Midnight Bites

by Rachel Caine

  Then he sensed something looming over his head, and looked up to see a face staring down at him. Or . . . no. Not a face. In that split second it looked like a face, a formless dark thing watching him, but then it solidified into shadows and an unfortunate pattern of mold.

  Still . . . he felt watched.

  There was also a corpse in the room, but it was not watching him. It lay in the corner on its back. The young man was clearly dead, and had been for days. Pale and bloodless, he bore neat holes in his throat, and his eyes were closed.

  “I’ve found the missing boy,” Myrnin called. “Dead.” He didn’t really need to say that. Neither he nor Oliver had been deluded enough to believe they’d find him alive.

  “Our quarry’s moved upstairs,” said a voice at Myrnin’s side, and he flinched just a little. Oliver had, once again, managed to creep up without drawing his attention. “Amelie’s not going to be well pleased with this. We’ll need to get the boy decently buried and compensate his family. You retrieve the body and I’ll go up and find this . . . I can’t properly even call him a vampire.”

  “The boy’s long gone, and he can wait,” Myrnin said. “This . . . might take both of us. Whatever this . . . thing may be, he is not quite sane.”

  Oliver sent him a look. Not the normal look of disdain and dismissal, but . . . something else. Something more serious. “Well, you would know,” he said. “But I think you may be right.”

  Oliver led the way up the steps, and Myrnin was careful to avoid the fragile center of the wood treads; this house, with its alarmingly off-true walls and stench of rot, was ready to collapse in the next strong wind. Surprising that it hadn’t already, considering its state. There was threadbare carpet at the top, and some ancient, faded photographs of a posed family lingered on the walls. A bedroom to the right held a tilting four-poster, a decaying mattress with pillows and the type of coverlet unpopular fifty years past. Clothes remained rotting in the wardrobe.

  He wondered what had happened to the family who’d once lived here and so evidently vanished without a trace . . . and then decided perhaps it was best not to know. This whole place trembled with fear and tragedy. No wonder their quarry had been drawn to it as a lair.

  Oliver tapped his shoulder and pointed down the hall to the other small bedroom. The door was shut, and starlight glinted on the old glass knob. Myrnin steeled himself, and nodded his readiness.

  Oliver took hold of the knob and turned it.

  The attack came through the door with shocking suddenness, smashing the old wood into splinters, and then the vampire was on them, screaming. It was armed with a knife, a sharp, oddly shaped thing that sliced the light as it arced for Oliver’s face. Oliver fell back, and Myrnin lunged forward over him and caught the attacker around the chest. His weight and momentum threw it backward, but the dry wood beneath them shattered on impact, sending them both crashing through the floor and down into the room beneath.

  It would have stunned a human, or broken his back, but vampires were made of hardier stuff—and this creature was unnaturally fast and strong. Myrnin grabbed for the right hand, the one with the knife, while trying to keep the snapping, ravenous fangs from his own throat. There was no room for fear or strategy. He couldn’t plan, couldn’t think of anything but simply surviving from one second to the next, until Oliver dropped through the jagged hole from the floor above, grabbed the vampire’s head in both hands, and twisted it all the way around to snap its neck with a dry clicking sound.

  That didn’t kill it, but it effectively rendered it helpless for a while. Oliver slung the thing off to the side and offered Myrnin a hand up, which he accepted without shame. He felt battered and greatly lucky to be alive.

  “We need to kill this thing,” Myrnin said. His voice, he was surprised to hear, sounded rational and quite precise. “We must kill it. Now.”

  “My orders are to bring him to Amelie,” Oliver said.

  “Couldn’t he just . . . fall and accidentally dismember himself?”

  “No matter how much I long for that, no. I follow her orders.” Oliver grabbed the prisoner’s arm and hauled it up. The head lolled unnaturally. “You did remember the bindings, I hope?”

  “Of course.” Myrnin searched his pockets, seared his fingers raw on the touch of silver braided wire, and folded a much-abused handkerchief over the flexible length to draw it out. He wrapped it tight around the wrists, then added a silver hook to link that binding to the broken throat. The neck was healing, of course. Slowly, but steadily. It would bear careful attention to make sure the creature stayed helpless.

  He tied the ankles with the same length of silver wire, and tested the tensile strength. The bindings seemed solid enough.

  The prisoner’s shoulders twitched, and he seemed to be staring at Myrnin with wide dark eyes. There was a wild menace in that face, and something far, far worse.

  “Careful,” Oliver snapped, and kicked at the bound body; the head bounced, but the neck was no longer limp. It recovered shockingly fast. “Look at me with such disrespect and I’ll take those eyes right out. Understand, Lucian?”

  “It has a name?”

  “Unfortunately we all have names. And pasts; his is a particularly unpleasant one. I don’t know who had the awful stupidity to make someone like this into one of us, but I hope his maker’s long dead, or he’ll join this monster’s bonfire.” Oliver hauled the prisoner—Myrnin refused to use a name for it, even in the noisy privacy of his own mind, because names gave things power—to its feet. It shuffled awkwardly in the silver ankle shackles, which was all to the good, as far as Myrnin was concerned. “Let’s go. The faster I have this finished, the better I’ll like it.”

