Morganville Vampires 11: Last Breath (31 page)

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.”

“Aw, that’s cute. Who grew up and got all butch? Doesn’t suit you, Glass. You’re the sensitive musician type, remember?” The bitter mockery in his voice was about as subtle as a rock to the head.

One thing about me—I
am
a musician, but I grew up in Morganville, and here, sensitive types don’t last long unless they have steel underneath. So I was never the weak pushover Shane’s dad had always assumed I was. Shane had known that, but his dad had always wanted him to make friends with
real
guys.

Honestly, smashing his brain would solve
so
many problems right now, for all of us, because the idea of Frank Collins continuing to throw his weight around when Claire was lying dead in our house … it really reeked of irony.

I turned around and said, “Black leather bag. Where is it?”

Collins had upgraded his image a little; he seemed younger, and he’d made himself look more badass at the same time. Sad. “Feel free to look around,” he said.

“Myrnin needs it.”

“You think that cuts any ice with me, Goldilocks? He didn’t exactly ask me before he wired me into his Frankenmachine. I don’t run his errands.”

I kept opening cabinets and pulling drawers. The clock was ticking away on me, and I was well aware that I still had to get back to the house before the deadline with Shane and Eve. If Amelie’s search team showed up here, I’d be screwed.

“Warmer,” Frank said. “Oooh, nope, wrong, cooler.”

“Shut up.”

“Tell me one thing and I will.”

“Or I could go pull your tubes—that’d work, too.”

“What do you think would happen if I told Shane about you and Claire?”

I froze. It was like a two-by-four hitting me in the head, and for a few seconds I couldn’t even organize a response … and then I had to fight back the red splash of rage that flooded over me.

I turned to look at him. Pretty sure my eyes were glowing a bright, angry crimson.
“You fucking liar.”

He laughed. “Oh, come on, Michael. She’s a pretty girl; she’s living in your house…. Are you telling me you never even
thought
about it? You think Shane would believe that, either? If I told him?”

It was a lie, a complete and total bullshit lie, but he was right about one thing: I
had
thought about it. Not after Shane had started falling for her, but before, a little. Just a little.

One thing about Frank, he’d always known how to see the cracks in your armor, and just where to hit. My friendship with Shane would always be strong, and it would always be fragile, too; he didn’t trust vampires, but he trusted me, and all that noise in his head over that made it harder than it should have been.

Any hint about Claire and me … that would shatter it all over again.

“What do you want, Frank?” I slammed one drawer and opened another one. Damn, I was getting hungry, spurred on by all the anger he was pulling out of me. I had a sports bottle at home filled with type O that I’d chug down, but it was distracting, feeling that jittery need at a time like this. I wondered where Myrnin kept his snacks. Then again, knowing Myrnin’s general whackitude, I wouldn’t have tried anything out of his refrigerator anyway.

“I want you to stop Amelie,” Frank said.

That made me turn around. All the bullying was gone now, all the crap, and
this
was the real Frank Collins. The one who still had a streak of—well, I wouldn’t call it humanity, exactly—
honor
left in him.

“Stop her from doing what, exactly?”

“Destroying this town and everybody in it.”

“Not the vampires,” I said. “And she said she’s handing over power to the humans.”

Frank laughed, a tangle of electronic noise from the speakers across the room. “You really believe she’d ever do that? Even at the end? She’s one of those who’d kill you to save you. Vampires get to leave. Humans get to die, all together, right in Founder’s Square—just like scientists humanely get rid of lab animals when they’re done with the experiment. And I’m the one who has to pull the pin.”

Part of me insisted that he was lying, again, because that was Frank’s deal. He lied. He bullied. He manipulated people to do what he wanted.

But the other part warned me that he just
might
be telling the truth. I’d heard Amelie and Myrnin talking. What he’d just said fit with what I knew from the two of them—although they’d left out the part about humans dying.

Of course.

“Tell me where the bag is,” I said.

“Only if you tell me you’re going to stop this thing.”

I opened another drawer and slammed it so hard the wood splintered. “Don’t be an ass—of
course
I’m going to stop it. Do you really think I’d let Amelie do a thing like that?”

“Maybe. Vampires are all about self-preservation.”

“All right, then suck on this: I’m staying here. I’m not going with the others. So she’d have to kill me, too.” I threw a stack of books out of the way and uncovered another set of drawers built into the bottom of the lab table I was searching.

And inside was a dusty black leather bag. Exactly like what I was searching for.

I pulled it out and opened it. Medical equipment. Things I didn’t recognize, but it looked like what Myrnin would want.

