Daylighters (19 page)

“Jesse—Michael looked bad. Is he going to be all right?”

Jesse cocked her head, and the heavy braid of red hair slid over one shoulder. “I think so. We’re latecomers, so we’re lucky; most of the poor bastards in here have been on the Daylighters formula for more than two weeks, which means that they’re hungry enough to drink cockroach juice and pretend it’s B positive. Michael’s just not as used to being deprived.”

“Why would the Daylight Foundation do a thing like that? Make vampires
more
hungry? Doesn’t it put their own people in danger?”

“Of course it does,” Jesse replied. “And the most effective way to demonize your enemy is to make them monsters. Most wars just do it through propaganda, but the Daylighters seem to feel it’s more effective if they actually reduce us to fangs and rage. It doesn’t take much to convince the average citizen of Morganville that we’re parasites that need killing. We’ve certainly acted that part often enough.” She looked sad and a little angry as she said it. “It’s why I left this place. Because Amelie was too much in the past, too steeped in tradition, and convinced of the superiority of the vampire. I warned her that things needed to change, but it’s never comfortable between us; we’ve both been rulers, once upon a time, and trust me, two queens can’t ever really be friends. It may be harsh, but in some ways, she’s reaping what she sowed.”

Jesse had left Morganville long before Claire had arrived, and Claire could well imagine that Jesse wouldn’t have been shy about her opinions. Amelie could be open-minded, but she didn’t like direct challenges . . . and probably especially not from a vampire who’d been a queen once, even for a brief time.

“So they plan to let vampires out on a rampage? Then catch them and prove once and for all the vamps are a threat that has to be eliminated? Why not just do it without all the bloodshed? It’s not like there’s anybody much objecting that I can tell.”

“Because Fallon doesn’t like to be the villain,” Jesse said. “He never has, as far as I can tell, and I think he needs the justification. In his eyes, he’s on the side of right, and there are few out there who’d dispute it, but to be a hero, he needs villains.” The weight of Jesse’s gaze felt oddly intense now, and Claire wondered what she was thinking . . . and if she was being judged for some shortcoming as simple as breathing and having a heartbeat. “I have a question, Claire.”

“What?”

“What makes you so well disposed toward vampires? I’ve lived here; I know what a pack of hyenas we can be, with very little warning. There’s little about us that ought to compel your pity, not to mention your loyalty.”

“You don’t think much of your own people, do you?”

“Not much,” Jesse agreed with an offhand shrug. “We’re a sad lot, in general, clinging to the past and to our own survival, no matter the cost to the lives of others. If I was in your shoes, I’m not sure I’d stand in the way of our more or less inevitable ugly fate. My question stands: why do
you
?”

Claire opened her mouth to tell her why and then . . . couldn’t, at least not at first. All the logical arguments she would have made seemed fake and cheap as old tinsel. She took a breath and composed her words more carefully. “Because no matter what any of you have done, you haven’t
all
done it. Because it’s not right to judge a class of people by the actions of one, or a few. That’s not justice. It’s prejudice, and I don’t like it. Justice means judging each person individually.”

Jesse’s lips slowly curled into a smile, and her eyes warmed as well. “High-minded,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll find a lot of people living up to your standard.”

Claire shrugged. “Doesn’t matter if they do or not. It’s my opinion; I’m not trying to make anybody else agree. But I don’t want them forcing their opinions on me.”

“And thus begins the war,” said Lady Grey, who’d once been queen. It sounded as though she knew exactly what she was talking about.

The certainty in her voice, and the sadness, made Claire shiver.

“W
e need to be doing something,” Claire said, pacing the floor. They were back in the room where Myrnin had waited—she still didn’t know if it was his bedroom, or someone else’s, or even if the vamps cared where they slept at all. If they bothered. “If Fallon’s got Oliver, and we should be doing something!”

“Fallon’s quite busy trying to find out what Oliver knows about Amelie’s escape,” Myrnin said. He was sitting on the bed perusing a decades-old water-wrinkled magazine that apparently featured Princess Diana’s wedding on the cover. Probably the only reading material left at the Bitter Creek Mall, Claire guessed. “And what Oliver knows is absolutely nothing. He didn’t even know she’d escaped. So there’s nothing Fallon will learn from him.”

“He could kill him!”

“She’s right,” Jesse said from where she leaned against the wall, arms folded. “He could.”

“He won’t. He needs Oliver, especially if Amelie’s nowhere to be found. Oliver is the only authority he has left that everyone respects. He’s afraid enough of us now; if there’s no one we all follow, then it’s that much harder to keep us in line.” Myrnin shrugged. “And as long as we can hear him screaming, then he’s all right.”

Claire flinched, and looked from him to Jesse, who nodded soberly. “Best you can’t hear it,” she said.

“Help him!”

Myrnin moved, with that eerie vampire speed and grace, and before she could finish saying the two words, he was kneeling next to her, chin raised. “Then help
me
,” he said, and pointed to the collar. “Help me take this off!”

“No,” Jesse said, coming off the wall to stand next to Claire. “Myrnin, you’ll get her killed, and yourself along with her. You’ve seen how deadly these things can be if you tamper with them.”

