Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires (7 page)

Fast.

Leaving Founder’s Square, with its safe little circle of lights still burning and its cordon of police and vampire guards … That was difficult. Not just because, deep down, Claire didn’t want to go, but also because the guards wouldn’t
let
them go. As in the Elders’ Council building, everyone had been given strict orders, and Claire imagined they’d been along the lines of
Whatever you do, don’t let those bastards in here, or let anybody else go out.
Naomi, though, wasn’t taking no for an answer, and there were few human cops who were willing to stand up to a vampire with an attitude, and a gun.

“Nice,” Shane said under his breath as she led them out into the street. The wreckage of cars and dropped weapons had been mostly cleared from that area—residue of the not-so-successful riot that humans had staged the night before against the vamps; it hadn’t been effective, but it had definitely been enthusiastic. “Any idea of how far we have to go?”

“No,” Naomi said, and furrowed her brow. “Why?”

“Just thinking that it might be better to go in a vehicle than on foot. For safety.”

“You,” Naomi said, “have a flamethrower, which is not of much use in the enclosed space of an automobile. Perhaps you might have considered that in your choice of weapons.”

“Not a car. A pickup,” he said without hesitation. “I get the back. Ladies in the front. Maximum speed, minimum exposure, plus a good firing platform for me and Claire, with the shotgun. Or you. Whichever.”

Naomi cocked her head and looked at him in silence for a few seconds, then nodded. “Very well,” she said. “Obtain one, if you please.”

“I always knew hot-wiring skills would come in handy, other than getting me more frequent-flier jail points,” Shane said. “Stay here.” He jogged away, light and lithe even under the weight of the heavy equipment he was carrying, and Claire watched him go with a hungry little stab of anxiety. For all his easy comebacks, Shane was as vulnerable as any of them. Even Naomi, who was
also
watching her boyfriend with a thoughtful frown grooved between her brows.

“I was told Shane Collins was unreliable,” she said, “but I see little sign of it now. I was also told he loathed my kind and would see us dead if he could. Yet he came with you to rescue us. Odd.”

“People change,” Claire said.

Naomi shrugged, and made it look like some exotic foreign gesture. “Assuredly,” she said. “But mostly I find they change for the worse, not the better. In fact, some who once liked me have changed so much that they tried to burn me as a monster.”

“Well, then you’re even,” Claire shot back, “because Amelie had Shane in a cage and was going to burn
him
for something he didn’t even do. He’s changed. For the better. And he didn’t have to.”

“Perhaps he has changed for you.”

For some reason the whole idea of that just made Claire … angry. “No.
Not
for me. He’s a good guy, deep down, and he wants to make things better. Same as me. So just—shut up about it.” She was, she realized, short of sleep, tired, anxious, and scared, and Naomi’s cool analysis of someone she loved made her unreasonably irritated.

Naomi said nothing, just gazed at her with placid, polite interest. There was a lot of frost inside her. She’d been nicer when there hadn’t been lives at stake, Claire thought; now survival was a big and increasing concern for her, and it was testing the limits of her willingness to put up with disrespectful humans.

But she didn’t snarl, glow red eyes, flash fangs, or otherwise try to make a vampiric comeback, so Claire had to be satisfied with that. They waited in silence for a few uncomfortable moments before the growing throb of an engine and a splash of headlights across the pavement signaled the arrival of a massive pickup truck that pulled to a stop neatly ahead of them. It idled slow and deep, and the bed of the thing was approximately the size of a blue whale. The interior of the cab could hold a soccer team. It even had a handy—though empty—gun rack in the back window.

The bumper sticker read:
YOU CAN HAVE MY GUNS WHEN YOU PRY THEM FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS
. Some joker—possibly the owner of the truck—had added
UN
before
DEAD
with a black marker. Claire cast a glance at Naomi, who was focused on the same words. There was an odd, vaguely amused smile on her lips that was not just a little creepy.

Shane leaned out the window of the truck and said, “God, I love rednecks. Who wants to drive this bad boy?”

“Not me,” Claire immediately said, at the same time that Naomi said, “I do not know how.”

