The hall opened into a giant open concrete space with a rusty lacework of iron overhead. The floor was cracked white tiles, and on the walls there was more tile, in patterns Claire was sure used to be beautiful, before they were discolored with time and more of the ever-present mold.
In the center was a big square pool, and it was full of glimmering blue-green water, lit from below. It glowed like a jewel, and it was beautiful and mesmerizing and the singing was coming from
there
, right there….
The woman they’d followed was in the pool. In the shallow end, but walking forward.
And she kept walking as the water reached her hips, then her waist, up to her chest, her neck….
… And she went under.
She didn’t come back up.
In the deep end of the pool, Claire saw …
… Bodies.
Claire lunged forward and ran to the edge of the pool. Shane tried to stop her, but she couldn’t let him, not now,
not now
!
There were bodies in the pool. Standing there, upright, six feet below the surface at least. They were anchored on the bottom, she thought, because she could see their arms floating. One woman’s long hair drifted lazily in the water, veiling her face, but as it wafted out of the way, Claire recognized her.
Naomi.
The vampire was still and silent, eyes wide. She looked dead.
Oliver was down there, anchored nearby.
And there was
Michael
.
Right there, staring up at her.
And he blinked.
He was alive. They were all
alive
.
She wanted to scream. Shane was dragging her frantically backward from the edge, and she realized that even as she’d been adjusting to the horrible reality of what she was seeing, she’d been thinking about taking one more step, just one, and sinking into that warm, still water, so calm and peaceful….
He spun her around and screamed in her face, “Claire, we have to go!”
He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the hallway.
Then stopped.
Because there was a pale-faced man standing there, staring at them. Claire blinked, and he wasn’t there anymore—it was a black
thing
, but she could see his human disguise at the same time, like a skin stretched over the reality.
Magnus.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I killed you, girl.”
Shane dug silver-coated stakes out of his pocket. He passed one to Claire, then took out what looked like a … sports bottle. One had a snap-down top, and he thumbed that off, aimed, and squirted a silvery stream out of it to splash on the thing in their way.
Magnus screamed, and it was like that singing sound, only a million times worse, and Shane dropped the bottle and the stake and staggered, then went down to one knee. Claire came close; it hammered at her in waves of relentless sound, but she could see that the silver nitrate had hurt the thing, burned away some of his human-skin disguise, and melted part of him into a bubbling, seething mass that ran off in a black current to the tiles.
Claire took a firmer grip on the silver stake, summoned up all the speed and strength Myrnin had granted her, and raced forward in a blur.
She buried the silver stake where, in a human, a heart would have been. It was like pushing it into Jell-O, nothing like staking a vampire at all. Sickening. She could feel the cold ooze on her fingers.
Magnus’s mouth opened, revealing razor-sharp rows of teeth, and he lunged at her. She yelped and rolled away, still vamp-fast, and Magnus yanked the stake out and flung it away. The wound it had left was another bubbling leak of black fluid, but he wasn’t down. Not by half.
Shane staggered up, grabbed her hand, and ran for the door he’d left unguarded. Black streamers of ooze were coming across the tile at them, and Claire had the awful, sickening feeling that if they stepped in it, they’d never get free. The ick on her fingers felt like it was squeezing them white, and she felt horrible pinpricks all over the skin where it touched. She dragged her hand against her jeans as they ran.
There were more of them in the entry hall, black oily shadows with fake human faces, and they were
all
Magnus. Shane sprayed the rest of the bottle at them, and Claire grabbed a silver-coated knife from his belt loop. She slashed at the one who came for him, and heard that shriek again, an angry, pile-driving pressure like the whole ocean descending on them … but the creature went down, splashing into silvery black fragments that rolled aimlessly over the carpet, and Claire grabbed Shane’s arm and dragged him forward for the clear air outside. He was staggering, and in the wan, flickering glow of the streetlight outside, she saw that his nose was bleeding, and his eyes were red.
She was bleeding, too, she realized, from both her nose and her hand. It looked as if it had been stung by a jellyfish. It was covered with little beads of blood.