“Wait,” Claire said. Her thoughts were racing, and she couldn’t understand what she was trying to think of until an image resolved in her mind, vivid and bloody and sharp. Amelie.

Amelie hadn’t been wearing a collar.

“I’m waiting,” Myrnin said, looking just barely patient.

“How did Amelie take hers off?”

“She didn’t,” he said. “I staked her dead so that she would not feel the burns as they activated the shock collar automatically when we went beyond the border. I only woke her up once we were well beyond the effective range, and then I set her loose. But I had no way to take it off without setting off the explosive.”

“She did,” Claire said. “She wasn’t wearing it when I saw her at the Glass House.”

“The Glass—” Myrnin looked utterly astounded. “She was supposed to go straight for the border, leave this town. Why in the world was she at the Glass House?”

“I think the more urgent question is how did she get the collar off by herself?” Jesse asked.

Myrnin nodded. “Claire, take a look at mine. See if there’s something we’ve missed.”

“Okay,” Claire said. He went to one knee, chin upraised and head tilted, and Claire bent over to study the latch. There wasn’t much to study, really. It was featureless, almost seamless, and there was a keyhole lock. The casing of the collar was hard black plastic. “I . . . don’t see anything that can help. Hold on . . . Do you mind if I . . . ?”

“Not at all,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Which should be obvious to you after all this time, Claire.”

She hesitantly reached out and felt around the collar, looking for any hidden switches, catches, or other weird features that might have given her a clue. It felt smooth and regular, until she found a slightly rougher patch toward the back of the circle. She pressed harder, and felt it give.

A section of the collar’s plastic casing snapped out, exposing wiring and a green circuit board. Claire sucked in her breath and carefully, carefully turned the collar around to expose the rest.

She saw a blinking red light and a gray string of rubbery material that ran through the middle. She stared hard at it, and realized that the gray stuff was probably the explosive that the Daylighters had built into the collars. The stuff designed to remove a vampire’s head. Being this close to the compound was bad, and the smell of ozone and the faintly oily stench of it made her feel even worse, but she pushed that aside.
Focus!
The circuitry looked pretty straightforward at least, but as she reached in toward it, she saw the red light blink faster. Some kind of proximity alert, maybe a motion detector . . . She forced herself to freeze but not draw her hand back, then take in deep, even breaths as she watched the light.

It slowed down. Motion detector. Move too quickly, and it would activate. She didn’t know whether it would administer a shock—which, as Myrnin had said, would probably fry her brain—or whether it would just blow up, taking her hand with it. Either way, not an outcome she wanted.

It seemed to take forever, but she moved very slowly, pushing her fingertip forward a quarter inch at a time, waiting for the light to slow down, until her fingertip brushed the bottom of the circuit board. She traced the line of the motion detector’s wire to the processor, and spent another few seconds staring at the rest of the configuration to be certain she hadn’t missed anything. It looked like there was only one connection going to the explosive.

“I’m going to try something,” she told Myrnin. “It could go wrong.”

“More wrong than it already has?” he asked. “Do what you must. I won’t know if it explodes.”

That was a grim thought, but she took a breath, held it, and slowly, slowly inched her finger toward the wire. Then she edged it underneath, and gave it a quick, sharp tug to sever the connection.

The blinking light went off.

Claire sighed and pulled back. Just a heartbeat after she did, the stun activated, a sharp blue hissing spark that zapped between the contacts underneath the collar and into Myrnin’s skin, and he fell, convulsing. She smelled burned flesh and leaned forward toward him, but Jesse stopped her with both hands on her shoulders.

“No,” she said sharply. “Wait. Just wait.”

It took a few seconds, but the charge stopped, and Myrnin relaxed, eyes open and blank for a moment before he blinked, reached up, and fumbled the compartment shut. “Well,” he said, “I think that’s enough experimentation for today. By the way, Oliver’s stopped screaming.”

Jesse let go of Claire, after a reassuring squeeze not quite strong enough to hurt. “Fallon must have decided Oliver didn’t know anything,” she said. “That might be good news.”

“It so rarely is,” Myrnin said. “I’ve told you, we need to destroy the human guards. Rip them to pieces. I can take down at least a few now that they can no longer explode me like a piñata, and I assume you—”

“No,” Jesse said, and reached a hand down to him. He took it and got to his feet. “They can still take you down. Besides, you don’t want to die in a bathrobe, do you? So undignified.”

“Has dignity ever been my outstanding characteristic, do you think?” he asked, as he flipped his still-damp, curling hair out of his face. “I’m talking about freeing the rest of us. I can act. You can act, to a point. We
must
do something. Claire’s proven that given enough time we might be able to deactivate these collars—”

“I didn’t prove that,” she protested. “I just proved I could pull one wire—and even that shocked you senseless. What if I’d move too fast and set off the explosive?”

“You’d need another bath,” he said. “And I fear this bathrobe would never be the same.”

“Myrnin—”

He held up a hand and turned toward the door. So did Jesse. Claire heard a quiet knock a few seconds later, and it opened to show the pale, silent face of a vampire woman, who nodded and stepped away.

