by Rachel Caine
The voice inside my head rose to a deafening shriek. You’re breaking all your promises. You’re giving up, you asshole. Wake up! It felt like being plunged into ice water, and for a breathtaking second I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t live with the stinging pain of it.
Michael grabbed my shoulder. “You okay, man?”
Yes. Of course I was. I was always okay, right? Everything was fine.
“I am leading a group to take Magnus,” Oliver told me and Michael out in the hallway; he supported Amelie with an arm under hers, as if he were escorting her to some fancy dance, but it was obvious he was keeping her upright. “I want the two of you with us.”
“Good,” I said. I was always up for a good fight, even against the draug—maybe especially against the draug. I would never get the images of Claire lying so still and broken on the floor of the Glass House out of my head, even though she was okay now. It had been the lowest moment of my life, in a life with plenty of cellar-diving events. I tried hard not to relive how I’d felt, seeing her that way. “Where are we going?”
Oliver didn’t bother to give info, but that was typical. He did arm us up, which was nice—shotguns, which felt solid and deadly in my hands. Then we fell into line with a bunch of vampires and even a dozen humans—surprisingly, the new leader of the human resistance (all the resistance leaders were named Captain Obvious) was one of them, sporting his I-hate-vamps stake tattoo but carrying a shotgun all the same. He nodded to me guardedly; I nodded back. That was like an entire conversation for somebody like him.
“How’d they talk you into this?” I asked him under my breath as we started moving toward the exit. Amelie was watching us go, like a queen sending her troops off to battle—back straight, hand raised, shining and pale and hard as diamond.
“Temporary,” the captain said. His eyes kept darting around at the vampires, never trusting for a second; I knew that feeling—hell, I lived it. “Common enemy and all that crap, but it ain’t like I’m signing up to be best friends. These vermin kill people, too. That’s all I care about.” He gave me a longer glance. “You?”
“The draug hurt somebody I care about,” I said. “And they’re going to answer for that.”
It was an acceptable reply, and he jerked his chin in approval—but his eyes went flat and cold when he looked past me at Michael. For him, Michael was the Enemy. I wondered whether that was ever going to change. Probably not, not until the vampires themselves changed it. And let’s face it, the chances of that were slim. Nobody likes giving up power, especially the kind that keeps them rich and safe and well fed.
Captain Obvious looked back, straight into my eyes, and said, “Something’s eating you. Wake up.”
Something’s eating you! Listen!
I struggled against that wave again, this time hot and red instead of icy cold, and came out the other side of it, into calm, still waters. “I’m fine,” I told him. “Everything’s just fine. We’re all okay.”
“Sure we are,” he said, and smiled. “Damn straight.”
The vamps had appropriated more buses for troop transport; these happened to be Morganville school buses. Ah, the memories. The cheap, shiny leatherette seats smelled like melted crayons, piss, and fear; I’d gotten the snot beaten out of me a couple of times on a bus just like this, before I’d taken charge of that. It had been righteous, though; I’d jumped in when ninth-grade Sammy Jenkins was slapping sixth-grade Michael around. Good times.
The vampires obviously didn’t care for the nostalgic ambience, because they slammed the windows down and let the cold, moist air roll through the bus. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were thinning and blowing away to reveal a clear blue sky. It might even warm up a little, burn off the thin puddles standing on the asphalt.
The desert was sluicing off the water as fast as it had fallen. Within a day, rain would be a distant memory. That was why the vamps had moved here—because water wouldn’t stand. It gave the draug fewer and fewer places to hide.
You’re drowning, Shane. Wake up. Something’s eating you. WAKE UP!
This time, I could almost ignore it. Almost. Except for the horrible, burning pain that wouldn’t go away. Wouldn’t let me think.
I could feel the tension and the anticipation in the vamps around me. For the first time in a long time, they were going to war—against an enemy who’d been hunting them, killing them, for ages. And they were ready. The violence in the air was thick, and every single one of them looked as hard as a bone knife. When Michael glanced at me, his eyes had gone bloodred. Usually that would have scared me, or at least disgusted me, but not now.
