Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires (30 page)

She watched it turn black, and crumble into black flakes. There was nothing living in that.

The water coming out of the sprinklers stopped acting like water; it rose
up
, straight up, arrowing directly into the clouds.

Escaping.

The sprinklers kept spinning, hissing out pressure, but only a little water made it out, and it seemed like natural stuff.

Claire yanked her foot free of the gelatinous substance with a squishing, squelching noise, and realized that a lot of the grass had dried off around her—the draug had taken most of the water with them. There was still some moisture, but it was just that. No draug.

They were running away from what she’d used.

She picked up a handy stick and poked at the rubbery mass that had been the draug …. It was heavy, solid, flaking into bits, and it smelled dead and rotten.

She stood up, sealed the bag, and gave Michael a big thumbs-up as she settled the hat at a better angle on her head. “I think that’s proof of concept,” she said. “Now we just have to get the stuff out of here.”

“Turn off the sprinklers!” Myrnin said, elbowing Michael out of the doorway. “Go on, shoo!”

“The draug took off, Myrnin, didn’t you see it? How often do you see drops go
straight up
?”

“I’m not coming out until you shut the valve.”

Chicken
, she thought, but didn’t say. He was right, of course. Maybe they were lying in the pipes, waiting for a delicious bite of vampire. She would have been only a snack, but Michael and Myrnin would be a sixteen-course meal.

“Stay there,” she said, and jogged on around the side of the shed. Finding the valve was surprisingly easy; turning it off wasn’t so much, since she didn’t have vampire strength, but she managed to twist the wrench a couple of times until the valve snugged tight.

Overhead, thunder rumbled.

Claire looked up; the clouds looked dark and heavily loaded now with rain. The draug, back in their transportation, she supposed. They could come down again, anytime.

But what about Magnus? Could he travel that way, or was he different? She felt like he was, somehow … he could transform to liquid but he had more mass to him. He was more
there
, more
real
than the others. They were like pieces split off of him, but connected to him. That was how it felt, anyway.

A shadow blocked out her view of the clouds, and she pushed back the awkward cowboy hat to look up. It was Myrnin. He offered her a hand up, and she accepted it. Her gloved hand still felt gritty from the powder. There wasn’t a single speck of moisture on it. Even when she swiped it over the still-moist ground, nothing stayed on the plastic without being absorbed.

“It works,” she said. Somehow she sounded surprised, as if she’d been standing in the doorway watching instead of actually
doing
it. “Myrnin—it really works.”

“Yes,” he said. There was a look on his face that she couldn’t understand at all. “Take that hat off. It ill becomes you.”

She took that to mean it was stupid, which she agreed with, and tipped it off. It dripped a stream of water off the brim—clean rainwater, not the draug contamination. The cool air hit her damp hair—damp with sweat, she realized—and she shivered.

Michael wasn’t far away. Shane was with him,
almost
there; she could see the struggle in him when he smiled. “Nice moves,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “It was my very best muddy crawl.” Her heart ached to see how pale he seemed, how shaky.

Michael seemed to know it, too, because he cut in with the usual banter to take the focus away from Shane. “I agree. You threw that powder like a girl, though.”

She channeled her inner Eve. “Which means what? Awesomely? Because you’d better not mean it any other way, or I might get offended.”

Michael was smiling, but he still looked strained. There was a trace of fright somewhere in it. “Don’t make us do that again,” he said. “Don’t make us stand there while you—take those kinds of risks.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “And we’re going to be all right. Didn’t you say we were, before I came out here?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “But I was kinda lying.”

“I know, stupid.”

Myrnin cleared his throat. “The draug may be gone, but they can return at any time.” He cast an uneasy glance up at the clouds. “We need transportation. I can perhaps fix the car, but—”

“Won’t have to,” Michael said, and nodded toward the corner of the high school, where another car was slowly pulling around the corner. It was a police cruiser, sleek and dangerous, and there were two figures in it. One had a shotgun barrel pointed out the
open window. Claire was surprised to realize that it was Richard Morrell.

Hannah Moses was driving.

She stopped the car and stepped out, frowning at them. “What the hell are you fools doing out here?” she asked.

“What brought
you
?” Shane asked.

