by Rachel Caine
“Way to stand up, Father,” Michael said.
“I can’t be in the business of martyrdom,” the priest said. “Not now, and not here. I have a duty to my parishioners, and I’m not denying you the sacrament of marriage; I’m merely postponing it. Come back in a week, bring your witnesses and rings, and I will do exactly as you wish. But not today. You need to go home with your escort.” He inclined his head to Myrnin, who bowed back. All of a sudden, Father Joe’s stiff posture relaxed, and he held out his hand to Michael, who reluctantly took it. “I’m sorry about this. I know how hard the two of you have worked to overcome the barriers between you. I won’t be another; I promise that. Give me one week, and I will give you what you want.”
“I’m holding you to it,” Michael said. “We’ll be back.”
“I will see you then. Go in peace. I’ll be praying for you all.”
He walked up the steps and through a door near the altar.
They all looked at one another, and then Myrnin said cheerfully, “Shall I drive?”
“No,” they said as one, and walked out toward the hearse.
After letting Myrnin in the house, it turned out to be almost impossible to get rid of him.
Partly it was because of what happened when they did let him in, or tried to. Michael and Eve went in first, then Shane, and Claire last, with Myrnin right behind her—and without any conscious direction from her at all, the front door tried to slam right on his face.
Claire hadn’t even touched it.
“My,” Myrnin said, slamming his hand against it and, despite vampire strength, being driven back a few inches before he got his balance and pushed it open. “This is interesting.” He stepped over the threshold, and the door banged shut behind him with unnecessary force. Glass rattled in the overhead fixture, and the windows of the parlor. The temperature of the house dropped fast into refrigerator territory, and Claire saw her breath fog the cold air of the hallway. Eve yelped from where she was in the living room, and said, “Damn, the AC is broken! It’s like a morgue in here!”
“It wasn’t a second ago,” Shane said. He was standing at the end of the hallway, looking back at Claire, and Myrnin. His eyebrows were raised. “Claire?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Myrnin had forgotten all about her. He was pressing his hands against the wood paneling, looking fascinated.
“I can actually feel it resisting me!” he said. “How marvelous. I know it can do such things, but to really have it directed at me—it must draw power from the very air. That’s the cause for the temperature change, I would imagine. Claire, are you doing this?”
“No,” she snapped, and walked away. She probably was, on some level; the house had grown really attuned to her moods, and she could not have wanted Myrnin gone more—well, maybe she could have, because if it had really been an emergency, the house could have thrown him completely out. It was just trying to strongly discourage him.
“I honestly think this house has accumulated more power than the other Founder Houses over the years,” Myrnin said. “It’s a side effect of the portals, you know, and the alchemical processes we used to lay the foundations, but this is the only house that has been continuously occupied since it was built. Even the Day House remained empty for several years at the turn of the last century, after that unfortunate business with the Langers . . . Well. In any case, this house has attained something like an independent consciousness. A soul, if you will. It’s fascinating!”
It was, a little, and normally Claire would have been jumping right in, talking about the physics and alchemical theories that made something like that possible, but right now, she just wanted him out. Badly. “Isn’t there something you have to do somewhere else?” she said. “Because you got us home. Fine. Now go away.”
Eve had come back to stand next to Shane, eyes wide. She’d shed the high heels, but she still looked like an exotic ghost from the early 1920s, even in bright red. “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t even know you could put that tone in your voice, Claire. You haven’t forgotten, this is Myrnin, right? As in, your boss? As in, the guy who just covered our asses at the party?”
“Thank you, Eve,” he said, and gave her a very warm smile. “I was happy to do it.” The smile became more tentative when he directed it at Claire. “I do apologize for any wrongs I have done you. Truly, I do. It was—not my first choice, believe me.” He nodded at Shane. “And that goes for you as well.”
