Carpe Corpus (8 page)

Myrnin turned slowly and raised his eyebrows at Claire. It was a mild expression, but the look in his eyes was fierce. “Interpret, please.”

“Bishop might have done this on purpose,” she said. “Right, Dr. Mills? He might have developed this disease and deliberately spread it—used the cure only for himself. But why would he do that?”

“I have no idea.”

Myrnin stalked away, moving in jerky, agitated strides; when a lab stool got in his way, he picked it up and smashed it into junk against the wall without so much as pausing. “Because he wants control,” he said. “And revenge. It’s perfect. He can once again decide who lives, who dies—he had that power once, until we took it from him. We thought he was destroyed. We were
sure.
”

“You and Amelie,” Claire said. There was a long, ugly history behind all this—she didn’t understand it and didn’t really want to, but she knew that at some point, maybe hundreds of years ago, Amelie had tried to kill Mr. Bishop once and for all. “But you failed. And this is his way of hitting you back. Hitting you all back at once.”

Myrnin stopped, facing a blank corner for a moment without replying. Then he slowly walked back toward them and took a seat on one of the lab stools that hadn’t been destroyed, flipping back the tails of his frock coat as he sat. “So it is deliberate, this bane.”

“Apparently,” Claire said. “And now he’s got you where he wants you.”

Myrnin smiled. “Not quite.” He gestured around the lab. “We do have weapons.”

Most of the granite-topped tables had metal pans spread with drying reddish crystals. Claire nodded toward them with a frown. “I thought we were going with the liquid version of that stuff?”
That stuff
being the maintenance drug that she and Myrnin had developed—or at least refined to the point of being useful—that acted to keep the vampire disease’s worst effects at bay. It wasn’t a cure; it helped, but it had diminishing returns, at best.

“We were,” Dr. Mills said. “But it takes longer to distill the liquid form than it does to manufacture the crystals, and we need to medicate more and more of the vampires—so here we are. Two prongs of attack.”

“What about the cure?” He didn’t look happy, and Claire’s heart shrank down to a small, tight knot in her chest. “What’s wrong?”

“Unfortunately, the sample of Bishop’s blood we had degraded quickly,” he said. “I was able to culture a small amount of serum out of it, but I’m going to need more of the base to really develop enough to matter.”

“How much more of his blood do you need?”

“Pints,” he said apologetically. “I know. Believe me, I know what you’re thinking.”

Claire was thinking of exactly how stupidly suicidal it would be to try to get
drops
of Bishop’s blood, never mind pints. Myrnin had managed it once, but she doubted even he could pull it off twice without being staked and sunbathed to death. But she wasn’t willing to give up, either. “We’d have to drug him,” she said.

Myrnin looked up from fiddling with glassware on the table. “How? He’s not one of those partial to human food and drink. And I doubt any of us could get close enough to give him a shot large enough to matter.”

Claire pulled in a deep breath as it occurred to her in a cold and blinding flash. “We have to drug him through what it is he
does
drink.”

“From everything I’ve heard about Bishop, he doesn’t drink from blood bags,” Dr. Mills said. “He only feeds from live victims.”

Claire nodded. “I know.” She felt sick saying it, so sick she almost couldn’t speak at all. “But it’s the only way to get to him—if you really want to end this.”

The two men looked at her—one older than her, the other infinitely older—and for just a moment, they had the same expression on their faces: as if they’d never seen her before.

Myrnin said thoughtfully, “It’s an idea. I’ll have to give it some thought. The problem is that loading blood with sufficient poison to affect Bishop will certainly kill a human subject.”

Poison. She’d been thinking of some kind of knockout drug—but that wouldn’t work, she realized. Doses big enough to affect a vampire would be poison to humans in their bloodstream. “Does he always drink from humans?”

Myrnin flinched. She knew why; she knew Myrnin had drained a couple of vampire assistants he’d had, which was strictly against the rules. He’d done it accidentally, kind of, when he was crazy. “Not . . . always,” he said, very quietly. “There are times—but he’d have to be greatly angered.”

“Yeah, like that’s a trick,” Claire said. “Would it kill a vampire to put that amount of poison in his bloodstream?”

“The drugs would not necessarily kill a vampire,” Myrnin said. “Bishop draining him certainly would.”

