Rachel Caine: Daylighters

Eve sucked in a steadying breath and said, “Michael’s still Michael, no matter what his diet is, and I want to be with him. Don’t tell me it isn’t safe. He won’t hurt me!”

“I see. I think you honestly believe that. Well, I really must let Michael tell you himself, mustn’t I? Perhaps it is best if you see him, then. Hannah will take you for a short visit, and we’ll hear no more about it after.”

He had a certain draw to him, Claire thought. She could see how he could convince people to follow him . . . even Hannah, who definitely was not born gullible. He had a fire in him, and strength, and courage. It was right there, for anyone who looked hard enough.

God, she thought, suddenly and coldly alarmed. Even I’m falling for it a little. That wasn’t normal. Not for her. Maybe when she’d first arrived in Morganville she might have bought into that kind of charisma, but she’d grown since then. She’d learned how to distrust a nice face and a winning smile.

It was odd, but something about him reminded her of vampires, and the charm they could deploy in the cause of gaining what they wanted. What unsettled her was that Fallon quite clearly wasn’t a vampire—she could see the pulse beating in his throat, his color was good, and there was none of that strange sense of other that she almost always got from the fanged gang.

She was so caught up in her own reactions that she almost missed what Fallon said, and it took a few seconds to penetrate that he had, in fact, just agreed.

He was going to let them see Michael, which should have been, by any measure, a victory.

Why did it feel so much like a trap?

Once upon a time—well before Claire had come to Morganville, and probably before she’d entered puberty—there had been a mall in town. It hadn’t been a huge one, not like the sprawling temples of shopping that you could find in the bigger cities like Dallas or Houston, or even Midland. It also had never had any of the major chain stores in it, mainly because (as Eve had speculated, probably correctly) Amelie didn’t want to have regular traffic in and out of town or to encourage visitors. And as humble as a Sears store might be, it would have still been better than anything else within a hundred miles, and it would have made people—people who weren’t in the know—come to Morganville.

So the mall had housed only local stores, and it had struggled along for a few years in the mid-1980s until the last business had failed and bailed, leaving behind one of the largest empty structures in Morganville—which said a lot, considering how many empty structures there were around town. The old tire factory, and the even older hospital, for example, were fairly gigantic. But the biggest difference to Claire was that she had never been forced to run for her life in the old mall. It had always seemed more of a sad place than an actively evil one.

As the police cruiser pulled up to one of the parking spaces in the cracked, deserted lot, she thought that was about to change.

“Right,” Hannah said, and turned around in the front seat to look at them. The three of them had been crammed together in the backseat this time, which actually was comforting; Claire loved the warmth and solidity of Shane sitting in the middle, even if it pushed her uncomfortably into the hard plastic of the door. “Rules, people. We’ve got them, and you’ll obey them. First rule is, you do exactly what my officers tell you, without hesitation or question. If they tell you to get down on the floor, you eat dirt. If they tell you to stop, you become a statue. Are we understood?”

“What the hell happened to you?” Shane asked her. “Because I’m pretty sure you used to be cool, Captain Obvious.”

“So did you,” Hannah shot back. “So be cool now, or end up back in handcuffs. Fallon said you’d get to see Michael, and I’m going to make that happen, but you be cool. ”

No one had a comeback for that. Eve looked tense, her dark eyes huge, as if she was afraid to do anything to screw up the chance to see the man she loved—but also, Claire thought, as if she was ready to gnaw through steel bars to get to him, if necessary. At moments like these, Eve looked exactly like what she was: strong and determined.

Fallon would almost certainly see that as a threat, that kind of devotion.

“Watch her back,” Claire whispered to Shane, and got a nod as Hannah exited the police cruiser and opened Eve’s door.

“I’m watching yours first,” Shane whispered back, then scooted over toward the exit. Claire followed, blinking at the harsh desert daylight again; the tint on the cruiser’s windows wasn’t vampire-dark, but it had lulled her into a false sense of being in a kinder, gentler place until the dry, dusty reality hit her full on.

The mall was on two floors, and it was built of bricks the color of dried mud. No windows. It was shaped like a rectangle—no fancy architectural touches here. The rusted steel letters still clung to the side of the building, or at least most of them did: BITTER CREEK MALL. Only a few letters had fallen away, or been ripped off, so the sign actually read BIT ER EEK MA L. Which seemed weirdly appropriate somehow.

Two uniformed police officers stood at parade rest outside the double doors that led into the mall, and Claire recognized one of them. He’d arrested Shane once—though that wasn’t exactly a small club of people.

Hannah gave them both brisk nods, and like the most intimidating doormen ever, the cops opened the entrance and stood aside to let them go in.

It smelled abandoned.

That was the first thing Claire noticed—the musty reek of old carpet, dust, mold—the aroma of a place that humans had long ago rejected. A faint undertone of rot, too.

And quiet. So very, very quiet. The sound of their footsteps echoed around an open atrium floored with cracked, dirty ceramic tiles in a brightly colored style that must have been hot back in the dark ages when the place was built, but just looked dated and clumsy now. A dry three-tiered fountain sat lifeless in the corner. The light coming in was dim at best; the skylights, Claire found as she looked up, were filthy, and the plastic had aged to a dull, opaque yellow. It gave all of them a sickly pallor.

“Cozy,” Shane said. “Going for the homeless heroin addict market with this place, are you?”

“We worked with what we had,” Hannah said. She sounded just a touch defensive. “We’re getting it cleaned and made more livable, but they don’t seem to care all that much about the decor.”

They being the vampires, Claire realized, because despite the hush, they were most definitely not alone. Silent figures loomed in the shadows like abandoned mannequins. Even when the figures moved, it was more like ghosts walking—silent and eerie. So many vampires. But none of them came out into the open tiled square of the atrium.

Eve took in a sudden sharp breath. “Jesus!” she gasped, and Claire knew she’d spotted them, too. There was something deeply unsettling about the way they were being watched. Like prey.

Like enemies.

“Stay where you are,” Hannah said, as Eve took a step out toward them. “They know the rules; they stay out of the atrium unless we specifically call their names.”

“Or what?” Shane asked tightly. He didn’t like this any more than Claire did. “What kind of punishments have you been dishing out?”

Hannah didn’t answer that—didn’t want to, Claire thought. But she had her hand on what Claire had originally thought was some kind of radio on her belt—a black box with buttons along the top and a flickering green light.

Maybe it wasn’t a radio after all.