Authors: Rachel Caine
Shane knew her way too well. “You’re going to see Myrnin, aren’t you? Claire—”
“I need to see what he’s doing,” she said quickly. “He was strange the last time I saw him.”
Her boyfriend mumbled something that might have been
He’s always strange,
but he mostly kept his dissatisfaction to himself. “Say hi to my dad while you’re there. You know, the brain in the jar? Frankenstein? That guy.”
“You could come and—”
“No,” Shane said flatly. There was a second’s pause, as if he’d surprised himself by the vehemence of his reply, and when he spoke again it was in a softer tone. “Be careful out there. If you want me to come along…”
“To Myrnin’s lab? That’s just asking for trouble and you know it. I can manage. I’ve got resources.” And silver-coated stakes, in her backpack. She had resolved to never leave home without them, after the events of last night. “If I’m not home before dark, though—”
“Yep, rescue has been calendared. Got it,” he said. “Love you.”
She heard the effort it took him to say it—not because he didn’t mean it, but because boys just didn’t like admitting it over the phone. He even lowered his voice, in case someone—Michael?—could overhear him.
Honestly.
“Love you, too,” she said. “Watch out for Eve, will you? There’s something funny about all this. I think Pennyfeather really did come for her, not for any of the rest of us. I think there’s something going on in vampireland that has to do with her and Michael.”
“Copy that,” he said. “Collins out.” He made a kissing sound into the phone before he hung up, which was way more embarrassing than saying
Love you
, but probably amused him more, and she smiled so much on her walk to Myrnin’s lab that her face hurt—especially around the cut.
The street that held the entrance to Myrnin’s lair—she always
thought of it as a lair, as much as a lab—was a pretty much normal Morganville residential neighborhood; more run-down than some, better than others. The houses were mostly cheaply built clapboard, thrown up forty or fifty years ago, though there were a few standouts. Two houses had burned down or been otherwise trashed during the recent draug invasion, and those were busy with swarms of hard-hatted workers scrambling over piles of bricks, lumber, and tile. The skeletons of new houses were up already. Claire wondered what it might be like to move into a new place, one that had never had anyone else in it, one that was fresh and unhaunted. That would be odd, probably. She’d gotten so used to houses with history.
At the end of the street loomed the old Day House. It was a Founder House, built almost exactly like the Glass House where Claire lived; it had been freshly painted a blinding white, and the trim had been done in a dark blue. As always, there was a rocking chair on the porch. Claire expected to see Gramma Day’s ancient little form there, rocking and knitting, but instead, the woman sitting there was tall, long-legged, and she wasn’t knitting.
She was cleaning a gun.
Claire veered off from the alleyway that was the entrance to the lab, and paused respectfully at the gate that blocked the Day House sidewalk. “Hi, Hannah,” she said.
Hannah Moses looked up, and the sunlight threw the scar on her face into sharp relief; it was hard to read her expression, but she said, “Howdy, Claire. Come on up.”
Claire unfastened the gate and came up the steps to the porch. There was another chair sitting across from the rocking chair, and a low table in between where Hannah had laid out the parts of her weapon with straight-line military precision.
“Grab a seat,” Hannah said, and blew dust off the part that she
held in her hand. She examined it critically, buffed it with a cloth, and put it down in its place on the table. “Where you headed, Claire?”
“Myrnin.”
“Ah.” Hannah’s gaze fastened on the cut on her cheek. “Something interesting happen?”
“Depends on how you feel about Oliver, I guess. Someone all in black tried to shoot a silver arrow into his heart.”
Hannah paused in the act of sliding a piece onto the frame of the handgun. “Tried,” she repeated. “I assume, not successfully?”
“It was pretty close.”
“I can see that. Apparently, whoever tried didn’t much care if you were in the way.”
“Cared enough to miss, I guess.”
Hannah nodded and went back to reassembling her gun with graceful, practiced efficiency. It took a breathtakingly short period of time, and then she loaded the weapon, chambered a round, and checked the safety before laying it back on the table. “Claire, we both know I’m sidelined by the vampires, and I won’t have much opportunity to help in an official capacity. So I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure!”
“I want you to leave Morganville.”
