Rachel Caine - [The Morganville Vampires 05]

by Lord of Misrule (lit)

  Home was theirs again. The refugees were all out now, leaving a house that badly needed picking up and cleaning—not that anybody had gone out of their way to trash the place, but with that many people coming and going, things happened. Claire grabbed a trash bag and began clearing away paper plates, old Styrofoam cups half full of stale coffee, crumpled wrappers, and papers. Shane fired up the video game, apparently back in the mood to kill zombies. Michael took his guitar out of its case and tuned it, but he kept getting up to stare out the windows, restless and worried.

  “What?” Eve asked. She’d heated up leftover spaghetti out of the refrigerator, and tried to hand Michael a plate first. “Do you see something?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and gave her a quick, strained smile as he waved away the food. “Not really hungry, though. Sorry.”

  “More for me,” Shane said, and grabbed the plate. He propped it on his lap and forked spaghetti into his mouth. “Seriously. You all right? Because you never turn down food.”

  Michael didn’t answer. He stared out into the dark.

  “You’re worried,” Eve said. “About Sam?”

  “Sam and everybody else. This is nuts. What’s going on here—” Michael checked the locks on the window, but as a kind of automatic motion, as though his mind wasn’t really on it. “Why hasn’t Bishop taken over? What’s he doing out there? Why aren’t we seeing the fight?”

  “Maybe Amelie’s kicking his ass out there in the shadows somewhere.” Shane shoveled in more spaghetti.

  “No. She’s not. I can feel that. I think—I think she’s in hiding. With the rest of her followers, the vampires, anyway.”

  Shane stopped chewing. “You know where they are?”

  “Not really. I just feel—” Michael shook his head. “It’s gone. Sorry. But I feel like things are changing. Coming to a head.”

  Claire had just taken a plate of warm pasta when they all heard the thump of footsteps overhead. They looked up, and then at each other, in silence. Michael pointed to himself and the stairs, and they all nodded. Eve opened a drawer in the end table and took out three sharpened stakes; she tossed one to Shane, one to Claire, and kept one in a white-knuckled grip.

  Michael ascended the stairs without a sound, and disappeared.

  He didn’t come back down. Instead, there was a swirl of black coat and stained white balloon pants tucked into black boots; then Myrnin leaned over the railing to say, “Upstairs, all of you. I need you.”

  “Um . . .” Eve looked at Shane. Shane looked at Claire.

  Claire followed Myrnin. “Trust me,” she said. “It won’t do any good to say no.”

  Michael was waiting in the hallway, next to the open, secret door. He led the way up.

  Whatever Claire had been expecting to see, it wasn’t a crowd, but that was what was waiting upstairs in the hidden room on the third floor. She stared in confusion at the room full of people, then moved out of the way for Shane and Eve to join her and Michael.

  Myrnin came last. “Claire, I believe you know Theo Goldman and his family.”

  The faces came into focus. She had met them—in that museum thing, when they’d been on the way to rescue Myrnin. Theo Goldman had spoken to Amelie. He’d said they wouldn’t fight.

  But it looked to Claire like they’d been in a fight anyway. Vampires didn’t bruise, exactly, but she could see torn clothes and smears of blood, and they all looked exhausted and somehow—hollow. Theo was worst of all. His kind face seemed made of nothing but lines and wrinkles now, as if he’d aged a hundred years in a couple of days.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we had no other place to go. Amelie—I hoped that she was here, that she would give us refuge. We’ve been everywhere else.”

  Claire remembered there being more of them, somehow—yes, there were at least two people missing. One human, one vampire. “What happened? I thought you were safe where you were!”

  “We were,” Theo said. “Then we weren’t. That’s what wars are like. The safe places don’t stay safe. Someone knew where we were, or suspected. Around dawn yesterday, a mob broke in the doors looking for us. Jochen—” He looked at his wife, and she bowed her head. “Our son Jochen, he gave his life to delay them. So did our human friend William. We’ve been hiding, moving from place to place, trying not to be driven out in the sun.”

  “How did you get here?” Michael asked. He seemed wary. Claire didn’t blame him.

  “I brought them,” Myrnin said. “I’ve been trying to find those who are left.” He crouched down next to one of the young vampire girls and stroked her hair. She smiled at him, but it was a fragile, frightened smile. “They can stay here for now. This room isn’t common knowledge. I’ve left open the portal in the attic in case they have to flee, but it’s one way only, leading out. It’s a last resort.”

  “Are there others? Out there?” Claire asked.

  “Very few on their own. Most are either with Bishop, with Amelie, or”—Myrnin spread his hands—“gone.”

  “What are they doing? Amelie and Bishop?”

  “Moving their forces. They’re trying to find an advantage, pick the most favorable ground. It won’t last.” Myrnin shrugged. “Sooner or later, sometime tonight, they’ll clash, and then they’ll fight. Someone will win, and someone will lose. And in the morning, Morganville will know its fate.”

  That was creepy. Really creepy. Claire shivered and looked at the others, but nobody seemed to have anything to say.

  “Claire. Attend me,” Myrnin said, and walked with her to one corner of the room. “Have you spoken with your doctor friend?”

