Last Breath tmv-11

by Rachel Caine

  I nodded. I could, and it was making me sweat. Hard to keep my hands on the wheel, my foot on the gas. I was feeling more and more—relaxed. Distracted.

  “Here,” Shane said. He was jamming rolled-up pieces of tissue in his ears, and handing me some. I didn’t really want it, but I took one and stuffed it in on the left.

  I instantly felt better. Sharper. And much, much more scared. I grabbed the other piece and got it in my right ear, pressed the accelerator, and ripped through the red light at top speed. Bill me for the ticket, Morganville, because I knew that stopping right now was an insane idea.

  Shane was breathing easier now, too, but he looked pale and wild-eyed. We didn’t talk—well, considering we’d just jammed up our ears, it probably wouldn’t have been productive, either. I drove too fast for the heavy rain, but the streets seemed deserted, and anyway, I was way too freaked-out to slow down.

  Lot Street showed up suddenly, and I swerved into a left turn, tossing Shane into the passenger’s door (but not, thankfully, out of it). When I slithered the hearse to a stop in front of the house, we looked at each other, and Shane pointed from me to the bag in the back, then from his chest to the items scattered on the backseat. I nodded and did a silent three count.

  I hit the back, grabbed the weapons bag, threw the stake inside, and raced through the gate and up the walk. I fished for my keys as I ran, and had them out and ready. The door swung open right on cue as Shane pounded up the steps behind me carrying his load, and we rushed inside, slammed the door, and locked it, hard.

  We stood there breathing hard for a few seconds; then Shane yanked tissue out of his ears and turned away. When I got mine out, I heard him yelling for Michael as he carried his items toward the living room.

  There was a black doctor’s bag and two bottles of liquid sitting there, and damp footprints on the carpet—but no Michael. “Michael!” I yelled up the stairs, adding to Shane’s voice as he checked the kitchen. “Michael, we’re back—”

  No answer. I tried not to look directly at Claire’s still form as I headed to the kitchen. I met Shane as he came out.

  “Nothing,” he said. “He’s not here.”

  “He went out after us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well—we should—”

  “Nothing,” Shane said. “We should do nothing but wait. Eve, it’s really freaking nuts out there. He’ll have to get back on his own. Look, he’ll be fine; you know Michael. He’s tough.”

  I nodded, but I felt short of breath. We were more than thirty minutes late. Even if he’d gone out, surely he should be back soon.

  But he wasn’t. The minutes slid by, greasy and way too fast, and with each one, my panic got a little stronger. I kept wanting to fiddle with my cell phone, but there was no point; the lines were still out. The TV stations were dark. What I could pick up on the radio were ghostly out-of-town signals, nothing local.

  It had been an hour when Shane said, very quietly, “I think we have to assume something happened.”

  I was trying very hard not to lose it. “Then what are we going to do?” I asked him. “Please. Tell me. We can’t call for help. It’s too dangerous to go out there. What the hell do we do? Jesus, Claire is—Claire is right there on the couch. What are we doing, Shane?” That last tipped over from distress into real terror, and Shane grabbed me and held on for both our lives. He was scared, too. Really scared.

  There was a knock at the back door.

  We sprang apart like we’d been caught doing something totally illegal, and I felt a surge of relief so intense it was like being soaked in a hot bath. “Michael,” I said, and raced to let him in.

  Rationality caught up one step later, as did Shane, who said, “Michael has keys.”

  I hit the reality wall face-first, and skidded to a stop.

  Shane eased the curtain aside. I saw his shoulders stiffen, then slump. He unlocked the door and stepped aside.

  And Myrnin swept in, all giant leather swirling coat and dramatic swooping hat. Rain fell off both in a miniature fountain as he shook himself, then took it all off. Despite all that cover, he still looked half-drowned. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “They’re looking for me. Did you get everything?”

  “I don’t know,” Shane said. “It’s in here.”

