Myrnin smiled. “You’re trying to trick me.” His eyes were getting darker, endlessly dark, and that smile had edges to it. “Oh, little girl, you don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like, having all these guests here, and all this”—he breathed in deeply—“all this blood.” His eyes focused on her throat, with its ragged bite mark hidden under a bandage Theo had given her. “I know it’s there. Your mark. Tell me, did François—”
“Stop. Stop it.” Claire dug her fingers into her palms. Myrnin took a step toward her, and she forced herself not to flinch. She knew him, knew what he was trying to do. “You won’t hurt me. You need me.”
“Do I?” He breathed deeply again. “Yes, I do. Bright, so bright. I can feel your energy. I know how it will feel when I . . .” He blinked, and horror sheeted across his face, fast as lightning. “What was I saying? Claire? What did I just say?”
She couldn’t repeat it. “Nothing. Don’t worry. But I think we’d better get you to the cell, okay? Please?”
He looked devastated. This was the worst part of it, she thought, the mood swings. He’d tried so hard, and he’d helped, he really had—but he wasn’t going to be able to hold together much longer. She was seeing him fall apart in slow motion.
Again.
Michael steered him toward the portal. “Let’s go,” he said. “Claire, can you do this?”
“If he doesn’t fight me,” she said nervously. She remembered one afternoon when his paranoia had taken over, and every time she’d tried to establish the portal, he’d snapped the connection, sure something was waiting on the other side to destroy him. “I wish we had a tranquilizer.”
“Well, you don’t,” Myrnin said. “And I don’t like being stuck with your needles, you know that. I’ll behave myself.” He laughed softly. “Mostly.”
Claire opened the door, but instead of the connection snapping clear to the prison, she felt it shift, pulled out of focus. “Myrnin, stop it!”
He spread his hands theatrically. “I didn’t do anything.”
She tried again. The connection bent, and before she could bring it back where she wanted it, an alternate destination came into focus.
Theo Goldman fell out of the door.
“Theo!” Myrnin caught him, surprised out of his petulance, at least for the moment. He eased the other vampire down to a sitting position against the wall. “Are you injured?”
“No, no, no—” Theo was gasping, though Claire knew he didn’t need air, not the way humans did. This was emotion, not exertion. “Please, you have to help, I beg you. Help us, help my family, please—”
Myrnin crouched down to put their eyes on a level. “What’s happened?”
Theo’s eyes filled with tears that flowed over his lined, kind face. “Bishop,” he said. “Bishop has my family. He says he wants Amelie and the book, or he will kill them all.”
14
T
heo hadn’t come straight from Common Grounds, of course; he’d been taken to one of the open portals—he didn’t know where—and forced through by Bishop. “No,” he said, and stopped Michael as he tried to come closer. “No, not you. He only wants Amelie, and the book, and I want no more innocent blood shed, not yours or mine. Please. Myrnin, I know you can find her. You have the blood tie and I don’t. Please find her and bring her. This is not our fight. It’s family; it’s father and daughter. They should end this, face-to-face.”
Myrnin stared at him for a long, long moment, and then cocked his head to one side. “You want me to betray her,” he said. “Deliver her to her father.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t ask for that. Only to—to let her know what price there will be. Amelie will come. I know she will.”
“She won’t,” Myrnin said. “I won’t let her.”
Theo cried out in misery, and Claire bit her lip. “Can’t you help him?” she said. “There’s got to be a way!”
“Oh, there is,” Myrnin said. “There is. But you won’t like it, my little Claire. It isn’t neat, and it isn’t easy. And it will require considerable courage from you, yet again.”
“I’ll do it!”
“No, you won’t,” Shane and Michael said, at virtually the same time. Shane continued. “You’re barely on your feet, Claire. You don’t go anywhere, not without me.”
“And me,” Michael said.
“Hell,” Eve sighed. “I guess that means I have to go, too. Which I may not ever forgive you for, even if I don’t die horribly.”
Myrnin stared at each of them in turn. “You’d go. All of you.” His lips stretched into a crazy, rubber-doll smile. “You are the best toys, you know. I can’t imagine how much
fun
it will be to play with you.”
