Rachel Caine - Fade Out

“Do we?” Myrnin looked at the array of hard drives. “You spoke of more than seventy cameras, but I see only sixty or so hard drives. What’s missing, Claire? You know Amelie. You know that her first concern is for her people. If she believes that we’ve been compromised here, she will cut our losses.”

“Losses being humans,” Shane said.

“She’d rather move us and destroy all evidence we were ever here. It’s always been her final option. You have no idea how many times she’s come close recently.”

Claire swallowed. “We can’t let her do that.”

“We cannot stop her,” Myrnin said. “Not even I can do that. But what we can do is remove the evidence.”

He crushed the hard drive he was holding into junk and dropped it to the floor, then moved on to the next, and the next.

Michael helped Eve out of the chair, picked it up, and smashed it into the editing station. He ripped out the hard drive from the video editing system and smashed it against the wall.

Claire and Eve backed up against the wall, holding hands, as the two vampires systematically destroyed every bit of data storage in the place. It took a while, but they were thorough, and when the last piece of equipment was broken into random parts, Shane said, “I thought that would feel better, somehow.”

“We’re not finished,” Myrnin said. “We need to find every camera and destroy those, as well. And we must find Kim and force her to tell us who helped her. This is not negotiable. A vampire traitor is far too dangerous to live.”

Kim had kept records—a hard copy printout stuffed in a cabinet drawer next to the wrecked editing machine. It listed a total of seventy- four cameras, all over Morganville. “She must have added a couple at the last minute. This is going to take hours,” Eve said. “We’ll have to split up, each take ten or so. Myrnin and Michael, you’ve got the Vamptown cameras. Claire, Shane, here you go. Knock yourselves out.”

“What about Kim?” Claire asked, taking the page of locations. “We still need to find her.”

“I will ask Ada to locate her,” Myrnin said.

“She can do that?” Claire asked, and then blinked. “Of course she can. Will she do that?”

“Possibly. If she’s in a good mood, which is never certain, as you know. But I assure you, Ada is no longer angry at you, so don’t be worried about that.” Myrnin checked a gleaming gold pocket watch he kept in his vest pocket, some complicated dragon-shaped thing. “We must meet back before sunrise. Where?”

“Someplace deserted,” Claire said. “Much as I hate it, how about German’s? I don’t want anybody overhearing us.”

“Paranoid much?” Eve asked. “Yeah, me too. I’m never taking my clothes off again, I swear.”

“German’s it is,” Myrnin said. “You know the portal frequency. Be there before sunrise, and do try to avoid getting yourself killed, if at all possible.”

He led them out of the studio, out into the night. Michael took his car, heading off with his list of camera locations. At German’s, Myrnin stepped through the dark clown-mouth doorway and was gone on his own errands, leaving Shane, Eve, and Claire standing there in the dark, in a fragile circle of flashlight.

“So?” Eve prodded. “Fire it up, Teleport Girl. I want this over with.”

Claire checked the list. “Right. The first twenty are easy—all in common areas. Eve, I’ll send you and Shane to the alley behind Common Grounds. I’ll take the university.”

“Hey,” Shane said. “Wait a minute. I don’t want you out there alone.”

“University,” Claire reminded him. “Protected ground. Besides, I’m the one with the bracelet.” She flashed the gold at him, and he didn’t look happy, but he did look resigned. “Also, we’ve got no time to argue. Go.”

Shane looked back at her before he stepped through the portal, and Claire felt a moment’s sick fear that she’d never see him again. Morganville was a dangerous place. Every good-bye could be the last.

We’ll get through this.

She focused on the portal, shifted frequencies, and started on her camera-destroying mission.

She hoped Myrnin was right about Ada.

Four hours later, it was approaching sunrise, Claire was bone-tired, and she’d bagged all of the cameras on her list, including the one in the football team’s shower room, which was an interesting experience. Kim had clearly been combining business with personal pleasure. She took the portal back to the alley behind Common Grounds, intending to pick up Shane and Eve, but they were nowhere in sight. She called Shane’s cell, and heard it ringing, but it was distant and muffled.

She found him standing braced against the wall, holding Eve’s ankles as she stood on his shoulders to reach a camera set on top of the roof of a shed. “Got it!” Eve called, and nearly overbalanced. Shane staggered around, got his equilibrium again, and helped her down to the pavement. “We should totally join the circus.”

“One of us already looks like a clown.”

“Hi guys,” Claire said, and they both jumped and turned her way. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

Shane hugged her. “How’d you do?”

“Twenty cameras. There was one missing. I think somebody found it and swiped it from the University Center. You?”

“That was the last one on the list,” he said. “Guess it’s time to see how Team Vampire did.”

Claire opened the portal to German’s Tire Plant, and stepped through, with Shane and Eve right behind her. The portal snapped shut as soon as they were inside, and Claire flipped on her flashlight.

“Um . . .” Eve turned on her light, as well. “Okay. Wrong number, Claire.”

“No,” Claire said. “That can’t happen. I mean, it’s the right frequency. I don’t know what happened, but we should be at German’s.”

“Well, we’re not,” Shane said, and shone his light around. They were in an underground tunnel. It was damp and dark and it smelled really foul—much worse than most of the vampire highway tunnels under Morganville. This one didn’t look like it had been used for a road, either. “Wrong turn.”

Eve said, in an entirely different voice, “ Really wrong turn.” She pointed off down the tunnel, and Claire saw shapes moving in the darkness. Pale skin. Shining red eyes. “Oh man. Dial us out, please.”

The only problem was that the portal system refused to pick up. They were locked out.

Claire looked at Shane and Eve and shook her head. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute, and she could see the light trembling from the force of her pulse beats. “We’re stuck,” she said.

Shane dropped the bag he was carrying, unzipped it, and passed weapons to Eve, then took out a wicked-lethal crossbow with silver-tipped bolts. “Somebody up there doesn’t like you, Claire.”

Claire primed the Super Soaker. “It’s Ada,” she said. “This time, I’m not letting Myrnin talk me out of it.”

The vampires—well, vampirelike things , sort of like Myrnin’s experimental attempts to turn humans back in his crazy days—hurled themselves out of the darkness with high-pitched, batlike squeals. Claire resisted the urge to scream, and let loose with the water gun. A blast caught three of them in midleap, and they shrieked even louder, hit the ground, rolled, and kept rolling. She could see the ghostly blue flare of flames around them as the silver ate into their exposed skin—which was most of it, because these things were more like tunnel rats than anything approaching human. Giant undead tunnel rats.

Only in Morganville . . .

Shane aimed and fired, taking one of them out just as it was preparing to leap, and reloaded with an ease that told Claire he’d been practicing. Eve had a handful of what looked like darts—regulation darts, the kind you threw at a target in a bar. She was dead-on accurate with them, too, as soon as any tunnel rat came within ten feet of her.