  He led the way back and indicated the stuff piled on the dining table. Myrnin pushed him out of the way and, with quick, able gestures, opened the doctor’s bag and pulled out all kinds of tubing, needles, some kind of pump . . . and made a little aha! sound as he grabbed a gear-studded machine covered with brass. He plugged the end of one tube into it, and the other into the pump.

  I watched as he set up a complicated, inexplicable device there on our dining room table, mixed chemicals together into a test tube, and poured the result into a funnel on the brass machine.

  It started up with a barely perceptive hum.

  “Where is Michael?” Myrnin asked, as he fitted a needle on the end of one of the tubes. “He should be here. I will need his help.”

  “He—” Shane cleared his throat, and didn’t look at me. “He didn’t make it back. We don’t know where he is.”

  Myrnin’s hands stilled for a second, and then he nodded. “Very well,” he said. “I have a blood connection to Claire, but none to the house; this will be trickier without that. You two are residents, so you have some standing. I’ll need vials of your blood.” He grabbed syringes and those rubbery tie things, which he pitched to each of us. “It’s best if you draw it yourself.”

  I held the capped needle—at least he was using a modern syringe—and the tourniquet and glared at him. “I’m sorry? What?”

  “Apparently I have not made myself clear,” he said, speaking the way vampires did when they thought you were drunk, stupid, or just deeply worthy of a smack. “If I do not have the blood of someone attuned to this house, then all this is busywork and window dressing. So please, stop following your usual extremely useless agenda of jabbering questions and put the needle in your arm!”

  “Are you high?” I blurted it out spontaneously, because the light had caught his eyes, and they looked seriously weird, in a medically induced kind of way.

  Myrnin blinked. “Amelie thought it best to calm me,” he said. “Given my distress.” His gaze darted toward Claire’s body on the couch, and suddenly I did understand. Of course he’d been distressed—too rattled to work. So Amelie had given him happy pills.

  Lovely.

  I wanted to catch Shane’s attention and get some solidarity going on this, but he had quietly, without fuss, dropped his coat and rolled up his sleeve, and was fastening a tourniquet around his arm.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me help.”

  “Got it,” he said, and tightened the rubber strap with his teeth in a way that made me wonder if that was actually the first time he’d tried it. Probably not. Shane had done some bad things out there on the road with his dad. “Let me do yours.”

  I didn’t want to—boy, did I not want to—but I stripped off my coat, sat down in a chair, and shivered while he rolled up my sleeve, fastened the tourniquet, and told me to work my fist. I have good veins—not a major plus, in Vamptown—and it took only about half a minute for him to find one, slip the needle in, and fill up the tube. “Just one?” he asked Myrnin, without looking up.

  “Two would be better,” Myrnin said. “Three would be extremely nice.”

  Shane silently pulled the crimson-sloshing tube from the syringe and slotted another one in. It hurt, and he touched my hand in silent apology as the blood bubbled up. He was better on the third vial, and then we were done.

  Myrnin reached in the bag and found a couple of premoist-ened antiseptic swabs and cotton balls. Shane finished me up and sat down next to me. His arm was turning red from the tourniquet, and it must have hurt, but he didn’t seem to mind. I could see the veins standing out in the bend of his elbow from three feet away.

  “Need me to—”

  “No,” he
interrupted me, which was a relief, because I was even more squeamish about putting needles into people than I was watching them stick into my own skin. He rested his forearm on the table, palm up, and did the whole thing with his left hand, including changing tubes, which was . . . scary impressive, really.

  He smiled a little, while he was doing it.

  “What?” I asked him. “You’re freaking me out now.”

  “Claire,” he said. “She had to come with me to the blood bank so I wouldn’t freak out and leave. And here I am, drawing my own blood and handing it to a vamp. She’d appreciate the crazy.”

  Myrnin was waiting impatiently on us, and when Shane handed him the blood, he gave us a quick nod, ripped the plastic diaphragms off the ends of the tubes, and poured them one by one into his weird little spinning machine.

  The house took on an absolutely horrible smell that burned my eyes and made me cough. Shane, too.

