Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires (17 page)

Claire and I zipped our sleeping bags together and fell asleep spooned together. I thought I’d sleep soundly; I had good reason to, but instead I kept feeling the sharp, digging stings, needles burrowing and probing inside me, and even though I knew it was a dream, just a dream,
nothing
, it kept me awake.

Whimpering.

Afraid.

Something’s eating you, Shane.

No. I was fine. Everything was fine.

I finally dozed, and woke up to find Amelie standing in the doorway. I’m not big on impressing the vamps, but there was something a little unfair about facing the Queen Bee with bed-head and morning breath. I guess the most important thing, though, was that she was awake, and standing up, and actually seemed better. Oliver was with her, looking like a scowling black crow, but I think that was mostly because he was still spoiling for a fight.

Evidently, he wasn’t going to get it.

“Magnus is injured,” Amelie told us. She sat, gracefully, on a chair and made it look as if it was her own idea instead of something to prevent herself from collapsing in a heap. She had her hair down, which made her look almost our age, though there’s nothing about the Founder’s eyes that reminds me of youth. “He hides now, and his draug thralls are dying quickly. Your actions may have turned the tide. I will not forget that.”

“You,” Oliver said, and pointed to me. “And you.” Michael. “Come with me.”

I traded a look with my best friend, and he shrugged, and we got up and followed the two vampires out of the hall. Claire wanted to come along, but I promised her I wouldn’t do anything stupid—though she probably knew that was a nutty promise, coming from me.

The voice inside my head rose to a deafening shriek.
You’re breaking all your promises. You’re giving up, you asshole. Wake up!
It felt like being plunged into ice water, and for a breathtaking second I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t
live
with the stinging pain of it.

Michael grabbed my shoulder. “You okay, man?”

Yes. Of course I was. I was always okay, right? Everything was fine.

“I am leading a group to take Magnus,” Oliver told me and Michael out in the hallway; he supported Amelie with an arm under hers, as if he were escorting her to some fancy dance, but it was obvious he was keeping her upright. “I want the two of you with us.”

“Good,” I said. I was always up for a good fight, even against the draug—maybe
especially
against the draug. I would never get the images of Claire lying so still and broken on the floor of the Glass House out of my head, even though she was okay now. It had been the lowest moment of my life, in a life with plenty of cellar-diving events. I tried hard not to relive how I’d felt, seeing her that way. “Where are we going?”

Oliver didn’t bother to give info, but that was typical. He did arm us up, which was nice—shotguns, which felt solid and deadly in my hands. Then we fell into line with a bunch of vampires and even a dozen humans—surprisingly, the new leader of the human resistance (all the resistance leaders were named Captain Obvious) was one of them, sporting his I-hate-vamps stake tattoo but carrying a shotgun all the same. He nodded to me guardedly; I nodded back. That was like an entire conversation for somebody like him.

“How’d they talk you into this?” I asked him under my breath as we started moving toward the exit. Amelie was watching us go, like a queen sending her troops off to battle—back straight, hand raised, shining and pale and hard as diamond.

“Temporary,” the captain said. His eyes kept darting around at the vampires, never trusting for a second; I knew that feeling—hell, I lived it. “Common enemy and all that crap, but it ain’t like I’m signing up to be best friends. These vermin kill people, too. That’s all I care about.” He gave me a longer glance. “You?”

“The draug hurt somebody I care about,” I said. “And they’re going to answer for that.”

It was an acceptable reply, and he jerked his chin in approval—but his eyes went flat and cold when he looked past me at Michael. For him, Michael was the Enemy. I wondered whether that was ever going to change. Probably not, not until the vampires themselves changed it. And let’s face it, the chances of that were slim. Nobody likes giving up power, especially the kind that keeps them rich and safe and well fed.

Captain Obvious looked back, straight into my eyes, and said, “Something’s eating you. Wake up.”

Something’s eating you! Listen!

I struggled against that wave again, this time hot and red instead of icy cold, and came out the other side of it, into calm, still waters. “I’m fine,” I told him. “Everything’s just fine. We’re all okay.”