Right now, I wished mine could do the same, because what was burning inside me was just as bright, and just as crimson. I wanted to hurt the draug for what they’d done to Claire.
To all of us. To me.
This isn’t right. …
Shut up, I told whatever it was in my head. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.
Nobody talked. Not even the other humans. Not even Michael. We just concentrated on what was ahead of us.
A fight, a real, genuine, straight-up fight. I was scared on some level, scared in a way I’d never been before, but I was part of something bigger now. Was this what it felt like to be in the army, to put on a uniform and all of a sudden be brothers (and yeah, sisters) with people you might not even like in private life? I imagined it was, because right now, in this moment, I would kill or die for anyone on this bus. Even the vamps. Somehow that felt wrong, but it also felt right. A better version of the life I’d been struggling to lead these past few years.
I would even fight and die for Myrnin, who was sitting up toward the front. He’d changed clothes. I liked him better when he was dressed crazy, but he’d gone black leather now, and that looked damn dangerous. I was glad Claire wasn’t there to see it. Some part of me was always going to worry about how she felt about him, so it was best she didn’t see him looking all tough. That was my job.
As the clouds parted, the vamps snapped the windows back up, and the tinting—why the hell was there vampire-quality tinting on a school bus, anyway? That made no sense …
Wake up, Shane!
The tinting cut off my view of where we were going. Not that it mattered. I had my shotgun, and I was ready to rock. It was so much easier to do something than to just … think.
Because when I stopped to think, everything fell apart. Shattered. Melted.
Wake up.
We pulled to a stop, and the vampires sitting behind me opened the emergency door; those of us nearby piled out through it, and the vampires moved in a blur to the shelter of the nearest shade while the humans took their time sorting out where we were.
It was Morganville High.
The old pile hadn’t improved from the last time I’d been walking the halls and ditching class. It had been ugly when it had been built back in the 1950s, and hadn’t gotten any prettier over the years. Solid, square red brick, with patches where people (including me) had tagged it that had been covered over with white paint (all the damage, none of the art). The sign outside had a picture of the school mascot, the Viper; we’d all known how stupidly ironic that was, but right now I kind of liked how his faded plastic fangs flashed in the sunlight. The lettering on the sign itself read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, but they weren’t renovating. It was just closed, like everything else in Morganville.
With no students running around, it looked and felt eerily dead. Water dripped from the gutters on the roof, but slowly; the gushing rains were long gone now, and the puddles in the yard were dried to a thin crust of wet sand under the sparse, struggling grass. Behind the school was the football field, the single most important thing in any small Texas town, but we weren’t headed there, of course.
The vamps shattered one of the big steel-wire-reinforced windows in the shadows, and began piling inside. I joined up with Michael and Captain Obvious. “Where the hell are we going?” Captain Obvious asked, which was—heh—a perfectly obvious question, r
eally.
And I knew the answer, without even thinking about it. “The pool.” MHS had its own indoor pool. I’d been on the swim team, so I knew all about that. It wasn’t a great pool, and in retrospect I was surprised the vampires had been persuaded to allow one to be built at all, but I supposed they’d figured one more enclosed indoor pool wouldn’t hurt.
No. They closed down the pool. Drained it. Filled it in. It’s not there anymore. Wake up, idiot.
The voice in my head wouldn’t shut up. Of course the pool was there. Now the surviving draug had withdrawn to this one spot, this place where I’d swum meets and won prizes. It was a personal place to me, and they’d violated it.
They were trapped.
So are you!
They were stranded, because of the closed valves on the pipes and the silver nitrate in the water.
Wake up, Shane!
