Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires (38 page)

I did not see them off on their mission. There was no need; Naomi would not thank me for taking the focus from her moment of glory, and there was nothing I could add. Michael and Eve would stay or not, as they pleased; I had given them my blessing to do so. There was no sign of Shane, which was a very good thing. I did not need the complication of his involvement just now.

I returned to Amelie’s apartments, now unguarded; her loyal men and women had gone to fight the draug, of course. I opened
the door to her bedroom and stopped there, because the sight was … grim.

Amelie was hardly recognizable now. Still fighting, because there was still a human form to be seen beneath that … growth, but she was losing, slowly and grimly. I pulled the soft silk comforter from beneath her to wrap around her body. I needed the full thickness to cover her. Once I had cocooned her so, I tied it off with ripped curtain cords, and took her slight weight over my shoulder. The smell of the draug settled around me, rotting fish and flesh, and I fought the urge to gag.
She is not one of them. Not yet.
I stopped breathing. A convenience of vampire physiology, but not always effective; our senses are too acute.

Smells pervade.

Amelie didn’t move. She could well have been an inconvenient corpse I was removing for disposal; that would not be unique in my lifetime, either in my human days or in my new life. She felt heavier than she should have, but that might have been the burden of what I was about to do. I did not waste time; I was well aware there was little left. I carried her through the halls, now mostly deserted. I heard a buzz of human conversation from one room, and identified voices I knew. The Morrell girl, mourning her lost brother; she was right to do so, because he would be a grave loss to the town. A smart, fair man, unlikely as one was to arise from such low beginnings. The girl had no such … quality.

I could sense that only humans were left in the building now, save for Michael. It allowed me to easily avoid them all.

My car was parked below, silently waiting, and I put Amelie in the trunk, not so much for her protection as for mine, should she finish her transformation before I was ready. Driving out into the cloudy night, I saw signs everywhere of decay and destruction. The draug accelerated such things, turning creaking structures in
need of paint and repair into crumbling, sagging ruins. They would destroy Morganville and rot it into the desert in a few months if left unchecked.

There were more than a few humans remaining in town; some had come against us in force a few nights ago, hoping to wrest control from the vampires. Those had scuttled back to their hiding places to await the end, whatever it might be, of our fight. I did not blame them. When giants fought, ants were crushed.

I navigated the streets without encountering a single draug, though I sensed their heavy presence. The lack of singing from them was an important and blissful indication of their wariness, their fear.
Yes,
I thought.
You are right to be afraid. This time, we will end you.
I imagined Magnus had felt the same exultation in discovering Morganville, the last bolt-hole of a doomed species. He’d gloried in the chance to finally, completely, eradicate us, even if it meant the end of his own—or would it? Without vampires to destroy, the draug would turn more toward less nutritious but more plentiful prey. Shane’s captivity was proof enough of that. They could make do with humans.

In a way, as we saved ourselves, we saved those who served us as well.

I parked at the mouth of the darkened alley, opened the car door and checked around the area. There were shadows, ominous ones, but those were quite normal for this place. No sign or smell of the draug, save what was coming from the trunk. I reeked of it myself, I realized. A filthy business, and heartrending.

I carried Amelie down the narrowing alleyway to the shack set at the end of it. Myrnin’s hovel, which contained only a stairway leading down to his laboratory and nothing else but the flickering glances and scuttles of nighttime lower-form intruders. It was dark there, all lights extinguished, but as I descended lamps flickered
on in response to the motion. Claire’s improvement, I should imagine. Myrnin would hardly have cared much.

The lab was a shambles, but that also was normal; Myrnin was, to put it mildly, not concerned with appearances. The girl had made attempts to clear it, but they never lasted long. I navigated around broken glassware, fallen chairs, scattered loose books and papers, and stopped in front of a large, locked cabinet marked
DANGER
, with many different dire-looking symbols and icons stickered on the face of it.

As I reached out for it, I felt a flicker of energy behind me, and glanced back to see a shape forming in mist and static. Not the draug.

Myrnin’s creation.

It was unnatural, this thing, this
apparition
; he had used the brain of a vampire to power it, and the spirit of the man remained. A reluctant vampire, to be sure; Bishop’s little joke, making our bitterest enemy into one of our own. Punishment for both the father and the son. I wondered how Shane Collins felt, knowing his father survived—if it could be called that—in this pathetic, impotent form.

Frank Collins was an image, nothing more. He existed as flat as a photograph, and with about as much power. He was indefinably degraded since last I’d seen him; then, he’d worn a certain cockiness, but now he seemed … faded. And old. The power in the lab flickered unsteadily, and so did his image.

He said nothing to me, and I said nothing to him. There was no point in bantering with the dead.

As I rolled the cabinet aside on its concealed track, he finally spoke up. “Is my son still alive?” he asked.

“I am much surprised you care,” I responded. “But yes, so far as I am aware.”

“Tell him—” Frank hesitated, and I had the curious sense that he was struggling to remember how to form words. “Tell him I said I was sorry.”

“I doubt that will matter very much,” I said, “given your history together. But if I survive the day, I will do so.”

“I’m dying,” he said. “My brain, I mean. The power keeps going out. Maybe that’s … that’s good.”

“Maybe it is,” I said. I was not without sympathy, but I chose where to give it, and Frank Collins was not my choice. I opened the door to the portal that led from Myrnin’s lab, and beyond it was thick, black, empty space. “Are the portals still functioning?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know …” And his image flickered and faded, and didn’t return.

