by Rachel Caine
“I’m sure,” Eve said. “That’s not him. Come on. We have to move it. If they didn’t hear that—”
They jumped down, landed with simultaneous thumps on the metal grating, and headed for the next tank.
But just ahead, the darkness rippled.
And then a white face emerged from that blackness, eyes that weren’t eyes, a mouth that moved all the wrong ways, that wasn’t human at all except when she looked at it straight on.
Magnus. There were others with him, but she could somehow tell when it was him; the others looked like bad photocopies. They didn’t have the same … gravity.
Magnus said, “You. The girl with clear eyes.”
“Yeah, me. You want me,” Claire said. “Because I can tell who you are. I always could. I just didn’t know it. So give Shane back, and you can have me.”
“Child,” he almost purred. “I can have you in any case.” Magnus’s whole face distorted into something so monstrous and evil that she screamed, couldn’t help it, and all the others copied him like reflections, because that’s all they were, shards and fragments of him.
They were linked, and somehow that was important, vital, but she didn’t have the time to think about it.
She fired at him.
The shotgun kicked hard at her shoulder, and a stinging fog of gunpowder blew back over her, but she was too late; he’d read her intentions and melted back into the others, and the ones who were splattered weren’t him, weren’t the master.
And then he was gone, sinking through the grating.
“Time’s up,” Eve said. “We have to find Shane now.”
CHAPTER NINE
SHANE
I was nearly gone. I could feel it now, how my body felt light and weirdly empty, how my muscles ached. My head pounded harder and faster—low blood pressure, less oxygen getting to where it counted. The water (not really water) around me was a dull crimson now, and it reminded me of terrible things, of opening a motel bathroom door and a tub and my mom’s slack white face and the color of the watery blood around her. She’d had her clothes on, I remembered suddenly. And she hadn’t filled the tub all the way, only about halfway.
I was thinking about it too much, because it started to become real, like those fantasies I’d already rejected. All of a sudden I was there, standing on cold tile, staring at my mother, and her papery eyelids opened, her eyes were the color of ice water as she said, “If you let go, it won’t hurt so much, sweetheart. Claire’s not coming back for you. Nobody ever comes back for you.”
“Mom—” I whispered. It was her voice, just like I remembered … sad and quiet and disappointed. Maybe a little scared. Mom had been scared most of the time. “Mom, I’m sorry, I can’t just give up.”
“You can’t do a lot of things, Shane,” she said. It sounded kind, that voice, but it wasn’t. “You couldn’t save me. You couldn’t save your sister. And you can’t save yourself, either. It’s too late for you. You have to let go, because that’s the only thing that will help stop the pain now. I’m your mother. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“Claire’s going to come back for me.”
“Claire’s a dream, too. She never loved you. Nobody ever really loved you, sweetie. You’re just not built that way. Why would a smart, pretty girl like that want you? You made it up, the way you made up all that other nonsense, about getting married and having a little baby and being happy. Because that will never happen either, son.”
That sounded like my dad, not my mom. He’d always been the one telling me I was hopeless, helpless, worthless. She’d quietly tried to make me feel better, not worse. Until the end.
But the terrible thing about what she was saying was that somewhere deep inside me, the black monster that lived there actually agreed with her. Good things didn’t happen to me, because I didn’t deserve them. All I was made for was fighting, right? For trying, and failing, to protect other people.
“Claire died,” my mother said, and sat up in the tub. The red water swirled around her. “Claire is dead. All this is just you refusing to admit any of that. You’ve gone crazy—don’t you understand that? It’s very sad, but you can’t hold on to fantasy any longer. You know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. It sounded faint, and lost. “No, that’s wrong. We brought her back. She’s alive.”
“Of course you didn’t bring her back. That’s ridiculous. She died, and they took her body away. And you took your father’s gun and you shot yourself, and you’ve been dying ever since. You want to know the truth? She never loved you. She loved that vampire. Myrnin.”