“Wrongs?” Eve asked, mystified. “What wrongs? What—”
And then she caught sight of the bruise around the collar of Shane’s turtleneck. It was now one hell of a bruise—dark purple, red, blue at the edges. Almost black in the center. God. You could see the actual outlines of Myrnin’s fingers. Claire saw Eve’s mind working, and then said, “You did it. Shane said he’d been in a fight, but it was you. That’s why she’s so angry.”
Myrnin looked even more kicked-puppy sad. “I am sorry for my actions. As I said. I can’t remove bruises, but happily he is recovering fully.”
Now Michael was in on it, too. “Wait a minute—what? Myrnin choked you?”
“Dude, it’s over. Done.”
“He tried to kill you!”
“If I’d really tried,” Myrnin said helpfully, “I’m sure I would have succeeded.”
The crazy thing was he actually thought that would be it. That Claire would forget about it—and if he’d come after her, she realized, she probably would have done just that. She had forgiven him for all kinds of crazy stuff before.
But this was a cold, calculated attack on Shane, and he’d gotten her to tell him where to find him.
No. Not this.
Myrnin was happily babbling on, oblivious to the mood of the four of them—and the house, whose internal temperature was falling so fast Eve was shuddering in her thin red dress. “The thing is, this house, this house! It’s developing, you see. It’s growing stronger. I’ve always suspected that there was something special here—obviously, it saved you once, Michael—and now it seems to be reacting quite strongly. . . .”
Michael took off his coat and put it around Eve’s shoulders, hugging her close. The four of them were aware now of what Myrnin had done. And united in their anger.
And something changed.
Myrnin’s cheerful blather ended in a yelp as the hallway floor literally rolled under his feet, a clatter of boards, and sent him reeling forward, toward Shane, Eve, and Michael, who quickly got out of the way. Claire braced herself against the wall, but she could tell this attack wasn’t directed at her, or her friends.
Only at Myrnin, who board-surfed the ripple in the floor, fighting to stay upright, until it ended in a sudden upward rise that snapped him into the air, flinging him—
Toward the wall where Myrnin’s mystical portal lay hidden.
It took time to open the thing—well, normally—but Myrnin had powers that Claire would never possess in that area, and by the time his outstretched arms reached the wall, the wall melted into a swirl of black, and Myrnin fell straight through it.
Gone, except for his shouted plea of “Claire, please listen—”
And then the portal snapped shut, the dark mist faded, and it was just a wall, again.
Claire walked over and put her hand over the surface. Paint, plaster, boards. Nothing magical about it, at least not that she could detect. “House,” she said. She rarely addressed it directly; none of them liked to acknowledge that they were living inside something that had actual consciousness, because that made their privacy iffy, at best. “I need you to keep him out. Lock this portal. Don’t let him inside through the doors, either.”
She felt an odd, deep throb rise up through her feet, and out through the palm of her hand, and although she couldn’t really detect a change, she knew it was done.
Myrnin was locked out.
Her cell phone rang. Claire pulled it from her coat pocket and looked at the screen, which showed a picture of Myrnin’s bunny slippers. She thumbed the connectio
n open and said, “Don’t try coming through again.”
“Claire, listen to me. I need to speak to you privately. There’s something very odd going on, and I need your input to understand exactly what—”
“I quit,” she said. “I thought we were clear on that.”
“The house. Listen to me, the house could be your salvation, in an emergency. I need you all to stay in that house as much as you possibly can. Claire—”
She hung up on him. Myrnin would never tell her what was going on, not in any way that made sense; neither would Amelie, obviously. And Oliver seemed to have come down firmly on the opposite side, too.
She couldn’t trust any of them. Not anymore.
Shane put his arms around her. “Sorry,” he said. “I know this hurts.”
“You’re the one with the bruises,” she said, and turned around to hug him back. “And you’re the one I care about.”
Michael cleared his throat. “Sorry to break the mood, but can we please talk about what the hell is going on?”
Claire took in a deep breath. “I guess we should.”
Because no matter what Amelie wanted, Claire couldn’t protect her friends if they didn’t know.
