Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

All the punching was, Claire realised, not without some cost to him; his hand was bloody, and the knuckles looked misshapen. He winced a little and pressed down on some of the knuckles until bones snapped back into place, then wiped the cuts clean on his filthy clothes. They’d already closed up. He met Claire’s wide-eyed stare for a moment, and gave her a sinister little smile. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘It’s your friend we’re after. Perhaps you should get on with it.’

‘Don’t mind him,’ Jesse said. ‘He’s always been a mean, narrow man. I really don’t know what anyone sees in him.’

‘Quiet. You were only queen for nine days. And you only survived your own execution by Amelie’s intervention, or you’d not be here berating me. Beheading is final for humans and vampires.’

That, Claire thought, was the beginning of an interesting story that didn’t seem to match with Jesse’s vibrant modern outlook, but there wasn’t time to ask questions.

‘Shouldn’t we wait for the others?’ Claire asked.

‘Do you want your friend alive?’ Oliver asked, which settled the question, pretty much. Pete, Shane and Michael would have to catch up.

The mechanical room was dark and cool, but Eve had handily brought along some small LED flashlights, which she and Claire used to good effect as the vampires went ahead through the dark. The noise from the air handlers, which had been soft outside, rose to a dull roar as they edged past rows of colour-coded pipes and metal conduits; after a brief, burning brush with the uninsulated curve of one of the pipes, Claire got a lot more careful. There were plenty of sharp edges, too. It would be a dangerous place to have a fight – too many things you could bang into, and burn flesh on. Clumsiness would be just as deadly as an opponent.

But no opponents presented themselves. It was just pipes and conduits, control panels, softly glowing indicators and lights, and not much else. It wasn’t even dusty. Claire did spot a rat staring at them in surprise (and probably outrage) from the top of one cluster of conduits; it ran off as soon as she looked at it, probably to spread the word among the Kingdom of Rats that probably existed down here … and her chattering brain was momentarily distracted by the image of a King Rat sitting on a throne, with a giant crown, surrounded by a bunch of other rats all secretly plotting to kill him and take his place. Because if she’d learnt anything from being in Morganville, it was that a ruler could never, ever relax.

Oliver suddenly paused, and so did Jesse, who’d moved up next to him; her pale, slender hand came up in a clenched fist, in a gesture that Claire knew from hanging out with Shane meant stop right now and hold . She and Eve paused and stood ready for anything, and after a moment Jesse nodded to Oliver and pointed to her own chest, then off to the right. He nodded back. She flitted away into the shadows.

Oliver turned and pointed to Claire, then gestured imperatively for her to go ahead of him.

As bait?

It didn’t seem like the moment to have an argument, since everything was being done in such silence. Claire edged out ahead of him with her LED light pointed down toward her feet; it served only to make the darkness around her seem more dense and choking. She narrowly avoided a dangerous eye-level collision with a protruding metal corner, ducked, and crept forward. The ceiling was getting lower, it seemed, and she could hear a faint squeaking sound that she assumed was more rats sounding an alarm.

Claire swept the light forward, trying to see where she was going, and … and there was Derrick.

Derrick was dead. Drained white. And there were huge, unreal puncture marks in his neck, and ragged skin around them. One single drop of red had trailed down his neck and dripped on the concrete underneath, and his eyes were open, wide and surprised. They’d gone dull and filmed with grey – dried out from exposure to the air.

Claire gasped and jumped backward. She couldn’t help it; coming up on a dead man here, in the creepy zone, was something that woke instincts she couldn’t control no matter how hard she tried. She almost banged her head on the sharp metal corner she’d avoided, but Oliver’s outstretched hand stopped her cold. ‘Quiet,’ he whispered, and his voice was about as sharp and uncaring as the metal. ‘He’s been dead for hours, beyond anyone’s help. There’s something in here with us.’

‘Some thing ?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t smell like a vampire, though it moves like one.’ That sounded … ominous. Claire paused to unzip her backpack and take out the sharp, shiny knife that Dr Anderson had given her. She wished she had something more long-range, like Shane’s flamethrower, but she stopped the thought almost immediately; Shane had always told her, you fight with what you’ve got, not what you want to have . ‘There’s a door beyond the body. Go open it. We may need to move through quickly.’

Again, she was bait – warm, pulsing bait that anything even remotely like a vampire would find tastily attractive. And she knew that he meant her to be just exactly that, but at the same time, it was a decent strategic move. Jesse was somewhere in the shadows with her own killer knife; Oliver was a deadly force even without a weapon. And Eve, somewhere beyond him, was more than capable of helping out, even unarmed. It wasn’t just her wit that could be deadly.

Claire stepped carefully over Derrick’s body – and didn’t that give her a nightmare flash from every horror movie, ever – and moved toward the single, small door that was set low in the wall. It was too small to go through standing up. She put the flashlight in her teeth and pulled the door handle, and it protested – not locked, just a tight fit. Her second yank got it free, and it swung open with surprising silence. She’d expected an appropriately eerie creak, at the very least, but someone had – ominously – oiled it to ensure it didn’t make noise.

And then something hit her, hard and stunningly without warning, from the left, and the flashlight spun away.

Claire didn’t even have a chance to cry out; her breath was driven out of her in a soundless burst an instant before her vocal cords responded, and then she was flat on her back with her head ringing from impact with a metal pipe, and she couldn’t understand what had happened, and there was something leaning over her, something pale and naked and awful with eyes like a cesspool on fire, and she felt the cold dribble of its saliva on her throat. It was only an instant, but it was a snapshot of a nightmare: a distorted mirror of a human being, with a hugely exaggerated jaw open far too wide with vampire fangs wider and longer than she’d ever seen extended and ready to cut. The nose was smashed and shrunken like a bat’s, the ears shrivelled little clumps at the sides of the head, and if the thing had ever had hair, it was long gone. Impossible to say if it was male or female; Claire couldn’t even imagine thinking of it that way.

And then it was lunging for her throat.

She reacted instinctively, shoving the knife deep into its chest. That helped – it kept it away from her throat. But it was still snapping at her, not dying nearly fast enough. She shut her eyes convulsively, and that was good, because she didn’t see what happened next, though she inferred it later. Instead of the icy bite on her neck, she felt a sudden chilly splatter of liquid flood over her that smelt rancid, like raw meat left in the fridge for months on end. The weight on her convulsed and fell away, and Claire balled up in a protected fetal curve toward the wall, retching.

The thing’s head bumped against her hip and rolled away. Decapitated, by Jesse’s extremely sharp knife. ‘Claire. Claire !’ Jesse’s calm, cool voice, and her hand on Claire’s shoulder. ‘Up. We need to go, quickly.’