“No.” I was backing up now, and the tile felt sharp and wet under my shoes. No, not shoes. I was barefoot. It felt as if I was standing on broken glass, and the pain helped, somehow. Helped me remember that this room was wrong, that the walls of that bathroom in that cheap motel hadn’t been dripping with water, that my mom hadn’t opened her eyes and said these terrible things, that it was him.
All this was Magnus, talking through my dead mother’s mouth.
“No.” I said it again, louder. “Get out of my head, you freak.”
“Son—”
I charged forward, grabbed the edge of the claw-footed tub and tipped it over on its side, away from me. There was a rush of bloody water around me, and then I was in the tub—no, in water, staring up at cloudy glass, and I was fighting it, banging my hands against the cover that held me in. I left bloody handprints on it, and the blows were weak, but it meant something.
So did the bobbing light that I could see coming from the side.
My face was out of the water, the liquid, and I pulled in a breath and yelled. It came out a weakened croak, but I tried again, shouted harder, and battered the glass again.
Claire. Claire came back. But wait, maybe that wasn’t right, maybe I’d made her up, made it all up, maybe she’d never existed, or maybe she had died, or maybe she didn’t love me at all …
But it wasn’t Claire who found me.
The face was familiar, but not her. And it wasn’t a girl. A larger, more squared-off face I recognized. Dick, I thought finally. Dick Morrell. To be fair, I guessed, I really ought to call him Richard now, if he was here to save my life. It sucked to be rescued by a Morrell, after all the energy I’d put into hating the whole family.
This couldn’t be a fantasy, because no way in hell would I ever fantasize about a Morrell showing up to save me.
Richard wiped moisture from the glass and saw me, and from his expression what he saw must not have been pretty. He yelled something, and then Hannah Moses was there, too, and somebody else, God, was that Monica? Maybe I was hallucinating after all. The three of them shoved the glass away.
I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t. The draug were swirling around me, devouring my blood fast now, trying to kill me before I could get away. They’d been holding back, I realized. Making me last. That was why they’d put me in shallow water, so I wouldn’t drown before they sucked out the last drops.
I managed to hold up a hand. It was pale and trembling, but I got it in the air, and Hannah grabbed it and pulled, hard. Once my shoulders were up, Richard took hold, too, and pushed, and I rolled over the lip of—what was it? A pool? No, some kind of container, maybe part of the purification process for the water treatment—and I hit hard steel grating with enough force to bruise, except I probably didn’t have much blood left to form any bruises. My skin was sunburn-red and stinging as if I’d rolled in broken glass, but I was alive.
Barely.
“Claire,” I whispered. I tried to get up, but my arms were too weak to lift me up. “Where’s Claire?”
Hannah crouched down next to me and took out her cell phone. She hit a button, listened for a tense few seconds, and hung up. “We need to get him out of here. Monica. Take his other side.”
“Me? Are you kidding? Blood is never coming out of this dress!”
I wasn’t imagining her, that was for sure, because I would neve
r, ever, imagine Monica, and even if I did, why would I make her so damn useless? “Shut up,” I managed to say. She gave me a filthy look as she bent down and put her shoulder under mine. My right arm draped over her shoulder. I hoped I was bleeding on her.
“You shut up. I broke both heels off my shoes on these stupid grates of yours.” She looked pale, and scared out of her mind, but she was still Monica.
Maybe that did mean there was still a Claire out there, somewhere. It was hard to know. Hard to figure out what was real, what was false, what was just a dream.
This felt real. The pain felt very real.
Hannah and Monica muscled me up to a standing position, not that it did much good, because I couldn’t do more than shuffle along with them. “Richard,” Hannah said, and Richard Morrell turned to glance at her. “Watch our backs.”
“Done,” he said. He looked at me for a second, and nodded. “Glad you’re okay, Shane.”
I wasn’t, of course. But it was nice of him to think so. “Thanks,” I said. “For coming.” Like it was some kind of party that I’d thrown. How polite I was, all of a sudden.
