Last Breath tmv-11

by Rachel Caine

  He looked down at me after about five seconds, and said, “We have less than a minute until they find us. Is Claire alive?”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I was hopeful, but you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t seen proof,” he said. “And now we have forty-five seconds.”

  “I need you,” I said. “She needs you. Come with me.”

  “I can’t,” Myrnin said. “It’s impossible. She’ll never allow me to leave.” He dug in the pocket of his vest, dropped a handful of old movie tickets, a foil-wrapped stick of gum, and something that looked like an ancient piece of candy to the carpet. “Where is it—Oh, bother—Wait—” He slapped pockets. I thought about reminding him of his own countdown, but honestly, it wouldn’t do much good. Myrnin, Claire had always insisted, ran on Standard Crazy Time, not the regular clock.

  He found a folded sheet of paper in his breast pocket, glanced at it, and handed it over to me. “Here,” he said. “I’ll need these things. Get them for me, before morning comes. Oh, and I’ll need her body.”

  I was trying to read the list, but that stopped me cold. I looked up. “Her what?”

  “Body,” he repeated. “Corpse. Remains. Mortal shell. Her body, lackwit, get it to the house, and now we’re out of time, for heaven’s sake—go!”

  “Go where?” I wondered how Claire dealt with this, the crazy talk, the sudden insanity, the demands—and then Myrnin spun me around, put a hand in the center of my back, and shoved. Hard.

  I stumbled forward and brought up my arms, because I was going to hit the blank wall . . .

  . . . And then the wall vanished into a well of black, a confusion of color, and the rest of my fall went through a freezing void and then out again into a cold, whipping wind, pellets of rain on my face, and the hard, scraping impact of my hands on pavement.

  I was outside a brick wall, in a part of town I didn’t recognize at first glance, until I found the distant lights of Founder’s Square and spotted the darkened sign for Marjo’s Diner, no longer open twenty-four/seven.

  I was halfway to the edge of town, in the entirely wrong direction from home . . . but the right side of town for Morganville’s one and only mortuary, run by a strange, stiff vampire called Mr. Ransom.

  I was close to a single, flickering streetlight, and I took the piece of paper and angled it to catch the glow. It was a list. A crazy list.

  And the first thing on it was CLAIRE—BODY.

  He’s nuts, I told myself. We all knew it, even Claire; Myrnin was a few pints short of a gallon at his best, and I wasn’t exactly sure this was his best. He was medicated, for sure. That might be a good thing, of course. Amelie wouldn’t want him to be scattered, so she might have made sure he was ruthlessly focused. In which case, the nutty list I was holding might actually make sense, in whatever universe Myrnin and Claire inhabited that the rest of us didn’t.

  I didn’t really have a choice. He’d given me orders, and a list, and if I wanted to save Claire, or have any chance of it, I needed to get moving.

  At the very least, Amelie was going to have a hell of a time finding me.

  And that made me grin, before I took off running toward the mortuary.

  * * *

  The mortuary was deserted when I broke the door open and went inside. Ransom had already abandoned the place. I checked the viewing rooms, but they were all empty of coffins and bodies; I supposed he’d actually had the decency to make sure all the other deceased had burials.

  At least, I hoped that was what he’d done with them.

  I found Claire zipped in a body bag in a large walk-in refrigerator downstairs. Frost had formed on the ridges of the bag, and the fastener was stiff, but I unzipped it far enough to see her pale, still face. It wasn’t just pale anymore. It was an eerie blue-white, and the marks on her neck had turned black.

  I closed it up and wondered what I was going to do. She’d been gone for hours, and I knew enough about the dead to understand that she was probably going to be stiff.

  I honestly wasn’t sure I could stand to pick her up. There was something horribly wrong about even trying, but Myrnin had been insistent.

  Man up, Mikey, I told myself. Shane would have done it.

  I had to do it for him.

  I slid my arms under her shoulders and thighs, and lifted her. She wasn’t heavy, and she also wasn’t stiff. Not at all. I almost dropped her as she sagged in my arms, and had to hug her close to my chest to balance her out.

