by Rachel Caine
Not a nod, this time. An explosive movement. Clemencie slapped her ghostly hands on the surface of the table and leaned forward, almost nose to nose with him, and he recoiled. Couldn’t quite help it. She bared her teeth and . . . nodded.
Damnation. He really needed to leave this place.
“If I go down and find you, will you let me leave here?” he asked her. The spirit stayed frozen in front of him, locked into that aggressive, frightening lean for what felt like far too long, and then she subsided back into a calm sitting position on the other side of the table.
And nodded.
Damnation.
The basement of a murder house, haunted by a very frightening, very sad little girl.
Yes, this sounded like, as Shane would have sarcastically said, the best time ever.
• • •
It was easy to see how searchers had missed it, he thought; the trapdoor to the cellar was well hidden in the floorboards, much more so than if it had been an ordinary sort of cool room. Someone hadn’t wanted this place to be found. Age and rot had sagged the boards, though, and he found the seams and pried it up. The hinges broke loose as it levered away, and the square of rotting wood almost disintegrated in his hands. He stared down into the dark. He’d often said to himself, and to others, that there was nothing in the dark that wasn’t also there in the light, but in truth, he knew differently. There was one thing in the dark: fear. Fear that smothered and consumed and twisted.
He’d spent too many years in dark holes like this, and he hesitated for a moment on the lip of the cellar.
Clemencie silently rose from her chair at the table, and the table itself disappeared as she walked through them toward him. Well . . . walked was not quite the right word. Glided, perhaps.
“I know,” he told her, and sighed. “I know.” Before she could rush at him and surprise him into it, he simply stepped out, and dropped.
It wasn’t so deep as he’d expected: ten feet, at most, a minor jump that he hardly felt at all.
But he did hear it, because bones snapped and crunched, and for an instant he waited for the pain to hit, but they had not, after all, been his bones. The skeleton that lay beneath his feet was dressed in a pale wisp of a dress that matched what the ghost wore.
Clemencie stood now in the cellar’s corner, silent and as pale as the dead bones around his feet.
“Ah,” he said. “I appear to have found you, Clemencie. And without much effort, it would seem. You didn’t escape the terror that found your family after all. . . .”
His voice faded, because he began to pick out the details of the room. Near her stood a row of wooden crates, and in the crates were coins, faded old crumpled paper money, jewels, watches . . . anything of value. Gold teeth had their own special bin. Here and there lying in heaps were mounds of decaying cloth, the glint of tarnished buckles, the withered leather of belts and boots. All carefully sorted.
“What is this?” he asked her. Her head was bowed, and she slowly shook her head. Fine, pale hair had fallen to cover her face like a mourner’s veil. But in truth, he did not need her to tell him. He’d seen such a thing before, in terrible places where the dead had been murdered with brutal efficiency, their belongings put into order for later use.
This cellar was a lair all its own, and whatever beast had made its nest here had been red indeed. From the carefully sorted loot, dozens had died here, at the least.
Another chained wooden door led out of the cellar, and he waited to see what she wanted him to do . . . but Clemencie gave him no sign. No sign at all.
No help for it, then. No way out but forward.
He strode forward, grabbed the rusted chain that secured the door, and yanked. It broke apart with a dull thud, and the door sagged on its hinges. Not quite as rotten as the trapdoor, but on its last days.
Beyond was pitch-darkness. Even vampire eyes had trouble without some spark of light, but Myrnin could smell the death here. A century on, it had its own powerful stench.
So many bones.
He turned back to Clemencie’s broken skeleton, with the dull rags of her hair still spread out on the dirt floor, and shook his head. “It appears to me that whatever fate your family suffered, it was one they well deserved. Still, no one chooses their family, and this is a vile place to call a grave,” he said. “I’ll take you out of here and bury you in a cleaner spot, if that’s what you wish.”