“Sure we are,” he said, and smiled. “Damn straight.”

The vamps had appropriated more buses for troop transport; these happened to be Morganville school buses. Ah, the memories. The cheap, shiny leatherette seats smelled like melted crayons, piss, and fear; I’d gotten the snot beaten out of me a couple of times on a bus just like this, before I’d taken charge of that. It had been righteous, though; I’d jumped in when ninth-grade Sammy Jenkins was slapping sixth-grade Michael around. Good times.

The vampires obviously didn’t care for the nostalgic ambience, because they slammed the windows down and let the cold, moist air roll through the bus. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were thinning and blowing away to reveal a clear blue sky. It might even warm up a little, burn off the thin puddles standing on the asphalt.

The desert was sluicing off the water as fast as it had fallen.
Within a day, rain would be a distant memory. That was why the vamps had moved here—because water wouldn’t stand. It gave the draug fewer and fewer places to hide.

You’re drowning, Shane. Wake up. Something’s eating you. WAKE UP!

This time, I could almost ignore it. Almost. Except for the horrible, burning pain that wouldn’t go away. Wouldn’t let me
think.

I could feel the tension and the anticipation in the vamps around me. For the first time in a long time, they were going to war—against an enemy who’d been hunting them, killing them, for ages. And they were
ready
. The violence in the air was thick, and every single one of them looked as hard as a bone knife. When Michael glanced at me, his eyes had gone bloodred. Usually that would have scared me, or at least disgusted me, but not now.

Right now, I wished mine could do the same, because what was burning inside me was just as bright, and just as crimson. I wanted to hurt the draug for what they’d done to Claire.

To all of us. To
me.

This isn’t right.
…

Shut up,
I told whatever it was in my head.
Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine
.

Nobody talked. Not even the other humans. Not even Michael. We just concentrated on what was ahead of us.

A fight, a real, genuine, straight-up fight. I was scared on some level, scared in a way I’d never been before, but I was part of something bigger now. Was this what it felt like to be in the army, to put on a uniform and all of a sudden be brothers (and yeah, sisters) with people you might not even like in private life? I imagined it was, because right now, in this moment, I would kill or die for anyone on this bus. Even the vamps. Somehow that felt wrong, but it also felt
right
. A better version of the life I’d been struggling to lead these past few years.

I would even fight and die for Myrnin, who was sitting up toward the front. He’d changed clothes. I liked him better when he was dressed crazy, but he’d gone black leather now, and that looked damn dangerous. I was glad Claire wasn’t there to see it. Some part of me was always going to worry about how she felt about him, so it was best she didn’t see him looking all tough. That was
my
job.

As the clouds parted, the vamps snapped the windows back up, and the tinting—why the hell was there vampire-quality tinting on a
school bus
, anyway? That made no sense …

Wake up, Shane!

The tinting cut off my view of where we were going. Not that it mattered. I had my shotgun, and I was ready to rock. It was so much easier to
do something
than to just … think.

Because when I stopped to think, everything fell apart.
Shattered. Melted.

Wake up.

We pulled to a stop, and the vampires sitting behind me opened the emergency door; those of us nearby piled out through it, and the vampires moved in a blur to the shelter of the nearest shade while the humans took their time sorting out where we were.

It was Morganville High.

The old pile hadn’t improved from the last time I’d been walking the halls and ditching class. It had been ugly when it had been built back in the 1950s, and hadn’t gotten any prettier over the years. Solid, square red brick, with patches where people (including me) had tagged it that had been covered over with white paint (all the damage, none of the art). The sign outside had a picture of
the school mascot, the Viper; we’d all known how stupidly ironic that was, but right now I kind of liked how his faded plastic fangs flashed in the sunlight. The lettering on the sign itself read
CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS
, but they weren’t renovating. It was just closed, like everything else in Morganville.