Claire fell silent, watching her. “I can’t just run away.”
“Yes, you can. You always could have done it.”
“Okay, then, I
won’t
do it. My grades—”
“You can’t use a good grade if they’re carving it on your tombstone. Pack up and get out. Go find your folks, get
them
to pack up, and go somewhere else. Far away. An island, if you can manage it. But get the hell away from the vampires, and keep away.”
“But you’re staying?”
“Yes,” Hannah agreed, “I’m staying. This house has been in my family for seven generations. My grandmother’s too old to go, and they’ve still got my cousin locked up somewhere in their dungeons, if she’s not dead and drained. I was like you. I wanted all this peace and love and cooperation to work, but it’s not going to happen. The vampires are ripping up the agreements. That ain’t on us. It’s on them.”
When Claire didn’t speak, Hannah shook her head, leaned over, and picked up the weapon. She seated it in a holster under her arm. “There’s a war coming,” she said. “A real war. There’s not going to be any room for people like you standing in the middle, trying to make peace. I’m trying to save your life.”
“You always wanted peace.”
“I did. But when you can’t have peace, there’s only one thing you can aim for, Claire, and that’s winning the war the best and maybe the bloodiest way you can.”
“I don’t want to believe it. There has to be a way to make Amelie listen, to stop all this—”
“It’s too late,” Hannah said. “She set up the cage in Founder’s Square again. It’s a clear message. Cross the vampires, and you’ll burn. Everything you worked for, everything I worked for, is going away. You pick a side, or you go. Nothing else to do.”
Claire cleared her throat. “How’s your grandmother?”
“Ancient,” Hannah said, “but she’s been that way as long as I can remember. She’s a hundred and two years old this year. I’ll give her your respects.”
There wasn’t anything else to say, so Claire nodded and left. She closed the gate behind her and glanced back to see Hannah stand up, lean against the porch pillar, and gaze out into the street like a sentry watching for trouble on the horizon.
Anybody who decided to go up against Hannah Moses had to
have a death wish. It wasn’t just the gun she’d so expertly assembled and loaded—heck, gun toting in Texas was practically normal. It was in her body language: calm, centered, ready.
And deadly.
If there really was going to be a war, being on the side against Hannah would be a very dangerous place.
Claire headed down the alley, away from the normal world of construction and power tools and Hannah standing sentry. As the wooden walls rose on either side of her, and narrowed from a one-car street into a cart path into a claustrophobic little warren, she hardly noticed; she’d made this walk so many times that doing it in broad daylight held no terrors for her at all.
But something was different when she got to the end of the alley.
The shack, the ancient, leaning thing that had been there ever since Claire had first come here, was just…gone. There was no sign of wreckage, not even a scrap of wood or a rusty nail left in its place. There had been stairs going down into Myrnin’s lab inside the shack itself.
Now, there was a slab of concrete. It was almost dry, but it had been poured only a day ago, Claire was certain of that; concrete dried fast in the Texas desert heat, and this was still just a tiny bit cool and damp to the touch. Someone had left a handprint at the corner of the slab. She put her own hand in the impression; it was a larger hand, longer fingers, but still slender.
Myrnin’s hand, she thought.
He’d sealed up the lab.
Claire felt an odd wave of dizziness pass over her, and she lowered her head and breathed in deeply to combat it. He’d told her that he was going to leave, but she hadn’t really believed it. Not like this. Not this fast.
But sealing your lab with concrete was a pretty definite sign of intent.
Claire left the alley at a run. She blew through the Day House gate and up the steps, and said breathlessly to Hannah, “I need to use your portal.”
“Our what?”
“C’mon, Hannah. I know you’ve got a portal in your house. It’s in the bathroom. I used it to get to Amelie before. I need to see if I can still get into the lab that way.” Hannah’s face remained tight and guarded. “Please!”
The front door creaked open, horror-movie style, and the tiny, wizened form of Gramma Day appeared in the gap. She studied Claire with faded brown eyes that still held the same sharp intelligence that Hannah’s did, and held out a palsied, wrinkled hand. Claire took it. The old lady’s skin was soft as old, fragile fabric, and burning hot, but beneath it was a wiry strength that almost pulled Claire off-balance. “You get in here,” Gramma Day said. “Ain’t no call for you to be standing out on the porch like some beggar. You, too, Hannah. Nobody’s coming today for us.”
