Carpe Corpus

by Caine, Rachel

  Obviously, Amelie had thought so, too. And Michael, because he went for Oliver in a big way, and was brought down by Pennywell and two others.

  Worse, though, was the next prisoner, also wrapped in silver chains, and suffering a lot worse than Amelie from the touch of the poisonous metal. His skin smoked and blackened where it touched him, because he was younger and more fragile than she was.

  Sam Glass.

  Amelie cried out when she saw him, and closed her eyes. She’d lost her careful detachment, and now Claire could see in her how much she cared. How much she wanted Sam.

  How much she loved him.

  Bishop smiled, and in that smile, Claire saw everything. He didn’t want to just destroy Morganville; he wanted to destroy life, and hope, and reasons for living at all. He could win only if he was the last vampire standing, no matter how many people that meant he had to kill along the way.

  “You couldn’t have won, Amelie,” he said, and the tattoo on Claire’s arm flared back into view, weaving its way up from a single spot of indigo on her wrist until it covered her arm. Then her chest. She felt it spreading like poison through her whole body, burning, and then it flared out like a brush fire. Gone for real, this time. “There, you can have your little pet back now. I no longer have need for her. She helped me learn everything I needed to know.”

  “I doubt that,” Amelie said. Her voice was ragged with emotion, but she held her father’s stare. “I was careful to keep things from her.”

  “Not so careful to keep them from Oliver, though. And that was a mistake.” He tipped her chin up to meet her eyes. “Morganville is mine. You are mine. Again.”

  “Then take what’s yours,” Amelie said. She seemed weak now. Defeated. “Kill, if you wish. Burn. Destroy. When it’s over, what do you have, Father? Nothing. Exactly what you’ve always had. We came here to build. To live. It’s not something you would ever understand.”

  “Oh, I do understand. I just despise it. And here,” Bishop said, “is where you die.”

  He yanked Amelie’s head to the side, and for a horrible second Claire thought she was going to see him kill her, right there, but then he laughed and kissed her on the throat.

  “Though, of course, not at my hands,” he said. “It wouldn’t be moral, after all. We must set a good example, or so you like to tell me, child. I’ll let your humans kill you, eventually. Once you’ve begged for the privilege.”

  He shoved Amelie aside, into Pennywell’s hands, and instead, he grabbed Sam Glass.

  “No!” Michael shouted, and leaped to his feet to stop it.

  He couldn’t. Claire caught sight of Sam’s pale, set face, of a determination she couldn’t understand, and of Michael being brought down ten feet away, as Bishop exposed Sam’s throat and bit him.

  Amelie’s scream tore through the air. Myrnin—still shaking and weak—crawled toward her. Ysandre kicked him aside, laughing.

  Oliver just stood there, like an ice sculpture. Only his eyes were alive, and even they didn’t show Claire anything she understood.

  Michael wasn’t there to hold Claire down anymore. She scrambled to her feet, clutched the silver knife, and plunged it into Ysandre’s back as deeply as she could. It dug into bone.

  “Oh,” Ysandre said, annoyed. She tried to get at the knife, but it was out of her reach. She turned on Claire with a snarl, then staggered. Shock blanked her pretty face, and then worry.

  Then fear, as the burning started.

  She fell, screaming for help. Claire vaulted over her to kneel next to Myrnin. He was fighting his way back through the pain, panting, and his eyes were bright crimson from the stress, and probably hunger.

  He wasn’t out of control, though. Not anymore. “Get me up,” he demanded. “Do it now!”

  She offered him a hand, and he used it to haul himself to his feet—unsteady, but stronger than she’d ever seen him. This was a different Myrnin . . . sleek, glossy, dark, and dangerous, with his glowing, angry eyes fixed on Bishop.

  “Stop him!” Claire yelled at Myrnin, as he just stood there. Sam was dying. Myrnin was letting it happen. “It’s Sam! You have to stop him!”

  Instead, Myrnin turned and attacked Pennywell.

  “No! Myrnin, no! Sam!”

  Oliver still wasn’t moving. He was staring at Bishop. Waiting.

  They were all waiting.

