Black Dawn: The Morganville Vampires (10 page)

Myrnin was, not surprisingly, dressed weirdly. Well, not
weirdly for
him
, but Theo’s old-fashioned suit jacket and pants were positively wallpaper by comparison. Myrnin had dragged out the Hawaiian shirts again; today’s was neon yellow, with palm trees and surfboards. He was also wearing baggy knee-length shorts, which left his legs looking … pale. Very, very pale.

He’d actually matched the whole thing with sandals this time, instead of bunny slippers, which indicated a certain razor-sharp focus in his thinking, the coffee confusion notwithstanding. He set the cup and saucer down empty with a rattle as his gaze focused on Claire.

“How is Amelie?” he asked, moving from her to Theo. “Oh, and hello, glad you’re not dead, Doctor.”

“Likewise,” Theo said pleasantly. “But she is not well, my friend. As you no doubt already know.”

“You were up all night,” Claire said. “I saw the weapons room. How long did all that take you?”

Myrnin flipped a hand impatiently, pushing the whole question, and her concern, aside. “Weapons are simple,” he said. “I’ve set up a workshop for them, and I’ve put Amelie’s bully boys to work, as well as a few human … volunteers, from the prisons. We have more important concerns than that, if we are to save ourselves. Defense alone won’t work. We need to launch an offensive operation.”

Myrnin was talking like a soldier.
Myrnin.
Claire looked at him doubtfully. “Have you, ah, talked to Oliver?”

“Yes,” Myrnin said. “He thinks I am insane.”

That did not bode well, not at all. “Ah … okay. Let me … get back to you.”

He put his hand on her arm and said very seriously, “I am not exaggerating when I tell you that if we do not take a more aggressive and scientific approach to this problem, we lose the rest of the
town, and we will all die. Do you understand me? We cannot hold here unless we plan our moves now, in detail.”

“And Oliver’s not giving you help, if things are that bad?”

“Oliver has his own concerns, and just now those revolve around Amelie. While I have no such constraints, dear as she may be to me. Gather your friends and I will show you why I have such concerns. Please.” He turned to Theo then. “And you, good doctor, could be quite the asset as well.”

But Theo was already shaking his head. “Quite impossible,” he said. “Naomi is very ill, and I must see to her immediately. Dragoon someone else, Myrnin.” He walked to one of the guards who had just entered the room—it was Billy Idol—and they exchanged words. Billy Idol pointed a spike-braceleted arm down one of the spoke hallways, and Theo left without a backward glance.

“Claire?
Please.”

When Myrnin asked like that, with those dark, puppy-dog eyes pleading his case, she couldn’t really do much except nod. “I’ll find them,” she said, “and then you’re going to explain this. In detail. And you’d better not be wasting our time.”

“True, there is no time to waste,” he agreed, and picked up his cup and saucer again. “There is a shocking lack of tea in this array of choices, do you realize that? Also, the carafe of type O is quite empty.”

Claire gave him a wordless stare and headed for the door.

“But the AB is still warm. Lovely.”

Claire shuddered and reached for the knob of the door, but it twisted before she touched it, and opened to admit Shane. “Hey,” he said, and the warmth she felt at his brief smile was out of all proportion to the moment. “Where’s Theo? Naomi’s looking pretty bad.”

“He just headed that way,” she said.

His dark gaze stayed on hers. “And Amelie?”

“They wouldn’t let me see her,” Claire said. “Which I think we both know means she’s not doing all that well.”

He nodded slowly, his face settling into grim, hard-edged lines. “Oliver takes over, we’re long-term screwed, you know that. Maybe we win against the draug, but what happens then? He’s old-school vamp, with old-school ideas about how humans ought to behave.”

She couldn’t really dispute that, not at all, and it gave her a sick, rolling feeling in her stomach. She hoped that Shane couldn’t see where Oliver had hit her, because if he did, the human/vampire war wouldn’t even be
that
far off. But luckily, he didn’t see it—or if he did, he must have assumed it was due to all their running, jumping, and fighting the night before. Not unreasonably.

“Where are your friends?” Myrnin asked, as he sipped on whatever blood type was in his coffee cup. “Michael and Shreve.”

“Eve.”

“Yes, yes, that one.” He flipped a hand impatiently. “Get them.”

