Fade Out (2 page)

Claire dumped her battered canvas backpack in a chair and found a knife to slide through the ropes that held the first box closed. She immediately sneezed, because even the rope was dusty. It was a good thing she took the time to grab a tissue and blow her nose, because as she was doing that, a fat, black spider crawled out from under the cardboard flap and began to scuttle down the side of the box.

Claire gave out a little scream and jumped back. In the next fast heartbeat, Myrnin was there, bending over the table, examining the spider with his face only inches from it. “It’s only a hunting spider,” he said. “It won’t hurt you.”

“So not the point!”

“Oh, pish. It’s just another living creature,” Myrnin said, and put his hand out. The spider waved its front legs uncertainly, then carefully stepped up on his pale fingers. “Nothing to be frightened of, if handled properly.” He lightly stroked the furry back of the thing, and Claire nearly passed out. “I think I’ll call him Bob. Bob the spider.”

“You’re insane.”

Myrnin glanced up and smiled, dimples forming in his face. It should have looked cute, but his smiles were never that simple. This one carried hints of darkness and arrogance. “But I thought that was part of my charm,” he said, and lifted Bob the spider carefully to take him off to another part of the lab. Claire didn’t care what he did with the thing, as long as he didn’t wear it as an earring or a hat or something.

Not that she’d put that past him.

She was very careful as she folded back the old cardboard. No relatives of Bob appeared, at least. The contents of the box were a tangle of confusion, and it took her time to sort out the pieces. There were balls of ancient twine, some coming undone in stiff spirals; a handful of what looked like very old lace, with gold edging; two carved, yellowing elephants, maybe ivory.

The next layer was paper—loose paper made stiff and brittle and dark with age. The writing on the pages was beautiful, precise, and very dense, but it wasn’t Myrnin’s hand; she knew how he wrote, and it was far messier than this. She began reading the first paper.

My dear friend, I have been in New York for some years now, and missing you greatly. I know that you were angry with me in Prague, and I do not blame you for it. I was hasty and unwise in my dealings with my father, but I honestly do believe that he left me little choice. So, dear Myrnin, I beg you, undertake a journey and come to visit. I know travel no longer agrees with you, but I think if I spend another year alone, I will give up entirely. I would call it a great favor if you would visit.

It was signed, with an ornate flourish, Amelie. As in, Amelie, Founder of Morganville, and Claire’s ultimate—although she didn’t like to think of it this way—boss/owner.

Before Claire could open her mouth to ask, Myrnin’s cool white fingers reached over her shoulder and plucked the page neatly from her hand. “I said determine if we can use these things, not read my private mail,” he said.

“Hey—was that why you came to America? Because she wrote to you?”

Myrnin looked down at the paper for a moment, then crumpled it into a ball and threw it in a large plastic trash bin against the wall. “No,” he said. “I didn’t come when she asked me. I came when I had to.”

“When was that?” Claire didn’t bother to protest how unfair it was that he wanted her to not read things to figure out if they needed them. Or that since he’d kept the letter all this time, he should think before throwing it away.

She just reached for the next loose page in the box.

“I arrived about five years after she wrote to me,” Myrnin said. “In other words, too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Are you simply going to badger me with personal questions, or are you planning to do what I told you to do?”

“Doing it,” Claire pointed out. Myrnin was irritated, but that didn’t bother her, not anymore. She didn’t take anything he said personally. “And I do have the right to ask questions, don’t I?”

“Why? Because you put up with me?” He waved his hand before she could respond. “Yes, yes, all right. Amelie was in a bad way in those days—she had lost everything, you see, and it’s hard for us to start over and over and over. Eternal youth doesn’t mean you don’t get tired of the constant struggles. So . . . by the time she wrote to me again, she had done something quite insane.”

“What?”

He made a vague gesture around him. “Look around you.”

Claire did. “Um . . . the lab?”

