Rachel Caine - Lord of Misrule

Myrnin simply closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. He looked old now, exhausted, like Oliver. “I’m sure it was for the best,” he said. “Perhaps you should have left the wood in place. Better for everyone, in the end. I would have just—faded away. It’s not very painful, not comparatively.”

“No!” She took a step closer, then another. He just looked so—defeated. “Myrnin, don’t. We need you.”

He didn’t open his eyes, but there was a tiny, tired smile curving his lips. “I’m sure you think you do, but you have what you need now. I found the cure for you, Claire. Bishop’s blood. It’s time to let me go. It’s too late for me to get better.”

“I don’t believe that.”

This time, his great dark eyes opened and studied her with cool intensity. “I see you don’t,” he said. “Whether or not that assumption is reasonable, that’s another question entirely. Where is she?”

He was asking about Amelie. Claire glanced at Oliver, still hunched over, clearly in pain. No help. She bent closer to Myrnin. No way she wouldn’t be overheard by the other vampires, though, she knew that. “She’s—I don’t know. We got separated. The last I saw, she and Bishop were fighting it out.”

Myrnin sat up. It wasn’t the kind of smooth, controlled motion vampires usually had, as though they’d been practicing it for three or four human lifetimes; he had to pull himself up, slowly and painfully, and it hurt Claire to watch. She put her hand against his shoulder blade to brace him. His skin still felt marble-cold, but not dead . It was hard to figure out what the difference was—maybe it was the muscles, underneath, tensed and alive again.

“We have to find her,” he said. “Bishop will stop at nothing to get her, if he hasn’t already. Once you were safely away, she’d have retreated. Amelie is a guerrilla fighter. It’s not like her to fight in the open, not against her father.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Oliver said, without taking his head out of his hands. “And neither are you, Myrnin.”

“You owe her your fealty.”

“I owe nothing to the dead,” Oliver said. “And until I see proof of her survival, I will not sacrifice my life, or anyone else’s, in a futile attempt at rescue.”

Myrnin’s face twisted in contempt. “You haven’t changed,” he said.

“Neither have you, fool,” Oliver murmured. “Now shut up. My head aches.”

Eve was pulling shots behind the counter, wearing a formal black apron that went below her knees. Claire slid wearily onto a barstool on the other side. “Wow,” she said. “Flashback to the good times, huh?”

Eve made a sour face as she thumped a mocha down in front of her friend. “Yeah, don’t remind me,” she said. “Although I have to say, I missed the Monster.”

“The Monster?”

Eve patted the giant, shiny espresso machine beside her affectionately. “Monster, meet Claire. Claire, meet the Monster. He’s a sweetie, really, but you have to know his moods.”

Claire reached out and patted the machine, too. “Nice to meet you, Monster.”

“Hey.” Eve caught her wrist when she tried to pull back. “Bruises? What gives?”

Amelie’s grip on her really had raised a crop of faint blue smudges on her upper arm, like a primitive tattoo. “Don’t freak. I don’t have any bite marks or anything.”

“I’ll freak if I wanna. As long as Michael isn’t here, I’m kind of—”

“What, my mom?” Claire snapped, and was instantly sorry. And guilty, for an entirely different reason. “I didn’t mean—”

Eve waved it away. “Hey, if you can’t spark a ’tude on a day like this, when can you? Your mother’s okay, by the way, because I know that’s your next question. So far, Bishop’s freaks haven’t managed to shut down the cell network, so I’ve been keeping in touch, since nothing’s happening here except for some serious caffeine production. Landlines are dead, though. So is the Internet. Radio and TV are both off the air, too.”

Claire looked at the clock. Five a.m. Two hours until dawn, more or less—probably less. It felt like an eternity.

“What are we going to do in the morning?” she asked.

“Good question.” Eve wiped down the counter. Claire sipped the sweet, chocolatey comfort of the mocha. “When you think of something, let us know, because right now, I don’t think anybody’s got a clue.”

“You’d be wrong, thankfully,” Oliver said. He seemed to come out of nowhere— God , didn’t Claire hate that!—as he settled on the stool next to her. He seemed almost back to normal now, but very tired. There was a shadow in his eyes that Claire didn’t remember seeing before. “There is a plan in place. Amelie’s removal from the field of battle is a blow, but not a defeat. We continue as she would want.”

“Yeah? You want to tell us?” Eve asked. That earned her a cool stare. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Vampires really aren’t all about the sharing, unless it benefits them first.”

“I will tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it,” Oliver said. “Get me one of the bags from the walk-in refrigerator.”

Eve looked down at the top of her apron. “Oh, I’m sorry, where does it say servant on here? Because I’m so very not.”

For a second, Claire held her breath, because the expression on Oliver’s face was murderous, and she saw a red light, like the embers of a banked fire, glowing in the back of his eyes.

Then he blinked and said, simply, “Please, Eve.”

Eve hadn’t been expecting that. She blinked, stared back at him for a second, then silently nodded and walked away, behind a curtained doorway.

“You’re wondering if that hurt,” Oliver said, not looking at Claire at all, but staring after Eve. “It did, most assuredly.”

“Good,” she said. “I hear suffering’s good for the soul, or something.”

“Then we shall all be right with our God by morning.” Oliver swiveled on the stool to look her full in the face. “I should kill you for what you did.”

“Staking Myrnin?” She sighed. “I know. I didn’t think I had a choice. He’d have bitten my hand off if I’d tried to give him the medicine, and by the time it took effect, me and Hannah would have been dog food, anyway. It seemed like the quickest, quietest way to get him out.”

“Even so,” Oliver said, his voice low in his throat, “as an Elder, I have the power to sentence you, right now, to death, for attempted murder of a vampire. You do understand?”

Claire held up her hand and pointed to the gold bracelet on her wrist—the symbol of the Founder. Amelie’s symbol. “What about this?”

“I would pay reparations,” he said. “I imagine I could afford it. Amelie would be tolerably upset with me, for a while, always assuming she is still alive. We’d reach an accommodation. We always do.”

Claire didn’t say anything else in her defense, just waited. And after a moment, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “You were right to take the action you did. You have been right about a good deal that I was unwilling to admit, including the fact that some of us are”—he cast a quick look around, and dropped his voice so low she could make out the word only from the shape his lips gave it—“unwell.”

Unwell. Yeah, that was one way to put it. She resisted an urge to roll her eyes. How about dying? Ever heard the word pandemic ?

Oliver continued without waiting for her response. “Myrnin’s mind was . . . very disordered,” he said. “I didn’t think I could get him back. I wouldn’t have, without that dose of medication.”

“Does that mean you believe us now?” She meant, about the vampire disease , but she couldn’t say that out loud. Even the roundabout way they were speaking was dangerous; too many vampire ears with too little to do, and once they knew about the sickness, there was no predicting what they might do. Run, probably. Go off to rampage through the human world, sicken, and die alone, very slowly. It’d take years, maybe decades, but eventually, they’d all fall, one by one. Oliver’s case was less advanced than many of the others, but age seemed to slow down the disease’s progress; he might last for a long time, losing himself slowly.