He looked at the ghost still waiting in the corner. She raised her head, and she was smiling. Oh, not a smile of thanks, or of relief, or of any sweet thing.
That, Myrnin thought, was an evil smile. A truly, truly evil smile.
“No,” Clemencie Vexen said to him, and her voice was full of screams and whispers and pleas and cries. It was the voice of hell given tongue and lips. “You took away my new friend. You will take his place. You will bring them here as my grandfather did, and my father, and my mother, and my uncle. You will sanctify them, and their worldly goods will fund our great works.”
I never should have touched a ghost, Myrnin thought. Never never never. My mother was right. His mental voice seemed high and strange, and if he had not been through so much in his long, long life, he’d have broken in pieces at that moment and gone utterly mad. Her eyes had taken on a glow; they were not merely blank. They were full of things he most earnestly wished to unsee.
“Very kind of you to offer,” he said aloud, “but I already have a job. And that of pet monster has never suited me very well.”
She came at him, of course, but by then he was already moving, leaping straight up for the open square of the cellar’s entrance, and as he rose, he caught the edges and vaulted up like a tumbler, rolling across the filthy floor and up to his feet and running as hard as he could, because he knew that the little demon wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had no idea what kind of harm she could do him, but if she could make the house itself into a weapon, then he imagined it would be quite a lot of harm indeed.
“There’s nowhere you can run!” Clemencie shrieked behind him, and then in a flash she was in front of him, a cold wrathful shadow that he only glimpsed before veering away and up the stairs, past the faded photographs of her loathsome family. He ducked as a kitchen knife flew in a steel whirl toward his neck, because while neck snapping might be survivable for a vampire, neck bisection was not, and he leaped over the yawning gap where he and her last friend, Lucian, had crashed through the floor, and landed catlike in the room beyond . . .
. . . which held another ghost.
Myrnin halted in an instant, because this one was standing facing him not three feet away, and like Clemencie, it seemed to be a soft, sweet girl. Younger, though. And indefinably . . . different.
“Ah, another sister. You must be—Trothe?” Myrnin asked. “Your sister’s already made the offer. I’ve refused.”
Trothe held out her hand.
“No,” he said. “I think I am quite finished shaking hands with your family of killers.”
Trothe gave him a look of utter incredulity, and then rolled her eyes, exactly like Claire’s friend Eve might have done in similar circumstances. She drew a line across her throat with her finger. Then she pointed past him to her sister, who had slowed and stopped at the entrance to the room . . .
. . . as if she couldn’t come into it.
“Ah,” he said. “Clemencie cut your throat. And those of the rest of the family, I suspect. Let me speculate. . . . To your parents, murder was only a practical business as a means to robbery. To her, it became less a career and more of a calling.”
Trothe seemed to sigh, but she nodded.
“And what do you want me to do about it, girl? You’re dead. I’m a vampire. She’s insane. I don’t see this having a positive outcome.”
At the door, Clemencie howled. It was the mother of all screams, straight from the pit of despair, and despite himse
lf, Myrnin shuddered.
Trothe just seemed impatient and slightly bored, which was impressive in the face of such madness. It spoke volumes about their home life, when they’d had a life. And a home.
Like Clemencie, Trothe could speak when she wished, because she finally found her voice and said, “I want you to leave, man.” In contrast with her sister, she sounded completely normal for a girl of her apparent age. “I want you to go outside and then burn this house to the ground to be sure it’s finished.”
That seemed . . . surprisingly sensible. Myrnin raised a hand. “Problem,” he said. “Your sister won’t let me leave.”
“I will,” young Trothe said, with a grim determination that Myrnin recognized. He’d seen it before, in Claire, who, although she was a bit older than Trothe Vexen, had the same steely resolve. She simply used it in ways that were not so bent on insanity and murder. “Go out this way.” She walked to a boarded-up window, and pointed.
He hesitated.