With no students running around, it looked and felt eerily dead. Water dripped from the gutters on the roof, but slowly; the gushing rains were long gone now, and the puddles in the yard were dried to a thin crust of wet sand under the sparse, struggling grass. Behind the school was the football field, the single most important thing in any small Texas town, but we weren’t headed there, of course.

The vamps shattered one of the big steel-wire-reinforced windows in the shadows, and began piling inside. I joined up with Michael and Captain Obvious. “Where the hell are we going?” Captain Obvious asked, which was—heh—a perfectly obvious question, really.

And I knew the answer, without even thinking about it. “The pool.” MHS had its own indoor pool. I’d been on the swim team, so I knew all about that. It wasn’t a great pool, and in retrospect I was surprised the vampires had been persuaded to allow one to be built at all, but I supposed they’d figured one more enclosed indoor pool wouldn’t hurt.

No. They closed down the pool. Drained it. Filled it in. It’s not there anymore. Wake up, idiot.

The voice in my head wouldn’t shut up. Of course the pool was there. Now the surviving draug had withdrawn to this one spot, this place where I’d swum meets and won prizes. It was a personal place to me, and they’d violated it.

They were trapped.

So are you!

They were stranded, because of the closed valves on the pipes and the silver nitrate in the water.

Wake up, Shane!

I shot my first draug halfway through the hallway; he was hiding in a classroom and oozed out of the shadows to grab a vampire by the back of the neck. The vamp had twisted free, and as soon as she was out of range I yelled and fired, and the silver shotgun pellets ripped the draug apart in a splatter of colorless liquid that smoked on the floor. It tried to reform, but another vampire—Myrnin, in his black leather—took what looked like a salt shaker from his pocket and tapped out some metallic powder into the mess.

Silver. It set the scraps of the draug on fire, and when the blaze was done, there was nothing but a damp smear on the floor.

Myrnin bared his fangs in a fierce grin, and we went on.

Nothing had changed in the school since I’d last been inside—the same lockers, dented and scratched; the same classroom doors; the same trophies in the case. I’d won at least two of them.

They were still there, with my name shining on them.

You never won any trophies, Shane.
Of course I had. I’d always wanted to win them, and I had.
This is a fantasy—don’t you get that? Wake up!

About a hundred draug later, we reached the pool, and we hadn’t lost a single one of our party along the way. But the pool was a different story. Firing shotguns loaded with silver in a room full of vampires was pretty damn dangerous, so only the first and second ranks got to have the firepower; the rest of us had to wait until the first rank had to reload, and then we pushed forward, dropped to one knee, and fired steadily at the mass of draug—the identical faces, the bland and empty not-people with
things
shivering
inside them—as they approached. A second rank fired over our heads. My ears went quickly numb from the pounding, shattering roars of the guns, but I didn’t care. What I cared about was making every single shot count.

I wanted Magnus. I wanted the bastard who’d started this, who owned it, who had
killed Claire
and nearly killed me along with her, even though I’d gotten her back.

Magnus, of course, didn’t risk himself.

Myrnin figured this out, because that was what Myrnin did; like Claire, he was a sideways thinker, and while the rest of us Joe Average idiots blasted away at the draug in front of us, he stepped away toward the edge of the pool and crouched down. He had a beaker in his hand, glittering and full to the brim with deadly silver and he set it down to pry the cap loose.

“He’s in the water!” Myrnin shouted. “Keep them busy—”

But he didn’t have time to finish whatever he was going to say, because Magnus reached up out of the water, grabbed him, and dragged him down.

I dropped my shotgun and ran for the beaker, pried the top off, and emptied it into the water.

The silver inside sluiced out into the water in a spreading, toxic stream. Myrnin had hold of something that had to be Magnus, the master draug, the
first
draug, and he was pulling him relentlessly toward the silver.

And into it.

I couldn’t see Myrnin at all now, because the water went from murky to black, swirling with vivid veins of silver. And then
boiling.

The vampires were just standing there, even Oliver, staring down into the water. Nobody was moving. Captain Obvious wasn’t going to go racing to the rescue, either.