by Rachel Caine
Michael did, pushing his anxiety and fury back until his eyes were blue and normal, and he could force a smile for the people outside in the coffee shop.
Then he went to find Rozhkov.
• • •
The tea shop was something he’d never paid any attention to before. It was closet-sized, just big enough to serve two or three at a time. Shelves of dusty jars of product, and a very bored woman behind the counter who barely looked up from her copy of Romantic Times when he came in. The clean, flowery scent of the teas was overwhelming. Then she came back for a second look, folded the magazine, and brightened up. “Oh, hello,” she said. “How can I help you? We have a special on Earl Grey and some of the Tazo flavors. I can brew you up samples, too.”
He didn’t have the heart to go full vampire on her; she seemed so happy to see a customer. “How about”—he picked one at random—“Blueberry Bliss Rooibos?” He had no idea what it was, but it sounded like something Eve would like.
“Sure!” she said brightly, and grabbed one of the dustier glass jars. “I’ll just make you up a cup to taste. Wait right here.”
She went through a beaded curtain to the back, and Michael quickly scanned the shop again. The rooms upstairs, Oliver had said.
He took hold of the shelves on the right, and pulled. They swung out. Behind them was a door—locked, but he snapped it easily enough and pushed it open. There was a handle on the shelf from the other side, and he pulled it to behind him as he entered.
Stairs. It was utterly dark, but he could make out silvery outlines, enough to find his way. Michael took them quickly, knowing that Rozhkov would have heard the lock breaking, and was at the top in only a second.
It was still long enough for Rozhkov to be ready.
Michael ducked the swing of a sword that would have easily decapitated him, and lunged forward, connecting hard with the bony, sinewy body of the other vampire. It would have overwhelmed a human, broken bones, but it hardly rocked Rozhkov back a few steps, and he kept his balance to drive a fist hard into Michael’s chest. It pushed Michael back, and he swayed back to avoid the next slash of steel.
Rozhkov looked strong, and cocky, and he gave Michael a broad, fanged grin. “Boy,” he said. “How long have you been in our life? You’re hardly more than an infant to me. Give up. I don’t need your life.”
“You don’t need Eve’s.”
“Ah, but I do. It’s destiny. She was drawn to me.”
“You came to us.”
Rozhkov shrugged. Logic didn’t matter, of course. “Her blood is true, and when she dies, I will take her energy. It is how I live. How I grow greater.”
“You’re insane,” Michael said. “Last chance. If you let Eve go, we can end this peacefully.”
“Why in the world would I desire such a thing?” Rozhkov put the tip of the sword against Michael’s throat. “Peacefully. You threaten me? You’re nothing. Nothing but a whisper in the dark.”
“No,” Michael said. “I’m the dark.”
He let go.
The thing he hadn’t said to Oliver, the thing he hadn’t said to anyone, was that the reason he fought his vampire nature so hard, the reason he loathed it so much, was that it was so incredibly easy. As easy as relaxing, and falling, and being . . . something else.
He grabbed the sword’s edge, ignoring the pain of the cut, and twisted the weapon out of Rozhkov’s hand, snapping the man’s wrist with the crisp sound of breaking twigs. Part of him—the small, trapped human part—screamed for it to stop, but the vampire didn’t listen. Rozhkov was prey. Rozhkov was enemy.
Michael tossed the sword into the air, grabbed it with two hands as it fell, and swung with all his might, aiming cleanly for the vulnerable, narrow throat.
It hardly gave any resistance at all.
Rozhkov was saying something, or trying to, when he died. Michael didn’t bother to listen. He stared down at the man’s face as it went still, then slack, and the malice in the eyes faded into nothing.
There wasn’t that much blood, and what there was trickled out dark and thick.
Michael reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a silver-coated stake that he’d swiped from Shane’s stash, and buried it in Rozhkov’s heart, just to be sure. Then he put the sword down and closed his eyes.
The dark was a storm inside him, a force like a whirlwind, stirred and excited by the violence. Yes, it said. Yes, this is you. This is how you are. How it will be.
