Lord of Misrule (15 page)

“Thought so.”

Shane punched him right in the face. Myrnin, surprised, stumbled back against the tower of crates, and snarled; Shane took a stake from his back pocket and held it at the ready.

“No!” Claire jumped between them, waving her hands. “No, honest, it’s not like that. Calm down, everybody, please.”

“Yes,” Myrnin said. “I’ve been staked quite enough today, thank you. I respect your need to avenge her, boy, but Claire remains quite capable of defending her own honor.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” she said. “Please, Shane. Don’t. We need him.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because he may know what’s going on with the vampires.”

“Oh, that,” Myrnin said, in a tone that implied they were all idiots for not knowing already. “They’re being called. It’s a signal that draws all vampires who have sworn allegiance to you with a blood exchange—it’s the way wars were fought, once upon a time. It’s how you gather your army.”

“Oh,” Claire said. “So . . . why not you? Or the rest of the vampires here?”

“It seems as though your serum offers me some portion of immunity against it. Oh, I feel the draw, most certainly, but in an entirely academic way. Rather curious. I remember how it felt before, like an overwhelming panic. As for those others, well. They’re not of the blood.”

“They’re not?”

“No. Lesser creatures. Failed experiments, if you will.” He looked away, and Claire had a horrible suspicion.

“Are they
people
? I mean, regular humans?”

“A failed experiment,” he repeated. “You’re a scientist, Claire. Not all experiments work the way they’re intended.”

Myrnin had done this to them, in his search for the cure to the vampire disease. He had turned them into something that wasn’t vampire, wasn’t human, wasn’t—well, wasn’t anything, exactly. They didn’t fit in either society.

No wonder they were hiding here.

“Don’t look at me that way,” Myrnin said. “It’s not my fault the process was imperfect, you know. I’m not a monster.”

Claire shook her head.

“Sometimes, you really are.”

 

Eve was fine—tired, shaking, and tear streaked, but okay. “He didn’t, you know,” she said, and made two-finger pointy motions toward her throat. “He’s kind of sweet, actually, once you get past all the crazy. Although there’s a lot of the crazy.”

There was, as Claire well knew, no way of getting past the crazy. Not really. But she had to admit that at least Myrnin had behaved more like a gentleman than expected.

Noblesse oblige. Maybe he’d felt obligated.

The place he’d kept Eve had once been some kind of storage locker within the plant, all solid walls and a single door that he’d locked off with a bent pipe. Shane hadn’t been all that happy about it. “What if something had happened to you?” he’d asked, as Myrnin untwisted the metal as though it were solder instead of iron. “She’d have been locked in there, all alone, no way out. She’d have starved.”

“Actually,” Myrnin had answered, “that’s not very likely. Thirst would have killed her within four days, I imagine. She’d never have had a chance to starve.” Claire stared at him. He raised his eyebrows. “What?”

She just shook her head. “I think you missed the point.”

Monica tagged along with Claire, which was annoying; she kept casting Shane nervous glances, and she was now outright terrified of Myrnin, which was probably how it should have been, really. At the very least, she’d shut up, and even the sight of another rat, this one big and kind of albino, hadn’t set off her screams this time.

Eve, however, was less than thrilled to see Monica. “You’re kidding,” she said flatly, staring first at her, then at Shane. “You’re okay with this?”

“Okay would be a stretch. Resigned, that’s closer,” Shane said. Hannah, standing next to him with her shotgun at port arms, snorted out a laugh. “As long as she doesn’t talk, I can pretend she isn’t here.”

“Yeah? Well
I
can’t,” Eve said. She glared at Monica, who glared right back. “Claire, you have to stop picking up strays. You don’t know where they’ve been.”

“You’re one to talk about diseases,” Monica shot back, “seeing as how you’re one big, walking social one.”

“That’s not pot, kettle—that’s more like cauldron, kettle. Witch.”

“Whore!”

“You want to go play with your new friends back there?” Shane snapped. “The really pale ones with the taste for plasma? Because believe me, I’ll drop your skanky butt right in their nest if you don’t shut up, Monica.”