It was biting me,
she thought, and shuddered in revulsion.
“Come on!” she screamed, and Shane coughed, bent over, and vomited out a stream of
water
.
But they hadn’t even gotten into the pool.
Magnus was in the doorway, and his eyes were silver white, like moonlight on water, and he was smiling at them.
They weren’t going to make it.
Claire screamed again, in pure agonizing frustration, and without even thinking about it, she grabbed Shane and threw him over her shoulder.
That shouldn’t have been possible, not at all; he was so much bigger and heavier than she was, but she felt like her veins were on fire, and she wanted to fight,
now
, fight this thing that had hurt her and come after Shane and come after Michael and Oliver and her
town
.
But she also knew she couldn’t do that. Shane would die.
So she balanced his weight, held on to his legs, and ran for her life, and his.
It took four long blocks for the adrenaline and whatever boost Myrnin’s blood had given her to wear completely off. She began to gasp and stagger, and then went down, hard, and Shane went down with her. Her whole body felt like it was coming apart. Shane had warned her that there was a crash, but this wasn’t a crash; it was more like being ripped apart and put back together again, and
God
, it hurt.
Shane had made it to his knees, looking pale and out of it, but the rain on his face seemed to bring him back. He met Claire’s eyes and held out his hand, and she took it.
Run,
he mouthed, and she nodded. She wasn’t sure she could, but he was right.
It was their only real hope.
They were racing flat-out past Common Grounds when Magnus—or his clone—stepped out from behind the building into their path. Claire shrieked and managed to avoid him, twisting out of the way of his grasping hand; Shane ran straight into him. He made it work for him; he got his shoulder around and rammed into the creature. He knocked it back. Whatever it was, it wasn’t completely gelatinous; there was some kind of weird strength inside of it, and that made it vulnerable to a physical attack. It staggered a few feet, and Shane made a perfect spinning turn, grabbed Claire, and pulled her into a dead sprint.
But ahead, Claire could see more of them, more of those human disguises in that generic nothing form, and behind them … something monstrous. They were coming up out of the rain gutters, dripping out of faucets … at least four of them, with more coming behind.
She slowed down and exchanged a fast, panicked look with Shane.
They weren’t going to make it.
He put his arm around her, but she shook it off and stood back-to-back with him. They circled, watching as the predators closed in. Claire wasn’t sure what was waiting in the Morganville Civic Pool, but whatever it was, she knew it was awful. Living death.
The earplugs made the fast, rasping sound of her breathing into its own horror-show sound track, along with the rapid thump of her heartbeat. She tasted blood; her nose was still dripping, and always, there was singing, singing, that high, clear, perfect music trying to draw her back.
She heard the roaring engine only at the last possible second before the hood of the hearse plowed through the row of creatures closing in from the front. One bounced off and rolled; the other three hit with too much force, and splashed into a thick black film over the windshield, hood, and grille.
The hearse skidded sideways, and Claire saw Eve’s white, shocked face in the driver’s side. Eve screamed something at them, but it didn’t matter what the message was; Shane was already throwing himself into a slide over the hood to the passenger door, and Claire scrambled after him.
Something caught her by the hood of her jacket.
She turned, pulled the silver knife, and slashed blindly. One of them shrieked that awful cry as it was hurt, and she managed to drive herself forward. Shane met her halfway and dragged her to the open door, shoved her inside, and yelled, “Go!” across to Eve as he got the door slammed shut.
She gunned it.
Claire felt a horrible bubbling pressure in her lungs, and coughed. Water sprayed out, tasting like rancid mold. She bent over and coughed until her lungs ached.
Shane pounded her back, not that it really helped, and put his arms around her when she came upright again. Eve looked seriously terrified. Claire said, “How did you know?” but Eve pointed to her ears. Claire saw a flash of blue.
Earplugs.
She didn’t turn back toward the house; instead, she drove straight for City Hall, where it looked like half the cars in Morganville were parked. There was a full-scale panic under way, Claire saw: families carrying suitcases, hurrying toward the building, police officers out directing traffic.