Shane jumped down from the cab, paused, and stared at the
two of them with a blank expression. “Don’t want to?” he asked Claire, and then swung his attention to Naomi, looking even more stunned. “Can’t? Seriously, there’s something wrong with the two of you.”

“If by
wrong
you mean
sane
,” Claire said. “That thing is like a tank, only a tank gets better gas mileage.”

“This is your biggest concern right now? Gas mileage?”

“No, I don’t think I can actually see over the dash! Who drives this thing? Bigfoot?”

“Rad,” Shane said. “You know, Rad, who owns the mechanic shop and sells bikes? That guy. C’mon. I’ll buy you a booster seat.”

Claire gave him a doubtful look, but he pointed to the pale gray sky, at the brightest point. A silent reminder that the day wasn’t getting any younger and their chances of finding Theo were dimming with the afternoon sun.

“Fine,” she said. Shane had to boost her up to the chrome step, and then she climbed into the cab of the truck itself. There were eighteen wheelers that were lower to the ground, she was convinced. Naomi had no such issues; she made her entrance to the passenger side look graceful. Claire slotted her shotgun into the rack behind them, but Naomi kept hold of hers, eyes distant and watchful.

It turned out she could see over the dash, after all, though she had to pull the seat all the way forward to reach the pedals. Shane vaulted up into the open bed of the truck and slapped the side of the truck in a signal to go.

“Well,” Claire muttered, “here goes nothing.”

Literally.

She stalled the truck immediately, then leaned out the window to yell at Shane, “Who drives a
standard
transmission these days?”

“Manly men,” he called back. “C’mon, Claire, you can do it!”

She could, but she just hated shifting. Too much to think
about, especially in their current, extremely complicated situation. No help for it, though; she gritted her teeth, adjusted the seat even closer, and got familiar, again, with the clutch. It was painful and humiliatingly awkward, but she managed. The truck leaped forward with a low, rumbling growl, and she thought,
We could probably pull down a building with this thing.
Worth noting, anyway.

Leaving the false circle of safety—false, because Claire knew it was just an illusion, sponsored by all those lights—still felt like a Very Bad Idea. She flipped on the headlights, on bright, even though it was still murky afternoon, and after a moment reached out and turned on the truck’s heater as well. The hot, dry blast of air made her shiver in relief. She felt chilled to the bone, and slimy, even though she knew there
probably
hadn’t been any draug in the raindrops that had soaked through her clothes.

What if there had been? How many of those contaminated raindrops does it take to make a whole draug?
They knew next to nothing about these things, and lack of knowledge always bugged her. She glanced over at Naomi—or, actually, at the back of Naomi’s head, because the vampire was turned to hold her shotgun out of the passenger window, watching for any sign of attack.

“Left,” Naomi said in a flat voice. “Then straight ahead.” She didn’t sound like she was much better than she had been, back on the steps … coping, but not happy about it. Claire wondered how long it would take for her antibodies—if vampires had such things—to destroy the invading blood … and what would happen if a lot of foreign vampire blood was introduced, all at once. Her skin prickled, and it wasn’t from the chill.
It might kill them. It would certainly go a long way toward knocking them down, fast.
She wondered how many humans knew that. It was good information, but it made her shudder to have it in her head. They didn’t like having their vulnerabilities known.

Claire turned left at the dead stoplight, after a brief pause. Kind of stupid, really, because there wasn’t any traffic to worry about. As far as she could tell, they were the only headlights moving in town. The rain had slacked off to a dully falling mist, and she kept the wipers working to clear the windshield. The steady
thump-thump-thump
had a soothing, normal kind of rhythm.

And then she heard something singing along with it.

At first she thought it was Naomi, unlikely as that was; it was a low hum of sound, elegant and just at the edge of her hearing. Then she thought it was the truck’s radio, or maybe a CD playing, but turning the dial didn’t bring up the sound.

She should have known it was the draug, but something kept her from remembering that. Instead, she found herself gradually turning the wheel toward the sound, hunting for it, trying to understand what that song was, a song she knew and loved and could
almost remember ….

As she was gliding into a slow right-hand drift toward the infected part of town, a drift that would take them on a wide turn into a main street, Naomi suddenly reached out and grabbed the wheel in a bone white hand, wrenching it back the other way. Holding it there.

