by Rachel Caine
After a few seconds, a voice answered. “Check, Richard, you’re the last station to report. Stand by for a bulletin.”
There were a few clicks, and then another voice came over the radio.
This is Oliver. I am broadcasting to all on the network with emergency orders. Restrain every vampire allied to us that you can find, by whatever means necessary. Locked rooms, chains, tranquilizers, cells, use what you have. Until we know how and why this is happening, we must take every precaution during the day. It seems that some of us have resistance to the call, and others have immunity, but this could change at any time. Be on your guard. From this point forward, we will conduct hourly calls, and each location will report status. University station, report.
Richard clicked the TALK button. “Michael Glass and all the other vampires in our group are being restrained. We’ve got student containment here, but it won’t last. We’ll have to open the gates no later than tomorrow morning, if we can keep it together until then. Even with the phone and Internet blackout, somebody’s going to get word out.”
“We’re following the plan,” Oliver said. “We’re taking the cell towers down in ten minutes, until further notice. Phone lines are already cut. The only communication from this point forward will be strategic, using the radios. What else do you need?”
“Whip and a chair? Nothing. We’re fine here for now. I don’t think anybody will try a daylight assault, not with as many guards as we have here.” Richard hesitated, then keyed the mike again. “Oliver, I’ve been hearing things. I think there are some factions out there forming. Human factions. Could complicate things.”
Oliver was silent for a moment, then said, “Yes, I understand. We’ll deal with that as it arises.”
Oliver moved on to the next station on his list, which was the Glass House. Monica reported in, which was annoying. Claire resisted the urge to grind her teeth. It was a quick summary, at least, and as more Founder Houses reported in, the situation seemed the same: some vampires were responding to the homing signal, and some weren’t. At least, not yet.
Richard Morrell was staring thoughtfully into the distance, and finally, when all the reports were finished, he clicked the button again. “Oliver, it’s Richard. What happens if you start going zombie on us?”
“I won’t,” Oliver said.
“If you do. Humor me. Who takes over?”
Oliver obviously didn’t want to think about this, and Claire could hear the barely suppressed fury in his voice when he replied. “You do,” he said. “I don’t care how you organize it. If we have to hand the defense of Morganville over to mere humans, we’ve already lost. Oliver signing out. Next check-in, one hour from now.”
The walkie-talkie clicked off.
“That went well,” Dean Wallace observed. “He’s named you heir apparent to the Apocalypse. Congratulations.”
“Yeah, it’s one hell of a field promotion.” Richard stood up. “Let’s find a place for Michael.”
“We have some storage areas in the basement—steel doors, no windows. That’s where they’ll take the others.”
“That’ll do for now. I want to move him to the jail as soon as we can, centralize the containment.”
Claire looked at Eve, and then at Michael’s sleeping face, and thought about him alone in a cell—because what else could you call it? Locked away like Myrnin.
Myrnin. She wondered if he’d felt this weird pull, too, and if he had, whether or not they’d been able to stop him from taking off. Probably not, if he’d been determined to go running off. Myrnin was one of those unstoppable forces, and unless he met an immovable object . . .
She sighed and helped carry Michael down the hall, past the stunned bureaucrats, to his temporary holding cell.
Life went on, weirdly enough—human life, anyway. People began to venture out, clean up the streets, retrieve things from burned and trashed houses. The police began to establish order again.
But there were things happening. People gathering in groups on street corners. Talking. Arguing.
Claire didn’t like what she saw, and she could tell that Hannah and Eve didn’t, either.
Hours passed. They cruised around for a while, and passed bulletins back to Oliver on the groups they saw. The largest one was almost a hundred people, forming up in the park. Some guy Claire didn’t know had a loudspeaker.
“Sal Manetti,” Hannah said. “Always was a trouble-maker. I think he was one of Captain Obvious’s guys for a while, but they had a falling-out. Sal wanted a lot more killing and a lot less talking.”
That wasn’t good. It really wasn’t good how many people were out there listening to him.