“You don’t scare me, Collins!”

Hannah rolled her eyes and racked her shotgun. “How about me?”

That ended the entire argument.

Myrnin, leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, watched the proceedings with great interest. “Your friends,” he said to Claire. “They’re quite . . . colorful. So full of energy.”

“Hands off my friends.” Not that that statement exactly included Monica, but whatever.

“Oh, absolutely. I would never.” Hand to his heart, Myrnin managed to look angelic, which was a bit of a trick considering his Lord-Byron-on-a-bender outfit. “I’ve just been away from normal human society for so long. Tell me, is it usually this . . . spirited?”

“Not usually,” she sighed. “Monica’s special.” Yeah, in the short-bus sense, because Monica was a head case. Not that Claire had time or inclination to explain all the dynamics of the Monica-Shane-Eve relationship to Myrnin right now. “When you said that someone was calling the vampires together for some kind of fight—was that Bishop?”

“Bishop?” Myrnin looked startled. “No, of course not. It’s Amelie. Amelie is sending the call. She’s consolidating her forces, putting up lines of defense. Things are rapidly moving toward a confrontation, I believe.”

That was exactly what Claire was afraid he was going to say. “Do you know who answered?”

“Anyone in Morganville with a blood tie to her,” he said. “Except me, of course. But that would include almost every vampire in town, save those who were sworn through Oliver. Even then, Oliver’s tie would bind them in some sense, because he swore fealty to her when he came to live here. They might feel the pull less strongly, but they would still feel it.”

“Then how is Bishop getting an army? Isn’t everybody in town, you know, Amelie’s?”

“He bit those he wished to keep on his side.” Myrnin shrugged. “Claimed them from her, in a sense. Some of them went willingly, some not, but all owe him allegiance now. All those he was able to turn, which is a considerable number, I believe.” He looked sharply at her. “The call continued in the daytime. Michael?”

“Michael’s fine. They put him in a cell.”

“And Sam?”

Claire shook her head in response. Next to Michael, his grandfather Sam was the youngest vampire in town, and Claire hadn’t seen him at all, not since he’d left the Glass House, well before any of the other vamps. He’d gone off on some mission for Amelie; she trusted him more than most of the others, even those she’d known for hundreds of years. That was, Claire thought, because Amelie knew how Sam felt about her. It was the storybook kind of love, the kind that ignored things like practicality and danger, and never changed or died.

She found herself looking at Shane. He turned his head and smiled back.

She was probably too young to have that, but this felt so strong, so real. . . .

And Shane wouldn’t even man up and tell her he loved her.

She took a deep breath and forced her mind off that. “What do we do now?” Claire asked. “Myrnin?”

He was silent for a long moment, then moved to one of the painted-over first-floor windows and pulled it open. The sun was setting again. It would be down completely soon.

“You should get home,” he said. “The humans are in charge for now, at least, but there are factions out there. There will be power struggles tonight, and not just between the two vampire sides.”

Shane glanced at Monica—whose bruises were living proof that trouble was already under way—and then back at Myrnin. “What are you going to do?”

“Stay here,” Myrnin said. “With my friends.”

“
Friends?
Who, the—uh—failed experiments?”

“Exactly so.” Myrnin shrugged. “They look upon me as a kind of father figure. Besides, their blood is as good as anyone else’s, in a pinch.”

“So much more than I wanted to know,” Shane said, and nodded to Hannah. “Let’s go.”

“Got your back, Shane.”

“Watch Claire’s and Eve’s. I’ll take the lead.”

“What about me?” Monica whined.

“Do you really want to know?” Shane gave her a glare that should have scorched her hair off. “Be grateful I’m not leaving you as an after-dinner mint on his pillow.”

Myrnin leaned close to Claire’s ear and said, “I think I like your young man.” When she reacted in pure confusion, he held up his hands, smiling. “Not in that way, my dear. He just seems quite trustworthy.”

She swallowed and put all that aside. “Are you going to be okay here? Really?”