  Down in the crowd, screaming had started, and as Claire looked out she saw that people were trying to run. There were vampires moving through the crowd—hunters, taking victims. The Morganville humans were fighting for their lives. A lot of people had shown up armed to their own funerals, including Shane and Eve; Claire caught glimpses of them down there, and all she could do was pray they’d be okay. They had each other for protection, at least.

  She had to help Michael. Claire didn’t dare grab the knife from Ysandre’s back—it was the only thing keeping her out of the fight—but she couldn’t just stand there, either.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to. Hannah Moses shouted her name, and as Claire turned, she saw Hannah throwing something at her. She instinctively reached up to catch it.

  It was a sharp wooden stake. Hannah didn’t wait to see what she was going to do with it; she was already heading for François, who was trying to get hold of Richard Morrell. Hannah leaped on the nasty little vampire, pinned him with an expert shift of her weight, and plunged her own wooden stake through his heart. It wouldn’t kill him, probably, but he was out of the struggle until somebody removed it.

  Michael had already won his fight by the time Claire got there; he was bloodied and a little unsteady, but he grabbed her arm and yelled, “Get out of here!”

  “We have to save Sam!” she protested.

  But it was too late for that.

  Bishop dropped Sam limply to the carpeted floor, and Claire could see that if Sam was still alive, he wouldn’t be for long. The holes in his throat were barely leaking at all, and he wasn’t moving.

  Fury whited out her good sense.

  Claire ran at Bishop as he turned, and rammed the stake at his chest, right on target for where his heart would be, if he had one at all.

  He caught her wrist.

  “No,” he said gently, like someone with a pet who’d piddled on the good furniture. “I’ll not be taken by the likes of you, little girl.”

  She tried to get away, but she knew it was over; there was just no way she was getting out of this. Michael had gotten into a fight along the way to reach Sam. Amelie was down on her knees, still bound by all the silver chains. Hannah and Richard were back-to-back, defending themselves against three vampire guards.

  Myrnin was fighting Pennywell, and destroying half the stage along the way. There was some old hate there. History.

  Oliver had drifted closer to Amelie, although Claire couldn’t see any change in him at all. He still wasn’t fighting, for or against, and he certainly wasn’t making any heroic effort to save her.

  “Claire!”

  Shane. She heard him scream her name, but he was too far away—twenty feet down, at the foot of the stage, looking up.

  He had a knife in his hand. As she looked down to meet his eyes, he flipped it, grabbed it by the blade, and threw it.

  The knife grazed her cheek, but it hit Mr. Bishop right in the center of his chest.

  He laughed. “Your young man has quite the throwing arm,” he said, and pulled the knife out as casually as a splinter. Not silver. It wouldn’t do a thing to him. “Your friends like to think they still have a chance, but they don’t. There’s no . . . ”

  Then the oddest thing happened. . . . Bishop seemed to hesitate. His eyes went blank and distant, and for a second Claire thought he was just savoring his victory.

  “There’s no chance,” he started again, and then stopped. Then he took an unsteady step to the side, like he’d lost his balance.

  Then he let her go altogether, to brace himself on the arm of his throne. Bishop looked down at the knife in his hand—Shane’s knife
—in disbelief. He couldn’t hold on to it. It slipped out of his fist, hit the seat of the chair, and bounced off to the floor.

  Bishop staggered backward.As he did, his coat flapped open, and Claire saw that the wound was bleeding.

  Bleeding a lot.

  “Get the book!” Amelie suddenly screamed, and Claire saw it, tucked in the breast pocket of Bishop’s jacket. Amelie’s book, Myrnin’s book. The book of Morganville, with all the secrets and power.

  Seemed only right that it ought to be the thing he lost tonight, even if he won everything else.

  Claire darted in, grabbed the book, and somehow ducked his clutching hands.

  Bishop lunged after her as she danced backward, but he seemed confused now. Slower.

  Sicker?

  As if sensing some signal, Oliver finally moved. He took a pair of leather gloves from his pocket, calmly put them on, and snapped the silver chains holding Amelie prisoner. He picked up the end of the silver leash and held it for a second, looking into her eyes.

  He smiled.

  Then he took that off her neck and dropped it to the floor.

