by Rachel Caine
“I see it,” he said. He slowed the truck to a crawl. “So, I’m guessing, Hi, we’re friendly strangers with a bunch of vampires in your bread truck probably isn’t the way to go here.” He put the truck in reverse. “Guess this wasn’t as good an idea as it looked at a distance.”
“Maybe we should—”
Whatever Eve was about to suggest became useless, because two police cruisers, carrying more armed bubbas, came screaming out of alleys on either side of the library building and blocked Shane’s exit. Shane hit the brakes. In seconds, Claire’s door was yanked open, and a huge man with a shotgun glared at her, grabbed her, and dragged her out onto the hot pavement. He pressed fingers to her throat for a second, then yelled, “Live one!”
“This one, too!” yelled his buddy, who was pulling a fighting, screaming Eve out of the cab. “Watch it, girl!”
“You watch it, you pervert! Hands!”
“Hey, leave her alone!” That was Jason, flinging himself out after Eve, looking every bit the feverish little maniac Claire remembered from the first time she’d seen him. Maybe a little cleaner. Maybe.
He must have moved too fast for the armed guard’s comfort, because he got hit in the guts with the stock of the shotgun, and collapsed to the street. Eve screamed his name, and got picked up and bodily carried into the library, along with Claire. “No!” Claire screamed, and looked back at the truck. Shane was getting wrestled out of the driver’s side, and Jason was being dragged to his feet.
This was not going well. And where the hell were Oliver and Morley? They weren’t on top of the van anymore....
Oliver dropped from the overhanging roof of the library and drop-kicked the bubba holding Claire. He shoved Claire out of the way as the one holding Eve aimed a crossbow and fired; Oliver snatched the arrow right out of the air and snapped the thick shaft with a twist of his fingers, grinning. “Let the girl go,” he said. “I’ve played this game with many better than you. And they all died, friend.”
He was looking pink from exposure to the sun, but not burned. Not yet. Uncomfortable, maybe. The guard’s eyes darted around, looking for support, and found it in the form of two more cowboy-hatted men racing to the rescue.
With shotguns.
Claire threw herself forward, throwing her arms wide. Eve let out a warning cry, but Claire stepped in front of Oliver as the shotguns came up. “Wait! ” she yelled. “Just wait a second! He’s with us!”
The shotguns focused on her.
Oh, crap.
“You’re running with the bloodsuckers?” one of them said in a soft, dangerous voice. “Little girl like you?”
“He’s not like—like those things at the courthouse,” she said. She put her hands up in the surrender position and took a step toward them. “We’re not supposed to be here. We just want to leave, okay? All of us. We want out of town.”
“Well, you ain’t leaving town,” the guy holding Eve said. “You or any of your fanged little friends. We’re not letting this thing spread any farther. Blacke is under quarantine.”
The heavy library doors opened, and a small, gray-haired woman stepped out. She didn’t look much like a leader—Claire wouldn’t have picked her out of a crowd at first glance—but immediately, everybody looked toward her, and Claire felt the gravity of the scene shift in her direction.
“Charley?” the woman asked. “Why are you pointing a shotgun at this pretty little girl? I heard somebody say she was a live one.”
“She’s with them!”
“There are no collaborators, Charley. You know that. Either she’s infected, or she’s not.There’s no in-between. Now lower your gun, please.” The woman’s pleasant voice took on a steely undertone. “Lower it. Now.”
“That one behind her, he’s infected,” Charley said. “Guaranteed.”
“Actually,” Oliver said, “in the sense you mean it, I’m not infected. Not in the way you’re thinking.”
The older woman, without so much as a pause, un-slung a strap from her shoulder, loaded a crossbow bolt, and fired it right into Oliver’s chest.
He toppled over and hit the ground with a heavy thud. Claire screamed and ran to his side. When she reached for the bolt to pull it out, the woman grabbed her arm and pulled her back, struggling. She shoved Claire at one of her guards, who held her securely. “You know what to do,” she said to another one of them, nodding toward Oliver. “Let’s get these kids inside. I don’t want them to see this.”