  “I tried. I couldn’t get through to him. Myrnin, are you . . . okay?”

  “Not for much longer,” he said, in that clinical way he had right before the drugs wore off. “I won’t be safe to be around without another dose of some sort. Can you get it for me?”

  “There’s none in your lab—”

  “I’ve been there. Bishop got there first. I shall need a good bit of glassware, and a completely new library.” He said it lightly, but Claire could see the tension in his face and the shadow in his dark, gleaming eyes. “He tried to destroy the portals, cut off Amelie’s movements. I managed to patch things together, but I shall need to instruct you in how it’s done. Soon. In case—”

  He didn’t need to finish. Claire nodded slowly. “You should go,” she said. “Is the prison safe? The one where you keep the sickest ones?”

  “Bishop finds nothing to interest him there, so yes. He will ignore it awhile longer. I’ll lock myself in for a while, until you come with the drug.” Myrnin bent over her, suddenly very focused and very intent. “We must refine the serum, Claire. We must distribute it. The stress, the fighting—it’s accelerating the disease. I’ve seen signs of it in Theo, even in Sam. If we don’t act soon, I’m afraid we may begin to lose more to confusion and fear. They won’t even be able to defend themselves.”

  Claire swallowed. “I’ll get on it.”

  He took her hand and kissed it lightly. His lips felt dry as dust, but it still left a tingle in her fingers. “I know you will, my girl. Now, let’s rejoin your friends.”

  “How long do they need to be here?” Eve asked, as they moved closer. She asked not unkindly, but she seemed nervous, too. There were, Claire thought, an awful lot of near-stranger vampire guests. “I mean, we don’t have a lot of blood in the house. . . .”

  Theo smiled. Claire remembered, with a sharp feeling of alarm, what he’d said to Amelie back at the museum, and she didn’t like that smile at all, not even when he said, “We won’t require much. We can provide for ourselves.”

  “He means, they can munch on their human friends, like takeout,” Claire said. “No. Not in our house.”

  Myrnin frowned. “This is hardly the time to be—”

  “This is exactly the time, and you know it. Did anybody ask them if they wanted to be snack packs?” The two remaining humans, both women, looked horrified. “I didn’t think so.”
<
br />   Theo’s expression didn’t change. “What we do is our own affair. We won’t hurt them, you know.”

  “Unless you’re getting your plasma by osmosis, I don’t really know how you can promise that.”

  Theo’s eyes flared with banked fire. “What do you want us to do? Starve? Even the youngest of us?”

  Eve cleared her throat. “Actually, I know where there’s a big supply of blood. If somebody will go with me to get it.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Shane said. “Not out in the dark. Besides, the place is locked up.”

  Eve reached in her pocket and took out her key ring. She flipped until she found one key in particular, and held it up. “I never turned in my key,” she said. “I used to open and close, you know.”

  Myrnin gazed at her thoughtfully. “There’s no portal to Common Grounds. It’s off the network. That means any vampire in it will be trapped in daylight.”

  “No. There’s underground access to the tunnels; I’ve seen it. Oliver sent some people out using it while I was there.” Eve gave him a bright, brittle smile. “I say we move your friends there. Also, there’s coffee. You guys like coffee, right? Everybody likes coffee.”

  Theo ignored her, and looked to Myrnin for an answer. “Is it better?”

  “It’s more defensible,” Myrnin said. “Steel shutters. If there’s underground access—yes. It would make a good base of operations.” He turned to Eve. “We’ll require your services to drive.”

  He said it as if Eve were the help, and Claire felt her face flame hot. “Excuse me? How about a please in there somewhere, since you’re asking for a favor?”

  Myrnin’s eyes turned dark and very cold. “You seem to have forgotten that I employ you, Claire. That I own you, in some sense. I am not required to say please and thank you to you, your friends, or any human walking the streets.” He blinked, and was back to the Myrnin she normally saw. “However, I do take your point. Yes. Please drive us to Common Grounds, dear lady. I would be extravagantly, embarrassingly grateful.”

  He did all but kiss her hand. Eve, not surprisingly, could say nothing but yes.

  Claire settled for an eye roll big enough to make her head hurt. “You can’t all fit,” she pointed out. “In Eve’s car, I mean.”

  “And she’s not taking you alone, anyway,” Michael said. “My car’s in the garage. I can take the rest of you. Shane, Claire—”

  “Staying here, since you’ll need the space,” Shane said. “Sounds like a plan. Look, if there are people looking for them, you ought to get them moving. I’ll call Richard. He can assign a couple of cops to guard Common Grounds.”

  “No,” Myrnin said. “No police. We can’t trust them.”

  “We can’t?”

  “Some of them have been working with Bishop, and with the human mobs. I have proof of that. We can’t take the risk.”

  “But Richard—,” Claire said, and subsided when she got Myrnin’s glare. “Right. Okay. On your own, got it.”

  Eve didn’t want to be dragged into it, but she went without much of a protest—the number of fangs in the room might have had something to do with it. As the Goldmans and Myrnin, Eve and Michael walked downstairs, Shane held Claire back to say, “We’ve got to figure out how to lock this place up. In case.”

