by Rachel Caine
“There’s still a pretty strong antivampire movement in town,” he said. “It got stronger these last few months. I’ve been trying to keep them calmed down, because if they start this now, they’ll just get themselves killed. And most of them aren’t looking at Amelie’s side as anything but another target. We can’t afford that until Bishop’s gone.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Nothing. Nothing we can do right now. Bishop’s the one pushing the agenda, not us. If he wants a fight tonight, he’s going to get one. Maybe bigger than he wants.”
The fourth address on the list was an apartment—there weren’t many apartment buildings in Morganville, since most people lived in single-family houses, but there were a few. Like in any small town, the complexes varied from crappy to less crappy; there was no such thing as luxury multifamily housing.
The apartment complex they stopped at was on the crappy end of the short spectrum. It was stucco over brick, painted a sun-faded pink, with two stories of apartments built into an open square on a central . . . well, Claire guessed you could call it a courtyard, if you liked a view that included a dry swimming pool with dark scum at one end, some spiky, untrimmed bushes, and an overflowing trash can.
Joe Hess checked apartment numbers. If the run-down appearance of the place bothered him, he didn’t show it. When they reached number twenty-two, he banged loudly on the door. “Police, open up!” he yelled, and pushed Claire out of the way when she tried to stand next to him. He gave her a silent stay there gesture, and listened. She couldn’t hear a thing from inside.
Neither could he, apparently. He shook his head, but as they turned to go, Claire clearly heard someone inside the apartment say, “Help.”
She froze, staring at Detective Hess. He’d heard it, too, and he gestured her even farther back as he pulled his gun from the holster under his jacket. “Willie Combs? You okay in there? It’s Joe Hess. Answer me, Willie!”
“Help,” the voice came again, weaker this time.
Hess tried the door, but it was locked. He took in a deep breath. “Claire, you stay right there. Do not come in. Hear me?”
She nodded. He whirled and kicked into the door, and the cheap hollow wood splintered and flew open on the second try, sending wood and metal flying.
Detective Hess disappeared inside. Claire saw curtains fluttering and blinds tenting as people looked out to see what was going on, but nobody came outside.
Not even in the middle of the day.
It seemed like a very long time until Detective Hess came out with someone held in his arms. It was a girl about Claire’s age, pretty, dressed in a Morganville High T-shirt and sweatpants, like she’d just dropped in from gym class.
She wasn’t moving, and he was holding a towel on her neck.
“Call an ambulance,” he ordered Claire. “Tell them it’s a rush, and bring the bite kit.”
“Is she—”
“She’s alive,” he said, and stretched her out on the concrete, still holding the towel in place. Hess looked up at her with fury shining in his eyes. “Her name is Theresa. Theresa Combs. She’s the oldest of the three kids.”
Claire went cold, and looked at the doorway of the apartment. “They’re not—”
“Let’s focus on the living,” he said. “Hold this on her throat, just like this.” She knelt beside him and pressed her small fingers where his larger ones were. It felt like she was pressing too hard, but he nodded. “Good. Keep doing that. I’m going to make one more sweep inside, just to be sure.”
As he stepped over the girl and back into the apartment, Theresa’s eyes fluttered, and she looked at Claire. Big, dark eyes. Desperate. “Help,” she whispered. “Help Jimmy. He’s only twelve.”
Claire took her hand. “Shhhh. Just rest.”
Theresa’s eyes filled up with tears. “I tried,” she said. “I really tried. Why is this happening to us? We didn’t do anything wrong. We followed all the rules.”
Claire couldn’t do anything to help her, except hold her hand and keep the towel over her throat, just like Detective Hess said. When he came back to the doorway, drawn by the distant howl of an approaching siren, she looked up at him in miserable hope.
He shook his head.
They didn’t speak at all until the paramedics took Theresa away. Claire stayed where she was, on her knees, staring at the blood speckling her trembling fingers. Detective Hess crouched down and handed her a moist wipe, with the attitude of somebody who’d done that sort of thing a lot. He patted her gently on the shoulder. “Deep breaths,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Good job taking care of Theresa. You probably saved her life.”