“She bought the land and began construction on the town of Morganville. It was meant to be a refuge for our people, a place we could live openly.” He sighed. “Amelie is quite stubborn. By the time I arrived to tell her it was a fool’s errand, she was already committed to the experiment. All I could do was mitigate the worst of it, so that she wouldn’t get us all slaughtered.”

Claire had forgotten all about the box (and even Bob the spider), so focused was she on Myrnin’s voice, but when he paused, she remembered, and reached in again to pull out an ornate gold hand mirror. It was definitely girly, and besides, the glass was shattered in the middle, only a few silvery pieces still remaining. “Trash?” she asked, and held it up. Myrnin plucked it out of her hand and set it aside.

“Most definitely not,” he said. “It was my mother’s.”

Claire blinked. “You had a—” Myrnin’s wide stare challenged her to just try to finish that sentence, and she surrendered. “Wow, okay. What was she like? Your mother?”

“Evil,” he said. “I keep this to keep her spirit away.”

That made . . . about as much sense as most things Myrnin said, so Claire let it go. As she rummaged through the stuff in the box—mostly more papers, but a few interesting trinkets—she said, “So, are you looking for something in particular, or just looking?”

“Just looking,” he said, but she knew that tone in his voice, and he was lying. The question was, was he lying for a reason, or just for fun? Because with Myrnin, it could go either way.

Claire’s fingers closed on something small—a delicate gold chain. She pulled, and slowly, a necklace came out of the mess of paper, and spun slowly in the light. It was a locket, and inside was a small, precise portrait of a Victorian-style young woman. There was a lock of hair woven into a tiny braid around the edges, under the glass.

Claire rubbed the old glass surface with her thumb, frowning, and then recognized the face staring back at her. “Hey! That’s Ada!”

Myrnin grabbed the necklace, stared for a moment at the portrait, and then closed his eyes. “I thought I’d lost this,” he said. “Or perhaps I never had it in the first place. But here she is, after all.”

And just like that, Ada flickered into being across the room. She wasn’t alive, not anymore. Ada was a two-dimensional image, a kind of projection, from the weird steampunk computer located beneath Myrnin’s lab; that computer was the actual Ada, including parts of the original girl. Ada’s image still wore Victorian skirts and a high-necked blouse, and her hair was up in a complicated bun, leaving wisps around her face. She didn’t look quite right—more like a really good computer generation of a person than a person. “My picture,” she said. Her voice was weirdly electronic because it used whatever speakers were around; Claire’s phone became part of the surround sound experience, which was so creepy that she automatically reached down and switched it off.

Ada sent her a dark look as the ghost swept through things in her way—tables, chairs, lights.

“Yes,” Myrnin said, as calmly as if he spoke to electronic ghosts every day—which, in fact, he did.“I thought I’d lost it. Would you like to see it?”

Ada stopped, and her image floated in the air in the middle of an open expanse of the floor without casting a shadow. “No,” she said. Without Claire’s phone adding to the mix, her voice came out of an ancient radio speaker in the back of the lab, faint and scratchy. “No need. I remember the day I gave it to you.”

“So do I.” Myrnin’s voice remained quiet, and Claire couldn’t honestly tell if what they were talking about was a good memory, or a bad one.

“Why were you looking for it?”

“I wasn’t.” That, Claire was almost sure, was another lie. “Ada, I asked you to please stop coming here, except when I call you. What if I’d had other visitors?”

Ada’s delicate, not-quite-living face twisted into an expression of contempt. “Who would visit you?”

“An excellent point.” His tone cooled and hardened and took on edges. “I don’t want you coming here unless I call you. Are we understood, or do I have to come and alter your programming? You won’t thank me for it.”

She glared at him with eyes made of static and ice, and finally turned—a two-dimensional turn, like a cardboard cutout—and flashed at top speed through the solid wall.

Gone.

Myrnin let out a slow breath.

