by Rachel Caine
Typical.
The name on the mailbox, written in messy black paint, was SUMMERS, but there was nothing in the box itself when Shane snapped it open. He shrugged and closed it, then unshipped the flexible hose of the flamethrower from behind him.
Claire mouthed, It’s a wooden house! She had to try three times before comprehension dawned on him. He looked disappointed, but he put the flammable fun away and got out his silver-loaded shotgun instead. Claire had hers hanging heavy in the crook of her arm, pointed so that if anything happened it would fire into the ground (and probably her foot, but that was better than the alternatives). Hunters would be so disappointed in me, she thought. She didn’t even really know how to carry the thing safely.
The front door—plain wood, warped from wind and weather—was tightly closed. Naomi studied it for a moment, then kicked, and the entire door and the frame slammed inside to lie flat on the narrow hallway floor.
Even Shane looked respectfully impressed … until she stopped at the threshold. She made a sign shooing them inside, and Claire finally understood that there was still some kind of barrier in place on the house itself. Someone—someone human—was still in residence here, and without an invitation Naomi was barred from entry. The rules of ownership were complicated in Morganville—ancestral houses and bloodlines, current occupants, whether vampires lived inside, all factored in, but clearly this was a human house, with a human barrier that kept vampires out, period.
Great. Well, at least she’d opened the door.
Shane must have figured it out, too, because he nodded to Claire, winked, and stepped through the doorway, walking on the unsteady fallen door itself. There was a faint dust of plaster in the air, and Claire sneezed, but she didn’t figure they were being particularly stealthy, what with the door blowing in and all. Shane was holding his shotgun easily, pointed at an angle toward the floor, so she imitated him. The wisdom of that became apparent when she tripped; she realized, with a cold start, that if she’d had the shotgun pointed up, near her face, she might have killed herself if she’d hit the trigger.
Shane checked the open room on the left, and she took the room on the right. Whoever had lived here, they hadn’t been more concerned with the inside of the house than the outside; it needed work, badly. The ceiling was sagging as if there’d been a bad leak that was dissolving the plaster. In fact, she could see water drops running down the wall from the light fixture, which wouldn’t have been safe if the power had been on. Even on its best days, though, this house would have earned a failing score on any of those how-clean-is-your-home reality shows; it smelled of mold and rotten food, and it felt icy cold. The furniture had the off-kilter look of a nightmare, and where there were children’s toys, they too had the look of something a serial-killing tot would drag around.
This did not look like a place where one would find Theo Goldman. Not at all.
She and Shane searched the whole house, even the attic, which revealed a bucket-sized hole in the roof through which water continued to drip. No wonder the place was falling apart. But no sign of anyone, human or vampire.
“This place needs housekeeping,” Shane said. “With my flamethrower.” It was a sign of just how bad things were that Shane thought that.
She looked up to smile at him, and although she heard nothing, she saw the sudden dawning of shock and alarm in his face, and had just enough time to gasp and try to turn around before a heavy, sweaty, muscular arm went around her neck and jerked her off balance. Shane instantly put the shotgun up to a firing position, but then realized what he was doing and put it down again. He set it carefully on the table and held up both hands in an I surrender kind of position.
Claire squeaked for air, went up on her toes, and tried to ease the strain on her throat. She was having a terrifying, white-out flashback of the moment that Magnus had seized her, had twisted until she’d felt and heard the crackle-snap of bones. Her heart was as loud as a jackhammer in her chest, and her pulse was roaring so loudly it sounded like a hurricane in her ears. She couldn’t see who held her, but it was a man’s body, a man’s hairy arm. She clawed at it, but her blunt nails weren’t going to do much. Think, Claire. Shane had taught her some basic things to do. Everyone is going to be bigger and stronger than you, he’d said, without being critical about it. You have to learn how to hit them in the weak spots.
