Rachel Caine - Black Dawn

“You were passing clever in using human science. I will have to find a new defense to counter it.” Magnus didn’t seem overly concerned about it. “No matter. I will create a new generation. They will have resistance to your poisons. And after all of you are dead, they will learn to feed on lesser fare. I have heard there are seven billion humans on the earth now. Enough for us to feed for thousands of years.”

Oliver pushed himself up to a sitting position. He looked awful, but there was fire in his eyes, bright and furious. “No,” he said. “You won’t. Because you’re not leaving this place alive.”

“I am a master draug. You, fool, can’t kill me. But you’ll make a fine addition to my blood gardens.” The draug reached down for him, and Oliver batted the hand—the misshapen thing that passed for one—away.

“You’re not the only master draug here,” he said.

“You mean my lovely creation?” Magnus laughed, a sound like saws rubbing together, and Claire flinched and fought the urge to cover her ears. “Your former queen? She has no thralls. No hive. She is no master draug yet. She will make her own kingdom, yes, but not here. This town is mine. You and the last of the vampires are my meat. She can feed her spawn on the thin blood of humans, far from here, when I allow her to go.”

The draug that had once been Amelie was watching him with blank concentration, and something eerily like hunger. She took a step toward him, and Magnus watched her without any sign of alarm.

“You forget something,” Oliver said. “Legend says a master draug cannot die by the hands of vampires . But it says nothing about dying at the hands of another draug. ”

Amelie continued to advance with steady, relentless steps. And this time Magnus backed up. Just a little. “I am her maker,” he said. “And she must obey my commands.”

“Think you so?” Oliver sounded viciously amused. “Try.”

Claire pulled herself into a tighter ball. This is bad, she thought. Really bad. I need to get out of here. Being in the middle of this was like being caught in a swarm of hornets, but despite the panic tearing at her, she knew that if she tried to get up, tried to run, Magnus would kill her instantly.

Or Amelie would.

Magnus had forgotten all about her, his focus now on the new master draug before him. “Stop,” he said. “I am your maker. I command you to stop .”

Something happened, deep inside that thing … the inner dark shadow seemed to thrash, come into focus, and then that was Amelie , looking out of the draug. The real Amelie. Her eyes. Her anger. She wasn’t gone after all. Not completely.

She said, “I am a queen. I take no orders .” She plunged the silver knife deep into Magnus, punching through the slimy shell. He gave a horrible metallic screech as Amelie dropped the knife and reached into his broken shell with her bare, pale hands.

“No one,” she said, almost in a whisper, “commands me in Morganville. I command you . I command you to be still. ”

His mouth stayed open, but the sound just … stopped. He wasn’t fighting her. It was as if he couldn’t. This, Claire remembered, was Amelie’s terrifying gift. She could compel vampires.

And now she could compel draug.

In that awful ringing silence, Claire heard the queasy squishing sound of Amelie’s hands pulling out of Magnus’s body. Something thrashed in her hands, alive and covered in suckers, mouths, teeth, something horrible dragged up out of the depths of the ocean where monsters lived.

The real form of a master draug, stripped of all its defenses.

Amelie crushed it. It made a wet sound, like a sponge being wrung out, and then there was a sudden, glassy snap .

Magnus’s shell collapsed, and the thick, murky fluid that inhabited it flooded out in a sticky, stinking rush to the thick old carpets. Claire scrambled up to a sitting position and crawled away from the mess, retching.

Amelie turned to Oliver and gave him that awful draug smile, full of death. “Now,” she said, “now it is mine. All of Morganville. All of you .”

“Not quite,” he said. He sounded far too calm, Claire thought, for someone who was about to be horribly killed by something as beautiful and terrible as Amelie was now. “Your transformation isn’t complete. You never made a thrall. Never made a hive. And now your maker is dead.” He smiled as she reached down for him. “And you will never be a master draug.”

She paused, and just for a flicker of a second Claire saw terror in her face. “I rule here.”

“You are wrong,” he said. “The woman inside you has never surrendered to you, never fully allowed the draug control.” He held out his hand, and in it was the leather-wrapped handle of a silver knife. “And never will. Remember who you are, Amelie. Reject this. You have the power to kill her. Do it now.”

She took the knife. And then she plunged it into her own body, and with her own hands tore out a small, weaker version of the creature that had existed within Magnus’s shell. It shrieked in high, thin tones that made Claire’s ears ring, and then Amelie’s cold white fingers closed around it and squeezed with remorseless strength.

It died.

Silence.

Amelie’s shell cracked like glass, and the liquid flooded out of her, too, in a black gush … and underneath lay her vampire body. Horribly shrunken, covered in black spots like mold, but still there. Unconsumed.

The real Amelie, the Founder of Morganville, looked a thousand years old, and she collapsed in a heap like a skeleton held together by nothing but string.

Oliver grabbed her, pulled her away from the blackening spot of the decaying draug, and held her in his arms as he sank down in the far corner of the room. Her eyes were open, but filmed and blind. He fumbled for the sleeve of his leather jacket and yanked it apart with one sharp move, baring a pale, muscular forearm covered with red marks that Claire recognized. Draug stings, in the shape of hands. Amelie had been feeding on him.

And now he was ripping open his wrist with his teeth and forcing her lips apart, giving it to her freely.

It seemed to take ages for her to move, but she finally did, raising her gray hands and taking hold of his arm. Claire had seen vampires feed when they were starving; they wouldn’t let go. Couldn’t.

But it wasn’t like that. Amelie’s touch stayed light on his arm, and after a moment she pushed his wrist away. She still looked awful, but the film was off her eyes, and there was a little more of her, as if the blood had inflated her dehydrated tissues. Still a mummy, but able to blink, move, and speak.

She said, “Let me die, Oliver.”

“No,” he said. There was no real emotion behind it, just a straightforward denial, as if she had asked to borrow a dollar. “You’ve won. You killed him before your transition was complete. You’ll heal.”

“I won’t,” she whispered. “I can’t. There is part of me—”

“You’ll heal,” he repeated. “I’ll hear no more of this. You are the Founder, you will heal, and everything else can be dealt with. Your subjects need you, my queen.”

“I have no subjects. I am no queen.”

Oliver smiled. It wasn’t a good thing. “You have been, and will be again. There’s nothing to fear. You’ve won, Amelie. Your enemies, at your feet.”

She smiled back a little. “You were my enemy once. I never laid you at my feet.”

“Not yet,” he agreed. “But for just now, there will be a truce. It’s a new age. A bright new age for vampires.”

Claire moved, and both of them immediately focused on her, and she wished she hadn’t. There was something shining and predatory about their eyes.