  Amelie surged to her feet—wounded, bloodied, messy, and angrier than Claire had ever seen her. She hissed at Oliver, fangs out, and then darted around him to kneel next to Sam.

  His eyes opened and fixed on her face. Neither of them spoke.

  She took his hand in hers for a moment, then lifted it to touch the back of it to her face.

  “You were right,” she said. “You were always right, about everything. And I will always love you, Sam. Forever.”

  He smiled, and then he closed his eyes . . .

  . . . and he was gone. Claire could see his life—or whatever it was that animated a vampire—slip away.

  Her eyes blurred with hot tears. No. Oh, Sam . . .

  Amelie put his hand gently back on his chest, touched her lips to his forehead, and stood up. Oliver helped her, with one hand under her arm—that was the only way Claire could tell that Amelie wasn’t herself, because she seemed to be more alive than ever.

  More motivated, anyway.

  Bishop was seriously hurt, although Claire couldn’t figure out how; Shane’s knife couldn’t have really injured him. The old man was barely staying on his feet now, as he backed away from Amelie and Oliver.

  That put him to moving toward Myrnin, who picked up Pennywell and threw him like a rag doll way out into the distance—all the way to the spotlight, where Pennywell slammed into the glass and smashed the machine into wreckage.

  Then Myrnin turned toward Bishop, blocking him from that side.

  The three vampires fighting Hannah and Richard suddenly realized that the tide was turning against them, and moved away. As a parting shot, though, one of them yanked the stake out of François’s chest, and the vampire yelled and rolled around for a second, then jumped to his feet, snarling.

  Oliver, annoyed, reached down and picked up the silver leash he’d removed from Amelie’s neck. In a single, smooth motion, he wrapped it around François’s throat and tied him to the arm of Bishop’s heavy throne. “Stay,” he snapped, and, just to be sure, wrapped another length of heavy silver chain around his ankle. François howled in pain.

  Oliver plucked the wooden stake out of Claire’s hand, removed the silver knife from Ysandre’s back, and drove the stake all the way through her to nail her to the stage. It went through her heart. She shuddered and stopped moving, frozen in place.

  “There, that should keep them for a while,” Oliver said. “Claire. Take this.” He tossed the knife to her, and she caught it, still numb and not entirely understanding what had just happened.

  “You’re . . . you’re not—”

  “On Bishop’s side?” He smiled thinly. “He certainly has thought so, since I sold myself to him the night he came to Morganville. But no. I am not his beast. I’ve always been my own.”

  Amelie took a step toward her father. “It’s over,” she said. “You’ve done your worst. You’ll do no more.”

  He looked desperate, confused, and—for the first time—really afraid. “How? How did you do this?”

  “The key was not in guessing whom you would choose to kill,” she said, and her voice was light and calm and ice cold. “You taught me endgames, my father. The key to winning is that no matter what move your opponent makes, it will be the wrong one. I knew you’d kill at least one of us personally; you enjoy it far too much. You couldn’t resist.”

  Like Bishop, she lost her balance. Oliver caught her and held her upright.

  Bishop’s face went blank. “You . . . you poisoned me. Through Myrnin. But I didn’t drink.”

  “I poisoned Myrnin,” she said. “And myself. And Sam. The only one who didn’t take poison was Oliver, because I needed him in reserve. You see, we knew about Claire after all. We counted on your knowing where we would be, and what we’d planned, at least insofar as she witnessed it.” A pawn. Claire had always been a pawn.

  And Sam—Sam had been a sacrifice.

  Amelie looked unsteady now, and Oliver put an arm around her shoulders. It looked like comfort, but it wasn’t; he took a syringe from his pocket, uncapped it with a flick of his thumb, and drove it into the side of Amelie’s neck. He emptied the contents in, and she shuddered and sagged against him for just a moment, then drew in a deep breath and straightened.

  She nodded to Oliver, who took out another syringe, which he pitched to Claire. “Give it to him.”

  For a second she thought he meant to Bishop, but then she realized, as Myrnin’s strength failed and he went to his knees, who it was really meant to help. She swallowed hard, looking at Myrnin uncertainly, and he moved his hair aside to bare the side of his pale neck. “Hurry,” he said. “Not much time.”