  “What about . . . this place?” Myrnin gestured at the house around them without giving it another look, because once had been truly enough for a lifetime. “It’s a certainty there are other victims in here.”

  “It’s a police matter. Something for Chief Moses to deal with, although I suspect most of the victims will be transients. He’d not have gotten away with his killing so long if he’d been preying on Morganville residents exclusively.”

  Pity poor Chief Moses, then. Myrnin shuddered. “Better to burn it to the ground,” he said. “It’ll bring their loved ones no peace to tell them how they died.”

  Oliver stared at him for a second, with a very odd expression. “It’s always better to know,” he said. “Better haunted by ghosts than always searching for what’s not there.”

  That sounded oddly like experience speaking, and Myrnin almost asked, but all he really wanted was to be out of this oppressive place, with all of the house’s evil humors.

  Oliver muscled his captive out a broken window, and Myrnin walked toward it to follow . . . and that was when the window disappeared. Between one tick of time and the next, it just vanished, as if it had never been. Instead, there was just a wall, with its skin of wallpaper peeling from the bones of plaster.

  Myrnin stopped. He slowly put out a hand, and touched crusted dry paper. It crumbled at his touch.

  He moved for the other window, and caught a glimpse of Oliver turning impatiently to find out why he hadn’t followed . . . and then that glimpse disappeared as the window filled with old, dry boards in a strange shimmer.

  Well. This called for direct action. He punched the wood in a flurry, unmindful of the splinters and shards, and they did indeed break . . . but as soon as they did, more appeared. And more. An endless supply of barriers.

  He heard Oliver hammering on the outside of the house, trying to batter a way in, but clearly, the house did not want Oliver.

  It wanted him.

  • • •

  Shouting Oliver’s name at full volume did nothing, except to rain down a tiny storm of dust from the decaying ceiling. Myrnin shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Nothing seemed to have changed. He was used to imagining things, but th
ose always had a certain feel to them; he’d trained himself in recognizing when his wandering mind threw up falsehoods.

  This did not seem to be such a case.

  He headed for yet another broken-out window, moving very slowly this time. As he stretched his hand forth, the house shifted . . . and his fingers touched a barrier, not open air.

  This place did not want him to leave.

  He could hear it now, a kind of low, lethal hum well below the level of even vampire understanding, but he knew in an instinctive way that it was saying something to him . . . and what it was saying would eat away at him, strip him down to bone and madness, and he could not have that. He was vulnerable here. He’d sensed it even outside, and he’d thought it was only his worry of being away from the safer ground of Morganville, but it was more than that.

  This place was alive.

  “You want something,” he whispered.

  Oliver and his prisoner were almost certainly gone by now. Oliver, being Oliver, would have decided that taking his prize back to Amelie would have precedence over any rescue effort—and to be fair, the prisoner he had in chains was too dangerous to leave to its own devices for long.

  He’ll come back for me, Myrnin told himself, to stem a rising tide of anxiety. Or he’ll send help. I only have to stay calm and find a way to save myself.

  Well, that seemed easy.

  He felt in his pockets and found the cell phone that Claire always insisted he carry; it was the simplest possible model, one with only a few numbers programmed and the choice of CALL, END, and EMERGENCY CALL. He decided that this was rightly an emergency call and pressed that button.

  Silence.

  He checked the small glowing screen. It told him there was no signal. I knew these things were useless, he thought, and dropped it to the floor to spin randomly, like a compass pointing toward insanity.

  When he looked up again, there was a dining table crouching in the middle of the room. It was entirely out of place, because it seemed new, shining, spotless. There were six chairs around it.

  He glanced back toward the wreck of a kitchen, and found it neat and orderly, as though the house itself was going back in time. No ghosts visible. That should have been an improvement. It didn’t seem so.

  There was now a book on the table—a photograph album, made of old green velvet with fancy celluloid corners. On it, in antique metal script, it said Our Family.

  There didn’t seem much alternative, and it was pointless to try for another exit. He had to follow the path this place set for him, at least for now. The house wanted to tell him something.

  He was willing to listen.

  Myrnin sat down in the chair in front of the album, and reached out to flip open the latch. There was a space on the left-hand side of the cover for a name, and written in faded copperplate it said The Vexen Family.

  Vexen. That seemed an ill-omened name.

  The right side held a single large photograph—or, rather, a tintype—of a thin, craggy old man in an ill-fitting formal nineteenth-century suit, with a top hat. He was standing in what would have been the best days of this old farmhouse, with a pinch-faced wife half his age in her Sunday-best bonnet and black dress of mourning. A group of children sat at their feet.

  But something about the photo struck him oddly, and in a moment he knew what it was: living children, but one dead one in the middle, propped up by his uncomfortable siblings on each side to give the boy a false appearance of life. It was given the lie by his blank stare and lolling head.

  A mourning photograph. A Victorian tradition, when only one image might have existed of each person, and a way to immortalize the dead before it was too late. To modern eyes, it was horribly morbid, but for that family, in that time, it would have been a precious thing to memorialize a loved one.

  He tried not to read anything into its presence in the album.