Chaos.
Eve pulled her earplugs out as she parked, and Claire and Shane did the same. Everybody started talking at once, but Eve shouted the other two of them down. “The cops came to the house!” she said. “Everybody from Walnut Street to Garden had to get the hell out and come here. No exceptions. I figured I’d better go looking for you. Oh God, those things—I hit them. And they splashed.
Gross.
I wore the earplugs because, you know, last time, the music … Did you find Michael?” Eve was bouncing from subject to subject like a crazed meth fiend, but it wasn’t drugs driving her, just panic. “Please tell me you found him!”
Shane said, “We found where they have him.” That was all he said, and that was probably a really good thing; Eve lit up with a smile. “We need reinforcements before we can even think about getting him out.”
“But he’s alive?”
“Yes,” Claire said. She couldn’t smile back; she just couldn’t. What she’d seen was too … grimly awful. “Yes, he’s alive. So’s Oliver, and Naomi, and a bunch of others. I have to get to Amelie. She has to
understand
.”
“Well, you need to do it soon, because she’s already started moving vampires out of town,” Eve said. “I saw buses leaving. They have blacked-out windows, like those rock star kind of things. Probably hot and cold running-blood taps, and I just totally skeeved myself out by saying that. I guess those are the first-class passengers. I heard from Hannah Moses that some were being put into semi tractor-trailer trucks, too. I guess that would explain the sudden Wal-Mart invasion.”
“Wal-Mart?” Shane repeated.
“I guess they grabbed whatever trucks they could get. Wal-Mart, grocery trucks, mail trucks … It looks like one of those disaster movies, with the people crawling over each other to get on the last helicopter.” Eve had lost her smile, and she looked … adult. And suddenly grim. “I think this town is done for, guys. It feels like it’s dying all around us.”
It felt that way to Claire, too. “Will you take us to Founder’s Square?” she asked. “Please? It’s not safe to try to get there on foot, not anymore. I know they told you to come here, but …”
“Sure,” Eve said. “Like I ever followed anybody’s rules anyway. Hey, try the seat belts. I hear they save lives and crap. We may be doing some seriously defensive driving.”
She turned the key, and the engine made an awful grinding sound. Eve frowned and tried it again. It sounded horrible, and it definitely didn’t sound like an engine was supposed to sound.
“Dammit,” she said, and unbuckled as she got out. Shane joined her at the hood, but instead of lifting it, they both stood there, staring.
Claire scrambled out to take a look, too. “What is it?”
The front grille of the hearse looked
melted
. There was black, wet gunk oozing out of it, and when Eve reached out to pop the hood release, Shane stopped her. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t touch that stuff. Get the work gloves—I left them in the bag in the back.”
Once she’d gotten them, Shane tugged the thick, heavy gloves on, took a deep breath, and reached under the grille to pop the latch. It came free with a sticky, wet sound, and as he raised the hood, there was a thin film of goo that came up with it.
The engine was fouled with the stuff, and it was
bubbling
. It looked, Claire thought sickly, like a cross between slime and seaweed, and it gave off a wet, thick smell of decay.
“Oh my God,” Eve said. It came out muffled, since she was pinching her nose shut and backing away. “Oh my God, my poor baby—what
is that
?”
Shane slammed the hood and stripped off the gloves. They were smeared with the same stuff, and he kicked them under the hearse. “Whatever it is, you’re not driving us anywhere,” he said. “So what are we going to do?”
“Find another car,” Claire said, and just at that moment, she spotted one pulling up. It was rocking pop music at an earsplitting volume, which cut off abruptly as the driver pulled the key and got out.
Monica Morrell didn’t look like she was planning on getting out of town. In fact, she looked like she’d been pulled out of an after-hours club, and as she stalked up the sidewalk, stiletto heels tapping out an impatient rhythm, Claire had to give her style points. Everybody else had a mismatched refugee look, but not Monica. She had on a glittery, figure-hugging minidress, one that showed off her long tanned legs and curves and cleavage. Even her long, straightened dark hair blew in the wind like a supermodel’s.