The silence stretched. Myrnin looked down at his dirty feet in those ridiculous flip-flops. In the other room, Claire heard a child singing her ABCs, and then a woman’s quiet voice hushing her.

“Myrnin,” Claire said. “It doesn’t have to be you.”

Myrnin raised his head and fixed his gaze on hers.

“Of course it doesn’t,” he said. “But it will have to be someone you know. Someone you might perhaps like. Of all the people in Morganville, Claire, I never expected you to turn so cold to that possibility.”

She shivered deep inside from the disappointment in his voice, and fisted her hands in the folds of Shane’s oversize sweatshirt. “I’m not cold,” she said. “I’m desperate. And so are you.”

“Yes,” Myrnin said. “That’s unfortunately quite true.”

He turned away, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to pace the far end of the room, turn after turn, head down.

Dr. Mills cleared his throat. “If you have some time, I need help bottling the serum I do have. There’s enough for maybe twenty vampires—thirty if I stretch it. No more.”

“Okay,” Claire said, and followed him to the other side of the room, where a beaker and tiny bottles waited. She poured and handed him bottles to place the needle-permeable caps on with a metal crimper. The serum was milky and slightly pink. “How long does it take to work?”

“About forty-eight hours, according to my tests,” he said. “I need to give it to Myrnin; he’s the worst case we have who isn’t already confined in a cell.”

“He won’t let you,” Claire said. “He thinks he needs to be crazy so that Bishop can’t sense that he’s still working for Amelie.”

Dr. Mills frowned at her. “Is that true?”

“I think he needs to be crazy,” she said. “Just probably not for the reason he says.”

Myrnin refused the shot. Of course. But he took pocketfuls of the medicine and disposable syringes, and escorted Claire back out of the lab. She heard the lock snap shut behind them.

“Are Dr. Mills and his family safe in there?” she asked. Myrnin didn’t answer. “Are they?”

“As safe as anyone is in Morganville,” he said, which really wasn’t an answer. He stopped and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. “Claire. I’m afraid. . . .”

“What?”

He shook his head. “I’m just afraid. And that’s rare. That’s so very rare.”

He sounded lost and uncertain, the way he sometimes did when the disease began to take hold—but this was different. This was the real Myrnin, not the confused one. And it made Claire afraid, too.

She reached out and took his hand. It felt like a real person’s hand, just cold. His fingers tightened on hers, briefly, and then released.

“I believe that it’s time for you to learn some things,” he said. “Come.”

He pushed off from the wall, and led her at a brisk walk toward the portal, flip-flops snapping with urgency.

5

Myrnin’s actual lab was a deserted wreck.

Whether it was Bishop’s goons, vandals, or just Myrnin being crazy, there was even more destruction now than the last time Claire had seen the place. Virtually all the glass had been shattered; it covered the floor in a deadly glitter. Tables had been overturned and floor in a deadly glitter. Tables had been overturned and splintered. Books had been ripped to shreds, with the leather and cloth covers gutted and empty, tossed on piles of trash.

The whole place smelled foul with spilled chemicals and molding paper.

Myrnin said nothing as they descended the steps into the mess, but on the last step, he paused and sat down—more like
fell
down, actually. Claire wasn’t sure what to do, so she waited.

“You okay?” she finally asked. He slowly shook his head.

“I’ve lived here a long time,” Myrnin said. “Mostly by choice, as it happens; I’ve always preferred a lab to a palace, which Amelie never really understood, although she humored me. I know it’s only a place, only things. I didn’t expect to feel so much . . . loss.” He was silent again for a moment, and then sighed. “I shall have to rebuild again. But it will be a bother.”

“But . . . not right now, right?” Because the last thing Claire wanted to do was get a broom and a dump truck to pick up all that broken glass when the fate of Morganville was riding on their staying focused.

“Of course not.” He leaped up and—to her shock—walked across the broken glass.
In flip-flops.
Not even pausing when the glass got ankle-deep. Claire looked down at her own shoes—high-top sneakers—and sighed. Then she very carefully followed him, shoving a path through the glass as she went while Myrnin heedlessly crunched his way through.

“You’re hurting yourself!” she called.

“Good,” he shot back. “Life is pain, child. Ah! Excellent.” He crouched down, brushed a clear spot on the floor, and picked up something that looked like a mouse skeleton. He examined it curiously for a few seconds, then tossed it over his shoulder. Claire ducked as it sailed past. “They didn’t find it.”