He stood perfectly still, willing the darkness back into its carefully locked little box, forcing it with every ounce of what was left of his humanity. It was harder than ever before. So hard he was afraid that if he ever let it out again, no box would hold it.
That’s not me, he told himself. I’m not that. I can’t be that.
The terrifying thing was that he so, so easily could be. Oliver knew it. That was why Oliver had sent him, instead of doing it personally. It was the old vampire’s way of teaching him a lesson.
Not this time, Michael thought.
But he couldn’t really be sure about the next time. Not at all.
The whole thing seemed to take a lifetime, but when he went back downstairs, the little shop was still empty. As he pushed the shelf back in its place and heard it click closed, the beaded curtain rattled, and the shop clerk bustled out holding a steaming cup of tea.
“Here you go.” She beamed, and held it out to him. “I think you’ll just love it.”
It tasted of ashes and blood and fear to him, but he bought two bags anyway.
• • •
That evening, Michael found Chief Moses standing on their porch. Behind her, twilight had fallen, and the sky was a rich dark blue, painted through with the fading orange of sunset. She was bathed in the yellow glow of the bug light. Her hat was off and tucked under her arm in a strangely official way.
“I have some news,” she said.
“Bad news?” he asked her. She shrugged.
“Depends,” Hannah said. “Can I come in?”
She was human; she didn’t really need an invitation. He nodded and stepped back to let her cross the threshold. She sighed, as if this was something she really didn’t want to do.
“Can you get Eve?” she asked him.
“Sure. Why?”
“Just get her, Michael.”
He didn’t need to; he heard the clump of her boots on the stairs, and knew she’d heard the knock. Claire and Shane were gone off on their own somewhere, so it was just the two of them in the house. Eve arrived breathless and flushed, still adjusting her top from where she’d pulled it on. “Oh, Hannah. Hey. What’s up?”
Hannah nodded without any change in her poker-faced expression. “I need to show you a picture and see if you recognize the man in it.” She didn’t pause; the photo was on her phone, and she clicked it on and turned it to show it to both Eve and Michael.
It was Kiril Rozhkov.
“What’s he done?” Eve asked. She sounded resigned.
“He went and got himself decapitated and staked,” Hannah said. “From what I hear, not much loss from anybody.”
“You think we had something to do with it?” Michael asked.
Hannah shook her head. “Nope, but in his coat pocket I found this.” She reached into her own pocket and took out a plastic bag sealed with red tape. Inside was a photo of the two of them, the one that had been in the local paper announcing their marriage.
“I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t Shane,” Eve said. “Or Claire.”
“I know that, too. They’re not the only ones in this town willing to stake a vampire now and again.”
“Then who do you think did it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Hannah said, still expressionless. “I’m not likely to get to arrest anyone.”
She knew. Her gaze settled o
n Michael, and stayed, and he felt a momentary chill. “Well,” he said. “I guess someone thought it had to be done.”
That earned him a very small, tight smile. “Guess so. I had a word with Oliver. He says it’s finished.” Hannah returned the photo to her coat pocket, along with her phone, and nodded to them both. “Have a good day, you two.”
She left without another word. Eve stood where she was, lips parted on questions she obviously couldn’t quite voice, as Michael shut the door behind her.
“Are you all right?”
Eve stared at him for a few long seconds. “I guess,” she said. “It’s just—he said he was family.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her, very gently, lips and forehead. “Family takes care of its own.”
He stayed awake all night, haunted by the memory, the darkness, the violence, but she slept soundly cuddled against him.
And as dawn came, and he knew she was all right, he closed his eyes and slept with her, in the light.
AND ONE FOR THE DEVIL
Dedicated to Martha Jo Trostel for her support for the Morganville digital series Kickstarter
We end the collection with another brand-new look at Morganville, courtesy of Martha Jo, who wanted a story from Claire’s point of view . . . and I just happened to have one lurking in the back of my mind. Claire and Myrnin (with bonus Eve) are always a dynamic combination for me; I love that his sometimes rash ideas balance out with her native caution. Mostly. This time, it isn’t Myrnin putting Claire in danger so much as Claire being forced to figure out a puzzle he’s put into motion, then been caught within.