EIGHT
CLAIRE
Staying in the house was possible for only a day or two before they began running out of important survival supplies, like Coke, hot dogs, and toilet paper. Michael insisted on making the supply run the first time, but on the second, Claire and Eve held a whispered meeting upstairs, and declared that they would be going on their own.
“No way,” Michael said. “You heard what Myrnin said, and besides, if Eve wasn’t the most popular girl in Morganville before, she’s on the blacklist now. They’ll lock up when they see you coming, babe. Amelie’s not happy at all.”
“Maybe she should go ahead and arrest me,” Eve said. “Because I’m not hiding in this house for the rest of my life. First, I need a haircut. Second—”
“There’s no second,” Shane interrupted her. “You’re not going, girls. Things are getting weird out there.”
“Says who?”
“Me,” Michael said. “The Food King is closed down and locked. They just put an out-of-business sign on Marjo’s Diner, too.”
“What?” Shane blurted. Marjo’s was his favorite place in Morganville, and hey, Claire was pretty fond of it, too. “It might be a cockroach factory, but it’s been around for what, fifty years? Never closed?”
“Well, it’s closed now,” Michael said.
Shane shook his head. He was sitting on the couch, game controller in his hands, but he’d forgotten all about it now. On the TV screen, zombies were ripping his avatar apart. “That’s insane. You know about my job, right?”
“What about it?” Claire asked.
“Fired,” he said. “Well, laid off—they called this morning. They’re closing for renovations, or so they said. Pretty soon, we’re not going to have anyplace open around here. What is up with this crap?”
“What about Common Grounds?” Eve asked anxiously. “I mean, Oliver let me take the week off, but . . .”
“Still open,” Michael confirmed. “So far, anyway. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This isn’t just some financial problem. There’s more to it.” He hesitated, then said, “And more vampires have gone missing.”
“More? How many more?”
“According to the gossip this morning, at least ten. Naomi hasn’t been seen again. Neither have the others.”
“Well,” Eve was saying, “we still have to go to the store. And we’re going, not either of you.”
“Why?” Michael asked. He’d folded his arms, and was frowning at her, but not in an angry way. He looked concerned.
Eve sighed. She ticked things off on her fingers. “I need fingernail polish, and neither of you can tell decent lacquer from rubbing alcohol. Next, Claire has a prescription she needs to pick up from the pharmacy, which neither of you really ought to be doing on her behalf, since it’s personal. Last, speaking of personal, there are intimate feminine products that I promise you neither one of you want to be taking up to a register, manly men.”
Shane actually flinched. Michael looked uncomfortable.
Eve grinned. “In case that wasn’t clear, I’m talking about tampons .”
“Yeah, pretty clear,” Shane said. “And okay, yeah, maybe you should go. Considering.”
“Damn right,” Eve said. She was in Action Eve mode today, dressed in black jeans, heavy combat boots, and tight-fitting tee with a massive silk-screened Gothic skull wrapped around it. Big spiked bracelets. A leather collar. All her Goth makeup was firmly in place, right down to jet-black lipstick and eye makeup the color of bruises. “Trust me. We’ve got this. Plus, I’m going armed.” She opened a leather pouch hanging from her spiked belt, and pulled out a bottle of silver nitrate, as well as a silver-coated stake. “We’ll be fine. In and out in thirty minutes.”
“Maybe I should go and just wait in the car,” Shane said.
“Maybe you should stop treating us like fragile china dolls,” Eve shot back, and spun the stake expertly in her fingers. “What do you say, CB?”
Claire was smiling, she realized. Unlike Eve, she wasn’t dressed to aggress; she was wearing plain jeans and a simple blue blouse, but she had her backpack, and inside it (instead of books) were a small, compact crossbow, bolts, silver nitrate, and stakes.
Plus her wallet, of course. She wasn’t planning on holding the place up.