  The next two pages held clippings of old, yellowed newspaper articles, complete with a not-very-expertly drawn illustration of the very farmhouse in which he now stood. This was, he realized, near the time of Morganville’s founding, and well before he’d become sane enough to venture far from his own walls in his new laboratory. The newspaper was the long-dead Morganville Crier, and it detailed a murder at the Vexen house. Micajah Vexen, his wife, Virtue, his brother Argus, and his children Trothe and Verily had all been killed. Missing from the home was the middle Vexen daughter, Clemencie. The gruesome scene had been discovered days later by a passing cowboy who’d stopped to water his horse. The Morganville sheriff of that time had been involved. No arrests had ever been made, according to the second clipped article.

  The next turn of the page brought photos of the dead. Not in their living years . . . No, the house was not that kind. These were photos taken of them on the spot of their discovery—crime scene photos, they would have been called today. Faded sepia, but vivid enough to be chilling. Likely a profitable morbid sideline for the photographer.

  Myrnin stared at them, trying to see what he was supposed to take from them. That it hadn’t been a vampire’s kill? That much was obvious; the scene was much too chaotic, too enraged, too . . . messy. It seemed to be a very human crime.

  “Seems a bit obvious,” he said conversationally to the madhouse that was holding him prisoner. “Some family argument that boiled out of control, and the children were in the way of it. Am I right?” He turned the page. Nothing. He turned another, and received blank pages. “If that is your very subtle way of showing displeasure at my lack of comprehension . . .”

  He looked up, because there was someone sitting across the table from him. A girl.

  “Ah. That’s better. Clemencie?” The girl sitting across from him was bone white, eerily so, with hair bleached pale and eyes clouded over. In life, he doubted she’d been so colorless. From the shape of her, she would have been perhaps thirteen or fourteen . . . child more than woman. “Or is your name Trothe?”

  The lips parted and shaped a word, but there was no sound.

  “Clemencie, then,” he said. “If you’re meant to terrify me, I’ll have to warn you that you won’t cause me nightmares. I’m far worse than you. In other words, you’ll have to do better.”

  She smiled. It was a sweet, unguarded kind of thing, and it made her . . . human. And it hurt, to think on this girl suffering. He’d been a predator a long time, but he’d rarely been a monster. Not in that way.

  She reached out one pallid hand to him, and turned it palm up.

  “You want something, yes. I know that much,” he said. “And I must compliment you on delivering a very creditable haunting, but you really must be more specific. I’m a vampire, not a mind reader.”

  She just gazed at him with those blind eyes, and he finally sighed. He’d been raised believing in many things, ghosts chief among them, and he knew better than to touch one. Especially at the ghost’s invitation. In the small Welsh village where he’d been raised, touching a ghost was a direct portal to hell.

  But he did want to get out of this place, and he sensed very strongly that Clemencie Vexen would be the only doorway through which he could pass.

  So he touched her hand . . . and died.

  It wasn’t actual death, physical death, but it certainly felt that way. Not pleasant. Not quick. It was the death of a confused, anguished child who could not understand how her life had gone so badly wrong, or why anyone, anyone, would want to wring such pain from her.

  He sat back with a sigh, falling back into his own suddenly aching body, and put a trembling hand to his forehead. Where the ghost had gripped his fingers, they felt icy and frostbitten, and were almost as pale as the corpse-girl’s. As the feeling came back, they shot through with hot needles of pain, but he hardly even noted it.

  He had died once, but by comparison his mortal ending had been much easier. He was not generally given to fits of emotion, but for a long momen
t he could not speak, nor could he look at Clemencie’s still, pale face, which was blankly tranquil, in death as it had not been in the last moments of her life.

  “Oh, dear child,” he said. “What happened to you here? And where did you go?”

  When he looked up, Clemencie was no longer there. No one was there. The book was gone, but the table itself—and the chair in which he sat—were very much in evidence.

  “Isn’t that what you wanted me to ask? No? Then what do you want from me?” he asked the empty air. There was a terrible feeling in the air, something heavy and grim that made him wonder whether this place would ever release him. Maybe it’s just lonely, he thought. Maybe it wants company. It’s tired of the dead. It wants the almost-alive.

  He felt hands on his shoulders then. Cold hands. From the corners of his eyes, he saw the bloodless pale fingers, and felt the exhalation of cold on the back of his neck. Vampire or not, he shivered.

  “You want me to find you,” he said, and drew in a sharp breath he did not need as her cold presence passed through him. When he exhaled the breath again, it hung as frozen fog on the air. Clemencie sat again in the chair across from him, staring with her blind, calm eyes. “You understand that it won’t bring you back?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Are you in the house?” That garnered him another nod, this one more emphatic. Twenty questions with a ghost. Well, it was hardly the most insane thing he’d ever done. Or even in the top hundred, if he was forced to be honest. “Upstairs?” No nod. He assumed that meant a negative. “Here, on this floor?” Silence and stillness, again. He heard that buzzing whisper again, pushing at his mind like white static, and it sparked alarm in him. He needed to leave this place. He could almost hear its . . . words, and he sensed that when he did, they would burn him like silver. “Below?”