  “You mean, against—” She gestured vaguely at the vampires. He nodded. “But if Michael lives here, and we live here, the house can’t just bar a whole group of people from entry. It has to be done one at a time—at least that’s what I understood. And no, before you ask me, I don’t know how it works. Or how to fool it. I think only Amelie has the keys to that.”

  He looked disappointed. “How about closing off these weird doors Myrnin and Amelie are popping through?”

  “I can work them. That doesn’t mean I can turn them on and off.”

  “Great.” He looked around the room, then took a seat on the old Victorian couch. “So we’re like Undead Grand Central Station. Not really loving that so much. Can Bishop come through?”

  It was a question that Claire had been thinking about, and it creeped her out to have to say, “I don’t know. Maybe. But from what Myrnin said, he set the doorway to exit-only. So maybe we just . . . wait.”

  Robbed of doing anything heroic, or for that matter even useful, she warmed up the spaghetti again, and she and Shane ate it and watched some mindless TV show while jumping at every noise and creak, with weapons handy. When the kitchen door banged open nearly an hour later, Claire almost needed a heart transplant—until she heard Eve yell, “We’re home! Oooooh, spaghetti. I’m starved.” Eve came in holding a plate and shoveling pasta into her mouth as she walked. Michael was right behind her.

  “No problems?” Shane asked. Eve shook her head, chewing a mouthful of spaghetti.

  “They should be fine there. Nobody saw us get them inside, and until Oliver turns up, nobody is going to need to get in there for a while.”

  “What about Myrnin?”

  Eve swallowed, almost choked, and Michael patted her kindly on the back. She beamed at him. “Myrnin? Oh yeah. He did a Batman and took off into the night. What is with that guy, Claire? If he was a superhero, he’d be Bipolar Man.”

  The drugs were the problem. Claire needed to get more, and she needed to work on that cure Myrnin had found. That was just as important as anything else . . . providing there were any vampires left, anyway.

  They had dinner, and at least it was the four of them again, sitting around the table, talking as if the world were normal, even if all of them knew it wasn’t. Shane seemed especially jumpy, which wasn’t like him at all.

  For her part, Claire was just tired to the bone of being scared, and when she went upstairs, she was asleep the minute she crawled between the covers.

  But sleep didn’t mean it was restful, or peaceful.

  She dreamed that somewhere, Amelie was playing chess, moving her pieces at lightning speed across a black-and-white board. Bishop sat across from her, grinning with too many teeth, and when he took her rook, it turned into a miniature version of Claire, and suddenly both the vampires were huge and she was so small, so small, stranded out in the open.

  Bishop picked her up and squeezed her in his white hand, and blood drops fell onto the white squares of the chessboard.

  Amelie frowned, watching Bishop squeeze her, and put out a delicate fingertip to touch the drops of blood. Claire struggled and screamed.

  Amelie tasted her blood, and smiled.

  Claire woke up with a convulsive shudder, huddled in her blankets. It was still dark outside the windows, though the sky was getting lighter, and the house was very, very quiet.

  Her phone was buzzing in vibrate mode on the bedside table. She picked it up and found a text message from the university’s alert system.

  CLASSES RETURN TO NORMAL SCHEDULE EFFECTIVE 7 A.M. TODAY.

  School seemed like a million miles away, another world that didn’t mean anything to her anymore, but it would get her on campus, and there were things she needed there. Claire scrolled down her phone list and found Dr. Robert Mills, but there was no immediate answer on his cell. She checked the clock, winced at the early hour, but slid out of bed and began grabbing things out of drawers. That didn’t take a lot of time. She was down to the last of everything. Laundry was starting to be a genuine priority.

  She dialed his phone again after she’d dressed. “Hello?” Dr. Mills sounded as if she’d dragged him out of a deep, probably happy sleep. He probably hadn’t been dreaming about being squeezed dry by Mr. Bishop.

  “It’s Claire,” she said. “I’m sorry to call so early—”

  “Is it early? Oh. Been up all night, just fell asleep.” He yawned. “Glad you’re all right, Claire.”

  “Are you at the hospital?”

  “No. The hospital’s going to need a lot of work before it’s even halfway ready for the kind of work I need to do.” Another jaw-cracking yawn. “Sorry. I’m on campus, in the Life Sciences Building. Lab Seventeen. We have some roll-
away beds here.”

  “We?”

  “My wife and kids are with me. I didn’t want to leave them on their own out there.”

  Claire didn’t blame him. “I’ve got something for you to do, and I need some of the drug,” she said. “It could be really important. I’ll be at school in about twenty minutes, okay?”

  “Okay. Don’t come here. My kids are asleep right now. Let’s meet somewhere else.”

  “The on-campus coffee bar,” she said. “It’s in the University Center.”

  “Trust me, I know where it is. Twenty minutes.”

  She was already heading for the door.

  With no sounds coming from any of the other rooms, Claire figured her housemates were all crashed out, exhausted. She didn’t know why she wasn’t, except for a suppressed, vibrating fear inside her that if she slept any more, something bad was going to happen.