I shot my first draug halfway through the hallway; he was hiding in a classroom and oozed out of the shadows to grab a vampire by the back of the neck. The vamp had twisted free, and as soon as she was out of range I yelled and fired, and the silver shotgun pellets ripped the draug apart in a splatter of colorless liquid that smoked on the floor. It tried to reform, but another vampire—Myrnin, in his black leather—took what looked like a salt shaker from his pocket and tapped out some metallic powder into the mess.
Silver. It set the scraps of the draug on fire, and when the blaze was done, there was nothing but a damp smear on the floor.
Myrnin bared his fangs in a fierce grin, and we went on.
Nothing had changed in the school since I’d last been inside—the same lockers, dented and scratched; the same classroom doors; the same trophies in the case. I’d won at least two of them.
They were still there, with my name shining on them.
You never won any trophies, Shane. Of course I had. I’d always wanted to win them, and I had. This is a fantasy—don’t you get that? Wake up!
About a hundred draug later, we reached the pool, and we hadn’t lost a single one of our party along the way. But the pool was a different story. Firing shotguns loaded with silver in a room full of vampires was pretty damn dangerous, so only the first and second ranks got to have the firepower; the rest of us had to wait until the first rank had to reload, and then we pushed forward, dropped to one knee, and fired steadily at the mass of draug—the identical faces, the bland and empty not-people with things shivering inside them—as they approached. A second rank fired over our heads. My ears went quickly numb from the pounding, shattering roars of the guns, but I didn’t care. What I cared about was making every single shot count.
I wanted Magnus. I wanted the bastard who’d started this, who owned it, who had killed Claire and nearly killed me along with her, even though I’d gotten her back.
Magnus, of course, didn’t risk himself.
Myrnin figured this out, because that was what Myrnin did; like Claire, he was a sideways thinker, and while the rest of us Joe Average idiots blasted away at the draug in front of us, he stepped away toward the edge of the pool and crouched down. He had a beaker in his hand, glittering and full to the brim with deadly silver and he set it down to pry the cap loose.
“He’s in the water!” Myrnin shouted. “Keep them busy—”
But he didn’t have time to finish whatever he was going to say, because Magnus reached up out of the water, grabbed him, and dragged him down.
I dropped my shotgun and ran for the beaker, pried the top off, and emptied it into the water.
The silver inside sluiced out into the water in a spreading, toxic stream. Myrnin had hold of something that had to be Magnus, the master draug, the first draug, and he was pulling him relentlessly toward the silver.
And into it.
I couldn’t see Myrnin at all now, because the water went from murky to black, swirling with vivid veins of silver. And then boiling.
The vampires were just standing there, even Oliver, staring down into the water. Nobody was moving. Captain Obvious wasn’t going to go racing to the rescue, either.
I’m not going to lie; I could have saved Myrnin. I was probably the only one who could have, who might have survived diving into that boiling, raging pool where the draug were dying.
But I didn’t try.
I left him there to die.
Just like he left you. Remember? Left you to be eaten. You need to wake up. NOW.
Nobody had left me behind. I was fine. I was just fine.
It’s you in there. You’re being consumed, Shane. Eaten. Can’t you feel it?
I did, for an agonizing second of utter horror. Felt it stripping me bare. Felt the invasion.
And then the calm settled over me, and it was all okay.
Everything was okay.
Always.
The clock ran faster after that.
The time between the pool and Claire’s eighteenth birthday was a gauzy blur; I didn’t remember much, but nothing much happened to remember, either. Amelie got better. Vampires came back. Morganville got rebuilt. Nothing ever changes, really—that’s how Morganville is. It just … exists.
I was just happy. We were all … happy. Claire cried over Myrnin, but she was happy he had saved us, happy he had died a hero.
The hero of Morganville.
The martyr.
You’re no martyr. You’re a fighter. So fight. NOW. Stop this!
Everything was fine.