Eve went back to Common Grounds to report in, and that was just when things started to go wrong.
Hannah was driving Claire back home, after dropping off a trunk full of blood bags from the university storage vaults, when the radio Claire had in her pocket began to chime for attention. She logged in with the code. As soon as she did, a blast of noise tumbled out of the speaker.
She thought she heard something about Oliver, but she wasn’t sure. Her shouted questions weren’t answered. It was as if someone had pressed the button by accident, in the middle of a fight, and everybody was too busy to answer.
Then the broadcast went dead.
Claire exchanged a look with Hannah. “Better—”
“Go to Common Grounds? Yeah. Copy that.”
When they arrived, the first thing Claire saw was the broken glass. The shutters were up, and two front windows had been shattered out, not in; there were sprays of broken pieces all the way to the curb.
It seemed very, very quiet.
“Eve?” Claire blurted, and bailed before Hannah could tell her to stay put. She hit the front door of the coffee shop at a run, but it didn’t open, and she banged into it hard enough to bruise.
Locked.
“Will you wait?” Hannah snapped, and grabbed her arm as she tried to duck in through one of the broken windows. “You’re going to get yourself cut. Hang on.”
She used the paintball gun she carried to break out some of the hanging sharp edges, and before Claire could dart ahead, she blocked the path and stepped over the low wooden sill. Claire followed. Hannah didn’t try to stop her, probably because she knew better.
“Oh man,” Hannah said. As Claire climbed in after her, she saw that most of the tables and chairs were overturned or shoved out of place. Broken crockery littered the floor.
And people were down, lying motionless among the wreckage. Hannah went from one to the other, quickly assessing their conditions. There were five down that Claire could see. Two of them made Hannah shake her head in regret; the other three were still alive, though wounded.
There were no vampires in the coffee bar, and there was no sign of Eve.
Claire ducked behind the curtain. More signs of a struggle. Nobody left behind, alive or dead. She sucked in a deep breath and opened up the giant commercial refrigerator.
It was full of blood bags, but no bodies.
“Anything?” Hannah asked at the curtain.
“Nobody here,” Claire said. “They left the blood, though.”
“Huh. Weird. You’d think they’d need that more than anything. Why attack the place if you’re not taking the good stuff?” Hannah stared out into the coffee shop, her expression blank and distant. “Glass is broken out, not in. No sign anybody got in the doors, either front or back. I don’t think anybody attacked from the outside, Claire.”
With a black, heavy feeling gathering in her stomach, Claire swung the refrigerator door shut. “You think the vampires fought to get out.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“Oliver, too.”
“Oliver, Myrnin, all of them. Whatever bat signal was calling them got turned up to eleven, I think.”
“Then where’s Eve?” Claire asked.
Hannah shook her head. “We don’t know anything. It’s all guesswork. Let’s get some boots on the ground an
d figure this thing out.” She continued to stare outside. “If they went out there, most of them could make it for a while in the sun, but they’d be hurt. Some couldn’t make it far at all.”
Some, like the policeman Claire had seen burn up in front of her, would already be gone. “You think it’s Mr. Bishop?” she asked, in a very small voice.
“I hope so.”
Claire blinked. “Why?”
“Because if it’s not, that’s got to be a whole lot worse.”
8
Three hours later, they didn’t know much more, except that nothing they tried to do to keep the vampires from leaving seemed to work, apart from tranquilizing them and locking them up in sturdy cells. Tracking those who did leave wasn’t much good, either. Claire and Hannah ended up at the Glass House, which seemed like the best place to gather—central to most things, and close to City Hall in an emergency.
Richard Morrell arrived, along with a few others, and set up shop in the kitchen. Claire was trying to figure out what to do to feed everybody, when there was another knock at the door.
It was Gramma Day. The old woman, straight-backed and proud, leaned on her cane and stared at Claire from age-faded eyes. “I ain’t staying with my daughter,” she said. “I don’t want any part of that.”
