by Rachel Caine
Myrnin leaned over the dusty counter and grabbed a key from a box, then hurried up the sagging, none-too-safe-looking stairs. Claire tried to see which key he’d grabbed, in case he (inevitably) left her behind.
Number thirteen. Of course.
She went up after him. Carefully. The safest part of the step was at the edges, so she went slowly, testing each for her weight and holding to the rickety banister in case something gave way. Nothing did, surprisingly. At the landing, she saw a sign in old-timey block lettering that pointed to her right for rooms one through ten, and left for eleven through twenty.
When she turned left, Myrnin was standing there, waiting for her. He snapped his fingers in that restless, manic way he sometimes got, and said, “Hurry, hurry, the moon will be down soon. Come on, Claire!”
He stalked off down the dark hall, and she lit it up with her flash, for safety. Good thing she did, because a grandfather clock had tipped over at some point, and lay flat across the path like a dead body. Myrnin had skipped right over it, but she had to be more careful.
“Ah!” Myrnin sounded gratified, and when Claire looked up, she saw him standing in front of a doorway. Number thirteen. “And one for the devil. Good. We’re in time.”
“In time for what?”
“I told you, the moon will be down soon.” He inserted the key and turned it carefully; the lock gave a groaning, rusty scrape, but the door swung open with a horror-movie creak. “Hurry, please. Speed is safety.”
That sounded . . . ominous. He was gone in the next second into the room, and she had to make a decision. Fast.
She stepped into the room.
It was, slightly to her disappointment, just an old, dilapidated hotel room, with a leaning bed on a rusty metal frame, one of those funny wooden wardrobes people used to use for their clothes instead of a closet, and a wooden stand with a cracked bowl and jug on it. Turn-of-the-century equivalent of running water, she guessed. It looked . . . depressing.
The glass was still intact in the window, and through it, she could see the moon glowing on the horizon. It was just touching the flat desert landscape, casting an icy blue glow into the room. Bright, though. Bright enough to see without the flashlight, so she clicked it off.
Myrnin opened up the old wooden wardrobe.
“What did you mean?” Claire asked him. “You said, And one for the devil. What does that mean?”
“Old expression,” he said. “Sometimes people would spill a drop of their wine and say it—one for the devil—so he’d not be angry at being cheated out of his due. But have you ever noticed that hotels of this age never have a room thirteen?”
“I know sometimes hotels skip the floor thirteen,” she said. “Because it’s unlucky, right?”
“Oh no, not at all. It’s the devil’s number, thirteen, and a number of great power from an alchemical point of view, which is not at all the same thing, whatever the churches may say. Ah! Perfect.” He rummaged in the cabinet, throwing out decaying old boxes, one of which held something that scuttled. Claire switched on her flashlight, and recognized the shiny black shell of the spider that hurried across the floor. That wasn’t Bob or his friendly cousin the house spider; that was the sleek Porsche edition of spiders: a black widow.
Claire took a couple of steps back to let it hurry past to the shadows in peace. Black widows weren’t attackers, generally, but you still didn’t want to piss one off. Myrnin kept searching the closet. There must have been a lot in there, because she heard him opening chests and slamming them shut again, tearing open boxes, muttering to himself.
The room was getting darker. She was glad she had the flashlight.
“Claire?” Myrnin’s voice came muffled from the closet. “Check the moon. Is it still up?”
That seemed like a nonsensical question, but she edged toward the window and looked out again. The moon seemed to be shivering on the horizon now, as if it were clinging to the thin edge. Just a sliver of it remaining now. Sunset—and moonset, Claire guessed—came fast out here on the dusty prairie. “Not much of it,” she said. “Wait—there it goes.”
Suddenly, Myrnin was beside her, staring out the old, warped glass. “Damn,” he said. “He’s coming.” He was holding a thing in his hand, but she couldn’t tell what it was, other than large and metallic. He dropped it to the floor with a heavy crash (and she hoped it wouldn’t break right through), and before Claire could draw breath, he grabbed the sash of the window and yanked it upward.
It shouldn’t have opened at all, because it probably hadn’t for close to a hundred years, but vampire strength forced it up with a rending shriek. Glass broke. “What are you—?” Claire started to ask, but broke off into a startled cry when Myrnin grabbed her by the arms, and swung her out the window.
She had time to register that she was dangling out in the cold, sharp air, with stars turning overhead, and that Myrnin had leaned far, far out the window, holding her hands.
“Pull me in!” she yelled.
He shook his head, and said, “I need to get you out of here. It isn’t safe.” His face looked grim and as serious as she’d ever seen him.
Then she felt his strong, chilly fingers release hers, and she was falling.
It was a long fall, and she hit hard and rolled. She’d landed on a rotting sofa abandoned on the sidewalk, which explained why she hadn’t broken bones, but the bounce to the street’s harder surface left plenty of bruises.
Myrnin hadn’t followed her down.