“No, you don’t understand!” Claire shouted. “You can’t—”
“I understand that he’s a vampire, and for whatever twisted reason, you want to protect him,” the woman said. “Now be quiet. You’re not in any danger here.”
Claire thought about all the vampires locked in the back of the truck. Michael.
She couldn’t tell them about that. If they were going to kill Oliver, just like that, she couldn’t imagine what they might do to a whole, confined load of vampires. It’d probably be way too easy. The sun was sliding steadily toward the horizon. Maybe, when it was blocked by the eastern buildings and there was enough shadow, they could get out of the truck and scatter.
The woman looked at her sharply. “You seem to be thinking very hard,” she said. “About what?”
“Nothing,” Claire said.
“I see. What’s your name?” When Claire didn’t answer, the woman sighed. “All right. I’m Mrs. Grant. I’m the librarian. I’m what passes for authority in Blacke these days, since all our peace officers and elected officials are dead. Now, let’s be friendly. I’ve told you my name. What’s yours?”
“Claire,” she said.
“And where are you from, Claire?”
Claire looked her right in the eyes and said, “None of your business.”
Mrs. Grant’s graying eyebrows hitched up, but under them, her faded green eyes didn’t seem surprised. “All right. Let’s get you and your friends inside, and you can tell me why you thought that vampire was someone you ought to be caring about.”
Claire looked back over her shoulder as she was pushed/pulled along. Oliver was being carried away, limp as a bag of laundry.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
The inside of the library was cool and dark, lit mostly by the natural sunlight trickling in the windows, although there were some camp-style fluorescent and LED lanterns scattered around, and even some old-fashioned oil lamps on the tables. The Blacke library was larger than Claire would have expected, with rows and rows of books, and lots of rooms off to the sides. In the middle was a kind of command center, with a small desk, a laptop computer, and some kind of small pedal-powered generator. Ranked on the shelves nearby were weapons, including a pile of silver chains—jewelry, Claire guessed, ransacked from all over town. There were a lot of first aid supplies, too.
Inside the library there were about twenty or thirty people; it was hard to see, because they were scattered around on cots between the aisles of books. Claire heard a small voice, then someone crying; it sounded like a little kid, maybe four or five. “What is this?” she asked, looking around. Mrs. Grant led her over to a long reading table and pulled out a chair for her.
“This is what’s left of our town,” she said. “The survivors. We’re a tough bunch, I’ll tell you that.”
“But”—Claire licked her lips and settled into the seat—“what happened here?”
Mrs. Grant waited while the others—Eve, Shane, and Jason—were deposited in chairs around the table, with varying degrees of gentleness. Shane was furious, and he looked as if he were seriously thinking of grabbing a fistful of weapons from the racks. Mrs. Grant evidently saw that, because she pointed at two of her burly cowboy guards and had them stand behind Shane, blocking him in at the table.
“Blacke’s never been what you might call a cross-roads,” Mrs. Grant said. “Most folks living here were born here. Their families have been here forever; we don’t see new people real often out here.” That was, in fact, pretty much like
Morganville, minus the attraction of Texas Prairie University. It was pretty much like every other small town in the area, too. Claire nodded. “One night, we got us some visitors. An old man in a suit, and his niece and nephew. Foreign people. French, maybe.”
Claire looked at Eve and Shane. Eve mouthed Bishop. Confirmation for what they already had guessed—Mr. Bishop had hit Blacke on his way through to Morganville.
And he’d had fun.
“They stayed at the Iron Lily Inn,” Mrs. Grant continued. “It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a hotel. Or had, anyway. Mrs. Gonzalez owned it. She made the best apple pie in the world, too.” She slowly shook her head. “Next morning, Mrs. Gonzalez was missing; never showed up at the school—she worked in the office up there. Sheriff John went around to the hotel and found her dead. No sign of those ... people.”
