by Rachel Caine
If you’re wondering why I was in the graveyard doing minion work for Myrnin the Crazy Vampire, well.
So was I.
Hi, my name is Shane Collins, and I hate vampires. I have ever since I was old enough to understand that (a) there were vampires in Morganville, Texas, and (b) they were the boss of me, no matter what I wanted. My goal was to be a fearless badass vampire hunter, and sometimes I have been that, but the reality that I’ve come to reluctantly accept is that not all vamps are terrible people. Selfish, sure. Annoying, definitely. But I can’t support my original stake-’em-all theory anymore, because—well, case in point was sitting on a tombstone watching me get covered in dirt while he had a cocktail. Myrnin was a lunatic, he dressed funny, and he was as annoying as an ingrown toenail, but I’d seen him do kind things, and brave things, for no better reason than a real person lurked somewhere in that vampire body.
It just spoils the fun when you realize that your kill all monsters crusade actually includes real people as collateral damage.
“Are you resting?” Myrnin asked, then took a loud sip through his straw. “I don’t think I’m paying you to rest.”
“It’s hard work.”
“Not for a vampire.”
“I’m not a vampire.”
“That would seem to be a pity.”
Myrnin took another gulp of his drink, probably just to irritate me, and I jammed the shovel in once more . . . and hit something solid. Instantly, he was off the tombstone, drink abandoned, and he was leaning over the grave to look down in it. “That’s it,” he said, and gave me a quick, commanding look. “Out. Now.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” I said, and managed to claw my way up and out of the hole. Of course he hadn’t brought a ladder. Vampires could do Olympic jumps, straight up, so they hardly ever felt the need for one. By the time I was collapsed on the thin grass of the Morganville Pioneer Cemetery, I was sweaty and filthy, and I ached all over. Also, I wanted to strangle the little rat, but only in an abstract kind of way. Mostly, I just wanted a shower. “Want to tell me why we’re digging up a dead guy from olden days?”
“We aren’t,” he said. “Well, I suppose we are, in a sense, but the bones aren’t what I’m after. . . .” His voice trailed off, and I heard scraping, as if he was clearing dirt away, and then a sharp snapping sound. A heavy, groaning creak. Yeah, that was some serious ghostly soundtrack, and it said something about my experiences in Morganville so far that it didn’t even make me nervous.
Silence then. Pardon the pun, but . . . dead silence.
“Hey,” I finally said. “Everything okay down there?”
No answer. Perfect. I tried to get up and my aching muscles put up a fight, but I won and rolled up to look over the edge of the hole.
Into . . . darkness.
The lid was up on the coffin, but there was no body. It was just . . . black. Kind of disorienting, and I sat back a little because it almost felt like it was trying to suck me in.
“Hey, Myrnin? Stop screwing around. You down there?” No answer. I flipped a rock over the side, expecting it to hit the bottom of the coffin, but it just . . . disappeared. “Come on. I’m getting paid to dig a hole, not haul your ass out of one!”
Myrnin had been mostly a giant pain in my neck since I’d first met him. He’d been suspiciously nice to my girl, Claire, for one thing, and I knew he had feelings for her. . . . Of course, what those feelings actually were was a different story, because Myrnin didn’t exactly follow normal rules of behavior. For instance, he’d once intended to kill her and put her brain in a computer, and to him, that didn’t even seem all that unfriendly. He’d gotten a little less crazy over the past few years, but honestly? Still pretty nuts.
Not something you really like to see in a guy who’s capable of ripping you limb from limb if he’s in a bad mood.
But also . . . unlike most vampires, Myrnin did care. He cared about pretty much everything, including people. He protected puppies and little kids. He had a spider for a pet. He’d practically adopted Claire, and personally saved her life (and mine, sad to say) more than a few times.
So I kind of owed the crazy bloodsucker.