The first thing he’d taught her to do was not to do what she was doing now … standing on her tiptoes, cooperating with her captor. It was terrifying, but it was Shane’s calm voice in her head now, telling her exactly what to do. Turn your head toward his elbow. Tuck in your chin. Grab his left wrist in your right hand. Punch down and behind you with your left as you turn and pull. Then don’t stop when he lets go, move in, go for his eyes and punch his throat. Never run. Never let him get his momentum again.
She did it, calmly, turning and tucking and punching, and suddenly she was free, and she was facing her attacker. She registered him only as a foot taller than she was, and only for geometry’s sake; faces and names didn’t matter right now. Her right fist blurred as she went for a fast, hard punch to his exposed throat …
But she stopped, because Theo Goldman stepped in like a shadow and grabbed her fist before it landed.
Her attacker stumbled back, white-faced with shock; he clearly hadn’t expected the little girl to come at him like that, and Claire felt a savage sense of victory before sanity kicked in again.
“Theo? What the hell?” He really hadn’t changed, but then, vampires didn’t, did they? He just looked … kind, with warm dark eyes and hair dusted with gray, and lines on his face that most vampires didn’t have. Smile lines.
He did, however, look tired.
Shane hadn’t moved, except to pick up the shotgun. His eyes were steady and cold on the man with Theo who’d grabbed her, and Claire sensed that he was waiting for the guy to make a second attempt.
The guy didn’t move, though Claire, still trembling and adrenaline fueled, was almost sorry.
Theo shook his head, then walked to the table and picked up a curling piece of paper. He turned the sheet over and wrote swiftly, then held it up so they both could see through the dim light of the kitchen window. HAROLD IS A FRIEND. HE WAS TRYING TO PROTECT ME. APOLOGIES.
“Great,” Claire muttered, but her fury was rapidly fading as she looked at Harold. He looked … wrong, a little. He seemed awkward, and fidgeted uncomfortably like a schoolkid caught cheating on a test. He also seemed scared.
In fact, despite his large size, he was acting exactly like a kid. Even down to the body language. There was something developmentally off about him, and he looked at Theo with miserable distress, as if he knew he’d done wrong but didn’t know why.
Claire backed up next to Shane and pushed down on the barrel of his shotgun. He was getting the same impression, she saw, and he nodded and dropped his guard. Slightly.
Shane said, “We’re here to get you,” but Theo shook his head and pointed to his ears. There was something weird about the way they looked, but Claire honestly couldn’t make out the details in the shadows. Shane claimed the pencil again and wrote, WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE. HAVE TRUCK. WILL TAKE YOU.
Theo read it, considered, and shook his head. He marked through it and responded, MUST TAKE HAROLD, TOO.
Shane shrugged, marked through it, and wrote (in smaller letters, since the paper was running out), BIG EFFING TRUCK.
Theo circled the word EFFING and raised his eyebrows. Claire made a frustrated noise in her throat, grabbed the pencil, and marked it out.
Ah, Theo mouthed, and smiled. Good.
The paper was scribbled over, thoroughly, so Claire hunted around in the wreckage of the kitchen, avoiding the piles of trash and really avoiding the sink full of dried, filthy dishes, until she found a balled-up flyer in the corner of the room. It was, she realized, the gym flyer, the one that had caused them so much trouble when Shane had taken up self-defense classes there a few months back. Another aftershoc
k, but less terrifying.
She turned it over and wrote, AMELIE NEEDS YOU. URGENT. VERY SICK.
Theo’s face went blank, and then tight with alarm. He scribbled back, WHAT HAPPENED?
DRAUG, she replied. BIT HER.
He mouthed something that she didn’t understand, and covered his mouth in a gesture of real distress. Then he nodded decisively and turned to Harold. He made a series of fluid hand signs, and Harold brightened up and nodded.
It was right about then that Claire realized what was so weird about Theo’s ears. There was something sticking out of them, sideways. Like …
Like needles. Really long needles. Knitting needles.
It was so shocking that she took a step back, eyes wide, and finally recovered enough to point to Theo and then gesture at his ears, urgently.