“Told you that you were getting warm,” Frank said.

“Game’s over, Frank.” I snapped the catches shut again and picked up the bag, along with the shopping bag of chemicals. “You lose.”

His voice came out of my cell phone speaker as I climbed the steps, heading out. “Do we have a deal?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t make deals with you.”

But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be stopping the massacre. If he hadn’t been lying about that, too.

Frank said, “What if I told you Claire was still alive in your house?”

And how Frank Collins it was, to save that as his
last
bargaining chip.

I held up the phone and said, very clearly, “I already know, dip-shit. And we’re going to get her back without any help from you.”

There was silence for a second, and then Frank said, “You know what, kid? I really hope you can. But the thing is, even if you do … you’re all going to die. Because I’m going to kill you. I’ve got no choice.”

We’d have to see about that.

But after Claire.

 

 

I made it home in an hour and three minutes, unlocked the back door, and raced inside to put my stuff on the table.

The house was silent, except for the dry ticking of the clock in the parlor. Claire’s body still lay motionless on the couch, covered with Eve’s knit afghan.

I went to the front and carefully checked the window. No sign of the hearse out front.

They were late. Later than me, and that was
late
.

I waited as the clock ticked, every second winding my nerves tighter.
Dammit, Shane, if you got yourself into it … If Eve …
I couldn’t finish the thoughts; my brain kept yanking away from it like a hand from a hot stove.

What if Frank wasn’t lying about the meeting at Founder’s Square? What if Amelie meant to end the Morganville experiment in a blaze of glory? I couldn’t understand that, but it all fit. She was scared of something,
very
scared. And scared people do insane things.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and I couldn’t wait anymore. The hearse wouldn’t be tough to spot. If they needed help, every minute would count.

I left the way I’d come in, through the back, and took shortcuts through neighbors’ yards until I was sure it was safe to be on the street.

I was two blocks from Lot Street, passing the shuttered and locked gates of Variety Liquor, when the rain began to fall again. I didn’t have a coat, but it didn’t matter. I kept moving.

Ahead, someone stepped out of the hissing darkness, and I saw a blur of water, teeth, something
wrong
, so very wrong, and then there was something in my head, drowning me alive. I felt cold.

The thing facing me looked like a man, but he was all wrong, too. So was his awful slicing smile as he whispered, “Come with me,” and I had no choice but to follow him into the dark.

Into the cold.

Drowning.

Dark.

“D
ammit,” Shane said. He’d been saying that for about five minutes straight, like some kind of mantra. “Hand me the wrench.
Dammit!
”

I crouched down and handed him the tool out of the box in the back of the hearse. Even Shane’s strength was having trouble with the bolts on the tire.

The flat one.

So
not my fault.

“You know—
dammit!
—if you actually got these things changed out before the tread is showing—”

“Zip it right there,” I told him. “Really not the time to lecture me about my car-maintenance habits. Just get it changed.”

“Yeah, working on it,” he said. “Dammit. We’re late already. Michael’s going to freak.”

“Hey, good, because if he shows up, we can have this fixed in thirty seconds,” I said.

Shane sent me a glare from under his rain-drenched hair, which was ratted around his face. He needed a shave, I thought. And a tranquilizer. “I don’t need help,” he snapped. He stood up and stamped on the wrench, and the bolt turned with a horrible metallic shriek. Now that he had it started, he was able to muscle it off and start the next one.

At this rate, we’d be thirty minutes in the freezing downpour. Sitting ducks for any passing vamp with a plasma craving.

Or worse, whatever worse was this week in Morganville. One thing was certain: it was not safe to be out with a flat tire after dark, even on the town’s best day ever. Which this most assuredly wasn’t.

I was trying to be the old Eve. I really was; I’d even zinged Shane a couple of times with wisecracks, but nothing felt the same. I kept seeing flashes in front of me, vivid as camera shots, of how Claire had looked lying there on the floor, her eyes open, head turned to the side.

Of how I’d known, even before I’d touched her, that she was gone.

Nothing was the same now. The rain was all wrong for Morganville; it
never
poured like this, especially not this time of year. The streets were flooding, again, and even under the hooded jacket I was wearing I felt chilled and soaked. And so many stores were shut—not just closed for the night,
closed
, with whited-out windows and notices on the doors.

It felt like the whole population was suddenly deciding Morganville was no longer safe.

Which,
duh
.

I shivered again and stamped my feet, which was a bad idea. I sent splashes of freezing water up my legs.