“I told you that he was mine!” Clemencie shrieked in triumph, and the sound was like razor blades on a chalkboard. The screaming seemed to ring in his ears like lost souls, and he wondered for a brief moment if he was as lost as poor bedeviled Lucian, who’d been spelled into carrying on Clemencie’s evils. It was possible that the poor devil might not have begun quite so badly as he’d ended. “He is mine!”
“You see how she is,” Trothe said. “I really can’t stay in this house with her anymore. It’s unbearable. You need to send us both away.”
Myrnin gave Trothe a frown as he said, “You know that likely means sending you both to hell. Assuming you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” she said. “I saw my parents there. I was there myself. But Clemencie escaped and came back here to . . . do her work. I had to come to try to stop her. I haven’t done very well, though.”
“Until now.”
“If you don’t disappoint me.” She looked as if she didn’t have much faith in him, which was a bit insulting considering how much he’d already survived in this cursed place. “Promise me you’ll do it.”
“Oh, I’ll do it,” he said. “This place deserves to burn.”
“So do we,” Trothe said. “Don’t let her tell you different. We did so many bad things. Don’t let her do it to you, too.”
Clemencie shrieked again, and the sound drilled at him, clawed bloody furrows in his fragile mind, and he could almost hear, almost know, almost see what she wanted him to become.
Worse, it almost seemed tempting.
No time left. If he intended to survive these bitter ghosts, he had to trust that Trothe could do as she promised.
“Now, go now!” Trothe cried, and he glanced back to see that Clemencie had broken whatever barrier had kept her at bay. She was rushing at him, and this time, he knew that if she touched him, his mind would shatter like a thin glass bowl.
Myrnin took a run at the window, leaped, and hit the boards with a crash that rattled his brain in its bones . . . and the boards broke away, and he soared a bit in cold desert air before arcing down to an ignominious rolling stop in the dirt.
That damned scorpion, or its close cousin, scuttled at him across the sand as he sat up. He didn’t bother to warn it this time, just picked it up and threw it hard enough to send it to Mexico, and turned his attention back to the Vexen house.
It was still and quiet and lifeless in the fading moonlight. Dawn was a dull blue edge on the eastern horizon now.
“You took your good time,” Oliver said from behind him, and Myrnin managed not to flinch. Somehow.
“I thought you’d be well gone.”
“It occurred to me you might need help.”
“Thanks for not providing it, then. You did that very well.” Myrnin stood up and slapped sand irritably from his clothing. The amount of it that had trickled down into his boots was going to drive him mad. Again.
“What happened in there?” Oliver’s face, when Myrnin glanced back at him, was less cynical and guarded than was normal for him. He seemed . . . worried. Perhaps he’d sensed something in that house, too.
And maybe he’d been worried that Myrnin would emerge as mad and savage a beast as their vampire quarry, Lucian.
“Ghosts,” Myrnin said. “And I’m about to lay them to rest. Do you happen to have a lighter?”
Oliver raised his eyebrows, but he fished in a coat pocket and brought out an ornate silver thing, engraved with a dragon. “I’ll want that back,” he said.
“Of course.” Myrnin picked up one of the tinder-dry broken boards that had come through the window with him, and searched around for a bit of sun-rotted cloth to wrap around the end of it. It caught on the first flicker of the lighter’s flame, and he held it upside down to feed the greedy fire for a moment, then walked back to the house.
Upstairs, in the window he’d exited, he saw Trothe Vexen, smiling down at him.
She blew him a kiss.
“That’s unsettling,” he told her. “Do give your sister my regards when you see her in hell.”
He threw the burning board inside a broken window, and whatever control Clemencie Vexen had over that house, she could not keep fire from seizing hungry hold of all the rotten, ready-burning things in it. In ten seconds the glow was visible at the window, and in thirty, flames were leaping and spreading throughout the structure.
Myrnin withdrew to a safer distance and stood to watch the Vexen house burn. Oliver stood with him, silent, as though he understood this was a necessary vigil.