He smiled, but there was something dark in it. He took the paper back and wrote, MUST KEEP MY EARDRUMS PIERCED. OTHERWISE CANNOT RESIST THE CALL.
The vampire version of earplugs, she realized … literally disabling his ears. But it must have hurt horribly, keeping those needles in place to block healing. She felt faint imagining it.
Harold fell in docilely enough behind Theo, heading for the door; Claire, at Shane’s hand wave, darted on ahead to make sure Harold didn’t do anything crazy when he saw Naomi.
But Naomi was gone, and for a second Claire was terrified that something had happened to her. Then she heard the rumble of the truck’s engine and saw that Naomi had started it up. She might not have driving experience, but she’d learned how to turn an ignition key, at least.
It all looked safe.
Claire put the gun at a ready position and stepped outside … just as a sudden gush of liquid rushed out of a rusty drainpipe at the corner of the porch, sending a thick wave across her path. At the same time, rain started falling faster, and harder, pounding like ball bearings on the fabric of her jacket and stinging her exposed skin.
She had just enough time to bring the shotgun up as the draug rose up out of the pool of water in front of her, clawed hands outstretched.
Still, even now, she couldn’t say what it actually looked like … because the human brain tried and tried to fit it into some sense, some pattern, but failed utterly. There were eyes, horrible gelatinous eyes that somehow weren’t eyes at all; there was a body that was not a body. What she registered as clawed hands was probably something else again, something worse, but it was the biggest warning her uncomprehending brain could screech at her, and she reacted instantly.
She pulled the trigger.
The impact slammed the stock of the shotgun against her shoulder so hard that she felt something crack—bone, probably—and a white snap of pain sizzled through her from neck to heels. At the same time, the roar of the shot hit her like a physical slap.
But that was nothing compared to what the silver did to the draug.
The pellets didn’t have time to spread far, but tore a neat circular hole four inches across straight through the draug’s—well, head, she supposed, was the nearest equivalent. There was a shriek of high-pitched agony, and then the draug collapsed in a wet slap as it lost all consistency and shape. Claire yelped as she leaped out of the way of the wave of its … corpse? If it was dead, which she couldn’t assume. But it wasn’t coming for her, and that was what was important.
There were more of them, rising out of hidden pools in the muddy yard, out of the drain in the street, condensing out of the rain itself.
Oh God. There were so many.
The sound of Shane firing as he pushed forward shocked her into pumping her shotgun, raising it, and firing again. It hurt, but she kept it up, racking and firing again and again. Shane was clearing a path to the truck, so she concentrated on keeping the draug away from the sides. She fell back behind Theo and Harold, keeping them as safe as she could.
The draug didn’t really care about humans; too little gain for them, so it was Theo she really had to worry about. They’d kill to get to him, of course, but unless Harold got in the way he’d be all right … for now. She killed, or at least discorporated, at least five draug before they reached the truck.
Theo didn’t get in. He stood aside, calm as ice water, as Harold scrambled up first. Claire and Shane took up positions on either side of him, firing to keep the draug away, and even though her ears were ringing and her heart racing, Claire could hear another shotgun going off. Naomi was keeping them away from her side of the truck as she waited.
Finally Theo jumped up and into the bed of the truck, and Shane followed last.
Now he tossed the shotgun to Theo, unhooked the nozzle of the flamethrower, and hit the ignition button.
Claire gasped and dived for the driver’s side of the truck. Naomi let fly with one last blast at a draug ten feet away, then slid over, and Claire climbed in. Had she thought the truck was too tall before? She didn’t even remember jumping up this time.
The dim afternoon suddenly exploded in orange light behind them, and Claire looked in the rearview mirror to see her boyfriend spraying the entire street with an intense stream of pure, concentrated flame. Where it touched the draug, they evaporated. She could hear the grating, metallic screaming even through the hearing protection of Naomi’s noise cancellation. They sure weren’t singing anymore.