If we’ve learned anything from our time in Morganville, it should definitely be Don’t go in the creepy building, but then again, in Morganville . . . they’re all creepy, to some extent. When you mix in Myrnin’s proto-time-travel technology, anything is possible.
Fun factoid: I got the idea for this story because weird things sometimes happen when you’re on a book tour. You get tired. You come in late at night. Often, there’s no thirteenth floor in a hotel, but sometimes there is; sometimes there’s a thirteenth floor but no room thirteen on that floor.
I had room number 1313 one evening, and then the next day at a new hotel, when I was also given a room on the thirteenth floor, my brain told me to look for 1313. It didn’t exist. I was convinced that the room had disappeared, until I reasoned it out, but I didn’t forget that out-of-body weirdness of looking for something that no longer existed.
When Myrnin was in one of these moods, it just didn’t pay to argue with him.
Claire sat calmly in his wing chair, near the far back corner of his laboratory, while he whizzed around at vampire speeds, tinkering with this, muttering at that, flipping through ancient tomes and flinging them across the room when he didn’t find what he was looking for. She’d asked him what he was doing. He’d given her a wild, distracted look, and she’d decided that maybe it was time to feed Bob the Spider some flies, and sit and read for a while.
She was two chapters into her book when she realized he was looming over her. Without looking up, she said, “You’re in my light.”
“Are you or are you not my assistant?” Myrnin demanded. “I can’t find anything in here! What have you done, rearranged things? Again?”
“No, I haven’t,” she said, and put her bookmark in place before she closed the volume and looked up at him. Myrnin had a black smudge along one side of his cheek, and his hair was sticking up at odd angles, as if he’d rubbed grease into it and forgotten about it. “You move things, and you forget you move things, and if you’d tell me what it was you were looking for—”
“I’m looking for something that isn’t here, or I wouldn’t be in quite such a state, now, would I? Up. Up up up.”
Claire rose and stepped aside, and her vampire boss flung himself into a boneless slouch in the chair, frowning at nothing. After a moment, he said, “It’s warm.”
“What?”
“The chair. It’s warm.”
“I was just sitting in it.”
“Ah. I forget, that’s a side effect for people with pulses.”
“What are you looking for?” Sometimes, with Myrnin, the patient repetition of the question worked better than anything else.
Like this time, because he suddenly looked at her. His dark eyes widened, and his mouth formed a surprised O, and he bolted up out of his chair and hugged her. It was a vampire-speed hug, which meant that she didn’t have time to object or respond before he was away, flashing toward a bookcase in the other part of the lab. He tossed out at least ten books, then found a slim volume and held it high. “Found it!”
“Could you please not leave books all over the floor?”
“Bother,” he said, and came back to throw himself into the chair with great enthusiasm. “I haven’t the time for that nonsense. Shelving, reshelving, picking up, cleaning . . . Everything tends to entropy and it’s just fighting the inevitable. But please, by all means, pick those up.”
“I will,” Claire said. “What is that?”
“This?” He held up the book, and she read the faded title. It wasn’t some ancient dusty Latin thing, which was what he was most fond of collecting; this was printed in the 1960s, by the weird type style and strangely quaint illustration. The title was A Traveler’s Guide to Haunted Places.
“Seriously?”
“Oh, I am dead serious. Well, dead and serious, you understand. I stored some things many years ago at a place I built, and I need them back. What time is it?”
“Time . . .” She pulled her phone and glanced at it. “Um, almost midnight. Why?”
“Because we’ll need to get there before sunrise,” Myrnin said. “Most important.”
That made zero sense, because Myrnin was fully capable of going out in the daylight when he wanted to, vampire or not. He was old, older than Morganville’s resident vampire queen, Amelie; that gave him a certain invulnerability to sunlight that younger undead didn’t have. Besides, a coat and hat usually did fine for protection.
