.”

  “Staking Myrnin?” She sighed. “I know. I didn’t think I had a choice. He’d have bitten my hand off if I’d tried to give him the medicine, and by the time it took effect, me and Hannah would have been dog food, anyway. It seemed like the quickest, quietest way to get him out.”

  “Even so,” Oliver said, his voice low in his throat, “as an Elder, I have the power to sentence you, right now, to death, for attempted murder of a vampire. You do understand?”

  Claire held up her hand and pointed to the gold bracelet on her wrist—the symbol of the Founder. Amelie’s symbol. “What about this?”

  “I would pay reparations,” he said. “I imagine I could afford it. Amelie would be tolerably upset with me, for a while, always assuming she is still alive. We’d reach an accommodation. We always do.”

  Claire didn’t say anything else in her defense, just waited. And after a moment, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “You were right to take the action you did. You have been right about a good deal that I was unwilling to admit, including the fact that some of us are”—he cast a quick look around, and dropped his voice so low she could make out the word only from the shape his lips gave it—“unwell.”

  Unwell. Yeah, that was one way to put it. She resisted an urge to roll her eyes. How about dying? Ever heard the word pandemic?

  Oliver continued without waiting for her response. “Myrnin’s mind was . . . very disordered,” he said. “I didn’t think I could get him back. I wouldn’t have, without that dose of medication.”

  “Does that mean you believe us now?” She meant, about the vampire disease, but she couldn’t say that out loud. Even the roundabout way they were speaking was dangerous; too many vampire ears with too little to do, and once they knew about the sickness, there was no predicting what they might do. Run, probably. Go off to rampage through the human world, sicken, and die alone, very slowly. It’d take years, maybe decades, but eventually, they’d all fall, one by one. Oliver’s case was less advanced than many of the others, but age seemed to slow down the disease’s progress; he might last for a long time, losing himself slowly.

  Becoming nothing more than a hungry shell.

  Oliver said, “It means what it means,” and he said it with an impatient edge to it, but Claire wondered if he really did know. “I am talking about Myrnin. Your drugs may not be enough to hold him for long, and that means we will need to take precautions.”

  Eve emerged from the curtain carrying a plastic blood bag, filled with dark cherry syrup. That was what Claire told herself, anyway. Dark cherry syrup. Eve looked shaken, and she dumped the bag on the counter in front of Oliver like a dead rat. “You’ve been planning this,” she said. “Planning for a siege.”

  Oliver smiled slowly. “Have I?”

  “You’ve got enough blood in there to feed half the vampires in town for a month, and enough of those heat-and-eat meals campers use to feed the rest of us even longer. Medicines, too. Pretty much anything we’d need to hold out here, including generators, batteries, bottled water. . . .”

  “Let’s say I am cautious,” he said. “It’s a trait many of us have picked up during our travels.” He took the blood bag and motioned for a cup; when Eve set it in front of him, he punctured the bag with a fingernail, very neatly, and squeezed part of the contents into the cup. “Save the rest,” he said, and handed it back to Eve, who looked even queasier than before. “Don’t look so disgusted. Blood in bags means none taken unwillingly from your veins, after all.”

  Eve held it at arm’s length, opened the smaller refrigerator behind the bar, and put it in an empty spot on the door rack inside. “Ugh,” she said. “Why am I behind the bar again?”

  “Because you put on the apron.”

  “Oh, you’re just loving this, aren’t you?”

  “Guys,” Claire said, drawing both of their stares. “Myrnin. Where are we going to put him?”

  Before Oliver could answer, Myrnin pushed through the crowd in the table-and-chairs area of Common Grounds and walked toward them. He seemed normal again, or as normal as Myrnin ever got, anyway. He’d begged, borrowed, or outright stolen a long, black velvet coat, and under it he was still wearing the poofy white Pierrot pants from his costume, dark boots, and no shirt. Long, black, glossy hair and decadently shining eyes.

  Oliver took in the outfit, and raised a brow. “You look like you escaped from a Victorian brothel,” he said. “One that . . . specialized.”

  In answer, Myrnin skinned up the sleeves of the coat. The wound in his back might have healed—or might be healing, anyway—but the burns on his wrists and hands were still livid red, with an unhealthy silver tint to them. “Not the sort of brothel I’d normally frequent, by choice,” he said, “though of course you might be more adventurous, Oliver.” Their gazes locked, and Claire resisted the urge to take a step back. She thought, just for a second, that they were going to bare fangs at each other . . . and then Myrnin smiled. “I suppose I should say thank you.”

  “It would be customary,” Oliver agreed.

  Myrnin turned to Claire. “Thank you.”

  Somehow, she guessed that wasn’t what Oliver had expected; she certainly hadn’t. It was the kind of snub that got most people hurt in Morganville, but then again, she guessed Myrnin wasn’t most people, even to Oliver.

  Oliver didn’t react. If there was a small red glow in the depths of his eyes, it could have been a reflection from the lights.

  “Um—for what?” Claire asked.

  “I remember what you did.” Myrnin shrugged. “It was the right choice at the moment. I couldn’t control myself. The pain . . . the pain was extremely difficult to contain.”

  She cast a nervous glance at his wrists. “How is it now?”

  “Tolerable.” His tone dismissed any further disc
ussion. “We need to get to a portal and locate Amelie. The closest is at the university. We will need a car, I suppose, and a driver. Some sturdy escorts wouldn’t go amiss.” Myrnin sounded casual, but utterly certain that his slightest wish would be obeyed, and again, she felt that flare of tension between him and Oliver.

  “Perhaps you’ve missed the announcement,” Oliver said. “You’re no longer a king, or a prince, or whatever you were before you disappeared into your filthy hole. You’re Amelie’s exotic pet alchemist, and you don’t give me orders. Not in my town.”