  She did it, somehow, and helped him back to his feet.

  When he looked up, she could see that he was better. Much better.

  Amelie said, “In case you have any doubt, Father, that was an antidote to the poison that is taking hold inside you. Without the antidote, the poison won’t kill you, but it will disable you. You can’t win against us. Not now.”

  Down among the crowds, the fights were dying down. There were casualties, but many of them were Bishop’s people; the humans of Morganville weren’t quite as easy to lead to slaughter as he’d expected. All their anger and vampire-slaying attitude had helped, after all.

  And now, pounding up the steps on the side of the stage, came Shane and Eve, backed by a party of grim-looking humans, including Detective Hess and several other cops. All held weapons. Eve had a crossbow that she aimed at Bishop’s chest.

  Michael took an extra stake from Hannah.

  All of Morganville on one side, and Bishop alone on the other.

  He backed up, toward the back of the stage.

  Behind him, the curtain took on a silvery shimmer.

  “Portal!” Claire yelled, but it was too late; Bishop had activated an escape hatch, and in the next second he stumbled through it and was gone. Amelie was too far away, and too weak to go after him anyway.

  Claire didn’t think; she just jumped forward, put her hand on the portal’s surface, and yelled Ada’s name.

  “What?” the computer asked. The sound this time boomed out of the portal.

  “I need to track Bishop!” Claire said.

  “I don’t work for you anymore, human,” Ada said, and shut down the portal with a snap. Claire turned to look at Myrnin, who was watching a few feet away, eyes fading back to his normal black. He walked toward her, bare feet gliding over the carpet, and studied the empty space where the portal had been.

  Then he reached out and drew a wide circle with a sweep of his arm, and the silver shimmer flickered back into view.

  “Don’t be rude, Ada,” he said. “Now, I know you can hear me. Where did our dear Mr. Bishop take himself off to?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Ada said primly. “I don’t work for you, either.”

  Myrnin placed his palm flat on the surface of th
e shimmer and looked at Claire. “He’s reprogrammed her,” he said. “He must have gone to her and given her his blood while we were making our own plans. I didn’t expect him to move so quickly. I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have been.” He removed his palm, and Claire realized he’d done it as a kind of mute button, so Ada wouldn’t hear what they had to say. “Ada, my darling, I put you together from scraps and my own blood. Are you really going to say you don’t love me anymore?” Claire had never heard him sound that way before—so in control of himself, so assured and darkly clever. It made her shiver somewhere deep inside. “Let me come to you. I really want to see you, my love.”

  Ada was silent for a moment, and then her ghostly image appeared on the surface of the portal—a Victorian woman, dressed in the big skirts and high collar of the times. She smoothed her pale hands over the fabric of her dress. “Very well,” she said. “You may call on me, Myrnin.”

  “Excellent.” He grabbed Claire by the hand and stepped through the portal.

  Her foot came down on something soft that ran off with a shrill squeak, and she jumped and gave out a squeal of her own. Rats. She hated rats. It was too dark to see, but in the next second the lights flickered on around the cavern, and there was the monster tangle of pipes and elaborate bracing that was Ada.

  Her ghost stood in front of the clumsy giant typewriter-style keyboard, smiling at Myrnin like a lovesick girl, but the smile faltered when she saw Claire. “Oh,” she said, through the tinny speakers of the computer. “You brought her.”

  “Don’t be jealous, love. You’re the only girl for me.” Myrnin strode up to the keyboard, through Ada’s two-dimensional form, and Claire saw Ada make a startled face and turn toward him.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Myrnin!”

  “Fixing you, hopefully,” he said. “Claire.”

  She headed for his side, but Ada turned on her, and the prim Victorian image turned into . . . something else. Something dark and corrupt and horrible, snarling at her.

  She flinched and veered off, but Myrnin’s hand reached out and grabbed her to drag her in, past Ada. “Ignore her,” he said. “She’s in a mood.” Myrnin tapped symbols, then uncovered the sharp needle on the control panel, and slammed his hand down on the point. “Ada. You will no longer accept commands from Mr. Bishop; do you understand me?”