Claire rose to her feet, shaky and disoriented, and stared up at the window. Myrnin was still up there, but he’d pulled himself back into the window. “What are you doing?” she yelled up at him, and heard the angry, unsteady edge to her voice to match the pump of adrenaline through her veins. “Are you crazy?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “Get me out before he—”
He never finished the sentence, because the window in front of him warped in, toward him. No, not just the window—a whole vertical piece of the building sucked inward, about ten feet of it.
And then it was gone. The window, the ten-foot column of brick building—all gone. But it wasn’t as if there were damage or a bomb or something.
A part of the building had sucked in on itself and vanished without a trace, without a seam, as if it had never been there at all.
Claire stood staring upward for a long moment, then dashed for the open front door. She pounded up the rickety stairs, not concerned anymore for the condition of the steps, and turned left. Room eleven. Room twelve.
Room fourteen.
Claire stopped in her tracks, breathing hard, and slowly backed up.
Room twelve.
Room fourteen, right next to it.
There was no room thirteen.
Not anymore.
It had vanished into thin air, and it had taken Myrnin with it.
• • •
“That’s . . .” Eve’s dark-rimmed eyes were wide, and she sat very still on her chair, hunched over her cup of coffee. They were sitting together in Common Grounds, at way-too-early o’clock. Eve had the morning shift, and though she’d opened the shop, there was nobody here yet. Just Eve, and her morning cup. “That’s just crazy.”
And Claire, with her problem. “I know,” she said. “I spent hours in that hotel, looking all over the place. It only has twenty rooms. Number thirteen is just . . . missing.”
“So it has to do with moonlight? As in, it’s only there when the moon shines? That’s beyond regular crazy, girl. That’s restraining-order, straitjackets, and men-in-white-coats crazy.”
“I know! Believe me, I know. But I was in that room, Eve. I was there. I saw it. Myrnin . . . saved me, I guess. But he’s trapped in there, and I need to get him out.”
“Um, so . . . moonrise? Or just a really nice spotlight with . . . a moon bulb, I guess? Look, what’s the harm? H
e’s a vamp. A day hanging out in a hotel room won’t exactly kill him, right?”
“Right,” Claire said, but she was unconvinced. Eve had made her a mocha, and she sipped at it but didn’t taste a thing. Her brain was still racing faster than her senses. “But he seemed scared, Eve. I don’t think it was just a matter of waiting around. There’s something else. Myrnin said he was coming.”
“He? What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Claire admitted. “I only know that he was worried enough to throw me out of a second-floor window to get me away from him, whoever that is.”
With a sudden chill, Claire remembered Myrnin saying, And one for the devil. He couldn’t mean the literal devil, though, horns and tails, pitchfork and all . . . could he?
She honestly didn’t know, with her crazy vamp boss. But she did know that he was scared. And Myrnin didn’t frighten easily. He’d taken a vanishing thirteenth room in stride, but it was what was inside the room that frightened him.
Or what was inside the room when the moon wasn’t there.
It made her head hurt. She compensated by drinking the rest of the mocha in gulps, and asking Eve, “Where’s Oliver?”
“In his hidey-hole,” Eve said. “Doing ninja accounting, I guess. I don’t ask. Why? Are you going to seriously ask him for help?”
“Who else can I ask? Amelie?” Claire shook her head. “I need backup.”
“What am I, chica? I’ve got skills. Mad ones, even.”
“Fair point, but neither one of us have, you know, vampire skills. And I’m pretty sure that would come in handy at some point, seeing as we’re not dealing with a human problem, exactly.”
“It’s a Myrnin problem, not a vampire problem. I think they’re just as badly equipped as we are, sweetie.” Eve patted her hand and bounced out of her chair. In fact, she kept bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, which was a neat trick in those heavy black boots. “You said it had something to do with alchemy, right? Well, you’re the resident Morganville alchemy scholar. So you are our secret weapon. See?”
“No,” Claire said. “I don’t. I mean . . . yes, I probably know more about alchemy than anybody else here except Myrnin, but . . .”
“But what? Suit up, Alchemy Girl. We’re going to hero.”
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Claire said. Eve stopped bouncing and looked at her with a long, level stare, until she finally sighed and said, “But we’re going to do it anyway.”
“Yes.” Eve held up a fist to be bumped. “Yes, we are.”
• • •
First stop was, of course, Myrnin’s lab, because it was the place Myrnin kept . . . things. Claire didn’t honestly know what some of them were, but she had a good enough guess at a few, and she could decipher his scribbles well enough to infer the rest. Eve took one look at the place, shuddered, and said, “I’m fine here, thanks. I’d rather not explore the fun house of horrors.”
“I’d have thought the fun house of horrors would be your kind of scene,” Claire said, but she left Eve sitting on the steps that led down to the lab proper, and started making her way over and around the piles of debris that always seemed to collect around Myrnin. She was looking for something in particular. Myrnin had a system; she’d finally recognized what it was, and it had less to do with the placement of things than groupings of them. He mounded things together into more or less coherent subjects; once he started moving them around, he moved the piles, not just single items.