Claire stomped on the brakes, suddenly and violently aware, and glared at her. From the back of the pickup she heard a metallic clang as Shane’s back hit the cab of the truck, and then an outraged, “Hey!
Flamethrower!
”

“I must adjust frequencies,” Naomi said, and twisted knobs on the device she’d taken out of her pocket again; suddenly the faint singing faded into a blessed white-noise silence. “You need to be careful, Claire. If you hear them, then they hear you—sense you, at any rate. Magnus has a taste of you now. He’s curious about your return. You don’t want to be in his hands again.”

Magnus. The head of the draug—their master, as Claire understood it. They all looked identical, but there was something about Magnus that was just more … there. A kind of density that pulled everyone around him into the dark.

In his hands again.
She couldn’t help but remember the cold, damp feeling of his hands around her neck, and a violent shiver seized her, as if her whole body wanted to throw off that memory. Deep, calming breaths, and then she nodded at Naomi. “I’m okay,” she said. “I know what to listen for now.”

“The point is
not
to listen,” Naomi said, but she let go of the wheel. “I assume you may have read a classical text or two, in your education, or is that no longer done?”

Claire was a little bit ashamed to think that it wasn’t, but she only said, “One or two.”

“You remember Odysseus, lashed to the mast of his ship, screaming to be released while his men rowed on, with wax blocking their ears?”

She did. It had been one of the stories her dad liked, one he’d read to her and they’d discussed when she was still just a girl. All of the great Greek myths, especially the ones about Odysseus. She’d always liked him. He was clever and dangerous, and he didn’t have any special godlike powers, either. Just his mind, and his will.

Listening to the sirens’ singing had been his own test.

“Odysseus was rarely a fool,” Naomi said, “but he was a fool then. That was the draug, singing to him, though the Greeks had a different name for them. He wanted to hear their song, and he did; he was lucky to avoid madness.”

Shane slid the back window open and stuck his head in. “Ladies, I’m sure this a fascinating conversation about shoes or whatever, but could we maybe not sit out here like a big old piece of bait? And by
we
I mean mainly
me
.”

He was right; this probably wasn’t the best time to be holding a review of the classics. Claire cleared her throat and put the truck back into gear to ease it straight down the road, in the direction Naomi pointed.

It was odd to realize, looking at her, that Naomi wasn’t much older than Claire herself; she must have been frozen at the age of eighteen or nineteen. Of course, at the time
she’d
been alive, eighteen or nineteen was old enough to rule kingdoms and have multiple children, so Naomi had been considered an adult long before she’d become a vampire. It all felt very new to Claire, still.

Naomi suddenly pointed to the right. The street name sign flashed briefly in the truck’s headlights but Claire didn’t really see it; everything in Morganville looked strange to her, shrouded by the falling rain and the lack of lights, and life. This was a residential street, and it looked completely deserted. Not even a candle flickering in a window, much less anyone in view outside.

Naomi’s hand clenched into a fist, and Claire drifted the truck to the curb and stopped—gently this time, careful of throwing Shane around in the back. He opened the back window again and watched as the vampire pointed straight at one of the houses in the middle of the block. It was just like a hundred other houses in Morganville—plain wooden frame, built probably in the 1940s, small by modern standards. Its pale paint (no telling what color it had originally been, since the sun faded everything to a uniform gray) peeled liberally from the boards, and some of the trim was rotted and falling off. There was a rusted bicycle lying in the weed-tangled yard and a metal swing set that listed so far to the right any child that sat on it would probably be killed in the collapse.

Typical.

The name on the mailbox, written in messy black paint, was
SUMMERS
, but there was nothing in the box itself when Shane snapped it open. He shrugged and closed it, then unshipped the flexible hose of the flamethrower from behind him.

Claire mouthed,
It’s a wooden house!
She had to try three times before comprehension dawned on him. He looked disappointed, but he put the flammable fun away and got out his silver-loaded shotgun instead. Claire had hers hanging heavy in the crook of her arm, pointed so that if anything happened it would fire into the ground (and probably her foot, but that was better than the alternatives).
Hunters would be so disappointed in me,
she thought. She didn’t even really know how to carry the thing safely.