“Dammit.” I sighed and grabbed the shovel, because I was not doing this unarmed. I had an LED flashlight clipped to my belt loop, and I turned it on and aimed it into the grave. Whatever that was at the bottom of the coffin, it just ate the light whole. “Why me, God?”
I didn’t wait for the answer, because I already knew it.
Because you can.
I jumped.
• • •
I felt my feet hit the bottom of the coffin with a thump, and then crack right through the rotten wood into soft, damp dirt. I won’t lie—it smelled pretty foul, and my skin crawled, because there was no way that it ought to be this dark down here; I’d just been in this hole, and the moonlight had been bright enough for me to see up top. Now it was like being trapped inside a black velvet bag.
I still had the flashlight in my hand, and I smacked it against my thigh, hoping that it would turn on and somehow this was all just some big misunderstanding, but it stayed pitch-black.
And then a pair of cold, too-strong hands grabbed me in the darkness. Yeah, I might have yelped. A manly sort of yelp, obviously.
“Calm yourself,” Myrnin said. He sounded annoyed, not unnerved, which would have been interesting if the sane part of me hadn’t been kind of freaking out. “It’s perfectly normal.”
“Normal?” My voice came out high enough to have been mistaken for my friend Eve’s. I cleared my throat and tried again, and got it into a more usual range. “What the hell is normal about this?”
“It’s a bit difficult to explain, but clearly, the item I was hoping to find is here. . . . Now stand very still, boy. And try not to make noise.”
I stood still. It wasn’t easy, because after Myrnin let go of my shoulders, I felt like I was drifting in the dark, pulled out into space. Nothing seemed real. I finally reached out and put my hand on what felt like rough, solid dirt to the side, and that reminded me that I was standing at the bottom of a grave. Weird that it should make me feel better.
“I think I said stand still,” Myrnin said, but he didn’t sound too angry. I could hear creaking, and then a sound that seemed like snapping bones, and then he let out a pleased sigh. “Perfect. Brace yourself.”
I didn’t know what he meant, and then there was a soft click, and light poured in. After that complete darkness, it seemed like somebody had a flashlight pointed directly in my face, and I gasped and blinked and realized that, hey, someone was shining a flashlight directly in my face, and that someone was me, because the thing hadn’t been working before and now it was. Probably because of something Myrnin had done.
I switched the beam off, blinked a few times, and saw Myrnin crouching down, examining what looked like some ancient, boxy camera held in the hands of a grinning skeleton. I’d managed not to step on him, whoever the dead guy was; my feet were braced on either side of the corpse.
Suddenly, I really wanted out of this grave.
“Don’t move,” Myrnin said absently, and carefully moved one of the skeletal hands. I expected the thing to come apart, but the hand held together. That seemed weird, because I thought skeletons this old fell apart. I didn’t see any muscle connecting the bones.
“I’d really like to go now,” I said.
“Oh, I wasn’t talking to you,” Myrnin said, and moved the other bony hand. It suddenly turned and wrapped around his wrist like a living thing. “Damn.”
The skeleton sat up and wrapped its other bony hand around Myrnin’s throat. Its fingers tightened fast, and I saw them sink in deep; it probably would have killed me, or anybody still human, but it didn’t seem to hurt him much. Benefits of being a bloodsucker. Myrnin grabbed hold of the skeleton’s neck and twisted, which only seemed to piss the thi
ng off. Myrnin was left holding a skull that snapped its dry teeth at him, trying to bite, and the hand around his throat didn’t let up at all.
I didn’t know what to do, but I figured getting rid of the skull might help, so I grabbed it out of his hands and pretended it was a gross, snapping football. I threw it long and up, aiming for the next county.
As soon as the head left the grave, the rest of the skeleton collapsed into dust and bones. The hand around his neck clattered in pieces back to the coffin’s wood. Myrnin’s throat looked like he’d been hanged by an old-time Western sheriff, and he coughed a little, shook his head, and bent down to pick up the old black camera thing from the litter of bones. Then he jumped, straight up, out of the grave, and left me standing there like an idiot.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Little help, since I just saved your life?”