“Thank Hannah. She was the one who signed us up.” He smiled, and all of a sudden he wasn’t the Dick Morrell I’d distrusted all my life, the one who was the shining football star and class president and perfect student, the good son of the bad mayor. He was just Richard, a guy who’d come to get me.
A guy who’d saved my life. “Hey,” I said, “sorry I’ve been such an asshole to you all your life.”
“Can’t really blame you,” he said. “Everybody judges me by my little sister and my old man. It isn’t unfair exactly.”
“Hey!” Monica said, and aimed a halfhearted, off-balance kick at her brother. Which he avoided. “I am so not voting for you next election.”
“I don’t think there will be another election,” he said, “or that I’d want to be mayor of this slow-motion disaster, anyway. I only did it because they said I had to.” He was walking backward now, facing away from us and watching our tails as we inched along the walkway. I began to wake up enough to see that we were in the water treatment plant’s lower levels, which reeked even though they were open to the air. There were tanks on all sides, and open pools on the other side of the chain link. Sewage was moving through there, or should have been, I guessed; it was no longer going anywhere, which was part of why it stank so badly.
I’d been locked in the last set of shallow tanks, where the recycled and treated water was given a final rinse before heading into the storage towers.
But it was worse than that, a whole lot worse. The pool we were passing now was large, and it was deep, and it had bodies. Just like the Civic Pool, but this water was a murky gray-green color, thick with draug and contaminants.
This was Magnus’s new blood garden, and it teemed with the draug, although few of them had any kind of shape to them. They were ignoring us, because we were human, and they were ripping into their favorite snacks. I felt the droplets of draug that were still on me sliding down, drawn toward the main pool, and a trickle of water ran from my feet to the edge.
Hannah had paused, staring. Monica made a strangled noise and tried to pull me forward, but I stayed put. “What?” Monica demanded. “Okay, fine, drowned people, gross, but we have to go!”
“Not yet,” Hannah said. “Hold on to him.” She slipped out from under my arm, and Monica staggered on her heel-less shoes as I sagged against her.
“Hey, watch the hands, Collins!” she snapped. As if I had any control over them, or wanted to feel her up anyway. She was just scared, and she wanted nothing more than to dump me and run.
I guessed that it was kind of impressive that she didn’t do that.
“Hannah?” Richard asked, backing toward her. “What are we doing?”
“We can’t leave this. They’re growing in numbers again. We have to take them down if we can.”
“How?”
“I have silver powder,” Hannah said. She grabbed the phone again and dialed. “I need to let them know to evac. Come on, come on …”
She finally got an answer.
I heard the screams coming out of the phone from four feet away.
CHAPTER TEN
MICHAEL
Getting the attention of the draug wasn’t a problem. From the moment I ran into the water treatment plant I knew they’d felt me, seen me, sensed my approach; they could detect me the way I could feel a heartbeat across the room. Predator senses. They were tuned to vampires, and I was young, vulnerable, blasting full volume Come eat me. I’m easy.
So far, my brilliant plan was working. Shane would have been pleased; in fact, he would have been right in there with me, I knew that. Hang in there, bro, I silently begged him. We’d had our good times and bad times, but when I thought of Shane what I mostly remembered was holding on to him the night Alyssa died. Holding him back from running into the burning house to die along with her. Then holding him back from attacking Monica Morrell, who’d been standing there flicking a lighter.
That crazy suicidal streak of his had always scared me, because I knew it was still inside him. But this time … this time I was hoping he’d be holding on with both hands. He had things to live for now. People who loved him.
Yeah, and one of them is you, and you left him here.
Shane wasn’t the only one who could wallow in guilt. I was soaking in it, because I’d left him. I’d done it because at the time I’d thought Myrnin was right—that Shane couldn’t have survived more than a few minutes. Myrnin had taken advantage of our shock and confusion. Mine especially. I had the keys. I could have said, Hell no—screw you. I’m going back for my friend. Instead, I’d mostly thought of getting the girls away from there, cutting our losses. And that had been Myrnin’s focus. Claire wasn’t ever willing to admit it, but we all knew that Myrnin put her safety ahead of anyone else’s. Even his own.