Richard answered that one. “All vampire sedans are equipped with GPS and an automatic signal when there’s engine trouble,” he said. “We got an alert over her radio that one was out of service here. There wasn’t any reason for it to be here, so Hannah wanted to check it out.” He stepped out of the car, and seemed to lose his balance for a moment. Hannah gave him a sharp, concerned look, and he caught himself with a hand on the cruiser’s roof. “Damn. Low blood sugar.”

“And no sleep,” Hannah said. “And pushing yourself too hard. Richard—”

“I’m okay, Hannah.” Not, Claire noticed,
Chief
, or
Chief Moses
, which confirmed her intuition that there was more going on between the two of them than just professional courtesy. He even threw her a smile, and it was a sweet one. Hannah didn’t smile back. She continued to look concerned. “Everything okay, folks?”

“The car’s trashed,” Michael said, “but then again, I think it was worth it. We found a way to kill the draug.” He said it casually, but the gleam in his eyes gave it away.

Both Richard and Hannah looked at him with identical expressions of
What did you just say?
“Well,” Hannah said, “I know we can hurt them with silver, but—”

“Not silver,” Myrnin said. “Silver only wounds them, and it can’t kill Magnus, though it can certainly make him very unhappy. No indeed. The boy’s right. We can
kill
them.” He dashed
off, and came back with his hands full of the blackened mass—well, not his hands, because even Myrnin wasn’t nuts enough to actually pick up the draug with his bare skin. It was actually dumped into Claire’s abandoned cowboy hat. He shook it, and it jiggled like gelatin.

Lifelessly. Bits of it flaked away.

“What the …?” Hannah bent forward over the hat, then reeled back, hand to her nose. “Oh, man. That smells like a weeklong floater.”

Claire looked at Shane. “What’s a floater?”

“Dead body,” he said. “You don’t want to know, trust me.” His gaze lingered on her, as if he was still in doubt that she was okay.

Or there.

She stripped off the nitrile gloves and gripped his hand tight and fast. He sent her a fast, unsteady smile.

“What is it?” Richard asked. He was staying well back from what was in the hat, but he took a pen from his pocket and poked it into the mass. No reaction. “I mean, what caused this?”

“Chemicals. Janitorial chemicals, to be precise. Young Shane here thought of it.” That was generous of Myrnin to say so, Claire thought; Shane seemed surprised, too. “It’s led me to think of a few other things that might work as well, but this is surprisingly effective.”

Shane’s pride, however cautious and concealed, was catching; Claire caught the gleam of it in Hannah’s face, and Richard’s, too. No, not pride.
Hope.
A rare commodity in Morganville.

“There’s a full barrel of it in the trunk of the sedan,” Myrnin said. “We’ll need to get it in yours, quickly.” As if to emphasize that, the clouds overhead gave another ominous rumble; he flinched, moved vampire-speed to the black sedan, and popped the trunk open by breaking the lock with a sharp pull of his fingers.
He and Michael wrestled the barrel out, but allowed Shane and Hannah to help him roll it over to the police car.

Richard stayed with Claire. He glanced at her, raised his eyebrows, and said, “What’s with the biohazard suit?”

Oh. She’d forgotten about it, actually. “The sprinklers were on,” she said. “The draug were waiting out here for us. I had to have some kind of protection.”

“Good thinking.” Richard wasn’t really listening to her, though; he was watching Hannah as she helped Myrnin and Michael muscle the drum into the trunk of the police car. It didn’t fit quite as well as it had in the vampmobile. There was something kind of sad about the way he was looking at Hannah … as if he wanted something he knew he could never really have. Though he did have her, didn’t he? Maybe?

People were complicated. Claire couldn’t figure out what was in her
own
head most of the time, much less her friends’. Or Shane’s. And she hardly even knew Monica’s brother.

“So,” she said, “you and Chief Moses—”

“What?” he asked, and suddenly his gaze was focused on her, laser-sharp. “Me and Chief Moses what?”

“Uh …”
Are dating,
she was going to say, but she was afraid suddenly that she’d misread all of that. Awkward. “… Make a good team, I guess.” Lame. “She’s pretty fantastic.”