  Then Myrnin took a syringe and vials and—without bothering with a tourniquet—drew some paler-than-normal blood out of his own veins. He put two vials of it into the machine, but kept the third attached to the syringe, which he capped and put in his pocket.

  “Right,” Myrnin said. “Sit her up.”

  Shane gave me a confused look.

  “Not her, her! Idiot. Never mind.” Myrnin stalked to the couch, pulled the afghan away, and . . . stopped. Just for a second. His back was to us, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I didn’t really need that to understand what he was feeling. I felt the same thing every time I so much as glanced toward her body—the black, horrible knotting inside, dread and anxiety and grief and horror all tied up together.

  He picked Claire up and moved her limp form into a sitting position on the couch. Her head tried to roll off to the side, and he carefully, gently adjusted it. Then he took one of the tubes, the one he’d fitted the needle to, and deftly inserted it into her forearm, like an IV. He flicked a switch on the machine on the table, and a sickly greenish liquid began flowing through the tubes, and into her arm.

  Nothing happened.

  “All right,” he said. “What I’m about to attempt is—dangerous. Very dangerous, not only for me and for the two of you, but also for Claire. If her spirit has been trapped by the house, it’s as if the house is a filter, but the pressure on her spirit remains, trying to pull her free and out to—whatever comes beyond this. We have to break the filter, and grab her spirit as it flies, and pull it back into her body. It will not be easy.”

  “But—” I licked my lips and risked a quick look at Claire’s silent body. God, she looked so pale. “Her neck. What about her neck?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s broken.”

  “Ah, that,” Myrnin said. “Yes. Well, I can fix that. You won’t like how that occurs, but I don’t think we have much of a choice.” He took the syringe out of his pocket and held it up. The pale, watery blood glimmered in the light. “This will heal her physical damage, and it will also strengthen the bonds between the two of us. It will allow me to try to pull her back.”

  “Wait, hang on a second,” Shane said. “You’re putting your blood into Claire? Isn’t that how you make someone a vampire?”

  “Yes.” Myrnin uncapped the needle. “It’s exactly how I would make a vampire. The process is the same; those who cross over die, and only their vampire maker can lead them back across that line, back to their bodies. This will let me try to do the same for Claire.”

  Shane lunged out of his chair and grabbed Myrnin’s arm as he positioned the needle over Claire’s neck, right where she had two faint, faded scars from where Myrnin had once bitten her. “No! You are not making her into—”

  Myrnin shoved him, and Shane went down. It was a gentle push, for a vampire. He didn’t even hit a wall. “Do you want her back or not?” Myrnin almost spat it at him. “If there’s any chance to reclaim her, any chance, don’t you want to take it?”

  “No!”

  “Oh, you’d rather she was dead and gone forever?”

  Shane was chalk white now, as if he’d taken up the Goth lifestyle. He didn’t try to get up. It was as if he didn’t have the strength, all of a sudden.

  He didn’t answer.

  “That’s what I thought,” Myrnin said, and plunged the needle home in Claire’s neck. I expected a flinch, but of course she didn’t move, didn’t react at all. I watched the pale blood press into her neck.

  No reaction. None at all.

  Myrnin knelt down and put his hands on her forehead. “Eve,” he said, in a careful, controlled, calm voice. “Please press the button on the side of the machine now.”

  “Don’t,” Shane whispered. He was looking at a nightmare, I realized. He loved Claire, and he wanted her back, but the idea of having her back as a vampire . . . that had to rip him apart, right at the core.

  He shut his eyes.

  I reached out and pressed the button.

  SIXTEEN

  CLAIRE

  Claire could feel Hiram out there, testing the walls, looking for weaknesses. It felt exactly like being in a glass-walled shark tank while the great white prowled around waiting for lunch. The house itself was protecting her—she knew that—but it was conflicted. Hiram was there first, after all. And Hiram at least thought he was in charge.