“Eve’s not here,” Shane said. When Claire sent him a startled look, he shrugged. “I asked. She took about a dozen vampires, got Oliver’s approval, and went out to set up weapons caches at different places around town. She’s not back yet.”

“Did Michael go with her?”

He didn’t say anything, but she knew all too well what that meant—even before Michael came walking in, looking rumpled, tired, and about as depressed as she’d ever seen him. He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes as he walked over to the center table and tested the carafes.

“That’s AB,” Myrnin said helpfully. “It’s still warm. Oh, and there’s a hint of sweetness in it. High triglycerides. I think the donor needed a bit of medication.”

“Are you high?” Michael asked him, in a totally colorless voice.

Myrnin blinked, and looked at Claire for help. “He means, are you on drugs.”

“Well,
obviously
.”

“More than usual?”

“Oh. No, no, just the usual doses. And where is Shreve?”

“Eve,” they all said in unison, and exchanged a look. Well, Shane and Claire did, and Michael made a fast-aborted effort at it. Shane licked his lips and continued, “She’s out.”

“Of the building?” Michael asked, still in that same nothing voice.

“Yeah. She’s got escorts, though.” That sounded weak, even from Shane, and he clearly didn’t know where to take it from there. “I mean, I’m sure she’s okay and everything.”

Michael just nodded. He looked tight and grim, and he sipped his cup of blood as if he really didn’t want it at all. Myrnin looked from him to the others, eyebrows going up and down as if he was about to blurt out a question that none of them wanted to answer, and then shrugged. “Very well,” he said, “evidently there is some difficulty that I really don’t care about, and is no doubt quite dramatic. Does anyone else care for coffee?”

Claire glanced at the red-stained cups he and Theo had left, and shuddered. “No, thanks.”

Shane clearly decided a change of subject was in order. He turned his most harassed expression on Michael. “Bro,” he said, in an injured tone, “I had to go out with a
flamethrower
, and you weren’t there to see it.”

“Pics or it didn’t happen.”

“Dude, little
busy
for pics. You know,
throwing flame.
”

That earned a glance up, and a brief grin, and some of the tension leaked out of Michael’s body language … but not all. And
the grin didn’t last. “Wish I’d been there,” he said, with a clear implication of
anywhere but here.
Which did not, again, bode well for the whole deal with Eve.

Myrnin rolled his eyes. “Oh, enough of this. Follow me.” He immediately set off at a rapid, though not vampire-quick, walk down yet another hallway, identical to all the others; Claire fell in with Shane, behind Michael.

“What the hell are we into now?” Shane asked her.

“Nothing good,” she replied. “But then, that kind of describes our day, right?”

“Speak for yourself. It describes my whole
life
.” He reached out and took her in his arms, a sudden and unexpected crush that drove her breath right away. “Except for you.” He kissed her, and despite everything, despite the hurry and the vampires and the draug and the doom hanging over them, it felt like sunlight shining right through her skin, melting her bones into soft, pliable gold. It couldn’t have lasted long, that kiss, but it felt eternal to her, as if it might echo forever. “I can handle anything now.”

“Well,” she whispered with their lips still touching, “as long as you have a flamethrower.”

He laughed, and let go … but kept hold of her hand.

Myrnin led them into a room that had obviously started life as another ballroom … but in the course of what could have been only hours, or at most a day, he had managed to transform it into a chaotic mess that reminded Claire strongly of his original laboratory. Books were stacked, scattered, and dropped everywhere, some open to a possibly important reference, or maybe just opened at random. He’d dragged furniture in to improvise work space, with limited success, and he’d taken the shades off the elegant lamps to
let the bright incandescent bulbs glare freely. The room smelled strongly of oil and metal, and … burned hair?

Myrnin strode across the deep maroon carpet (now liberally smudged with spots of dirt, oil, and who knew what else) to what had once been a giant sideboard, except that he’d ripped it away from the wall and shoved it into the middle of the room. It held about a dozen books, scraps of metal, bars of silver, and nails; he swept the whole thing clean with one dramatic gesture and then unfurled a set of blueprints across the lavish marble top—already stained from at least one chemical spill.

It was a map of Morganville. A standard-issue civilian kind of map, but there was a clear plastic overlay on it, marked with careful, precise handwriting and colored dots—Myrnin’s writing, though far more controlled than Claire had ever seen it. The entire side of town from the border up to the TPU gates had been colored in flat black, simply marking it out.