“Who did that to them?” Once she started wiping her hands, she really couldn’t stop. “Why?”
“It’s been happening all over town,” Hess said. “People whose Protectors went over to Bishop. People who lost their Protectors in the fight. People whose Protectors never cared enough in the first place. Half of this town is nothing but a mobile blood supply right now.” The look on his face, when she glanced up, was enough to make her shiver. “Maybe the crazies are right. Maybe we should kill all the vampires.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, very softly. “Because people never kill people, right?”
He had Eve’s death warrant in his pocket.
He didn’t argue about it.
They found another five people on Hannah’s list, all safe and alive—well, one of them was drunk off his butt at the Barfly, one of the scarier local watering holes, but he was still breathing and unfanged. One by one, they were put on the bus.
By four p.m., the last bus was motoring out of Morganville, heading for parts unknown (to Claire, at least), and she was left standing with those who were left. Richard Morrell. Hannah Moses. Shane and Eve, standing there together, whispering. Joe Hess, talking on the police car radio. There were other people around, but they stayed in the shadows, and Claire had the strong suspicion that they were vampires. Amelie’s vampires, getting organized for something big.
Without warning, Claire felt a burning sensation on her arm.
When she pulled back her sleeve, she saw the tattoo was swirling, like a pot of stirred ink under her skin. Bishop was trying to pull her in. She could feel the impulse to walk out of the warehouse and head for Founder’s Square, but she resisted.
When she was afraid she couldn’t hold back anymore, she told Shane. He put his arms around her. “I’m not letting you go anywhere,” he promised. “Not without me.”
The impulse felt like a string tied around her guts, pulling relentlessly. It was annoying at first. Then it hurt. Finally, she pulled free of Shane’s embrace and walked in circles around the open space of the warehouse they’d used for the bus staging area, making wider and wider arcs. He intercepted her when she came close to the door, and she looked at him in silent misery. “I hate this!” she blurted. “I want this thing out!” And she burst into tears, because it felt overwhelming to her, this feeling of despair and anguish, of not being where she was supposed to be. This time, even Shane’s presence couldn’t help. The misery just came in waves, crushing her underneath. She heard Shane yelling at Richard Morrell, and then Hannah was there, saying something about helping.
Claire felt a hot sting in her arm, and then calm spread like ice through her veins. It was a relief, but it didn’t touch the burning on her arm, or the anxiety boiling in her stomach. Her body still wasn’t her own.
“She’ll sleep for a while,” Hannah said, from a long way off. “Shane, I need you.”
Claire couldn’t open her eyes, or tell them that she wasn’t really asleep at all. She seemed to be—she got that—but she was desperately awake underneath. Painfully awake.
Shane kissed her, warm and gentle, and she felt his hand smooth her hair and trace down her cheek. Don’t leave me, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t make herself move or speak.
Her heartbeat thudded, slow and calm, even though she felt the panic buildin
g inside her.
She felt herself carried somewhere, tucked into a warm bed and piled with blankets.
Then silence.
Her eyes opened, as if someone else was controlling them, and as she sat up, she saw someone standing in the corner of the darkened room where they’d left her.
Ada.
The ghost put a pale, flickering finger to her lips and motioned for Claire to sit up. She did, although she had no idea why.
Ada drifted closer. Once again, she wasn’t three-dimensional at all, just a flat projection on the air, like a TV character without the screen. She didn’t really look human; in fact, she looked more like a game character, all smoothness and manufactured detail.
Somewhere in the dark, a cell phone rang. Claire walked over to a pile of boxes labeled EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION EQUIPMENT and ripped away tape to retrieve a cell phone. Fully charged, from the battery icon on the display. She lifted it to her ear.
“Bishop is trying to pull you to him,” Ada’s tinny, artificial voice said. “But I need you elsewhere.”
“You need me.”