“What the heck was that?” Claire asked. Ada creeped her out, and besides, Ada really didn’t like her. Claire was, in some sense, a rival for Myrnin’s attention, and Ada . . .

Ada was kind of in love with him.

Myrnin looked down at the necklace and the portrait lying flat in his palm. For a moment, he didn’t say anything, and Claire honestly thought he wouldn’t bother. Then, without looking up, he said, “I did care for her, you know.” She thought he was saying it to himself more than to her. “Ada wanted me to turn her, and I did. She was with me for almost a hundred years before . . .”

Before he snapped one day, Claire thought. And Ada died before he could stop himself. Myrnin had told her the first day she’d met him that he was dangerous to be around, and that he’d gone through a lot of assistants.

Ada had been the first one he’d killed.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Claire heard herself saying. “You were sick.”

Myrnin’s shoulders moved just a little, up and down—a shrug, a very small one. “It’s an explanation, not an excuse,” he said, and looked up at her. She was a little startled by what she saw—he almost looked, well, human.

And then it was gone. He straightened, slid the necklace into the pocket of his vest, and nodded toward the box. “Continue,” he said. “There may yet be something more useful than sentimental nonsense in there.”

Ouch. She didn’t even like Ada, and that still stung. She hoped the computer—the computer that held Ada’s still-sort-of-living brain—wasn’t listening.

Fat chance.

The afternoon passed. Claire learned to scan the sheets of paper instead of read them; mostly, they were just letters, an archive of Myrnin’s friendship with people long gone, or vampires still around. A lot were from Amelie, over the years—interesting, but it was all still history, and history equaled boring.

It wasn’t until she was almost to the bottom of the second box that she found something she didn’t recognize. She picked up the odd-shaped thing—sculpture?—and sat it on her palm. It was metal, but it was surprisingly light. Kind of a faintly rusty sheen, but it definitely wasn’t iron. It was etched with symbols, some of which she recognized as alchemical. “What’s this?”

Before the words were out of her mouth, her palm was empty, Myrnin was across the room, and he was turning the weird little object over and over in his hands, fingers gliding over every angle and trembling on the outlined symbols. “Yes,” he whispered, and then louder, “Yes!” He bounced in place, for all the world like Eve with her Blanche DuBois note, and stopped to wave the thing at Claire. “You see?”

“Sure,” she said. “What is it?”

His lips parted, and for a second she thought he was going to tell her, but then some crafty little light came into his eyes, and he closed his hand around the sharp outlines of the thing. “Nothing,” he purred. “Pray continue. I’ll be—over here.” He moved to an area of the lab where he had a reading corner with a big leather armchair and a stained-glass lamp. He carefully moved the chair so its back was toward her, and plunked himself down with his bunny-slippered feet up on a hassock to examine his find.

“Freak,” she sighed.

“I heard that!”

“Good.” Claire sawed through the ropes on the next-to-last box.

It exploded.

When Claire opened her eyes again, she saw three faces looming over her. One was Myrnin’s, and he looked concerned. One was the shining blond head of her housemate Michael Glass—Michael had her hand in his, which was nice, because he was sweet, and he had beautiful hands, too. The last face took her a moment, and then recognition clicked into place. “Oh,” Claire murmured. “Hello, Dr. Theo.”

“Hello, Claire,” said Theo Goldman, and put a finger to his lips. He was a kind-looking older man, a bit frayed around the edges, and he had an antique black stethoscope in his ears. He was listening to her heart. “Ah. Very good. Your heart is still beating, I’m sure you’ll be very pleased to hear.”

“Yay,” Claire said, and tried to sit up. That was a bad idea, and Michael had to support her when she lost her balance. The headache hit a moment later, massive as a hurricane inside her skull. “Ow?”

“You struck your head when you fell,” Theo said. “I don’t believe there’s any permanent damage, but you should see your physician and have the tests done. I should hate to think I missed anything.”