  I can’t stay here, she thought. She had no idea how much time had passed. This room was strange that way; it felt frozen, as if time didn’t really affect it . . . or passed much more slowly than in other places. That was possible, of course; quantum physics allowed for the possibility that time was variable, but that was usually at the subatomic level, not in the visible world.... Interesting problem, though. Maybe it had something to do with the way the portals worked, also at the subatomic level.

  And I’m distracting myself with physics. Well, some people recited baseball scores or movie lines; physics was a perfectly valid hobby. Besides, if she got really desperate, she could recite the periodic tables.

  I can’t spend the rest of my—eternity sitting on my ghostly butt up here. Alone.

  But she didn’t dare try to leave, either.

  A ripple of raw power suddenly ran through the house. It was so strong that it seemed to break everything apart into jagged, glittering, spinning pieces—the furniture, the room, the house. It all flew apart in a sudden, confusing explosion, turning and falling and rising all at once.

  And then she felt the pull.

  It wasn’t like she’d felt when she’d gone through the portal—that had been a kind of pull, too, but it was as if she’d been anchored and had to unravel herself into strings to move away. This felt more as if she were being pressed together, and a great, vast vacuum was dragging her away into the unknown.

  Claire screamed and flailed, trying to grab onto something, anything, but it was all shattered, all cutting edges and confusion—

  And then something seized her in powerful hands.

  Hiram Glass.

  He was still mostly whole, but there were pieces coming off him, bits chipping away and flying into the darkness. “You!” he shouted, and bared his teeth at her, right in her face. “You vandal! You’ve destroyed everything!”

  “No, I didn’t—” He wasn’t listening. That mouth opened, impossibly wide, and Claire knew he was going to bite her and rip her apart before the dark could take her....

  With the strength of desperation and panic, Claire pushed, as hard as she could.

  And broke his hold.

  Hiram looked comically surprised as his hands slipped free, and he spun off into the black void, screaming as he broke apart into tiny, glittering pieces.

  Gone.

  I’ll be next, Claire thought. She was weirdly calm. There was no way she could resist that pull. It was like a black hole, and she was standing on the event horizon.

  Claire.

  It was a whisper in the hurricane that roared around her, but she recognized the sound. Myrnin. That was Myrnin’s voice.

  “Here!” sh
e screamed, as the void pulled her away. “Myrnin, help me! Help!”

  The spinning pieces of reality around her seemed to slow down. She saw herself reflected in one side of a jagged shard, and then it turned, and she saw Myrnin’s face in it. He looked worried, and there were lines of effort around his mouth that she’d never seen before.

  His hand reached out to her, but it was as if he was trapped behind the glass; his hand slapped against it, and then the spinning shard turned again, and she lost him.

  Claire twisted. There, in another piece, she saw him again, reaching out.

  Take it, he was trying to tell her. It wasn’t a voice—it was something else, a kind of whisper moving inside her, like blood in her veins. Only she no longer had blood, or veins. This was coming out of her very core, the thing that had survived her body.

  Her soul.

  Take my hand.

  She couldn’t. He was on the other side of that glass, and the pieces were moving, and she was being dragged inch by inch into the dark.

  Then she saw Shane in one of the spinning, glittering shards. He was on his back, propped up, staring out of the shred of reality, and he looked so agonizingly alone.

  Take my hand, Claire—do it now! Myrnin’s whisper sounded desperate now. Anguished. This was hurting him, too.

  She kept her gaze on Shane’s face, but she lunged for Myrnin’s hand as another piece of reality slid past her.

  Her fingers broke through the cold, icy surface, and touched his.

  And reality came back together. She could still see the cracks, hear the awful noise of the darkness beyond that, but Myrnin’s hand twisted and closed around her wrist in an unbreakable hold, and she fell, and fell, and fell....

  And took a breath.

  A real breath.

  It hurt.

  Her first thought was This can’t happen, and the second was blotted out by a wave of pain so intense that she wanted to vomit, but couldn’t. She couldn’t move. The pain was in her neck, and she remembered the terrible snap, the darkness, the moment when everything had . . .