Rachel Caine: Ghost Town

Claire wasn’t planning to stop at the Day House, although Gramma Day, an ancient little old woman sitting outside in a big rocking chair, called to her and asked whether she wanted any breakfast rolls. Claire smiled at her and shook her head—Gramma didn’t always hear too well—and got a friendly wave in return as she turned right, down the narrow fenced alley between the Day House and the anonymous tract home on its other side. It was too small for a car, this alley, and it got narrower as it went, like a funnel. Or a throat. It was suspiciously clean, too—not a lot of trash blown in, and even the tumbleweeds had stayed away.

And here she was, walking right into the trap-door spider’s lair.

The door to the rickety shack at the end of the alley banged open before she could reach it, and the spider himself charged out, grabbed his coffee out of her hand, and dashed back inside at vampire speed before she could say a word. From the glimpse she had of him, he’d been wearing black cargo-style pants that were too big for him, flip-flops with daisies on top, and some kind of satin vest with no shirt, probably because he just forgot to put one on. Myrnin didn’t dress for vanity. Completely at random, really, as if he just reached into the closet blindfolded and put on whatever pieces he touched first.

Claire went at human speed into the shack and down the steps, and emerged into the big room that was Myrnin’s lab and sometimes his home. (She thought he had a separate one, but she rarely caught him absent from this one, and there was a room in the back with castoff clothes he rummaged through when the mood took him.) Myrnin was bent over a microscope, studying who-knew-what. He had all the lights on, which was nice, and the lab looked clean and cool today, all its steampunky elements gleaming. She wondered whether he had a mad-scientist cleaning service.

“Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Claire said, and dumped her backpack on a chair. “How did you know which coffee was yours?”

“I didn’t.” He shrugged. “You haven’t been returning my phone calls. And you know how much I dislike making them in the first place. Telephones are so cold and impersonal.”

“I didn’t answer because I didn’t feel like rerunning the argument again. We’re not getting anywhere with it, are we?”

He looked up from the microscope, shoved old-fashioned square spectacles up on top of his long, curling black hair, and looked at her with a devastating smile. Myrnin was—for a vampire who looked about twice her age, but was thousands of years older than that—pretty hot. He could be sweet and affectionate one minute, cold and predatory the next, and that kept her from having any kind of crush on him, mostly. Truth was that he’d make a terrible, possibly fatal boyfriend.

She also really had no idea how he felt about her, deep down. He treated her like a particularly clever pet most of the time.

“I love arguing with you, Claire. You always surprise me. And occasionally, you even make sense.”

She could have said the same about him, but not in a flattering kind of way. Instead of trying to put that into words, she took her coffee over to the granite-topped lab table. He was using a modern microscope, digital, that she’d ordered for him special. He seemed happy with it, for now, though he’d probably go back to his old brass-and-glass monstrosity soon. Myrnin was just more comfortable with Victorian technology. “What are you doing?”

“Checking my blood,” he said. “I do it every week. You’ll be happy to know that there’s still no trace of the Bishop virus.”

The Bishop virus was what they’d named the cruel sickness that had attacked the vampires long before she’d arrived—a manufactured virus that Amelie’s father, Bishop, had released, because only he had the cure. Unfortunately for him, since he’d first used the cure on himself, his blood had been the cure for everybody else, and now the evil old vampire was locked down, under maximum security, somewhere in Morganville. Nobody knew where, except Amelie and the people guarding him.

Claire liked it that way. The last thing she wanted to think about was Bishop getting away and coming after all of them for revenge. She’d met some nasty vampires, but Bishop was, as far as she was concerned, the worst.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said. The Bishop virus had caused vampires to lose themselves, their memories, their self-control. It had happened slowly for most, which made it worse—like human Alzheimer’s, only a vampire stripped of all of those things was an unpredictable, dangerous beast. Unlike the others, Myrnin hadn’t recovered completely—or, more likely, he’d always been a little off the bubble from normal. “Can I see?”

“Oh, certainly,” Myrnin said, and stepped back to let her squint into the eyepiece of the microscope. There, in vivid color, was the busy life of Myrnin’s drop of blood—which wasn’t his own blood, really, so much as that of others. There was a lot of difference between vampire blood and human, and Claire was still fascinated by how it worked. “See? I’m in fine shape.”

“Congratulations.” She shut down the microscope—no sense in running up the lab’s probably horrible electric bill—and sipped her coffee while he drank his. “What are we doing today?”

“Oh, I thought we’d take a day off. Go to the park, stroll, watch a film . . .”

“Really.”

“You know me too well. Since you weren’t talking to me this week, I designed some new circuitry. I’d like to see what you think of it.” He darted over to another table, this one covered by a white sheet. For a horrible few seconds she thought there was a person under there . . . but then he whipped it off, and it was just piles of metal, glass, and plastic. It didn’t look like circuitry. Most things Myrnin built didn’t look right. They just worked.

Claire came over and tried to figure out where to start—probably there, at the open pipe that wound around and led to some kind of vacuum-tube arrangement, then into what looked like a circuit board scrounged from something more rational, then into bunches of wire, all the same color, that snaked out like spaghetti to other things buried under more coils of tubing.

She gave up. “What is it?”

“What do you think it is?”

“It could be anything from a lawn trimmer to a bomb, for all I know.”

“I would never build a lawn trimmer,” Myrnin said. “What did the lawn ever do to me? No, it’s an interface. For the computer.”

“An interface,” Claire repeated slowly. “Between what and what?”

He gave her a long look, one of those “don’t ask me questions you already know the answer to” looks, and she felt her stomach clench.

“I’m not going to let you do that,” she said. “No building brains into your machines. No. You can’t kill someone just to power your stupid computer, Myrnin; it’s wrong !”

“Well, I kill people for blood, you know. I thought this would be more like conservation—waste not, want not, and all that. If I’m killing them already.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “You don’t kill people for blood, not in Morganville. I know for a fact that since you got better, you haven’t—” Well, did she know that, actually? Was she sure? “I’m pretty sure you haven’t.”

He smiled, and it was a sad, sweet smile, the sort that broke her heart. “Oh, Claire,” he said. “You think me a far better man than I am. That’s kind, and flattering.”

“Are you saying that you—”

“Doughnuts!” Myrnin interrupted her, and darted away, to zip back in seconds with an open box. “Chocolate glazed. Your favorite.”