“Of course. With Myrnin deactivated, I require someone to assist me. Take the portal to reach me.”
“There’s a portal?” Claire felt slow and stupid, and she didn’t think it was the drugs that Hannah had given her. Ada’s ghostly representation gave her a scorching look of contempt.
“I have made a portal,” she said. “That’s what I do, you silly fool. Take it, now. Six steps forward, four to your right. Go!”
The connection died on Claire’s borrowed phone with a lost-signal beep. She folded the clamshell and slid it back in her pocket, and realized that someone—Shane, she guessed—had taken her shoes off for her. She put them on and walked six paces forward into the dark, then four steps to the right.
Her fourth step sent her falling through freezing-cold blackness, and then her foot touched ground, and she was someplace she recognized.
She came out in the cells where Myrnin and Amelie had confined the vampires who had become too sick to function on their own. It was an old prison, dark and damp, built out of solid stone and steel. The tornado that had raged through Morganville a few months back had damaged part of the building; Claire hadn’t been involved in tracking down the escaped patients, but she knew it had been done, and the place repaired. Not that Bishop had cared, of course. Amelie had done that.
But all the cells were empty now.
Claire stumbled to a halt and wrapped her arms around her stomach, where the tug from Bishop’s will felt like a white-hot wire being pulled through her skin. She braced herself against the wall, breathing hard. “I’m here,” she said to the empty air. “What do you want me to do, Ada?”
Ada’s ghost glided down the corridor ahead of her—still two-dimensional, but this time the view was from the back. Her stiff belled skirts drifted inches above the stone floor, and she looked back over her shoulder toward Claire in unmistakable command. Great, Claire thought. It’s not bad enough that Bishop has his hooks in me; now it’s Myrnin’s nutty computer, too. I have way too many bosses.
Eve would have told her she needed a better job, which would include sewage treatment.
“Where are we going?” she asked Ada, not that she expected an answer. She wasn’t disappointed. The prison was laid out in long hallways, and the last time Claire had been here, most of the cells had been filled with plague victims. She’d delivered their food—well, blood—to them to make sure they hadn’t starved. Some had been violent; most had just been lying very still, unable to do much at all.
Where were they now?
At the end of the line was the cell where Myrnin had spent his days, off and on, when he was too dangerous to be in the lab or around anybody—even other vampires. It had been furnished with his home comforts, like a thick Turkish rug and a soft pile of blankets and pillows, his ragged armchair, and stacks of books.
No sign of Myrnin, either.
Ada glided to the end of the hall, then turned to face Claire, flickering from a back view to a front view like a jump cut in a movie.
“That’s really creepy,” Claire said. “You know that, right?”
Her phone rang. She opened the clamshell. “You were seeking Dr. Mills,” Ada said. “He is here.”
“Where?”
“Follow. He requires assistance.”
Claire kept the phone to her ear as Ada turned around again and misted right through the stone wall. Claire stopped, her nose two inches away from the surface of the barrier. She slowly reached out, and although the stone looked utterly real—it even smelled real, like dust and mold—there was nothing under her hand but air. Still, her brain stubbornly told her not to take another step, or she’d end up with a bruised face at the very least. In fact, her whole body resisted the order to walk on.
Claire forced her foot to rise, inch forward, and step into the stone. Then the other foot, shuffling forward to match it. It didn’t get any easier, not for five or six tor-turous inches, and then suddenly the pressure was gone, and she stepped through into a large, well-lit room.
A room full of vampires.
Claire froze as dozens of pallid faces turned toward her. She’d never gotten to know the inmates—they’d mostly been anonymous in the shadows—but she recognized a few of them. What were they doing out of their cages?
The voice on the phone at her ear snapped, impatiently, “Would you come, then?”
Claire blinked and saw that Ada was drifting in the middle of the room, staring at her in naked fury. “They’re not going to—”
“They will not hurt you,” Ada said. “Don’t be absurd.”
