Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

Destroyed.

No time to mourn; I was in serious shit, because this dog wasn’t just a dog; the hellhound glare of its eyes was proof enough of that. I’d never seen anything like it before, not even in Morganville; dogs were pretty predictable, but this one was coming after me like I was a steak and he’d been starved for months. All my weapons were in the pack, which was with Michael, and besides I really didn’t like the idea of killing a dog, even one that was trying to kill me.

It launched itself at me in a running leap, growling, showing way-too-sharp teeth, and I fell backward to the grass and put one foot up like a soccer player going for a goal. Good timing. My foot caught the dog underneath and changed the trajectory from down to my throat, to up and headed for a hard landing against Michael’s car.

Michael caught it as it bounced off. More accurately, he got it in a headlock and held it there as it snarled and fought and ineffectively clawed the air for purchase. I heaved in thick, fast breaths and got to my feet in a post-fight burst of adrenaline. The sleeve of my coat was shredded, and I could feel bruises deep into my arm, but at least I hadn’t lost any flesh out of it.

Lucky.

‘What the hell?’ I said, and Michael shook his head.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘It’s almost as if it’s been turned, but you can’t do that. Animals can’t become vampire. They don’t have enough – will, I guess.’

‘Tell that to the devil beast, then, because he damn sure looks like he’s been turned.’

‘Whatever he is, we can’t leave him running around out here,’ Michael said. ‘You mind waiting a bit until this is taken care of?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Not unless you want to share the seat with him, locked in the car.’

‘Yeah, I haven’t had my shots, better not. Throw me your phone,’ I said. ‘Mine’s trashed. I’ll call it in.’

‘Let me see your arm.’

‘I’m fine, man.’

‘Let me see.’

I took off the coat and rolled up the long sleeve of the thermal I was wearing beneath. Red bruises that were going to black-and-blue in a few hours … and some distinct dark, welling spots of blood. Funny. I hadn’t felt the punctures at all.

I wiped the blood off.

No wounds.

‘Shane?’ Michael sounded worried. Hell, he was right to be. I shook my head, and he pitched his phone to me. I fielded it neatly, dialled 911, and reported devil dog in a vampire headlock. They didn’t sound surprised. That’s my hometown for you. He repeated the question after I hung up, with a more urgent edge to it.

‘I’m fine!’ Well, maybe I wasn’t, but I knew how this would go … if nobody knew what was going on, I’d get my ass hauled up in front of the Founder, or worse, Myrnin, who’d siphon blood off of me and hem and haw and make crazy statements and finally say he didn’t know what was going on. So I’d prefer to skip the drama and work out my problems on my own. Right now, the idea of letting anybody poke and prod me sounded horrifying. ‘They’re on the way.’

They were, too, at high speed. The cop car that wailed toward us screeched around the corner, and the two police inside bailed as the doors flew open. One was a vampire, which was nice, since apparently it was taking vampire strength to subdue angry Fido.

The other was the former mayor, now returned to police chief (which was where she belonged, I thought). Chief Hannah Moses looked at each of us in turn, considered the state of my arm and jacket, and then focused in on Michael and the dog. ‘Hal, if you’d please wrangle the dog …?’

Hal, the other cop, nodded and moved in. He and Michael did a complicated little manoeuvre transferring control of the snarling, writhing, snapping Fluffy, whose devil-red eyes continued to haunt me. Hal dumped the dog in the trunk of the police car, where it immediately began attacking the metal with a fury that chilled, and then he returned to us. ‘That’s the third one,’ he told Hannah, who nodded.

‘Third one?’ I asked. ‘Mind if I ask …’

‘You can ask, I’m just not sure I have an answer,’ Hannah said. She looked strong, tall, competent, perfectly put together … she held herself like a woman who wasn’t afraid of anything, and that was almost true. She was afraid of failure, and she’d failed at being mayor, because that was a job nobody could win. But give her a weapon, a uniform, and a problem, and I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather get behind. ‘I can’t tell you what they are, Shane, because I don’t know. All I know is that we got a report of a wild dog last night that was attacking people, and it looked just like this one. Had to shoot that one, it was going after a kid. Two more tonight. I’m hoping like hell this is the last one.’

‘Experiment gone wrong out of Myrnin’s lab?’ Michael wasn’t afraid to go there. Well, he was only half a step ahead of me, actually.

‘I checked,’ Hannah said. I’d have paid to hear that conversation. ‘He says no. He says he wouldn’t. He likes dogs.’

‘Probably true,’ I said. ‘And Claire would never put up with him experimenting on helpless animals. He cares what she thinks, even if he doesn’t care about anybody else.’

The sound of the dog in the trunk was like a demon in a tin can, and it was unnerving me. The whole police cruiser was rocking on its tyres. Hannah didn’t so much as glance at it. Michael cleared his throat and said, ‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Find out what’s going on, or try to,’ Hannah said. ‘So far, nobody’s been killed, but I don’t like it. Nothing good ever comes of weird things happening in this town.’ Before I could comment on how true that was, not that she needed my opinion, she focused in on me. ‘How’s your arm?’

I showed her. I’d wiped the blood away, and all that showed was bruising. ‘Nothing broken. Coat’s toast, though.’

‘It makes you look tough,’ she said, and smiled. ‘Going somewhere?’

‘Yeah. You know. Out.’

‘Of town.’

I was silent. I’d gotten approval from the Founder to bug out of Morganville for a while, but that didn’t mean Amelie couldn’t change her mind. She did. Often. And I wasn’t her favourite person, anyway.

‘Well,’ Hannah said after a few seconds of whistling wind, ‘I suppose you should be on your way, then. Tell Claire we miss her.’

‘She’s only been gone a day.’

‘And yet,’ Hannah said. She was still giving me a professional kind of smile, but now it had a softening of warmth to it. ‘You’d better do right by that girl, Shane.’

‘Thanks, Mom.’ I meant it sarcastically, but you know, if Hannah had been my mom, I’d have probably turned out a lot more badass. Not to mention less prone to stupid mistakes. ‘Michael’s giving me a ride out of town.’

‘Better get going, then.’ She nodded to me, to Michael, and she and Hal got back into the snarling, rocking police cruiser, shut off the flashers, and headed off to wherever you unloaded insane devil dogs.

My arm was starting to ache. Nothing bad, though. Just hot and abused. I’d had lots worse. Lots worse. Michael stuck my bag in the back seat and we went back in the house; he had a nice leather jacket that he let me have for the trip, with the warning that if I got it torn up he’d patch it up with strips of my bleeding flesh, which hey. Brotherly love.

I’d left Morganville a couple of times before – once with my dad and mom, when we’d fled after our house burnt and my sister died. Then again with Michael, Eve and Claire (and the much-loathed vampire Oliver as our chaperone). Still, approaching the town boundary made my heart speed up and my palms clammy; it was a built-in resident reaction. Despite the chill in the air, I rolled down the window to see where we were, and I shivered when Michael’s car sped past the ghostly, creaking billboard where we’d said goodbye to Claire in the predawn light. I let out a slow, shaky breath and rolled the heavily tinted window back up. It was like travelling in space, riding around in vampire cars.