Not reassuring, perhaps. The portals were Myrnin’s creation as well—magical doorways (though he assured me they were based on his blend of alchemy and science) that tunnel through space, linking places together as if adjacent rooms in a single house. One could cross town in only a few moments, theoretically, if one knew the secrets of the portals and their locations. I knew a few. Myrnin never shared the full extent of his invention with anyone save Amelie.

I faced the portal and concentrated hard. There was a whisper of color through the dark, dim but definite. I traced the outlines of the place I wished to see in my mind—the brightly colored stained-glass lamps, the red velvet sofa with its lion’s-head arms, the thick, dusty carpeting. There was a small Monet painting that Amelie had favored, hanging just there …

I felt another force suddenly add itself to mine in one intense surge, and color exploded out of the dark, showing me the room in shining, perfect focus.

No time.

I plunged through, into freezing cold, then heat, and then I was stepping/falling through the dark and into the light.

The portal snapped shut behind me with an almost metallic shriek, and I sensed that it wouldn’t be opening again, not without repairs. Morganville was shattering all around us. Soon there’d be nothing left to save.

That power.
It hadn’t been Frank; he’d had little or nothing left to give. No, this had been power with a familiar sort of feel. Amelie was, at least on some level, still awake. Aware.

Alive.

Perhaps because of this place. This room, this house, still held a sense of eternity, peace, and a measure of her own power. Here, of all places, Amelie could find strength. In many ways, the Glass House was the unbeating heart of the town—the first of her Founder Houses to be completed, the first of her homes. When the structure had been built, it had been the first of thirteen identical buildings, all linked, connected, strengthened by blood and bone and magic and science.

Here, in this place of power, I hoped she could maintain a little longer. And if not … it was a fitting place for it to end.

I put her down as gently as possible on the red velvet sofa, and unwrapped the silken covers from around her body. They pulled away wet and sticky, and beneath she was a melting wax sculpture with pale, blind eyes.

I left the hidden attic room and went to the second floor. The young people who lived here—Claire, Eve, Michael, Shane—were indifferent housekeepers, but the bathroom held clean towels. No water, of course, but in the kitchen I found a sealed, safe bottle of water, and a not-yet-curdled supply of blood that
Michael Glass must have stored against emergencies. Prudent. I would have stored more than that, but I am by nature cautious and paranoid.

The house had a curiously empty feel. I had been here many times, but always there had been a sense of
presence
to it, of something living within it that was not just the occupants, but the spirit of the house itself. Myrnin’s creations had odd effects, and the oddest had been the awakening of these immobile, unliving buildings made of brick, wood, mortar, and nails. But the spirit that had dwelt here seemed as dead as Morganville itself.

When I knelt beside Amelie with the dampened towel and began to sponge her face clean, her eyes suddenly shifted to fix on me. For the first time in hours, I saw a spark of recognition in them. She didn’t move otherwise; I continued my work, wiping the damp residue of the draug from her pale cheeks, her parted lips.

Her hand moved in a flash, and caught my wrist to hold it in an iron grip.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t hold, Oliver. You know what to do. You can’t allow me to lose myself. Naomi was right. Unkind, but right.”

“We still have time,” I told her, and put my other hand over hers—not to pull it free, but to hold it close, even if it hurt me. “If Magnus can be killed, this will stop. It will all stop.” Because that was the secret of the draug, the one that Magnus had sought to keep so close. That was why he had targeted Claire, who could see through his disguises and defenses. He was the most powerful of the draug, and the most vulnerable. Kill him, and his vassals died. They were nothing but reflections, shells, drones serving a hive.

But Amelie was shaking her head, just a little. As much as she could. “The master draug
cannot
be killed. Not by steel or silver,
bullets or blades. The most we can do is force him to flee and regroup. You
must
kill me before the transformation is complete, do you understand? I thought perhaps, this time—but we are not so lucky, you and I.” Her smile was terrible, but beneath the alien taking her body, I could still see the ghost of Amelie. She had been my bitter enemy, my gadfly, my bane—we had hundreds of years of bile and ambition between us, but here, at the end, I saw her for what she was: a queen, as she had always been. In my mortal life I had brought down kings, laid low monarchs, but never her. There was something in her stronger than my ambition. “Do me the kindness, my old enemy. It’s fitting.”

“In a while,” I promised her. “Bide with me.”

“I will,” she said, and closed her eyes. This time, the smile was utterly her own. “I will try.”

F
inally,
finally
, I was taking my rightful place. Thirty vampires, all at my unquestioned command. It rankled me that Oliver had been the one to grant it to me, but I would see to him soon enough. I was royalty. He was nothing but a jumped-up king-killer and fanatic who’d once stolen a throne, and there would be a reckoning. It had been foolish of him to give me his vassals to command.

I would use them to do more than finish the draug. I would do it for my sister’s sake. Amelie was queen, true, but when a queen can no longer rule, her heir must act, swiftly, to ensure that no chaos erupts.

I was the heir.
Not
Oliver.

The only vehicle large enough to carry us all was a yellow-painted bus; it stank of human children, and other less pleasant
things, and I ordered the windows put down. The clouds were rolling away on the winds, leaving the skies over Morganville finally clear and ice-cold, with stars glittering in spills of diamond. So many stars here. My sister had chosen her defensive ground well, and if the weapon Oliver had given us worked as he claimed, this would be the final, triumphant victory.

And I would lead it.

I was already planning for what would occur after this battle. First, I would ensure that Amelie did not rise a draug; next, I would bind her people close to me by right of blood. Oliver could be exiled, or dispatched if he refused to go. And Morganville, such kingdom as it was, would be mine. Once the draug were finished, we would rebuild this town in the right and proper way … and the nonsense that Amelie had allowed, this equality between humans and vampires, that would stop.