“Really?” He locked gazes with her. “For now, yes. But we have work to do, Claire. Much work, and very little time. I can’t hide for long. You do realize that stress accelerates the disease, and this is a great deal of stress for us all. More will fall ill, become confused. It’s vital we begin work on the serum as quickly as possible.”

“I’ll try to get you back to the lab tomorrow.”

They left him standing in a fading shaft of sunlight, next to a giant rusting crane that lifted its head three stories into the dark, with pale birds flitting and diving overhead.

And wounded, angry failed experiments lurking in the shadows, maybe waiting to attack their vampire creator.

Claire felt sorry for them, if they did.

 

The mobs were gone, but they’d given Eve’s car a good battering while they were at it. She choked when she saw the dents and cracked glass, but at least it was still on all four tires, and the damage was cosmetic. The engine started right up.

“Poor baby,” Eve said, and patted the big steering wheel affectionately as she settled into the driver’s seat. “We’ll get you all fixed up. Right, Hannah?”

“And here I was wondering what I was going to do tomorrow,” Hannah said, taking—of course—the shotgun seat. “Guess now I know. I’ll be hammering dents out of the Queen Mary and putting in new safety glass.”

In the backseat, Claire was the human equivalent of Switzerland between the warring nations of Shane and Monica, who sat next to the windows. It was tense, but nobody spoke.

The sun was going down in a blaze of glory in the west, which normally would have made Morganville a vampire-friendly place. Not so much tonight, as became evident when Eve left the dilapidated warehouse district and cruised closer to Vamptown.

There were people out on the streets,
at sunset.

And they were angry, too.

“Shouty,” Eve said, as they passed a big group clustered around a guy standing on a wooden box, yelling at the crowd. He had a pile of wooden stakes, and people were picking them up. “Okay, this is looking less than great.”

“You think?” Monica slumped down in her seat, trying not to be noticed. “They tried to kill me! And I’m not even a vampire!”

“Yeah, but you’re you, so there’s that explained.” Eve slowed down. “Traffic.”

Traffic? In Morganville? Claire leaned forward and saw that there were about six cars in the street ahead. The first one was turned sideways, blocking the second—a big van, which was trying to back up but was handicapped by the third car.

The trapped passenger van was vampire-dark. The two cars blocking it in were old, battered sedans, the kind humans drove.

“That’s Lex Perry’s car, the one turned sideways,” Hannah said. “I think that’s the Nunally brothers in the third one. They’re drinking buddies with Sal Manetti.”

“Sal, as in, the guy out there rabble-rousing?”

“You got it.”

And now people were closing in around the van, pushing against it, rocking it on its tires.

Nobody in their car spoke a word.

The van rocked harder. The tires spun, trying to pull away, but it tipped and slammed over on its side, helpless. With a roar, the crowd climbed on top of it and started battering the windows.

“We should do something,” Claire finally said.

“Yeah?” Hannah’s voice was very soft. “What, exactly?”

“Call the police?” Only the police were already here. There were two cars of them, and they couldn’t stop what was happening. In fact, they didn’t even look inclined to try.

“Let’s go,” Shane said quietly. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

Eve silently put the car in reverse and burned rubber backing up.

Claire broke out of her trance. “What are you doing? We can’t just leave—”

“Take a good look,” Eve said grimly. “If anybody out there sees Princess Morrell in this car, we’ve all had it. We’re all collaborators if we’re protecting her, and
you’re
wearing the Founder bracelet. We can’t risk it.”

Claire sank back in her seat as Eve shifted gears again and turned the wheel. They took a different street, this one unblocked so far.

“What’s happening?” Monica asked. “What’s happening to our town?”

“France,” Claire said, thinking about Gramma Day. “Welcome to the revolution.”

Eve drove through a maze of streets. Lights were flickering on in houses, and the few streetlamps were coming on as well. Cars—and there were a lot of them out now—turned on their headlights and honked, as if the local high school had just won a big football game.

As if it were one big, loud party.

“I want to go home,” Monica said. Her voice sounded muffled. “Please.”

Eve looked at her in the rearview mirror, and finally nodded.

But when they turned down the street where the Morrell family home was located, Eve slammed on the brakes and put the car into reverse, instantly.