It really wasn’t all that absurd. Claire had seen some of these same vampires clawing gouges in stone with their fingernails, and gnawing on their own fingers. She was like a doggie treat in a room full of rabid rottwei lers.
None of them lunged at her. They stared at her as if she was a curiosity, but they didn’t seem especially, well, hungry.
She followed Ada’s image across the room to a small stone alcove, where she saw Dr. Mills lying very still on a cot.
“Oh no,” Claire whispered, and hurried over to him. “Dr. Mills?”
He groaned and opened reddened eyes, blinking to focus on her face. “Claire,” he croaked, and coughed. “Damn. What time is it?”
“Uh—almost five, I think. Why?”
“I just went to sleep at four,” he said, and flopped back to full length on his cot. “God. Sorry, I’m exhausted. Forty-eight hours without more than a couple of hours down. I’m not a med student anymore.”
She felt a wave of utter relief. “They didn’t, you know—”
“Kill me? Other than by working me half to death?” Dr. Mills groaned and sat up, rubbing his head as if he was trying to shove his brains back inside. “Amelie wanted to use the serum to treat the worst cases first. I got everyone housed here, except for Myrnin. I have two doses left. There won’t be any more if we don’t get blood from Bishop to culture.”
She’d almost forgotten about that. “Have you seen Myrnin?”
“Not since Amelie brought me here,” Dr. Mills said. “Why?”
“He’s sick,” Claire said. “Very sick. I was looking for you to try to help him, but I don’t know where he is now. Amelie took him, too.”
He was already shaking his head. “She didn’t bring him here. I haven’t seen them.”
Claire sensed a shadow behind her and, turning, came face-to-face with a vampire. A smallish one, just a little taller than her own modest height. It was a girl barely out of her teens, with waist-length blond hair and lovely dark eyes, who smiled at the two of them with an unsettlingly knowing expression.
“I am Naomi,” she said. “This is my sister Violet.” Just behind her was a slightly older girl, same dark eyes, only a little stronger in the chin, and with midnight-black hair. “We wish to thank you, Doctor, for your gift. We have not felt so well in many years.”
“You’re welc
ome,” Dr. Mills said. He sounded tense, and Claire could understand why; the vamps were all on their best behavior, but that could change, and she saw a shadow of it in Naomi. “I’m sure Amelie will be along to get you soon.”
The two vamps nodded, bobbed an old-fashioned curtsy, and withdrew back into the main room. There was a soft buzz of conversation building out there, a kind of whisper that sounded like a calm sea on the shore. Vampires didn’t have to speak loudly to be heard, at least by one another.
“Is Amelie coming?” Dr. Mills asked. “Because I’m starting to feel like the special of the day around here.”
Oh. He thought Claire was the scout riding ahead of the vampire cavalry. She looked around for Ada, but she didn’t see any sign of her now. She’d just faded out. Claire folded up the phone and put it back in her pocket, feeling a little stupid. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was told you needed help.”
He gave a jaw-cracking yawn, murmured an apology, and nodded. “I’ve got sacks of crystals, and some of the liquid. We need to distribute it all over town, make sure everybody who needs it gets medicated. It won’t last for long, and it isn’t the cure, but until I can get Bishop’s blood, it’ll have to do. Can you help me measure it into individual doses?”
Claire realized, as she was scooping measuring spoons of red crystals and putting them in bottles, that the burning urgency in her guts had finally, slowly faded away.
She pulled up her sleeve.
The tattoo was barely a shadow under her skin.
As she stared at the place where it had been, Naomi the vampire leaned over her shoulder and studied it with her. Claire flinched, which was probably what the vamp had intended, and Naomi chuckled. “I see Bishop marked you,” she said. “Don’t fear, child. It’s almost gone now. He marked my sister once.” The smile left her face, and it set in hard, cold lines. “Then he marked us both forever. Sister Amelie told us he was dead, long ago, but he isn’t, is he?”
Claire shook her head, unable to say anything with fangs so close to her neck. Naomi didn’t seem to be threatening, but she didn’t seem to be comforting, either.