Claire pulled in a deep breath. “Maybe I should see Dr. Mills. Just in case—hey, wait. Why did I fall?”

They all exchanged looks. “You don’t remember?” Michael asked.

“Why? Is that bad? Is that brain damage?”

“No,” Theo said firmly, “it is quite natural to have some loss of memory around such an event.”

“What kind of event?” There it was again, that silence, and Claire raised her personal terror alert from yellow to orange. “Anybody?”

Myrnin said, “It was a bomb.”

She blinked, not entirely sure she’d heard him right. “A bomb. Are you sure you understand what that is? Because—” She gestured vaguely at herself, then around at the room, which looked pretty much untouched. All glassware intact. “Because generally bombs go boom.”

“It was a light bomb,” Myrnin said. “Touch your face.”

Now that she thought about it, her face did feel a bit hot. She put her fingers on her cheeks. Burning hot. “What happened to me?” She couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice.

Theo and Michael both tried to talk at once, but Michael won. “It’s like a sunburn,” he said. “Your face is a little pink, that’s all.”

Michael wasn’t a very good liar. “Great. I’m red as a cherry, right?”

“Not at all,” Myrnin said cheerfully. “You’re definitely not as red as a cherry. Or an apple. Yet. That will take some time.”

Claire tried to focus back on what was—hopefully—more important. “A light bomb?”

Myrnin looked suddenly a great deal more serious. “It’s an inconvenience for a human,” he said. “It would have been extremely damaging to me, or to any vampire, had I been the one to open the box.”

“So who sent you a bomb?”

He shrugged. “Eh, it was so long ago. Might have been Klaus. But I might have actually sent it to myself. I’m not always that rational, you know. Mind you, I wouldn’t open the last box if I were you.”

Claire sent him a long, wordless look, then accepted the hand Michael extended to help her to her feet. She felt dizzy and—yes—sunburned, and a whole lot filthy. “Great. You might have booby-trapped your own boxes. Why would you do a thing like that?”

“Excellent question.” Myrnin left her and went to the table, where he lifted from the open box a complicated-looking tangle of metal and wires—the kind of bomb an insane Victorian inventor might have made—and set it very carefully to one side. “I can only think that I meant it to protect what else was in the container.”

He stood there staring into the box, not moving, and Claire finally rolled her eyes and said, “Well?”

“What?”

“What’s in the box, Myrnin?”

In answer, he tipped it over in her direction. A cloud of dust fogged the air, and when it cleared, Claire saw that there was nothing in the box.

Nothing at all.

“I’m going home,” she sighed. “This job sucks.”

Michael gave her a ride back to the Glass House, which was what she meant when she said home, although technically she didn’t live there. Technically, her parents had a room for her in their house, and her stuff was there. Mostly. Well, partly. And, according to the agreement she’d reached with them, she slept there most every night—for a few hours, anyway.

It was all part of her parents’ grand scheme to keep her and Shane—well, maybe apart was too harsh. Casual. They didn’t want their little girl shacking up with the town bad boy, even though Shane was not the town bad boy, and he and Claire were in love.

In love. That still gave her a delicious little tingle every time she thought about it.

“Parents,” Claire said aloud. Michael sent her a look.

“And?”

“They bring the crazy,” she said. “Is Shane home?”

“Not yet. I dropped Eve off at her first rehearsal.” He smiled slowly. “Was she that excited when she got the letter?”

“Define excited. You mean, did she look like a cartoon character on crack? Yes. I never knew she was all into acting and stuff.”

“She loves it. She’s always acting out scenes from movies and TV shows in her room. When we were in high school, she used to organize these little plays in study hall, give us all parts she’d written out on little pieces of paper, and the teacher never knew what the hell was going on. Insane, but fun.” Michael braked his car; Claire couldn’t see beyond the tinted windows, but she assumed there was some kind of red light. Good thing Michael had special vampire vision, or they’d be exchanging insurance with some other driver right about now. “So this is a big deal for her.”