  I couldn’t leave her in the body bag. It just felt so wrong.

  I unzipped the plastic all the way. She was still wearing the clothes she’d died in, which was a relief. I picked her up again, carefully, like a sleeping girl instead of a dead body, and braced her against me.

  “Claire?” I said, ridiculously somehow expecting her to open her eyes and talk to me, because she felt . . . almost living. Her color was wrong, and she was cold, but still . . . and it was probably better that she didn’t answer me, because that would have been too weird even for a vampire to contend with.

  I carried her out of the refrigerator, through the lab room, up the stairs, and out through the broken front door. Outside it was still raining, in chilly little fits, as if the sky were shivering in the cold. I bowed my head over her, somehow not wanting her to get wet, and ran for home.

  I made it only as far as the end of the block before a police cruiser turned the corner, and its blue and red lights suddenly popped on and flashed. It nosed in to the curb, and a bright light focused on me.

  “Hold up,” called a familiar voice. I squinted against the light, and it was redirected to glow on my feet instead of my eyes.

  Hannah Moses closed her car door and walked toward me, settling her nightstick in its loop on her belt. “Michael Glass,” she said. “You planning on explaining to me why you’re stealing a dead girl out of the mortuary?”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not exactly sure I know why I’m doing it.”

  She was staring at me—no, she was looking at Claire, with grim sadness grooving lines on her face around the prominent scar. “Never thought I’d see her go down,” she said. “I honestly didn’t.”

  “The thing is, she may not be gone.”

  Her eyebrows rose, then fell. “The house.”

  “You know?”

  “I’ve got relatives in the Day House, Michael. And I spent time there. There’s something not quite right about those things. Ghosts. I heard them growing up.”

  “I think Claire’s still in there,” I said. “And we’re going to get her back.”

  “Just you.”

  “Myrnin,” I said. “And me, yeah. And Eve, and Shane. So you have to let me go. You have to let me try.”

  She looked tired, and the sadness wasn’t all for Claire. She seemed . . . beaten down. “This whole town’s dying,” she said. “Did you know that? It’s our home, and it’s being taken apart around us. What difference does one girl make, against all that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe none at all. But she matters, Chief. She matters to us.”

  Hannah was silent again, for a long moment, and then she sighed and said, “Put her in the back and get in there with her. I’ll drive you home.”

  “Uh, I’m not exactly supposed to be doing this—”

  “Amelie gave orders to grab you on sight, stun you, and drag you back to Founder’s Square by any means necessary,” she told me. “I’m not supposed to be doing this, either. But I’m damned tired of doing what people tell me.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She drove fast, but carefully. We passed a few cruising police cars, and she told me to get down, but nobody tried to stop us. Why would they? She was chief of police, and as far as anyone could tell, the back of the car was empty. A fugitive vampire wasn’t likely to be escaping in a police car.

  Claire’s body felt loose and relaxed where it rested on my knees. I was holding her neck and head still. In the passing flashes of stre
etlights—where they were still working—she looked not so much peaceful as just . . . vacant. She still had that fragile look to her, that pretty shape to her face, but everything that had been Claire was missing now. She could have been anybody.

  “They’ll be watching your house,” Hannah said. “I’ll park, pop your door, and go to the front to talk to Shane. They’ll watch me do it. You take her and go around back.” She put on her cap with its plastic covering and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Stay out of sight of the windows once you’re in there. Amelie will be checking the house as soon as she realizes you aren’t in any of the other spots. I’ll try to warn you if I can.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Tomorrow I’m out of a job,” she said. “Might as well go out flipping the bird to the powers that be killing us.”

  It occurred to me to wonder what she meant by that, but then she was out of the car, and my back door was open just a crack, and I had to get moving, fast, with Claire balanced in my arms. Good thing I was a vampire. Running with a second person’s weight while in a crouch, keeping to the shadows, wasn’t a job for a human.

  I made the back door and got inside. I could hear Hannah saying something, and then the front door closed while I locked the back behind me.