“You don’t know that, Gramma.”
“Don’t you tell me what I know or don’t, girl.” There was a firm tone of command in the old lady’s voice as she led Claire down the hallway. There was an eerie sense of déjà vu to it—the same hall as the Glass House, the same parlor to the left, the same living room opening up ahead. Only the furniture was different, and the march of family portraits on the walls, some of them going back to the mid-1800s, of earnest-looking African American people in their Sunday best. As they shuffled down the hall, it got more modern. Color portrait photos of people with heavily lacquered bouffant hairdos, then thick, luxurious Afros. Toward the very end, Hannah Moses looking incredibly neat
and imposing in her military uniform, and a framed set of medals beneath it.
There was one important difference between the Glass House and the Day House: there was a downstairs bath. It must have been added ages ago, but Claire envied it, anyway. Gramma swung open the door and shooed her inside.
“You going to see the queen?” Gramma asked her.
“No, ma’am. I’m going to see if I can find Myrnin.”
Gramma snorted and shook her trembling head. “Ain’t no good gonna come of that, girl. Trap-door spider’s not a safe thing for you to be running after. You ought to go home, lock your doors, get ready for trouble.”
“I’m always ready,” Claire said, and grinned.
“Not like this,” Gramma said. “Never seen a time when the vampires weren’t scared of something, but now, they ain’t afraid of anything, and it’s gonna go hard for us. Well, you do as you like. Folks always do.” She swung the door shut on Claire, and Claire hastily felt for the light switch, an old-fashioned dial thing on the wall. The overheads clicked on. From the look of the bulbs, they might have been original Edisons.
It was an altogether normal sort of bathroom, and although she kind of needed to go, Claire didn’t dare use it. Only Myrnin would have ever been thoughtless enough to build a portal in a bathroom, she thought. The people in the Day House must have a lot more fortitude than she did, because she’d never be able to take down her pants in a room where anyone with the secret handshake could walk right out of the wall and stare at her. Granted, that was a smallish circle of people…Amelie, Oliver, Myrnin, Claire herself, Michael, a few others (and even Shane had managed once or twice).
Oh, and a couple of would-be serial killers who’d gotten their hands on the secret. Ugh.
Claire cleared her mind, closed her eyes, and focused. She felt the answering tingle of the portal, lying dormant and invisible, and when she looked, she saw a thin film of darkness forming over the white-painted door. It was misty at first, then as dark as a velvet curtain hanging in midair, rippling gently in an unfelt breeze.
She built the image of Myrnin’s lab in her mind: the granite worktables, the art deco lights on the walls, the chaotic mess of books and equipment. Then there was Bob the Spider’s tank in the corner, larger than ever and thick inside with webs, along with the battered old armchair sitting next to it where Myrnin sat and read, when he was in the mood.
The image flickered in the darkness, ghostly, and then flared out. No, it was still there, Claire thought, but the lights themselves had been turned off. To keep her away?
Screw that. Claire reached into her backpack and pulled out a small, heavy flashlight. She switched it on and stepped through the portal into the dark.
It was not just dark in the lab. It was profoundly, elementally black. This far below ground, and with the entrance sealed anyway, it felt like being sealed into a tomb. Claire felt the portal snap shut behind her, and for a moment she was tempted to turn around and wish herself home, immediately, but that wouldn’t help. She still wouldn’t
know.
There was a master switch to the power, and by carefully watching her footing (Myrnin hadn’t bothered to clear up the leaning piles of books or the scattered trip hazards), she found her way to the far wall, next to a musty old mummy case she’d always assumed was a genuine thing—because it was Myrnin’s. She’d
never opened it. Knowing Myrnin, there could be anything inside, from a body he’d forgotten about to his dirty laundry.
She threw the master switch up, and lights flared on. Machines started up around the lab with a chorus of hums, pops, crackles, and musical tones. The laptop she’d bought for Myrnin booted up in the corner and glowed reassuringly. At least one beaker started bubbling, though she couldn’t see why.