Just as I had put Eve’s first, in the heat of the moment. Shane wouldn’t even blame me for that, the jackass. He’d have done exactly the same thing. And he’d be right here, right now, moving with the shadows, luring the enemy away from those we needed to protect and taking the worst of it on ourselves.
I sometimes thought he’d had a little too much influence on me. I never used to be suicidal.
I spotted a still pool of dirty water ahead, near the corner of the building, and slowed; there was no way to be sure if it was safe or infected with the draug, but I couldn’t take the chance. Avoiding its slippery edges took me under a drain spout, which I missed until the liquid gushed out and landed on me with a wet slap.
The draug formed out of it, clinging to my back, clawing at me. They weren’t strong, but everywhere they touched skin it felt like acid burning off layers. The clothes stopped it for only a few seconds. If the draug couldn’t soak through it, they flowed around and under, seeking prey.
Junkies seeking their particular brand of crack.
I had a shotgun loaded with silver, but there was no way to get it into position to hurt the one on my back without doing damage to myself. My strength didn’t work well against the draug, because they were mush in this form, and when something has a blob of a body, it’s difficult to get anything like a real grip.
I scraped it off against the rough brick side of the building, and my shirt got torn in the process. The skin beneath felt burned and raw, and already I seemed noticeably weaker.
Worse: the noise cancellation device that I’d been wearing clipped to my belt was shattered. I held my breath and tried not to listen … and then realized that I didn’t need to worry. The draug weren’t singing here. Not at all. Not even a hum. If they’d been able to make that sound, I’d have lost my focus, gotten confused, been overtaken … but something had happened to them, something to impair their ability to generate that call. When they’d first arrived in Morganville, they hadn’t been able to sing, either. Magnus had gone after vampires one by one, and only when he had a certain number of draug under his command co
uld he start that eerie, beautiful call that drew us in against our will.
We must have killed enough, at least for now, to rob him of that power. Eve would have, at this point, said, “Go us!” but I wasn’t feeling especially victorious. I was feeling weak. Got to keep moving. The whole point of this was to draw Magnus’s attention and get the rest of the draug to come after me; they needed all the hot, tasty vampire they could get, and I was right here, waiting. But if I waited too long, I could draw them right into my friends instead, especially if I stuck too close to the building itself.
I avoided the puddle, which looked too still, and moved on.
On the side of the plant was a long chain-link fence, posted with warning signs. These made handy grips as I scaled up and over and dropped on the other side … then saw the treatment pools. The water was also treated in the pipes, but there was some kind of system I didn’t fully understand to take it from gray to clean, and each of the pools looked different—a progression of treatments. There were also covered sections and containers on the other side of the fences, probably for taking samples. All in all, it was pretty much Draug Heaven … as long as they didn’t mind questionable water quality.
And I was in trouble, because I almost immediately realized that the pool nearest to me had waves in it. Thin, small waves at the far end, building into large tidal surges as they approached the edges of the ponds.
They were coming for me, and I was already weak. If another one got hold of me, I’d end up at the bottom of that pond, helpless and hopeless this time.
There were walkways over all the pools—rusted metal grates that were elevated about five feet over the surface. I got a running start and leaped over the onrushing waves, landed with a solid thump of feet on metal, and started running against the tide, heading for the far end of the body of water.
The waves collapsed and churned in confusion, as if a school of piranha had turned on itself, and then reversed course to race after me. I felt the shuddering slap as the liquid hit the metal. Smaller waves were trying to leap up and grab hold ahead of me, but they didn’t have momentum and I was hauling ass; the best any of them did was to throw droplets on my shoes, and I kicked those off as I ran. I made it to the end of the walkway. There were two choices here—off onto the ground on the other side, and from there over the fence, or a switchback that ran another, identical walkway at an angle across the next pond.