Draug territory.

“Now,” he said, and set random pieces of junk at the four corners of the map to hold it open. “Obviously, we’re here.” He pointed to a red dot overlay on the building at Founder’s Square. “This is the police perimeter around us.” A solid red line, as precisely drawn as with a compass. “This is the outer ring of our defenses.” Another ring, but this one of individual red dots, spread evenly. It reached as far as Lot Street, where the Glass House—their home—sat empty. “There is nothing within this circle that has not been drained of standing water, or salted with silver if we couldn’t drain it, so the draug cannot get here easily.”

“The rain—,” Shane began, but Myrnin cut him off.

“They can use the rain only when it is heavy and constant, and even then it’s a risk; by spreading themselves so thin, they lose many parts into the dry soil. It’s a bit of a kamikaze attack, to put
it in human terms, and they dare not employ that method to attack us here, in our stronghold; there’s no catch basin for them to use that hasn’t been treated and prepared against them. But our problem is outside of this circle.” He tapped the other two-thirds of the town, where black dots and puddles of dark ink marred the surface. “I’ve tracked all the reports I could find. Claire, you said the draug came after you just now, correct?”

She nodded. “Came after Theo and Naomi, probably. But there were a lot of them.”

“Not so many now,” Shane said, and yeah, that was smug. “Flamethrower.”

“Still, worrisome,” Myrnin said, and marked the map where Shane pointed. “That is far out of the area that Oliver predicted they would occupy. Could you hear the singing?”

“Naomi had that noise cancellation device, but Theo—” Claire’s throat closed up on the words, but she forced them out anyway. “Theo had needles in his ears. To keep himself from hearing.”

Myrnin’s eyebrows climbed again, and he tapped the marker against his lips. “An interesting tactic. Perhaps one we should think about as emergency equipment to be issued to all personnel.”

“Ugh. No.
Human
eardrums don’t grow back, Myrnin.”

“Oh, right. Well, just the vampires, then.” He scribbled a note on a random piece of paper—actually, over the printing in a book—and went on. “Oliver believes the draug are consolidating their position here, in the occupied areas, but I think he is very wrong. Look at the blue marks.”

For a few seconds they didn’t seem to make any sense; it was Michael who said quietly, “Bodies of water.”

“Fountains,” Myrnin said, and tapped a couple of spots. “I’ve
sent operatives to shut off any flow to or from them, and poison them; Oliver discounts them strategically, and he’s likely correct. But our biggest issue is obviously here.”

That was a
large
blue dot. Very large.

“What the hell is that?” Shane asked, frowning. “Morganville High?”

“No, that’s taken care of,” Myrnin said, and tapped another dot. “The pool there has been drained and filled in. No, this is a far different sort of problem altogether.”

“That’s the water treatment plant,” Michael said. “Out on the edge of town.”

“There are exposed pools of water there, and inflow and outflow controls for the pipes in the city. If I were Magnus, I would move my headquarters immediately to
that
as the most strategic point. No doubt he has already done so, or is in the process.”

“You’re kidding. He’s hiding in sewage?” Shane asked.

“Not sewage, no, though that gets treated through this operation as well. What is in those exposed pools is commonly known as gray water—the water from baths, showers, sinks, washing machines, and such. It needs treatment to be clean for drinking again, but it doesn’t contain sewage. By preference, this is where we will find the draug. Not in the sewage tanks. Even the draug have
some
standards.” Myrnin shook his head slowly. “The difficulty is that there are two necessary tasks to be performed. First, of course, we must attack the draug directly in those pools,
if
they exist there—and Oliver does not believe they do. He says he has sent operatives and they have reported it clear.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“I think the draug are more than capable of strategy,” Myrnin said, “and strategically, they are in a defensive mode at this point. We’ve hurt them; they have not overwhelmed us as quickly as
they’d hoped, and they can’t attack us directly at Founder’s Square. So they’re hiding until they regain their numbers, and I believe they will conceal themselves here, at the treatment plant. It is a natural stronghold for them—they can infest this maze of iron and water like a horde of starving cockroaches, and they’ll be just as hard to anticipate and to kill in such close quarters.”