“Find what?”

“The entrance,” he said. “To the machine.”

“What machine?”

Myrnin smiled his best, looniest smile at her, and punched his fist down into the bare floor, which buckled and groaned. He punched again, and again—and an entire six-foot section of the floor just
collapsed
into a big black hole. “I covered it over,” he said. “Clever, yes? It used to be a trapdoor, but that seemed just a bit too easy.”

Claire realized her mouth was gaping open. “We could have fallen right through that,” she said.

“Don’t be overly dramatic. I calculated your weight. You were perfectly safe, so long as you weren’t carrying anything too heavy.” Myrnin waved at her to join him, but before she got halfway there, he jumped down into the hole and disappeared.

“Perfect.” She sighed. When she finally reached the edge, she peered down, but it was pitch-black . . . and then there was the sound of a scratch, and a flame came to life, glowing on Myrnin’s face a dozen feet down. He lit an oil lamp and set it aside. “Where are the stairs?”

“There aren’t any,” he said. “Jump.”

“I can’t!”

“I’ll catch you. Jump.”

That was a level of trust she really never wanted to have with Myrnin, but . . . there was no sign of mania in him, and he watched her with steady concentration.

“If you don’t catch me, I’m totally killing you. You know that, right?”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but didn’t dispute that. “Jump!”

She did, squealing as she fell—and then she landed in his strong, cold arms, and at close range, his eyes were wide and dark and almost—
almost
—human.

“See?” he murmured. “Not so bad as all that, was it?”

“Yeah, it was great. You can put me down now.”

“What? Oh. Yes.” He let her slide to the ground, and picked up the oil lamp. “This way.”

“Where are we?” Because it looked like wide, industrial tunnels, obviously pretty old. Original construction, probably.

“Catacombs,” he said. “Or drainage tunnels? I forget how we originally planned it. Doesn’t matter; it’s all been sealed off for ages. Mind the dead man, my dear.”

She looked down and saw that she was standing not on some random sticks, but on
bones.
Bones in a tattered, ancient shirt and trousers. And there was a white skull staring at her from nearby, too. Claire screamed and jumped aside. “What the
hell,
Myrnin?”

“Unwanted visitor,” he said. “It happens. Oh, don’t worry; I didn’t kill him. I didn’t have to—there are plenty of safeguards in place. Now come on, stop acting like you’ve never seen a dead man before. I told you, this is important.”

“Who was he?”

“What does it matter? He’s dust, child. And we are not, as yet, although at this rate we certainly may be before we get where we’re going. Come on!”

She didn’t want to, but she wanted to stay inside the circle of the lamplight. Dark places in Morganville really were full of things that could eat you. She joined Myrnin, breathless, as he marched down an endlessly long tunnel that seemed to appear ten feet ahead and disappear ten feet behind them.

And suddenly, the roof disappeared, and there was a cave. A big one.

“Hold this,” Myrnin said, and passed her the lamp. She juggled it, careful to avoid hot glass and metal, and Myrnin opened a rusty cabinet on the wall of the tunnel and pulled down an enormous lever.

The lamp became completely redundant as bright lights began to shine, snapping on one by one in a circle around the huge cavern. The beams glittered off a tangled mass of glass and metal, and as Claire blinked, things came into focus.

“What is that?”

“My difference engine,” Myrnin said. “The latest version, at least. I built the core of it three hundred years ago, but I’ve added to and embroidered on it over the years. Oh, I know what you’re thinking—this isn’t Bab bage’s design, that limited and stupid thing. No, this is half art, half artifice. With a good dash of genius, if I might say so.”

It looked like a huge pipe organ, with rows and rows of thin metal plates all moving and clacking together in vertical columns. The whole thing hissed with steam. In and around that were spaghetti tangles of cables, tubes, and—in some cases—colorful duct tape. There were three huge glass squares, too thick to be monitors, and in the middle was a giant keyboard with every key the size of Claire’s entire hand. Only instead of letters on it, there were symbols. Some of them—many of them—she knew from her studies with Myrnin about alchemy. Some of them were vampire symbols. A few were just . . . blank, like maybe there’d been something on them once, but it had worn completely off.