Trothe stayed in the window staring out until the house collapsed in upon itself in a roaring rush of flames and sparks and ashes, and then it was done. Completely done.
“Whatever did you do with Lucian?” Myrnin thought to ask as smoke rose up in the dawning sky, and the Vexen girls vanished back to whatever fate waited for them.
“He fell,” Oliver said. “Tragic dismemberment accident.”
“Ah. Pity. How do you feel about a hearty breakfast?”
“I could murder a Bloody Mary,” Oliver said.
“Two Bloody Marys sound better.”
Oliver fixed him with a long sober look. “Are you sure you’re quite all right?”
“As all right as I’ve ever been,” Myrnin said. He was well aware, in fact, that it was not a reassuring answer. But what was one more whispering ghost at the back of his mind? He had a chorus of the wretched things. It was hard for someone to drive him to insanity when he’d already crossed those borders and taken up residence.
Amateurs.
SIGNS AND MIRACLES
Dedicated to Kelley Armstrong (and her readers) for her support of the Morganville digital series Kickstarter
I was so awestruck that no less than the fantastic urban fantasy / YA author Kelley Armstrong helped us get our Morganville digital series off the ground, and she then donated the custom hardcover to one of her readers. She allowed me to choose the characters for this story, and I decided to explore one that I particularly love and have never written in point of view: Hannah Moses. This is a mystery story with Hannah as our detective, unraveling the story of a girl left for dead and a mysterious peddler of anti-vampire drugs, with bonus Monica Morrell, being heroic against her will, mostly. Glimpses inside the Morganville Police Department we’ve not previously been able to see, too.
I love mystery stories, and getting to write one like this was a total treat. Thanks, Kelley!
As with most things in Morganville, it started with a body. This one just happened to be alive.
Hannah Moses watched as the paramedics rolled the unconscious young woman away on a gurney, and then turned her attention back to the pavement where the victim had been found. It was dry asphalt, except where blood cast darker shadows. Not much use doing fancy analysis on that; the stains had been smeared around on dirty asphalt, then baked in the sun, and it probably was
n’t going to be any help at all. Not like Morganville, Texas, had much in the way of crime scene forensics, anyway.
“Problem?” The unctuous British voice made her stiffen, just a little; she could never get used to the way some vampires could sneak right up on her, even in daytime. Oliver was the worst. He got a hell of a kick out of it.
“You could say so,” Hannah said. She turned and put her hands on her hips. It emphasized the gun belt she wore, and she had to use every trick in her intimidation book to deal with Oliver, Morganville’s biggest snake and Amelie’s—what the hell was he, second-in-command? Boyfriend? God, she didn’t even want to know. “Got a resident who was attacked here sometime this morning. Nobody found her for hours.”
He stood in the shadows cast by a brick wall, unsettlingly close. He could easily step into the light if he wanted, even without the cover-ups, but she thought he liked the drama. “Quite a lot of blood,” Oliver noted. He sounded casual, as if they were chatting about the weather. “Not my work, of course.”
“I know. You’re so neat when you eat,” Hannah agreed. It wasn’t a compliment, and from the sharp-edged smile he gave her, he didn’t take it as one. “She was bashed in the head. She hung on, waiting for somebody to save her. Paramedics aren’t giving her much of a chance at recovery, though.”
“Well, you can’t save everyone,” Oliver said, in the same uninterested tone as before. “In point of fact, you can’t save anyone, in the end. Unless you make them immortal, of course.”
“That’s a hell of a long view you’ve got there.”
“It’s practical. I learned long ago not to accept responsibility for things outside my control.”
“Then why are you here? Didn’t think the problems of regular people-on-people crime were your business.”
“Everything that happens in Morganville is my business, Chief Moses, since I am the Founder’s . . . What would you call it? Man on the street?” She just stared at him until he shrugged. “The girl’s one of mine, technically. I felt obliged.”