Claire quickly moved aside to let her in, and the old lady shuffled inside. As Claire locked the door behind her, she asked, “How did you get here?”
“Walked,” Gramma said. “I know how to use my feet just fine. Nobody bothered me.” Nobody would dare, Claire thought. “Young Mr. Richard! Are you in here?”
“Ma’am?” Richard Morrell came out of the kitchen, looking very much younger than Claire had ever seen him. Gramma Day had that effect on people. “What are you doing here?”
“My fool daughter’s off her head,” Gramma said. “I’m not having any of it. Move out of the way, boy. I’m making you some lunch.” And she tapped her cane right past him, into the kitchen, and clucked and fretted over the state of the kitchen while Claire stood by, caught between giggles and horror. She was just a pair of hands, getting ordered around, but at the end of it there was a plate full of sandwiches and a big jug of iced tea, and everybody was seated around the kitchen table, except for Gramma, who’d gone off into the other room to rest. Claire had hesitantly taken a chair, at Richard’s nod. Detectives Joe Hess and Travis Lowe were also present, and they were gratefully scarfing down food and drink. Claire felt exhausted, but they looked a whole lot worse. Tall, thin Joe Hess had his left arm in a sling—broken, apparently, from the brace on it—and both he and his rounder, heavier partner had cuts and bruises to prove they’d been in a fight or two.
“So,” Hess said, “any word on where the vampires are heading when they take off?”
“Not so far,” Richard said. “Once we started tracking them, we could keep up only for a while, and then they lost us.”
“Aren’t they hurt by the sun?” Claire asked. “I mean—”
“They start smoking, not in the Marlboro way, and then they start crisping,” Travis Lowe said around a mouthful of turkey and Swiss. “The older ones, they can handle it okay, and anyway, they’re not just charging out there anymore. They’re putting on hats and coats and blankets. I saw one wrapped up in a Sponge-Bob rug from some kid’s bedroom, if you can believe that. It’s the younger vamps that are in trouble. Some of them won’t make it to the shade if they’re not careful.”
Claire thought about Michael, and her stomach lurched. Before she even formed the question, Richard saw her expression and shook his head. “Michael’s okay,” he said. “Saw to it myself. He’s got himself a nice, secure jail cell, along with the other vampires we could catch before it was too late. He’s not as strong as some of the others. He can’t bend steel with his bare hands. Yet, anyway.”
“Any word on—” Claire was wearing out the question, and Richard didn’t even let her finish it.
“No sign of Eve,” he said. “No word from her. I’d try to put a GPS track on her phone, but we’d have to bring the cell network up, and that’s too dangerous right now. I’ve asked the guys on the street to keep an eye out for her, but we’ve got a lot of things going on, Claire.”
“I know. But—” She couldn’t put it into words, exactly. She just knew that somewhere, somehow, Eve was in trouble, and they needed to find her.
“So,” Joe Hess said, and stood up to look at a blown-up map of Morganville taped to the wall. “This still accurate?” The map was covered in colored dots: blue for locations held by those loyal to Amelie; red for those loyal to Bishop; black for those burned or otherwise put out of commission, which accounted for three Founder Houses, the hospital, and the blood bank.
“Pretty much,” Richard said. “We don’t know if the vampires are leaving Bishop’s locations, but we know they’re digging in, just like Amelie’s folks. We can verify locations only where Amelie’s people were supposed to be, and they’re gone from just about every location we’ve got up in blue.”
“Where were they last seen?”
Richard consulted notes, and began to add yellow dots to the map. Claire saw the pattern almost immediately. “It’s the portals,” she said. “Myrnin got the portals working again, somehow. That’s what they’re using.”
Hess and Lowe looked blank, but Richard nodded. “Yeah, I know about that. Makes sense. But where are they going?”
She shrugged helplessly. “Could be anywhere. I don’t know all the places the portals go; maybe Myrnin and Amelie do, but I don’t think anybody else does.” But she felt unreasonably cheered by the idea that the vampires weren’t out wandering out in the daylight, spontaneously combusting all over the place. She didn’t want to see that happen to them . . . not even to Oliver.