That couldn’t be the whole story, Claire thought; she knew how vampires were made, and if Mrs. Gonzalez had been drained to death, she wouldn’t have come back. So she just waited. Mrs. Grant seemed to want to take her time, and Claire was trying hard not to think about what might be happening outside, with Oliver. Morley had run off, she supposed. And she had no idea what would happen to the vampires still in the back of the truck.
“We thought the murder of Mrs. Gonzalez was the end of it—shocking, first serious trouble this town had seen in close to thirty years, but still, the end. And then the next night Miss Hanover just vanished from her store—gas station, right up the street. Best we can tell, those two women were the first victims. We know the three strangers left town that night; somebody saw them driving that big, black car of theirs like a bat out of hell. Didn’t matter. They left this behind.”
Mrs. Grant looked down at her hands, which were spread out on the table in front of her. Strong and scarred, they suggested she hadn’t always been a librarian. “It started slow. People started disappearing, maybe one every few weeks. Disappearing, or dying. Then it got bad, fast, just—in days, it all of a sudden seemed like half the town was gone. Sheriff John didn’t call for help soon enough. Next thing we knew, we saw them for the first time, in force. Terrible things, Claire. Terrible things happened. And we had to do terrible things to survive.”
“Why didn’t you just—,” Eve began to ask, but was interrupted as Mrs. Grant’s head came up sharply.
“Leave?” she snapped. “Don’t you think we tried? Phones were out, landlines and cells. Internet went down with the power the first day; they ripped the power station apart while they were still thinking. We sent everybody we could out of town on the school buses. They never made it. Some kind of trap on the road, blew out all the tires. Some made it back here. Most didn’t.”
It was like some horror movie come to life. Claire had thought Morganville was bad, but this—this was beyond bad.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But why stay here? Why don’t you just—try again?”
“You know how many people used to be in Blacke?” Mrs. Grant asked. “One hundred seventy-two. What you see here in this building is what’s left. What’s left still breathing, anyway. You think we can just walk away? These were our friends, our families. And if we leave, what happens? How far does this spread?” Mrs. Grant’s eyes hardened until they were like cold green ice. “It stops here. It has to stop here. Now, you explain to me how you’re traveling around with one of them.”
“What’s more important is that Oliver wasn’t—like those people you’re talking about. They’re sick. He’s not.”
Mrs. Grant let out a sharp laugh. “He’s dead. That’s as sick as it gets, Claire from nowhere.”
“Look,” Shane said, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table, “I’m not saying the vampires aren’t the essence of freaky; they are. But they’re not like this. Not—normally. They can be—”
“And how do the four of you know anything at all about vampires?” Mrs. Grant asked. None of them answered, and her eyes narrowed. “There are more out there. More of them. Even if we finish here, there are more.”
“Not like these!” Claire said again, desperately. “You have to believe me; they’re not all—”
“Not all bad,” said Morley, who stepped out of the shadows of one of the racks of books, looking terrifying and bloody and as unreassuring as possible. “No, we’re not. Although some of us are no doubt better than others.”
And Oliver appeared on top of the bookcase, looking down. In his long black coat, he looked very tall, very strong, and even more intimidating than Morley. More came out of the shadows, too. Claire spotted Patience and Jacob, near the edges of the group.
And Michael, golden Michael, who smiled at Eve as though it would all be all right, somehow.
Mrs. Grant came out of her chair and lunged for the weapons.
Shane slammed his chair backward, throwing the two guards behind him off balance. That was all the time Oliver needed to jump from the bookcase to the table, then to the floor, and take the guns out of their hands.
He didn’t hurt them. He didn’t have to.
Morley did that way-too-fast vampire thing and was suddenly at the weapons rack ahead of Mrs. Grant, baring his fangs and grinning. He made a little finger-wagging gesture, and she skidded to a stop and backed off, breathing fast. Scared to death, of course, and Claire didn’t blame her.
Michael, meanwhile, was already at Eve’s side. She threw her arms around his neck. “How did you get out?” she asked, her voice muffled against his shirt. He rubbed her back gently and rested his chin against her hair.