  I paused for a moment. Eve and Shane were talking out in the hallway, and I realized that there was no way around it: this was going to come as a shock.

  Better, I thought, to get it over with fast.

  I expected Eve to scream when I stepped out with Claire’s body in my arms, but she just stared at me, eyes gone wide and strange, and then she turned and looked at Shane, lips parting.

  He froze, and I saw all the color drain out of his face. He braced himself by slapping a hand against the wall, and blurted, “What in the hell are you doing?”

  I couldn’t tell him, because I didn’t know. “Draw the shades,” I told Eve. “Go. All of them. We can’t let anyone see me.”

  “Where’s Myrnin?”

  “He’s coming,” I said, and hoped like hell I was right. “Help me put her on the couch in the living room.”

  Shane ran on ahead, tossing pillows and game controllers to the floor, and then he took a deep breath and helped guide her legs as I eased her down. “Why did you do this?” He sounded shaken. I’d have been surprised if he wasn’t, honestly. “They took her away.”

  “Myrnin gave me a list. She was on it.” I took one of the afghans Eve kept draped on the back of the couch and put it over Claire, then folded it carefully up to conceal her face. “Just leave her where she is. I have to go get the rest of what he wrote down. I’ll be back.”

  “Wait!” Shane grabbed my arm as I started to head for the back door again. “Amelie’s guys were just here. They tossed the place looking for you.”

  “Good. Then they won’t be looking here again for a while.”

  Eve was standing off to the side. She hadn’t said a word until now. “Michael—they told us we had to call when you came back. If we don’t, they said—” She darted a look at Shane. “They said they’d come back and kill us all. I think they meant it.”

  “They did seem pretty serious about their mayhem,” Shane said. “Screw it. Go, Mike. If they want to give it a try, they’ll get a fight. I’m not ready to give it up, not as long as there’s a chance we get her back.”

  I nodded. “Have you seen her again?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat. “She’s okay.” Shane wasn’t, I realized. He looked . . . really tired. Dark circles under his eyes, an unhealthy color to his skin.

  “I hope so,” I said. Hope. I’d thought of Claire before as Shane’s hope, and here I was, carrying corpses in the hope that Myrnin— professional lunatic—would show up and work some kind of weird magic and bring my friend back to life. That was, all things considered, a pretty good definition of hope, too. “Take care of them. I’ll be back.”

  “Wait. Give me half the list. I can help.” Shane had real passion in him now—a purpose. I knew it was dangerous. Then again, from the few hints Amelie had dropped back in her office, being a vampire was no longer any protection against the perils of the night, either.

  I folded the paper in half, tore it, and handed him his portion. “Three items on there,” I said. “One hour. Understood?”

  “Got it,” he said. “Watch your back, bro.”

  “You, too,” I said.

  “Wait,” Eve said, and stepped forward. “Seriously, you two are not going out in the middle of the night and leaving me here with—” She didn’t look directly at Claire’s body, lying covered on the couch. Instead, she took a deep breath and plunged gamely on. “With the possibility of those vamp assholes coming back to kill us—”

  She was right about that. “No,” I said. “You go with Shane. Nobody should be here alone.”

  “Claire’s alone,” Shane said. He’d pulled an olive green canvas bag out from under a cabinet on the other side of the room and unzipped it, and was checking the contents. “I hope she understands why we have to do this.” He looked up. “Stay strong, Claire. We’ll be back for you. I promise.”

  “I’d like to go with you,” Eve said to me, in a close whisper.

  “I know.” I took her hands and kissed them, then her lips. She could always bewitch me that way, just with a kiss, all over again, and it was hard to break away from the taste of raspberries and chocolate and the sweet, delicious, spicy flavor that was all Eve. “I’m going to be moving fast, and on foot. You and Shane get the hearse. Meet you back here in one hour. If you’re late, I’ll find you.”

  She smiled, and a dimple formed in her cheek. I wanted to kiss it, but there wasn’t time. Especially not time for all the parts of her I wanted to kiss.