Well, maybe to Oliver, sometimes. But not today.
The three men stared at her for a few seconds, then went back to studying the map, talking about perimeters and strategies for patrols, all kinds of things that Claire didn’t figure really involved her. She finished her sandwich and walked into the living room, where tiny, wizened little Gramma Day was sitting in an overstuffed wing chair with her feet up, talking to Hannah. “Hey, little girl,” Gramma Day said. “Sit yourself.”
Claire perched, looking around the room. Most of the vampires were gone, either confined to cells or locked away for safety; some, they hadn’t been able to stop. She couldn’t seem to stop anxiously rubbing her hands together. Shane. Shane was supposed to be here. Richard Morrell had said that they’d arranged for the Bloodmobile to switch drivers, and that meant Shane would be coming soon for his rest period.
She needed him right now.
Gramma Day was looking at her with distant sympathy in her faded eyes. “You worried?” she asked, and smiled. “You got cause, I expect.”
“I do?” Claire was surprised. Most adults tried to pretend it was all going to be okay.
“Sure thing, sugar. Morganville’s been ruled by the vampires a long time, and they ain’t always been the gentlest of folks. Been people hurt, people killed without reason. Builds up some resentment.” Gramma nodded toward the bookcase. “Fetch me that red book right there, the one that starts with N.”
It was an encyclopedia. Claire got it and set it in her lap. Gramma’s weathered, sinewy fingers opened it and flipped pages, then handed it back. The heading said, New York Draft Riots, 1863.
The pictures showed chaos—mobs, buildings on fire. And worse things. Much, much worse.
“People forget,” Gramma said. “They forget what can happen, if anger builds up. Those New York folks, they were angry because their men were being drafted to fight the Civil War. Who you think they took it out on? Mostly black folks, of all things. Folks who couldn’t fight back. They even burned up an orphanage, and they’d have killed every one of those children if they’d caught them.” She shook her head, clicking her tongue in disgust. “Same thing happened in Tulsa in 1921. Called it the Greenwood Riot, said black folks were taking away the
ir business and jobs. Back in France, they had a revolution where they took all those fancy aristocrat folks and cut their heads off. Maybe it was their fault, and maybe not. It’s all the same thing: you get angry, you blame it on some folks, and you make them pay, guilty or not. Happens all the time.”
Claire felt a chill. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you think about France, girl. Vampires been holding us all down a long time, just like those aristocrats, or that’s how people around here think of it. Now, you think about all those folks out there with generations of grudges, and nobody really in charge right now. You think it won’t go bad on us?”
There weren’t enough shudders in the world. Claire remembered Shane’s father, the fanatical light in his eyes. He’d be one of those leading a riot, she thought. One of those pulling people out of their houses as collaborators and turncoats and hanging them up from lampposts.
Hannah patted the shotgun in her lap. She’d put the paintball gun aside—honestly, it wasn’t much use now, with the vampires missing in action. “They’re not getting in here, Gramma. We won’t be having any Greenwood in Morganville.”
“I ain’t so much worried about you and me,” Gramma said. “But I’d be worried for the Morrells. They’re gonna be coming for them, sooner or later. That family’s the poster children for the old guard.”
Claire wondered if Richard knew that. She thought about Monica, too. Not that she liked Monica—God, no—but still.
She thanked Gramma Day and walked back into the kitchen, where the policemen were still talking. “Gramma Day thinks there’s going to be trouble,” she said. “Not the vampires. Regular people, like those people in the park. Maybe Lisa Day, too. And she thinks you ought to look after your family, Richard.”
Richard nodded. “Already done,” he said. “My mom and dad are at City Hall. Monica’s headed there, too.” He paused, thinking about it. “You’re right. I should make sure she gets there all right, before she becomes another statistic.” His face had tightened, and there was a look in his eyes that didn’t match the way he said it. He was worried.
