Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires
Read Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires Online
Authors: Rachel Caine
Tags: #Horror, #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Fiction
THE MORGANVILLE VAMPIRES NOVELS
Glass Houses
The Dead Girls’ Dance
Midnight Alley
Feast of Fools
Lord of Misrule
Carpe Corpus
Fade Out
Kiss of Death
Ghost Town
Bite Club
Last Breath
Black Dawn
MORGANVILLE
VAMPIRES
Black Dawn
Rachel Caine
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
N
EW
A
MERICAN
L
IBRARY
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First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, May 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Roxanne Longstreet Conrad, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Caine, Rachel.
Black dawn: the Morganville vampires/Rachel Caine.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58534-4
1. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.O557B53 2012
813′.6—dc23 2011052660
Set in Centaur MT
Printed in the United States of America
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
This book is dedicated to my friend and writing mentor Patricia Anthony. Without her steady guidance, fantastic advice, and brilliant example, I would never have reached the place I am today. Thank you for pushing me, Pat. I hope you keep doing it for years and years to come.
It’s also dedicated to the Bexter, and Ronan. Welcome to the world, little man! Congrats, Mom!
To my friends at the Tucson Marriott University Park, especially Kat, Sandy, and Echoe, who made the last part of my writing task so much easier with their enthusiastic support and cheering-on.
To the semi-official support group of the Smart Chicks, especially Kelley and Melissa. It’s so nice to be part of such an amazing group of women, never mind amazing writers. Rock on, Smart Chicks.
To Joe Bonamassa, because, always.
And to Cat, who puts up with the endless long days and deadlines and crises, and does it so gracefully. Love you, sweetie. I promise someday there will be a day without word count. But not today.
I
n previous books up through
Bite Club
, we’ve seen events in Morganville through the eyes of Claire Danvers; since then, we’ve been visiting other points of view, especially in
Last Breath
, the book immediately prior to this one.
We’ll continue to see events this way in
Black Dawn
… so be sure to note who is narrating the scene for you at the beginning of each chapter. Because everyone has secrets …
… And some of them will be deadly.
INTRODUCTION
M
organville, Texas, isn’t like other towns. Oh, it’s small, dusty, and ordinary in most ways, but the thing is, there are these … vampires. They own the town. They run it. And until now they’ve been the unquestioned ruling class.
But now this dry, landlocked town has been flooded by unnatural rains, and the rains have brought something else … the predators who’ve hunted the vampires almost to extinction.
The draug.
They hide in the water. They feed on vampires by preference, humans by necessity, and even in a desert town, there’s no place safe now that they’ve arrived. Not for the vampires or for those few humans still standing beside them.
So hold on tight. Because Morganville’s changed.
And it’s a very dark new day.
I
t would have been better if he’d screamed.
Michael Glass didn’t scream. Instead, he made a terrible keening noise in the back of his throat, arched his back, and began to flail violently inside his zipped-up sleeping bag. Fabric shredded under vampire strength, and insulation bulged out of the tears as he fought his way free, but even once the weight was off him he just kept … flailing.
Across the room, Claire Danvers bolted straight to her feet, tripped over her own sleeping bag, and managed to catch herself against a wall just before she hit the floor face-first. Her heart was slamming too fast against her ribs, and she had the sour, helpless taste of panic in her mouth.
They’re here
was the only coherent thought in her head. She had
to be ready to fight, to run, to react, but all she could think of was how utterly scared she was just now. And how helpless.
There were things out there in the world, things that
vampires
feared, and now those things were here. She was only seconds out of a very light, fitful sleep, but she knew that the nightmares had followed her effortlessly right into the real world.
The draug.
They weren’t vampires; they were something else, something that moved through water, formed out of it, dragged vampires down to a slow and awful death.