  “You be careful,” she told me. “I am marrying you, you know.”

  “I know.” I gave in to temptation and kissed her nose. “Same here.”

  I waited to be sure that the house was tightly locked and Shane and Eve were safely in the big, black tank of a hearse before I took off running. My portion of Myrnin’s list required things from his lab, and I was far better qualified to be in that part of town after dark—and Myrnin was prone to setting little traps for visitors, too. Better me than my friends.

  The Day House next to the alley had all its lights ablaze, and I paused before I entered to look up at the second-floor corner window. The lace curtains parted, and the ancient, seamed face of Gramma Day looked out at me. She saluted me and raised a shotgun. I waved back.

  We had an understanding, me and Gramma. I wondered if her granddaughter Lisa was back; if she was, she’d be heavily armed, too. The Days could tell things were changing, and not for the better.

  Good. That meant they stood a good chance of not being victims.

  I raced the rest of the way, dodging standing puddles of water—the rain had ceased, at least for a while—and trash cans as I went. The alley narrowed at the end, funneling directly to the shack that concealed Myrnin’s lab entrance.

  Someone had helpfully busted open the door, and I didn’t even slow down as I jumped the stairs, landed flat-footed on the stone floor, and took a moment to look at the jumble that was in front of me.

  Holy crap. Someone had definitely had a tantrum, or a fight. Knowing Myrnin, I’d put my money on the first thing.

  I shoved books out of the way—there were a lot of books—and heard the crash of glass somewhere underneath the pile. I knew what I was looking for, but it was anybody’s guess as to whether he’d have kept it where he’d had it the last time I’d visited. Myrnin liked to redecorate. Forcefully.

  Bob the Spider was still doing fine, sitting in his web in the fish tank near Myrnin’s battered leather armchair; he’d grown to almost the size of a tarantula by now. I wondered what Myrnin fed him, but that wasn’t my concern, not today. I edged by the tank, while eight beady eyes watched me, and opened the chemical cabinet that Claire had insisted be installed for things that might actuall
y sear flesh or cause horrible death.

  Inside, the bottles were all intact, and neatly labeled in Claire’s careful printing. I paused for a second to stare at that, because it felt as if she were right here, standing with me; but that was illusion, not fact. The real Claire was trapped in the house, just as I’d been once.

  This was just . . . an afterimage. Wishful thinking.

  I looked at the list and grabbed two bottles. Claire had left a shopping bag in the corner, and I started filling it up. The chemicals were only part of what Myrnin wanted; he also needed a piece of equipment that looked like some kind of defibrillator. He’d drawn a sketch in his sloppy, yet oddly accurate, hand, and I held it up as I stared at each steampunked-out machine in view.

  There, on the fifth table, sat a match to what he’d drawn. I grabbed it up.

  The last thing, though, wasn’t in view, and I spent long, frustrating minutes opening cabinets and pulling out crap to try to find it. A black leather bag, like an old-fashioned doctor’s kit.

  It was nowhere.

  “I’d ask if you were looking for something, but that seems pretty obvious,” said a gravelly voice from behind me. I hadn’t felt anybody approach, but I knew the voice, all right, and there was nobody to sense behind it.

  Just a picture, flat and grayscale, of Shane’s dad.

  I tried not to show it too much around Shane, but I hated his father. Hated him, more than any human being or creature or whatever on the face of the planet. It wasn’t from any one thing, although he’d done horrible stuff to me; I could get over that, bad as it was. No, it was what he’d put Shane through, day after day, all his life. It was bad enough when he was just a mean drunk, pushing his son to be a bully like him; it had gotten ten thousand times worse after Shane’s sister and mother had died, and Frank’s obsession with destroying the Morganville vampires had taken over whatever good he had left inside.

  Shane had a big dark streak inside him, but honestly, I’d always been surprised that he had anything but the dark, after what he’d been through.

  Because of his dad.

  So, without turning around, I said, “Fuck off, Frank, before I find your jar and smash your brain like a boiled tomato.”