Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

Maybe that was just his default setting.

There was a knock on the front door, and Pete headed for it. Shane got up, too, frowning. ‘That was too quick for pizza,’ he said. Pete nodded without pausing; he had a baseball bat hidden in the shadows near the doorway, and he grabbed the length of wood on his way. Then he checked the peephole.

‘Is it the police?’ Claire asked. She felt a little short of breath, suddenly, because if it was, there didn’t seem to be an easy way out of this place. Defensible, but limited retreat. And they couldn’t fight their way out, not against regular human police. It would be wrong on every level, even if they weren’t guilty.

‘No,’ Pete said. There was an odd tension in his voice, and he stepped back from the door, opened it, and said, ‘Get in, quick.’

It happened fast – one second he was standing alone on the doorstep, and the next … the next, there were three people crowding the hallway with him. Two supporting a limp, maybe unconscious third.

As Pete slammed and locked the door, Claire bolted forward. So did Shane.

And Eve let out a strangled little sound that was half glad cry, half sob.

She and Jesse were supporting the dead weight of a very pale, very still Michael Glass.

With a wooden stake in his heart.

‘Christ, is that guy dead?’ Pete blurted out, when he saw the stake. Shane ignored him, grabbed Michael’s weight by the shoulders, and helped Jesse carry him over to the couch. Eve followed, and Claire hugged her hard when she paused to try to catch her breath. She was shaking all over.

‘He’s okay,’ Claire said, and rubbed her back. ‘Eve, it’s okay, it’ll be okay …’

‘Pull it out,’ Shane snapped at Jesse, who had crouched down beside the couch to stare at the stake in Michael’s chest. ‘Hurry up, he’s too young, it could really hurt him.’

‘Stop! Don’t touch it. It’s spring-loaded,’ Jesse said, and pointed to a symbol burnt into the side of the wood. ‘I know this mark. It’s a Daylight Foundation inventory sign. It’s got a silver payload built in. If you try to remove it, it’ll flood his heart with silver. It’ll kill him.’

Shane had reached out for the stake, but now he pulled back, eyes narrowed and simmering with fury. ‘Who the fuck is the Daylight Foundation?’

‘Trust me, nobody you need to screw around with,’ Jesse said. ‘There’s a method for disarming this thing, but we need to be very careful. I’ve got some experience. Let me handle it.’

‘What the hell happened out there?’ Shane demanded. No one answered him, not even Eve; she was staring down at Michael, her face ashen. Claire held on to her, because it seemed that, after having made the single-minded effort to get Michael to safety, Eve had completely lost all strength to keep herself upright. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t doing anything, except … waiting, with a kind of fatal, desperate patience. The ruby wedding ring flashed and trembled on her clenched left hand. ‘Claire. Claire . Go check the door, make sure nobody’s coming after them.’

She didn’t want to leave Eve, but he was right; it was important. Pete seemed rooted to the spot, staring at the completely unexpected second vampire in his living room; he seemed to be rethinking his whole life strategy, in that single moment.

‘Go,’ Eve whispered. ‘I’m okay.’ She stood on her own, somehow, and Claire squeezed her arm and rushed to the door to look through the peephole.

There was a streetlight conveniently situated outside that cast a harsh glow over the sidewalk, which seemed deserted except for Jesse’s car, parked across the street. The peephole didn’t offer much of a glimpse off to the sides, but Claire was pretty certain that everything was clear. She turned back and gave a thumbs-up sign to Shane, who nodded and looked down at Michael again with tense, desperately still silence.

Then the door behind Claire’s back vibrated under a sudden, very strong volley of knocking. Too strong. Claire yelped and whipped around to stare out the peephole again, and saw a pallid face under a shock of wildly windblown black hair. No human being was naturally that pale.

She unlocked it and said, ‘Get in, quick!’ because it was Myrnin … and behind him, Oliver.

The two vampires entered in a rush of displaced air, and Oliver quickly shut and locked the door again. He leant against it, seeming tired – weirdly – and Claire had a chance to think, Why is Oliver here? Because even though he’d been exiled from Morganville by Amelie, she didn’t think he had any reason to be poking around this part of the country. Oliver looked ragged, too – and dressed down, in worn blue jeans grimy with oil, a faded, loose T-shirt with some kind of wolf design on it, and his long, salt-and-pepper curly hair worn in a loose, sloppy ponytail in back. It didn’t seem to have had a wash recently. Neither did he.

And Myrnin … well, at least he wasn’t dressed any worse than he usually was, but he seemed very pale, and not any cleaner than Oliver. They’d both been travelling hard, she guessed, although vampires didn’t really smell bad, unless they came in contact with things that did. From the general miasma around the two of them, they’d been around rotting garbage for a while.

Myrnin stared at her for a long few seconds, then scraped his disorderly hair back from his face, and said, ‘They don’t have you, then. But do they have it ?’

‘It? What does that mean?’ Claire asked. He didn’t answer her. He just hugged her, suddenly and violently, and before she could even make a surprised sound he was gone. It was like being hugged by a snowman, only less … moist. And more unpleasantly fragrant.

Oliver said, ‘We went to see Irene Anderson. Myrnin has a good relationship with her, even now. However, she was … unhelpful. She had no idea where you had gone, only that you had taken the device with you from her laboratory.’

‘I – wait, what? I didn’t take anything!’

‘Oh,’ Myrnin said, and turned back toward her from where he stood next to Eve. ‘Oh, that is such very, very bad news. Because if you didn’t, someone did. Someone with laboratory access, since I personally reviewed the records.’

Myrnin sounded … sane. Despite the tangled hair, the dirty homeless-style clothes, the smell of garbage and the whiff of things much worse. He looked taut, worried and paranoid, but not crazy.

So, things were very, very bad, then. Claire sometimes thought of him as only recreationally crazy; when things were life and death, her boss (and friend) seemed to make a concerted effort to view things with icy precision. He paid for it later, but she’d never been less than grateful to him for making the effort.

‘You’re saying someone broke into Dr Anderson’s lab and took VLAD.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘VLAD?’

‘The – the device. Vampire Levelling Adjustment Device.’ She realised, belatedly, that Oliver, who was decidedly not in her inner circle of people she trusted, was listening, but he refrained from comment. His attention was fixed on Michael, as if he actually cared.

Which, knowing Oliver, he actually might, though he’d no doubt deny it.

She was almost sure Myrnin would glower at her for naming her pet project after a famous vampire – Vlad Tepes, commonly thought to be the historical inspiration for Count Dracula – but he only shook his head in impatience. ‘We must go, and quickly. We can’t stay here,’ Myrnin said. ‘Oliver and I are being hunted.’

‘By who?’

‘Whom, my dear girl, whom , grammar really has descended to the lowest—’

‘Myrnin!’

‘I have no idea.’ His tone was flat, and there were dangerous embers of red in his eyes. ‘When I do, there will be reckoning for Michael.’