No answer. I swore under my breath, tried not to step on any bones as I pulled my feet out of the rotten wood. Hard to see how I was going to climb out, since when I scrambled up, the sides started to collapse in on me. Great, I thought grimly. I’m going to suffocate in a grave because Claire’s boss forgot about me.
Myrnin’s face appeared over the top of the grave, just as another avalanche of dirt piled in on me, raising a choking cloud. “Oh,” he said, as if he was surprised to find me still down there. “Can’t you get out?”
“Sure, I’m just staying down here because it’s so damn comfy.” I spat out a mouthful of dirt, and God only knew what else. “Little help?”
He extended one bone-white hand down to me. I grabbed hold, and he pulled so hard that he almost dislocated my shoulder. “Come along, Shame,” he said. “We have work to do.”
I was technically working for him, true, but no way did that mean he could call me that. “My name is Shane,” I said. “With an n. Dickhead.”
“Sorry,” Myrnin said. I saw the thinnest, fastest ghost of a smile. “I’m just very forgetful.”
Like hell he was. “Speaking of that, you paid me a hundred to dig up a coffin for you. Not to follow you around the rest of the night and battle dead guys. I think a little evil-skeleton-demon hazard pay might be a good idea.”
“He wasn’t evil,” Myrnin said, seizing upon exactly the wrong thing, of course. “Keep up, then; there isn’t any time to lose. I must get this camera obscura to my lab.”
I didn’t know what a camera obscura was, but it sounded like trouble. “Oh no, you don’t. If you want me to tag along, it’s an extra hundred.”
Myrnin was notoriously cheap, or at least, utterly oblivious to the concept of fair pay, but he didn’t hesitate to raise my bluff. “Two hundred, plus what I already pledged,” he said. “I suppose you want to be paid in those paper bills. You may count them out yourself. I can’t be bothered.”
I should have known that if he was willing to double my asking price, it was going to be a bad, bad night, but then again, three hundred bucks. I’d done some terrible things for less than that. Hell, I’d done them for free.
“Deal,” I said. “But we’re taking my car.”
• • •
My car was a sweet, sinister ride . . . deep black, with murdered-out wheels and chrome. Ninja black. Since I wasn’t a vamp like my passenger, I had to keep the headlights on, which spoiled the stealth effect, but image wasn’t worth dying over.
I half expected to argue with Myrnin about how to ride in a car like a human, but he got in, fastened his seat belt, and seemed perfectly at home. I eyed him suspiciously while I started up the engine. “Where’d you learn to buckle up?”
“Claire has explained to me the rules for riding in a motorized vehicle,” he said. “Also, I understand not to attempt to drive from this position. She got very upset when I tried it last time.”
“Touch this wheel, and swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
“I see what she likes about you,” he said. “How long have you been wedded now?”
“Coming up on a year,” I said. It still felt weird, really weird, to say that. I’d never thought past having the wedding—it seemed like the biggest possible goal there was in the world, and I hadn’t bothered to think about what would happen after.
And the wedding day came, and the fear and pride and rush of something so big I couldn’t even define it. Love, I guess. So much love.
Then the world turned, the sun came up, and . . . we were married. And that was weird, because it turned out getting married wasn’t an achievement so much as a level-up, play-on kind of deal. Life was more different now than I’d ever imagined, because there was this other person entwined with me who was there every day. Not in the boyfriend/girlfriend I-can-leave-if-I-want way, but in an I’m-never-leaving-you way. Took time to figure out how to live with that, for both of us. We had amazing times and stupidly bad times and days where nothing happened at all, because . . . life. Life was happening together now, not separately. And it was only just beginning to dawn on me how incredibly wonderful that really was.
Every morning when I opened my eyes, I was still amazed she was lying in the same bed with me. But I didn’t want to say any of that. Not to Myrnin, anyway.