One year to the day from their not-so-successful engagement party, Michael and Eve finally tied the knot, in the church with Father Joe presiding. Amelie gave her blessing, and I had to wear a tuxedo and a tie. Eve wore bloodred. Of course she did. Claire was the one who looked like a bride, really; she was wearing some other color, but I didn’t really notice except to see the light in her eyes and the smile on her lips as Michael and Eve kissed under the flower arch. Eve threw the bouquet, and as usual, her throwing arm sucked, especially backward, because somehow she managed to throw it to me. I tossed it back. On the second try she hit Monica Morrell, Bitch Queen, which was so not going to happen; no man in his right mind would go there.
At some point when we were passing around the champagne and cutting the cake and dancing, I remember Eve twirling in my arms, light and damp with sweat, and she looked me in the eye and said, “This is a lie, Shane. It’s all a lie, and you know it deep down. Wake up. You have to wake up.” But then she was gone, dancing away with Michael, and I forgot.
It was so much easier to just … forget. Let go. Drift.
I think it was around this time that I went to see Claire’s family. Her mom and dad had moved out of Morganville, because of his health problems more than anything else, though she’d been happy to have them out of the fray; they sort of remembered Morganville, but not the vampires. I went by myself, with Amelie’s permission, and ended up standing in front of Claire’s parents—her dad looked a whole lot healthier, which was odd—to tell them what was on my mind.
“I want to marry your daughter,” I said. Pretty much just like that … no hello, no buildup, nothing, because I was nervous and it just came out.
And Mr. Danvers smiled and said, “Of course you do.” There was something great about that smile, and also, something … off. It was exactly what I’d hoped to see. And that was … weird.
No, there wasn’t anything weird about getting what I wanted for a change. I deserved to be happy. I needed to be happy.
It’s a lie, Shane. Wake up.
Mrs. Danvers said, “Shane, she couldn’t have a better young man.” And her husband nodded. I looked at them for a few seconds in silence. I was sitting in their living room, which looked a lot like the living room they’d had back in Morganville—but then, they would have kept the same furniture, wouldn’t they? I even recognized all the pictures on the walls. They’d put them back in the same spots.
The last time I’d sat down with them like this, it hadn’t gone nearly so well. Oh, no. Mr. Danvers had been angry, and I hadn’t blamed him, because I
’d never intended all this to go so fast with Claire, but I’d said I loved her and I meant it. I still did.
“You’re not angry?” I finally asked. Mr. Danvers chuckled. He sounded just like one of those fathers on an old TV show, I forget which one.
“Of course not,” he said. “Why would we be? You’ve always been there for her, Shane. You’ve always looked after her. And we know she loves you.”
I found myself saying, “What about the stuff you said last time? That she had to wait until after college? About MIT and a career and everything?”
“Well,” Mrs. Danvers said, with that warm, sweet smile that my own mother had never given me, although she’d done her best, “that’s Claire’s decision, of course, but we’ll support whatever she feels is more important.”
It’s all so easy, isn’t it? Like a dream. Exactly like a dream. Wake up.
I didn’t want to wake up. I liked it here.
I found myself shaking Mr. Danvers’s hand, and getting a hug from Claire’s mom, and promising to work with her on the wedding, and all of a sudden I was in my car—when had I gotten the car? I couldn’t remember, but it seemed like I’d had it all along, my own black, shiny, murdered-out car—and driving back to Morganville, with Claire’s grandmother’s wedding ring in my pocket. It was a diamond with rubies on both sides.
No, that was your mother’s ring. Your dad pawned it, remember? To get the money to send you back to Morganville. You didn’t want him to do it. You can’t have it now, can you?
Of course I could.
I was getting married.
The only problem was, none of it seemed real as it sped forward. Not the days that passed in a haze, not when Michael and Eve moved out on their own and left me and Claire the Glass House (and why would they do that, it was Michael’s house, why would he leave it to us?).
Newlyweds needed their own place, Eve told me, and winked. But she didn’t seem like Eve anymore. She was almost … a shadow. Threadbare. A memory of someone I’d known once.