“Yeah, I got that. Speaking of big deals, I heard that you’re playing at the TPU theater tomorrow.”

The tips of his ears got a little pink, which (even in a vampire) was adorable. “Yeah, apparently they heard about the last three sets at Common Grounds.” Those had been pretty spectacular events, Claire had to admit—people jammed in shoulder to shoulder, including an impressive number of vampires all playing nice, at least for the evening. “Not a big deal.”

“I heard the tickets were sold out,” Claire said smugly. “So there. It is a big deal, dude. Deal with it.”

There was a complicated expression on Michael’s face—pride, nerves, outright fear. He shook his head and sighed. “You ever feel like your life is kind of out of control?”

“I just went to work for a vampire, was scared by a spider, and got knocked down by a tanning bomb. And that’s just my day, not my week.”

“Okay, yeah. Point.” Michael turned the wheel and hit the brakes again. “You’re home, Pinky.”

“Don’t even think about calling me that.”

Except, when she got upstairs and in front of a mirror, she realized that Michael wouldn’t be the only one calling her that, or worse. Her face was shiny pink. As if she’d been dipped in blush and then wrapped in plastic. Ugh. When she pressed her fingers against her skin, she left dramatic white spots that slowly filled in again. “I’m going to kill him,” she muttered, and slammed the bathroom door, locked it, and flipped on the shower as she glared at her hot pink reflection. “Lock him in a tanning bed. Drive him out in the desert with the top down. Myrnin, you are toast. Burned toast.”

It was worse when she had her clothes off; her naturally pale skin was a violent, gut-wrenching contrast to the sunburn on her face. She hadn’t realized it before, but she had burns on the tops of her hands and arms, too—anywhere that had been exposed to the blast of light.

Radiation. UV radiation. It didn’t really hurt yet, but Claire knew it would, and soon. She showered fast, already uncomfortable with the sting of water on shocked flesh, and then searched her closet in vain for something that wouldn’t clash with her new, hot pink color scheme.

Oh, Monica was going to love this like a new puppy. Finally, she put on her bra and panties and flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She knew she should dry her hair, but she was in too bad of a mood to care. Shiny, pretty hair wasn’t going to help at all. And tangled, ratty hair would at least fit her current mood.

After spending a solid fifteen minutes of glum brooding—which was pretty much her limit—Claire grabbed her headphones and loaded up the latest lecture from Myrnin on string theory. Well, she assumed it was string theory, although Myrnin had a tendency to confuse science with mythology and alchemy and magic and who knew what. Pieces of it still made more sense than anything she’d heard from a tenured professor—and pieces of it were complete gibberish.

The trick was figuring out which were which.

She didn’t even know that anyone was in the room until the bed tilted to one side. Claire opened her eyes on near-complete darkness—when had that happened?—and instinctively grabbed for the covers, then remembered she was on top of them, and nearly naked, and panic went nuclear. She yanked off her headphones and slithered off her side of the bed, away from whatever weight had settled on the other side. . . .

The bedside light snapped on, revealing Eve sitting there in all her Gothy glory. Purple was still the color of the day, but she’d gone informal—purple tights, some baggy black shorts, a purple tee with Gothic lettering all over it.

Eve tilted her head to one side, staring at Claire. “Wow,” she said. “Respect, girl. That is one hell of a sunburn. I haven’t seen one that bad since my cousin fell asleep in a deck chair on the Fourth of July at nine a.m. and nobody woke her up until four.”

Claire, still trying to control her racing heartbeat, gulped down breaths and grabbed her bathrobe from the chair in the corner of the room.As she yanked it on, it dragged over the backs of her hands and arms, and she almost yelped, again, from the pain. Her face felt as if it were on fire. Literally, with flames. “It’s not a sunburn,” she said. “It was some kind of UV bomb. It was meant for Myrnin.”