Silence, and then Eve said, “Okay, that was extra creepy, with whipped creepy topping. And this is me, changing my mind.”
The glee faded from Myrnin’s eyes, replaced with a kind of lost desperation that Claire recognized all too well. “It’s coming. Claire, it’s coming, I’m afraid. I don’t know what to do. I can feel it.”
She reached out and took his hand. “I know. Please, try. We need you right now. Can you hold on?”
He nodded, but it was more a convulsive response than confirmation. “In the drawer by the skulls,” he said. “One last dose. I hid it. I forgot.”
He did that; he hid things and remembered them at odd moments—or never. Claire dashed off to the far end of the room, near where Richard slept, and opened drawer after drawer under the row of skulls he’d nailed to the wall. He’d promised that they were all clinical specimens, not one of them victims of violence. She still didn’t altogether believe him.
In the last drawer, shoved behind ancient rolls of parchment and the mounted skeleton of a bat, were two vials, both in brown glass. One, when she pried up the stopper, proved to be red crystals.
The other was silver powder.
She put the vial with silver powder in her pants pocket—careful to use the pocket without a hole in it—and brought the red crystals back to Myrnin. He nodded and slipped the vial into his vest pocket, inside the coat.
“Aren’t you going to take them?”
“Not quite yet,” he said, which scared the hell out of her, frankly. “I can stay focused a bit longer. I promise.”
“So,” Michael said, “what’s the plan?”
“This.”
Claire felt the portal snap into place behind her, clear as a lightning strike, and Myrnin grabbed the front of her shirt, swung her around, and threw her violently through the doorway.
She seemed to fall a really, really long time, but she hit the ground and rolled.
She opened her eyes on pitch darkness, smelling rot and old wine.
No.
She knew this place.
She was trying to get up when something else hit her from behind—Shane, from the sound of his angry cursing. She writhed around and slapped a hand over his mouth, which made him stop in midcurse. “Shhhh,” she hissed, as softly as she could. Not that their rolling around on the floor hadn’t rung the dinner bell loud and clear, of course.
Damn you, Myrnin.
A cold hand encircled her wrist and pulled her away from Shane, and when she hit out at it, she felt a velvet sleeve.
Myrnin. Shane was scrambling to his feet, too.
“Michael, can you see?” Myrnin’s voice sounded completely calm.
“Yes.” Michael’s didn’t. At
all.
“Then
run
, damn you! I’ve got them!”
Myrnin followed his own advice, and Claire’s arm was almost yanked from its socket as he dragged her with him. She heard Shane panting on his other side. Her foot came down on something springy, like a body, and she yelped. The sound echoed, and from the darkness on all sides, she heard what sounded like fingers tapping, sliding, coming closer.
Something grabbed her ankle, and this time Claire screamed. It felt like a wire loop, but when she tried to bat at it, she felt fingers, a thin, bony forearm, and nails like talons.
Myrnin skidded to a halt, turned, and stomped. Her ankle came free, and something in the darkness screamed in rage.
“Go!” He roared—not to them, but to Michael, Claire guessed. She saw a flash of something up ahead that wasn’t quite light—the portal? That looked like the kind of shimmer it made when it was being activated.
Myrnin let go of her wrist, and shoved her forward.
Once again, she fell. This time, she landed on top of Michael.
Shane fell on top of her, and she gasped for air as all the breath was driven out of her. They squirmed around and separated. Michael pulled Eve to her feet.
“I know this place,” Claire said. “This is where Myrnin—”
Myrnin stepped through the portal and slammed it shut, just as Amelie had done not so long ago. “We won’t come back here,” he said. “Out. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”
He led the way, long black coat flapping, and Claire had to dig deep to keep up, even with Shane helping her. When he slowed down and started to pick her up, she swatted at him breathlessly. “No, I’ll make it!”
He didn’t look so sure.
At the end of the stone hallway, they took a left, heading down the dark, paneled hall that Claire remembered, but they passed up the door she remembered as Myrnin’s cell, where he’d been chained.
He didn’t even slow down.