As she put the truck in gear and popped the clutch, Shane lurched forward and nearly fell out of the open bed of the truck—right into the draug.
But Theo grabbed him by the shoulder and held him in place as Harold crouched in the corner of the truck’s bed, looking scared out of his mind.
Claire sighed in relief, and hit the gas pedal hard. In less than thirty seconds, the rain had lessened again to a gentle patter on the roof, and Shane shut off the flamethrower’s little ignition burner.
Naomi kept watch out her window, shotgun ready, all the way back to the warm, welcoming lights of Founder’s Square.
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAIRE
Eve’s coffee and breakfast and cookies were still out on the table when Claire, Theo, and Harold passed through the big round hall. Well, some of it was still there; it looked as if her cooking had been popular this morning. Claire didn’t see Eve, which was odd; she would have expected her to still be working off her nervous caffeinated high. Probably still baking. Or, more worrying, maybe she really had gone out with vampires to put together caches of weapons around town.
Please be made up, she thought to both Michael and Eve. I don’t like it when things are bad.
But she had a sinking feeling that things were going to get worse before they got better between those two.
“Harold,” Theo said, and opened up a door. “You’ll be safe here. I will be back soon.”
Harold made urgent signs to him—deaf, which was probably the only reason he’d survived out there in draug-held Morganville. Theo smiled and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No one will bother you here. You have my word.”
Harold didn’t seem convinced, but he went into the room and Theo shut the door behind him.
“So … is he a friend of yours?” Claire asked.
“A patient,” Theo said. “And now we must go to another of my patients: Amelie.”
All the doors leading out of this room looked alike to Claire, and she hesitated, wondering which one led to the Founder of Morganville, but Theo didn’t. He made straight for one of them, opened it, and hurried through; she sped to catch up before the door closed again.
They were in one of the building’s endless, identical carpeted hallways, with the tasteful (and probably outrageously expensive) art on the walls. At the end of the hall was a set of double doors, guarded by two vampires. Amelie’s bodyguards.
“Theo Goldman,” Theo said as he approached. “I’m expected.”
“Doctor.” One of them nodded, and reached to open the door for him. “First room on the left.”
Claire followed him in. The guards eyed her, but neither moved to stop her. They just closed the
door quietly behind her.
It was odd, but the smell struck her first. Vampires generally didn’t smell of anything … maybe a faint rusty whiff of blood if they’d just fed, or faded flowers at the worst, but nothing like the cloying, damp, sickroom aroma that had sunk deep into the room’s thick carpet and velvet drapes. The place looked beautiful, but it smelled … rotten.
Oliver stepped out of the first room on the left and closed the door behind him. He had his sleeves rolled up to expose pale, muscular forearms. There was a fading bite mark on his right wrist, and a bright smear of blood. He looked … tired, Claire thought. Not the Oliver she was used to seeing.
When he saw them, he straightened to his usual stick-up-his-butt posture and nodded to Theo. His gaze passed over her, but he didn’t say anything. It’s like I’m not even really here, she thought, and felt a surge of anger. We just risked our lives for you, jerk. The least you could do is say thanks.
“How much did they tell you?” Oliver asked Theo, who shrugged.
“Not much,” he said. “She has been bitten, yes?”
“By the master draug. Magnus.”
Theo paused and went utterly still, his gaze locked on Oliver’s face. Then he glanced down at the bitten skin, and the faint bloodstain. “That won’t work,” he said. “You know that. You only endanger and weaken yourself.”
Oliver said nothing. He just stepped aside and let Theo proceed into the room.
When Claire would have followed him, just like the shadow she appeared to have become, Oliver’s hand flashed out and grabbed hold of her shoulder. “Not you,” he said. “She is too ill for human visitors.”
What that meant, Claire thought, was that Amelie was beyond distinguishing between friends and, say, food. She shuddered. She’d seen Amelie go savage, but even then it had been Amelie in control, just in full vampire mode.