So she was looking for the pile that had to do with the alchemical influence of the moon. It was a big subject, because the idea that the moon’s light held very different properties from sunlight was central to a lot of alchemical theory; things that worked in the sun didn’t always work in the moon, and vice versa. She personally thought it was a load of nonsense, but Myrnin liked to keep an open mind, and after seeing the magically disappearing room thirteen, she was prepared to cautiously admit that maybe he was on to something.
The mound of things loosely grouped together under the general heading of moon was staggering. She started combing through the books and setting aside what might come in handy, but what she was really looking for was a particular gadget that Myrnin had shown her, once upon a time. As with most things he invented, she doubted she’d gotten the full story of what it did, but it had sounded like the alchemical equivalent of an ALS, an alternative light source.
It looked like a cross between a flamethrower (because of the giant backpack) and a flashlight (connected to the backpack with a flexible copper tube), as imagined by someone with lots of steampunk flair. Claire found it under the table, in a box marked DEADLY AND FRAGILE, which didn’t bode all that well, but she was pretty sure that the box belonged to something else entirely anyway.
“Really?” Eve said from the stairs. “You’re joining the Ghostbusters now? Because that looks like a movie prop.”
Claire avoided the obvious Who you gonna call? joke—too easy—and slid the leather straps over her shoulders. It was heavy, this thing, but it balanced okay. The flashlight-ish part had a simple on/off switch, and she took a deep breath, pointed the light at a dark corner of the lab wall, and switched it on.
A pale blue-white glow bathed the lab’s textured stone. It didn’t look much different from moonlight.
“Got it,” she called to Eve, and grabbed up a random assortment of other things that might come in handy, too—weapons, mainly. Myrnin had a lot of weapons lying around, everything from modern guns to ancient clubs. All that went into a black nylon bag with a sports logo; she doubted Myrnin even knew the brand, but he probably liked that the name came from Greek.
“I’ll take that,” Eve said, and grabbed the bag. “Anything else? Do you have to feed the spider or anything?”
“Bob’s fine—Myrnin fed him yesterday,” Claire said. “And I didn’t think you liked spiders.”
“Ugh, I don’t. But he’s weirdly cute, I guess. For a spider. Whatever, this place is creeping me out.”
“Wait until you see where we’re going,” Claire said. “Maybe we should call Michael?”
“Michael’s teaching today. What about Shane?”
“He opened the restaurant for the day, and he’s kind of, you know, in charge.”
“Heavy lies the assistant manager crown. Okay, then, it’s girl power all the way.” Eve grinned, and bounced on her toes again. “Lead the way, Ghostbuster. I’m ready.”
“You’re really not,” Claire said, “but here goes.”
• • •
Eve had grown up in Morganville, and left it only once in her entire life, and even she didn’t come to this area of town. “I thought they’d torn it down,” she said, as she pulled her big black hearse to a stop about a block from the hotel. That was as close as she could get, given the stuff littering the street ahead . . . trash, but also boards with rusty nails sticking up and broken bricks. It looked like the aftermath of a riot, but it could just as easily have been the last big storm that had swept through, about the time the water-vampire draug had attacked the town. Morganville wasn’t real big on civic services. Or civic pride, in these parts of town.
“They should,” Claire said. “But maybe the vampires don’t want it torn down.”
“Prime lurking territory,” Eve said. “Can’t imagine they get a lot of wandering victims, though. Even meth cookers go more upscale than this.”
Claire had to agree with that. There was a totally creepy vibe to this place, and suddenly she wished she’d called Shane, or Michael, even though they had work to do of their own. This is my job, she told herself, and put the steampunk moonlight on her back while Eve gathered up the weapons. Eve added a shotgun from the back—probably Shane’s—and locked up the car. Claire looked around. In the daylight, she’d have expected this place to seem more sad than scary, but nope. Still scary. The shadows were too da
rk in the bright sunlight, and with the warming wind hissing sand through the streets, it seemed like an alien, empty world.
“Which one?” Eve asked. She didn’t sound worried; she sounded steady, and Claire needed that just now.
“The hotel,” Claire said.
“With the creepy gargoyle? Awesome. Take point, fearless leader. I’ve got your back.”
Eve might sometimes seem fragile, but she wasn’t; growing up in Morganville either broke people or gave them a core of strength that wouldn’t bend. Eve was solid steel where it counted, and having her on hand made Claire feel steadier, sharper, ready.
She adjusted the dragging weight of the—moonlight?—and led the way through the still-open door, down the molding hallway, to the silent, dusty check-in desk. The key for thirteen was still missing. She supposed that Myrnin had held on to it. Could be a problem, she thought, and went behind the counter to rummage around in the drawers. Carefully, of course; she was mindful of the shiny black widow spider that Myrnin had discovered upstairs. There were decades of dead insects in the drawers, but under a desiccated old beetle, she found a ring of keys.
The master set for the rooms.
“So,” Eve said, in an appropriately quiet voice for the venue, “just how scary is this going to be?”
“Well, how do you feel about disappearing rooms with vampires trapped inside?”
“When you put it that way, it is a moot point,” Eve said. “Right. Let’s do this. Oliver said I could have the morning off, but it’s already nearly ten. If I’m not back on the clock at noon, he’ll want blood. I mean, literal, actual blood.”