“She is that,” he said. Crisis over. He let his attention wander back to focus on Hannah; Claire wondered if he even knew he was doing it. “Did she ever tell you how she got that scar?”

“No.” The dark, seamed scar across Hannah’s face was dramatic, but somehow it only made her look … regal. Scarily more beautiful, as if it were a really exotic tattoo.

“She pulled three people out of a burning truck in Afghanistan, under heavy enemy fire,” he said. “She was going back for the
fourth when the munitions exploded. She got hit by shrapnel. She was a hero. Got decorated for it and everything. And then she came back here.” He shook his head. “Why the hell would she come back here?”

Good question. Claire wasn’t sure she had any rational answer, either, but she tried. “It’s her home. Maybe there was somebody here she wanted to come back for, too. Is that … you know, possible?”

That startled him, and he was thinking how to answer that when Hannah finally thumped the trunk closed and said, “Right. We’re going to get cozy in here. Claire, in the back with Myrnin and Shane. Probably in the middle, knowing how they get along. Richard, Michael, up front with me.”

Conversation over. Claire scrambled into the back and was breathlessly jammed between Shane’s solid, warm heat, and Myrnin’s oddly cool, angular body.
Manwich,
she could almost hear Eve say, only Eve would never actually count Myrnin as a man, exactly.

“Get us back to Founder’s Square,” Myrnin ordered. “I have quite a bit of work to do, you know.
Quite
a bit. This is a very promising beginning, but there is much left to discover. We will need better delivery systems, the ability to distribute the chemicals widely, and—”

“Yeah, we get it,” Hannah interrupted. “Faster is better. No problem, we’re going right now, just keep your fangs folded.”

“That’s very rude,” Myrnin said. “I haven’t brought my fangs out for some time. Not in mixed company, anyway.”

Hannah gave him a long look in the rearview mirror, then put the car into reverse and began an expert, smooth job of backing up. Once in the parking lot, she did a wide circle and made for the exit. The boxy shape of the high school, with its faded cartoon
snake mascot sign, quickly receded in the distance, and Claire breathed deeply in relief.

Almost there
, she thought.
We’re almost to the end of this.

And then the rain fell. Softly at first, a few fat, pattering drops on the windshield … then more of them, a bucket being emptied, then a roaring flood. It came shockingly fast. It wasn’t like rain at all, really, more like water with a few bubbles of air trapped inside. As if they’d suddenly been plunged into the deep, dark sea.

“Faster,” Shane shouted across to Hannah. A flash of lightning from the dark clouds above turned his face into blue-white stone, except for the panic Claire saw in his eyes. “C’mon,
drive
, lady! We’re going to get caught out here!”

She tried, she really did, but the water was rising so fast in the streets that driving faster built up a wave—first in front of the tires, and then at the bumper of the car. It took only a few short minutes for the narrow roads to flood up to the curbs. The drainage wasn’t working—no, Claire realized, it
was
working, just in reverse. Muddy, tainted water was flowing
up
out of the drains, adding to the rain that was falling.

The draug were trying to drown them fast and hard.

Hannah had to slow the car as it approached the next intersection. There was a dip in the pavement there, a deep one, and there was no telling what would happen if she drove into it. No, there was—Claire remembered what had happened to Eve’s hearse, with its burned-out motor.

The draug could disable the car.

“Turning around!” Hannah shouted, and executed a fast, sliding turn that pushed Claire hard against Myrnin. She grabbed for the back of the seat and wished she’d had time to hunt for a seat belt, but there was no room between them to fasten one now.
“Going for a side road. Richard, keep your eyes open. You see anything coming, shoot it.”

She drove at a probably-too-fast speed down the side road, as closed and lightless buildings flashed past; gutters gushed water in thick, silvery streams, from what Claire could make out. The rain was coming down at a breathless pace, and it sounded like a hail of dropped ball bearings on the roof of the cruiser.
They’re supposed to be getting weaker, not stronger. Or is this their desperation effort, since they know we can hurt them?

Something hit that was harder than just a raindrop, with a sharp
crack
, and Claire twisted around to look behind them. There was a draug crouched on the trunk lid, leering in at them, its face smearing and running in the rain. It had a thick chunk of brick in its hand, and slammed it against the back window a second time.