“The building across the way casts a pretty big shadow,” he said. “We bailed as soon as we could. From there it wasn’t hard. They thought they had everybody they needed to worry about.”
“You didn’t—”
“No,” Michael said. “We didn’t hurt anybody. Patience made sure of that.”
The townspeople of Blacke—all twenty or thirty of them—were gathering together in a tight block now, with their kids safely in the center. They looked about to make their last stand. Not one of them, Claire realized, thought they were going to live through this.
“Hey,” she said to Mrs. Grant. “Please. Don’t be afraid. We’re not going to hurt you.”
Morley laughed. “We’re not?”
“No, we’re not,” Oliver said, and piled the weapons on the table. “Shane, get the silver.”
“Can I keep some?”
Oliver smiled grimly. “If it makes you happy.”
“You have no idea.”
“Distribute the chains to everyone else. Make sure they’re wearing silver at their necks and wrists. It’ll help protect them, should some of us, Morley, suffer a lapse of character.” He checked each shotgun for shells, and tossed them to specific individual vampires, who snatched them out of the air with lazy accuracy. “Right. I’m afraid Mrs. Grant is quite right; we can’t allow this infection—and it is an infection—to spread any farther than it has already. We must hunt down and dose everyone who’s contracted the disease, or destroy them. That’s as much for our kind as yours, you see.”
“Dose them?” Mrs. Grant blurted. “What are you—”
Patience Goldman opened up a small black satchel—her father’s doctor bag, Claire realized—and inside were dozens of vials of liquid, as well as some bottles of red crystals. Claire herself had helped develop those; the liquid contained a cure for the bloodborne disease that Bishop had spread here, or at least she hoped it did. The crystals would help restore people’s sanity, temporarily. It worked best doing the crystals, then giving the shot. It had for the far-gone vampires in Morganville.
“They can be saved,” Oliver said. “Your family and friends can be restored to sanity, we believe. But they can’t be restored to human. You understand? What’s done is done on that score. But you can have them back, if you can adjust to that small difference.”
“This is insane,” one of the guards said, a little wildly. His crossbow was now in the hands of one of Morley’s vampires, a littl
e guy with a lined, twisted face and a limp. “We have to fight! Lillian—”
“We’re not here to fight you,” Oliver said. “And we’re not here to save you. I am here to stop the spread of this infection by any means necessary, which, as I see it, aligns with your goals. My other friends,” he said, putting some irony into that last word, “are just passing through your fine town. None of us have any reason to want to harm you.”
“You’re vampires,” Mrs. Grant said blankly.
“Well, obviously. Yes.” Oliver snapped another fully loaded shotgun closed and tossed it through the air.
To Mrs. Grant.
“Any questions?” he asked.
She opened her mouth, closed it, and looked around. There were a lot of vampires—just about as many as there were humans. And none of them were making threatening moves. Shane walked around, handing out silver chairs to people, smiling his best I’m-a-nice-guy smile. Even Jason seemed to be doing his best to be non-threatening, which wasn’t exactly easy for him.
“Then let’s sit down,” Oliver said, and pulled out a chair at the table. “I, for one, have had a very hard day.”
12
Night fell as tensions gradually eased; the people of Blacke never quite got comfortable, but they loosened up enough to put on some stew in the library’s small kitchen, which had a miniature stove that ran on gas. Apparently, the gas was still flowing, even though the electricity was out. As the light faded outside the windows, Mrs. Grant and three of her burly cowboy-hatted guards—Claire guessed the cowboy hats were a kind of uniform—made the rounds to barricade the doors and windows.
Morley joined them, and after a long, uncomfortable moment, Mrs. Grant decided to ignore his presence. The guards didn’t. Their knuckles were white on their weapons.
“May I assist?” he asked, and put his hands behind his back. “I promise not to eat anyone.”
“Very funny,” Mrs. Grant said. Morley gave her a grave look.
