Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

Pandora’s box was open.

The bottle was empty. I went to the cooler and got a six-pack, and worked my way through that while trying to forget about my dad’s furious disappointment with me, his abuse, his willingness to sacrifice me for the cause … and then once I’d pushed that back, all the times that I’d been at the mercy of a pair of fangs, and helpless. Too many times, in Morganville.

And then, I brooded about the draug.

They were the worst, the draug – creatures in the water, creatures that were worse than the vampires and more alien than anything I could really imagine. They didn’t have feelings, except cold hunger, and they’d had me for a long time in their tanks. Feeding on me. Trapping me in dreams, and nightmares, until I wasn’t sure I could tell the difference between the two any more.

By the time I’d managed to work through that trauma, I was out of beer, and stumbling drunk, and I felt … empty. Just empty. No more anger, no more fear … just a vast vacuum that needed filling with something other than all the fury I’d held inside, and finally released.

I needed Claire. Needed her.

And so I clumsily unlocked Florey’s, reset the alarm as I left, and weaved along the silent sidewalks heading for her apartment. I didn’t think ahead to what I was going to say to her. I guess in my beer-soaked mind it would all just magically work out, and she’d be so happy to see me she’d forget about everything else. Because everybody loves having the drunken self-pitying boyfriend banging on their door at Jesus, four-thirty in the morning. At the time, hey, it seemed like a fabulous idea.

I never got there.

See, I forgot all the lessons that had been drilled into my head in Morganville: first, never get stumbling drunk, because you never know when you’re going to need your wits and reflexes about you. Second, see the first rule.

And third, never ever do it after dark.

For some reason, I thought that Morganville was the equivalent of Dead Space Level Twelve, and having survived that, I didn’t rate the nerdy, vampire-free streets of Cambridge at more than a Level Two.

Turns out that it wasn’t vampires I had to worry about. It was just a gang of guys who’d finished off their night badly and were looking for somebody to blame, and I was staggering down the wrong damn street. There were six of them, and approximately one quarter of me, and those weren’t good odds in any game.

In real life, you don’t get a reset, and you don’t get extra lives, and I got the crap pounded out of mine. I don’t really know how it happened; I saw them coming, whooping and hollering and high-fiving, and then they went quiet when they saw me and I guess they didn’t like the T-shirt I had on, or maybe they thought I was some rich, stupid kid out for a stroll, but after the first punch it was all just a blur because there wasn’t any way to fight six guys at once. It was more a matter of going down, curling up, and trying to survive it while being dimly aware that the beer wasn’t making it any less painful, and that one of them had a really high, shrill, ragged voice as he yelled faggot in my ear and kicked me in the liver.

And then I heard the ring of metal on concrete, and I went cold, because one of them had found a piece of rebar lying around, and I knew with sudden certainty that these guys were going to kill me right here on this stupid sidewalk, for nothing , without even the reason of knowing my name or hating my politics. They were just going to kill me because they needed to kill something, and I was handy.

At least zombies would have had a reason.

I would have been dead if Team Vampire hadn’t swooped in and saved my drunken ass.

I didn’t see a lot of it, given that I had a pretty good concussion and blood in my eyes, but I saw pale skin, a killer smile, whipping hair that flared red in the streetlight, and curves that would be fairly impossible to forget. Jesse had come to my rescue, and so had Pete; my fireplug of a friend had taken the rebar and was strategically applying it to arms and legs with dispassionate calm. There was a lot of screaming, and within seconds, seconds , it was all over and there were seven guys on the concrete.

Then Jesse helped me stand up, and there were six.

‘Don’t worry, they’re not dead,’ she said, and gave me a merciless appraisal. ‘You look like shit, Collins.’

‘Thanks,’ I mumbled. I didn’t mean for the compliment. ‘Well, that walk sucked.’

She laughed as I spat out a mouthful of blood, and if she thought I was wasting food, at least she didn’t say so. Pete brought the rebar along with us, and we went to a car parked about a block down. It was a long walk. I passed the time by wondering (probably aloud) why Pete had brought along his iron stick. I know it was aloud because he finally said, ‘Fingerprints,’ as he tossed it in the trunk of the car and helped Jesse pile me into the back. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘You’re perceptive,’ I said, and slid sideways until my already-sore head collided with window glass. ‘Ow.’ That wasn’t adequate to the situation, but I didn’t think it was manly to cry like a little girl. I pulled myself into a leaning position and breathed deeply, trying not to think of how the world was spinning. ‘It was only a six-pack.’

‘Of?’

‘Russian imperial stout.’

‘Oh, honey,’ Jesse said from the driver’s seat, clearly amused. ‘The Russians have nothing to do most of the winter but drink as a hobby. You really should work up to that stuff. Take it from me, I was around when Gregory Rasputin was still the man to beat in a drinking game. You’re going to regret that.’

‘He’s going to regret it a lot more,’ Pete said. He was poking and prodding me, a fact I realised late, and when I ineffectively slapped at him to stop, I missed and smacked myself in something that was already bruised. Not sure what. ‘Might have to take him to the ER. He could have internal bleeding.’

Jesse cocked her head and glanced back at me, and I saw that red glow in her eyes again. Weirdly, it seemed comforting right now. Homey, even. ‘He might have, but he doesn’t,’ she said. ‘I could tell if he did. Oh, he’s got plenty of haemorrhages, but they’re not life-threatening. And he’s no stranger to cuts and

bruises. Watch his head, though. I saw them get in a good shot at least twice.’

‘He’ll have a hell of a headache from the contrecoup, but doesn’t look like anything too bad. Might want to get an X-ray, though.’

I was starting off my time in Cambridge pretty much the same way I had my return to Morganville: with hospital visits. ‘What the hell,’ I sighed. ‘I haven’t had a good X-ray in a long time. Could be fun.’ Because unlike most drunken tough guys, I’d seen enough to know that head injuries were nothing to fool around with. You could look and feel fine for a day, then drop dead of the swelling and exploding veins.

‘I think you’re confusing X-rays with something from a porn movie,’ Jesse said, ‘but sure. One ER visit, coming up. I hope that whatever you had going with those guys was worth all the trouble. What did they do, kick a puppy, insult your mother …?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything. They just wanted to hurt someone, and I was there.’

After a moment of silence, she said, ‘Yes, I know how that can happen.’ She sounded grim, like she personally knew it, and hey, she probably did. She might have even been on the receiving end, but you could never assume that kind of thing with vampires. ‘Why were you wandering around in the dark, Shane? I’m assuming that coming from Morganville you know better.’

‘I thought it’d be safer here.’