“Where are we going, exactly?”
“The Morganville Traveler’s Rest,” he said. “Come along, then. Bring everything.”
Claire rolled her eyes and texted her husband—husband; she loved thinking that so much—Shane, to let him know where she was going. It was an established thing, when Myrnin was in his crazycakes moods. Just insurance. Not so much that she thought he’d hurt her; they were long past that kind of fear. More that he’d forget and abandon her someplace. That happened way too much.
Shane texted back that he wished she were coming home. She wished she were, too. But sending Myrnin off unescorted seemed like a bad plan. He was in a manic phase, and that almost never went well . . . but she could keep him from doing something really crazy.
Hopefully.
Take everything. Right.
Claire grabbed what she thought she might need, bundled it into a bag older than she was, and followed Myrnin out into the night.
• • •
She had no idea where the Morganville Traveler’s Rest might be; she’d never heard of it, and Morganville, Texas, wasn’t that big of a town. So she wasn’t too surprised to find that it was one of the many dilapidated, shuttered buildings around town . . . the crumbling ruins of places that weren’t worth keeping up or renovating. Home of rats, cockroaches, and vampires too derelict or damaged to play by Amelie’s rules of good behavior. Or those who just enjoyed a good scary place to haunt.
It was definitely scary. Definitely. Morganville’s nights were clear and cold, and though she’d wrapped up in a thick jacket and a scarf and gloves, her breath fogged white as she struggled to keep up with Myrnin. He wasn’t vampire-speeding away from her, at least; he was clearly impatient, but keeping more or less to a human pace.
A fast human pace.
“Slow down!” she finally g
asped. He didn’t slow; he stopped, and then he turned and looked back at her, sighed, and came to take the heavy bag from her.
“Better?” he asked.
“Not if you keep acting like it’s a race!”
“Well, it is, a bit,” he said. “I would have asked you to drive me, but you seem to have such trouble with the windshield.”
“It’s a vampire tinted windshield, Myrnin.”
“Just as I said. Ah, good. This way.”
They were at the corner of Oh-Hell-No and You’re-Gonna-Die, as Eve would have put it, and this way looked like it was definitely worse. The silver wash of moonlight on sagging wood and leaning buildings turned it all into a Gothic nightmare, and except for the occasional streetlight, there wasn’t any sign of life here. Old, old buildings, mostly built of brick with concrete ornaments on them. There was one across the street that looked like it had once been a hotel, six or seven generations back; above the boarded-up door, a gruesome-looking gargoyle leaned down. Up near the top, letters in the concrete read EST. 1895.
Definitely not the place Claire wanted to be urban exploring at this time of night. Or, actually, at all, ever, the end, but what was worse than urban exploring at this time of night was that Myrnin might actually leave her alone doing it.
She hurried after him when he darted for the EST. 1895 building. The front door was boarded over, but the plywood hadn’t weathered the tough Morganville sunshine and heat too well, and besides, vampire strength was enough to rip even sturdy plywood like tissue paper. All Claire needed to do was stand back—well back, because sometimes Myrnin forgot where he was throwing stuff, and that didn’t end well. The shredded board skidded past her, out into the street, where she doubted anyone would be running over it for a couple of days, at least. Still, she trudged over, grabbed the wood (it was surprisingly heavy), and towed it back onto the sidewalk.
Myrnin had already shoved open the door, which leaned on rusty hinges like a drunk. Beyond, it looked scary-black, but Claire sighed and turned on her very bright little LED flashlight. She never left home without it, for precisely this kind of reason. It lit up an ancient hallway, a ceiling that looked bulging and precarious from some leak long ago, and wallpaper that she couldn’t imagine had ever been pretty. There was a front desk up ahead, which had survived fairly well, and a honeycomb of wooden boxes behind it, most with dusty keys still in them. Lots of vacancies, she thought, and shuddered. She imagined most of them weren’t vacant at all. It was every horror movie Eve had ever forced her to watch, come to life.