“Where are we going?” Eve gasped. “Man, I wish I’d worn different shoes—”
She cut herself off as Myrnin stopped at the end of the hallway. There was a massive wooden door there, medieval style with thick, hand-hammered iron bands, and the Founder’s Symbol etched into the old wood.
He hadn’t even broken a sweat. Of course. Claire windmilled her arms as she stumbled to a halt, and braced herself against the wall, chest heaving.
“Shouldn’t we be armed?” Eve asked. “I mean, for a rescue mission, generally people go armed. I’m just pointing that out.”
“I don’t like this,” Shane said.
Myrnin didn’t move his gaze away from Claire. He reached out and took her hand in his. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I will if you take your meds,” she said.
He shook his head. “I can’t. I have my reasons, little one. Please. I must have your word.”
Shane was shaking his head. Michael wasn’t seeming any too confident about this, either, and Eve—Eve looked like she would gladly have run back the other way, if she’d known there was any other choice than going back into that darkness.
“Yes,” Claire said.
Myrnin smiled. It was a tired, thin sort of smile, and it had a hint of sadness in it. “Then I should apologize now,” he said. “Because I’m about to break that trust most grievously.”
He dropped Claire’s hand, grabbed Shane by the shirt, and kicked open the door.
He dragged Shane through with him, and the door slammed behind him before any of them could react—even Michael, who hit the wood just an instant later, battering at it. It was built to hold out vampires, Claire realized. And it would hold out Michael for a long, long time.
“Shane!” She screamed his name and threw herself against the wood, slamming her hand over and over into the Founder’s Symbol. “Shane,
no
! Myrnin, bring him back. Please, don’t do this. Bring him
back. . . .
”
Michael whirled around, facing the other direction. “Stay behind me,” he said to Eve and Claire. Claire looked over her shoulder to see doors opening, up and down the hall, as if somebody had pressed a button.
Vampires and humans alike came out, filling the hallway between the three of them, and any possible way out.
Every single one of them had fang marks in their necks, just like the ones in Claire’s neck.
Just like the ones in
Michael’s
neck.
There was something about the way he was standing there, so still, so quiet. . . .
And then he walked away, heading for the other vampires.
“Michael!” Eve started to lunge after him, but Claire stopped her.
When Michael reached the first vampire, Claire expected to see some kind of a fight—
something
—but instead, they just looked at each other, and then the man nodded.
“Welcome,” he said, “Brother Michael.”
“Welcome,” another vampire murmured, and then a human.
When Michael turned around, his eyes had shifted colors, going from sky blue to dark crimson.
“Oh
hell
,” Eve whispered. “This isn’t happening. It can’t be.”
The door opened behind them. On the other side was a big stone hall, something straight out of a castle, and the wooden throne that Claire remembered from the welcome feast was here, sitting up on a stage. It was draped in red velvet.
Sitting on the throne was Mr. Bishop.
“Join us,” Bishop said. Claire and Eve looked at each other. Shane was lying on the stone floor, with Myrnin’s hand holding him facedown. “Come in, children. There’s no point anymore. I’ve won the night.”
Claire felt like she’d stepped off the edge of the world, and everything was just . . . gone. Myrnin wouldn’t look at her. He had his head bowed to Bishop.
Eve, after that first look, returned her attention to Michael, who was walking toward them.
It was not the Michael they knew—not at all.
“Let Shane go,” Claire said. Her voice trembled, but it came out clearly enough. Bishop raised one finger, and Michael lunged forward, grabbed Eve by the throat, and pulled her close to him with his fangs bared. “No!”
“Don’t give me orders, child,” Bishop said. “You should be dead by now. I’m almost impressed. Now, rephrase your request. Something with a
please
.”
Claire licked her lips and tasted sweat. “Please,” she said. “Please let Shane go. Please don’t hurt Eve.”
Bishop considered, then nodded. “I don’t need the girl,” he said. He nodded to Michael, who let Eve go. She backed away, staring at him in disbelief, hands over her throat. “I have what I want. Don’t I, Myrnin?”
Myrnin pulled up Shane’s shirt. There, stuffed in his waistband at the back, was the book.
No.