“We’ll be fine,” Claire said, and held Shane’s eyes. “Trust me.”
He nodded, still frowning. “I don’t like it.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But we can’t hide for the rest of our lives. This is our town, too.”
The drive to the other store was a little bit longer, but Eve livened it up by blaring death metal and driving with the windows down, which made people not only turn and look, but glare. Oh, Eve was in a mood. It was fun.
Eve pulled the hearse up in front of the pharmacy and put it in park. “Don’t get out,” Claire shouted over the music. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Five minutes!” Eve shouted back. “Five minutes and I come to kick ass. That is not a metaphor!”
Claire made an OK sign with her fingers, because it was impossible to yell loud enough to be heard as Eve cranked it up another notch; she escaped from the vibrating hearse, dashed across the empty space, and into the relative silence of Goode’s Drugs (known locally, she had learned from Shane, as Good Drugs, because the pharmacist was known to sell some not-quite-legal stuff under the counter from time to time). The thumping bass from the hearse rattled the glass, but other than that, it seemed deserted.
Claire walked past racks of cold medicines, pain relievers, mouthwash, and foot powders to reach the actual pharmacy counter at the back. No one was in sight at the window, so she rang the bell. It made a clear, silvery note in the air.
Silence.
“Hello?” Claire said, and then louder, leaning over the counter, “Hello? Anybody?”
She caught sight of someone right at the corner of her vision, and turned to look. There, standing behind the counter at the end of a long set of shelves, was a man. Not Mr. Rooney, who ran the pharmacy; not the vampire Claire had seen in there a few times, who probably owned the place. No, this was—
This was the man she’d seen outside Common Grounds. The quiet, nondescript one.
“Hello?” she asked, looking right at him. “Do you work here?” She leaned farther over the counter, trying to get a clearer angle, but when she blinked . . .
. . . He was gone.
“Mr. Rooney?” She yelled it this time. “Mr. Rooney, there’s somebody behind the counter! I don’t think he’s supposed to be there! Mr. Rooney, are you all right?” Nothing. Claire felt her mouth dry up and her palms get sweaty. She took her phone out of her pocket and dialed 911. “Hello, I’m at Goode’s Drugs, and I think there’s something wrong—the pharmacist isn’t here, and
I saw somebody in the back. Yes. I’ll wait.”
The emergency operator told her a car was on the way; in Morganville, that wouldn’t be a long wait at all. Claire considered going back outside to wait in the hearse with Eve, and in fact was retreating back from the service window when Mr. Rooney suddenly popped up out of nowhere behind her and said, “Can I help you?”
Claire yelped, jumped, and almost overbalanced as she banged into a shelf. She steadied herself and said, “Where were you?”
“Me?” Rooney frowned, his kindly old-man face turning surly. “Taking out the trash. Why do you care what I was doing, missy? What do you want?”
“My prescription,” Claire said. She got her breathing under control as Mr. Rooney entered some numbers on a door keypad and buzzed through to the back. He appeared at the service window a second later.
“ID,” he said, and combed through a plastic bin while she got it out. “Danvers, Claire. Yes, right here. Twenty-seven fifty.” He eyed her license, frowning. “You’re a little young to be taking these birth control pills, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Claire said, blushing. “You don’t lecture the seventeen-year-old guys who buy condoms, do you?”
“That’s different,” he said.
“No, it’s really not.” Claire put the money on the counter—exact change—and grabbed the bag. She almost walked away, but then turned to say, “I called the police. There was somebody behind your counter back there.”
“Nobody’s back here,” Rooney said.
“Look around. There is!”
“I’m telling you there’s nobody,” he said sharply. “You go tell your friend out there to turn that noise down or I’ll get the police on you!”
He watched her go. Claire glanced back once, just as the door swung shut, and saw the face of that man again.
This time, he was in the store itself. She had no idea how he could have gotten out there; he was standing next to the old-fashioned water fountain, and the electronic door definitely hadn’t opened and closed.