“She seems happy,” Myrnin said. He was looking out the window as I drove, and he sounded quiet. Thoughtful. Not the usual thing for him. “I thought she would be more . . . restless.”
I guessed he was meaning to be nice and make small talk, but talking about Claire was creeping me out. I knew he’d had some kind of feelings for her—what they were exactly was a mystery, because he wasn’t even as normal as most vampires, never mind regular human guys. When he said he loved Claire for her mind, I think he meant it, and from him, that was equally creepy.
“How’s Jesse?” If we were talking about girls all of a sudden, it seemed only fair we should talk about his . . . though it was hard to figure out exactly what attraction crazy, wardrobe-challenged Myrnin had for hot, funny, savage Jesse, except they shared a liking for plasma.
“Lady Grey is . . . indescribable,” he said. “But then, she always was. She rescued me twice, you know, from a particularly awful kind of hell. And she was very kind to me in my recovery. I’ve missed her.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“And what?”
“Seemed like the two of you had a thing.”
“A thing?”
“You know.”
“I do not know, and I might prefer not to know.”
“Let me put it another way: Do vampires . . . ?” I left it right there, filling in the blanks with raised eyebrows. He sent me an irritated look.
“Do we what? Your generation’s infelicity with verbs fills me with despair.”
I didn’t even know what infelicity was, but I guessed it meant we were bad at them. So I spelled it out. “Do vampires have sex?”
He seemed shocked. That was pretty funny, because I could swear he was about a thousand years old, and surely someone had mentioned sex to him before. If not, holy crap, this was going to be awkward.
“I . . .” He clearly had no idea what to say, and flapped his hands as if he was shooing the whole subject off. “That is far too personal a question, Shame, far too personal!”
“Yeah, the name’s still Shane.”
“No, I believe I had it quite right this time. It suits the moment much better.”
It was pretty great, watching him squirm. “Are you actually a virgin? Because I don’t think I’ve seen this much nervous fidgeting from anyone out of grade school.”
“I come from an age when what happened behind closed doors was kept there. And since you clearly will not abandon the subject, vampires are fully capable of . . . such things. Just not as driven by them as humans, since we are not constantly hounded by the shadow of death. And we do not . . . procreate in the same way.”
That almost made sense, I guessed. “You skated by my other question. The virgin one.”
; Myrnin gave me a frosty silence, so I guessed he wasn’t going to answer . . . until he did. “I’ve had lovers,” he finally admitted. “Ada was my last. Since her . . . death, I’ve not been moved to attempt it again.”
I’d met Ada only in her last incarnation—a crazy, disembodied brain in a jar powering Myrnin’s machine in his basement. I knew, because Claire had told me, that he’d killed the girl. Hadn’t meant to, but she’d died, and his answer to that had been to try to make her live on as a brain in a jar. She hadn’t cared much for it, and then she’d tried to kill us all. I guess in relationship terms, yeah, that kind of thing might put you off dating for a hundred years.
I know he regretted it. But that didn’t change the fact that Claire had worked side by side with him for years, and every single day I’d wondered if he’d suddenly turn on her, too. And of course, he had, but Claire was ready for it. She was tough, my girl. My wife.
Wow. Still weird.
“So,” I said. “Changing the subject . . .”
“Thank you.”
“. . . what exactly is that thing you pulled out of the grave, anyway?”
“A kind of camera obscura. Oh, but I suppose they teach you nothing in school these days. . . . That is the earliest type of camera, invented in perhaps the sixth century. This one has been enhanced with certain properties that make it project something else.”
“What?”
“Darkness,” Myrnin said. “Or, more accurately, the complete absence of light. It can create an area of darkness in which things that prefer darkness can be studied.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound creepy at all.”
“Humans have an irrational dislike of darkness. Really, there’s nothing in it that isn’t also there in the light.”