“Ouch. Right, so we should get you some of that sunburn cream crap in the gallon size. Note taken.”

Claire belted her robe. “Did you just come to see the freak show?”

“Well . . . entertaining as it is, no. I came to tell you that dinner was ready, but you were all grooved out on tunes.”

Claire considered telling her that she’d been listening to lectures, but decided that in Eve’s world, that was too much information. “Sorry,” she said.

“Hey, I wouldn’t have dared come in except that Shane’s downstairs setting the table.” Eve winked. “And if I’d sent him, well. Dinner would get cold, right?”

Oh God. Shane. Shane was going to see her like this, looking like some exile from Planet Magenta. “I—I don’t think I feel well enough to eat,” she lied, even as her stomach rumbled at the thought of food. “Maybe you could bring me—”

“It’s only going to get worse,” Eve broke in with ruthless cheerfulness. “Oh yeah. Big-time worse. First, the red face, then the blisters, then the peeling skin. Trust me, unless you’re going to hide for the next week, minimum, you might as well just get on downstairs. We’re having tacos.”

“Tacos?” Claire repeated wistfully.

“I even made that funky rice stuff you like. Well. I boiled the water and put the funky rice stuff in it, anyway. That’s cooking, right?”

“Close enough.” Claire sighed. Across the room, a mirror reflected someone standing in her clothes that she refused to believe was really her. “Okay. I’ll be right down.”

“Better be.” Eve kissed her fingers at Claire and scooted out the door, slamming it behind her.

Claire was still trying to decide whether her pink shirt made her look marginally better or marginally worse, when she felt an ice-cold sensation travel through her like a wave. No drafts, nothing like that—this was internal. It was a warning, straight from the semi-self-aware house.

Something was wrong in the house.

Claire grabbed her emergency home defense kit on the way out of her room—a bag of everything from pepper spray to silver-plated stakes—and raced down the hall, then down the stairs, and arrived with a jolt to find everybody else, including Michael, calmly sitting down to dinner.

“What?” Eve asked. Michael rose to his feet, evidently reading the look on Claire’s face, if nothing else.

Shane blurted out, “What the hell happened to you?” Under normal circumstances this might have made her feel really bad, but she was off that right now.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Didn’t anybody else feel that?”

They exchanged looks. “Feel what?” Michael asked.

“The—cold. It was like a wave . . . of cold?” Her words slowed down, because she wasn’t getting any reaction from them. “You didn’t feel it. How is that possible? Michael?” Because it was Michael’s house, and technically, she didn’t even live here anymore. Exactly. The house shouldn’t have communicated anything to her before it talked to him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does it feel the same now?”

“Yes.” Claire still felt cold, cold enough that she had chills running through her body. She was surprised her breath didn’t smoke in the air. “Worse,” she managed to say, and Shane got over his shock about her burn and came to take her hands. She winced as the tender skin complained, but she was grateful for the warmth, too.

“You’re freezing,” he said, and grabbed a fleece blanket from the back of the couch, which he wrapped around her. “Damn, Claire. Maybe it’s the sunburn—”

“Not a—sunburn,” she said through chattering teeth as he led her to the table and sat her down. “It’s the house. It’s got to be the house!”

“I—don’t think it is,” Michael said, and slowly sank back into his chair. “I’d know, Claire; there’s no way I wouldn’t. This is something else.”

She shook her head and hugged the blanket closer, miserable both ways—her face burning hot, her body shaking with cold.

“Try to eat something,” Eve said, and loaded tacos on her plate. “How about something hot to drink?”

Claire nodded. The chill seemed to be sinking in deeper, drilling toward her bones. She had no idea what would happen when it got there, but it didn’t seem good. Not good at all.

She kept the blanket tight with her right hand and reached out for a taco with the left, hoping her shaking hand wouldn’t scatter the contents all over the table . . . and Shane grabbed her arm. “Look,” he said, before she could protest. “Look at the bracelet.”