“We’re summoned,” Myrnin said. “Claire, I should put you back down that pipe. Do you think you can make your own way out to—”

“I’m not going,” she said.

“You can’t
stay.
”

“I’m not going until I find out what he’s doing with Eve!”

“Claire, you can’t—”

She locked eyes with him and said it again, quietly, fiercely. “I’m. Not.
Going
. Eve’s in danger. If Fallon’s willing to hurt Oliver like that, what do you think he’ll do to Michael? To
her
?”

They were going to argue with her—she could see it—but then an odd stillness came over them, and Jesse broke out of it to say, “There’s no time. We have to take her with us.”

•   •   •

They took her downstairs, walking between them down the wide, curling staircase to the atrium. On the ground floor, ringing that open center of tile, was a solid wall of vampires, standing shoulder to shoulder. They surrounded the open space where she’d first entered this place with her friends. On the surface, it looked like some kind of vampire town hall meeting.

Oliver was lying crumpled on the tile a few feet from Fallon. He looked dead, until he moved just a little, trying to rise. He couldn’t manage it.

Myrnin’s hand pulled her to a stop and held her there, hidden by the crowd. “Silence,” he warned her, and bent down to stare directly into her eyes. “On your life,
silence.
”

A petite little vampire lady glanced over at them and fixed a hungry gaze on Claire’s neck, but then moved aside as Jesse pushed in to guard her. She stood with Myrnin and Jesse on either side, totally surrounded by unbreathing bodies.

And she felt that every single one of them wanted to take a bite out of her . . . but not a single one of them dared to try.

The outer door opened, and two cops half dragged Eve in. She’d recovered a bit, because she was fighting—not effectively, but it took them some muscle to subdue her enough to move her to the center of the tiled atrium beside the dry fountain, where Fallon stood. They weren’t alone—apparently even Fallon wasn’t
that
sure of his prison. A full dozen armed Daylighters stood ranged around them, looking as tense and vigilant as Secret Service agents in a shooting gallery.

Eve stopped flailing and settled for glaring. She knew what kind of danger she was in, but she also kept studying the ranks of vampires, looking for Michael.

Who didn’t seem to be present.

“Oliver has assured me that he had nothing to do with Amelie’s disappearance, but someone here knows. Someone here helped.” Fallon’s voice, calm and confident, rang off the tiles and distant spaces. “And I can promise you that in the coming days, each one of you will be questioned, at length, about your involvement, so you may look forward to your turn, unless you want to confess it now. Anyone?”

Dead—pun intended—silence. Claire glanced around, but nobody moved. Not even a twitch.

“Then let me assure you that the offer I made you last night still holds today. Whatever you have done in your past, whatever atrocities, from this moment on, I can make you whole. I can make you clean. You can be forgiven and your crimes forgotten. You all know me; you know what I was. I made a new start in my life, and each of you can as well—all you need do is take a step. Just one single step.”

Oliver was still lying on the floor, too weak to get up, but when he spoke, it sounded as if he somehow towered a dozen feet over Fallon and his people. “You’ll get no volunteers here,” he said. “Be off with you, and take the girl away. She’s meat for the dogs if she stays here, and you know it. You’ve not forgotten what it feels like to starve, Fallon, and you’re not so saintly as you pretend.”

“Neither are you, for all you pretend to be a leader.”

“I’m no leader,” Oliver said, with a short, bitter bark of a laugh. “And you’re no kind of holy man.”

“I’ve never claimed that.”

“You claim to offer salvation.”

“Your salvation is your own affair. What I offer is a chance at
redemption
, pure and simple, and you’ll never get such an offer again. You know that to be true.” Fallon seemed to be almost pleading. “I know you think your cause is true, Oliver. Has there ever been a time you didn’t? But even you must remember that the faith we share holds that vampires are damned
.
Cut off from heaven, doomed to walk the earth and drain the living of their hope and their eternal rewards because of their own sin of pride. You are not immortal. You are
lost.
And I am showing you the way home.” He meant every word; Claire could see that. There were even tears shimmering in his eyes. He really did believe he was their savior.

“You’re showing me to the grave,” Oliver said. “A cold homecoming, indeed. The answer is no. You’ll get no volunteers here.”

“Not even Michael Glass? Not even when that would reunite him with his lovely girl, who’s been so brave in pleading for his release?”

“Wife,” Eve said. Her voice sounded husky and wrong somehow—dazed, drugged, and deeply afraid. But she was still standing. Still fighting. “I’m his wife.”

“You’re his bait,” Oliver said, and rolled painfully to his feet. Guards tensed, and Fallon hovered his thumb over the control on the box he held. “Michael won’t be biting, Fallon, so take her out of here before something unfortunate happens.”

“To her?”

“To you,” Oliver said, and there was a deep, dark purr in his voice that made Claire’s skin crawl with a strange mix of dread and anticipation. “No more games, you pathetic shell of a man. You haven’t been saved—you’ve been hollowed out, emptied, made into a shadow of what you were. You’re walking dead, and you know it. Go shamble toward the grave alone. You’ll find no followers among Amelie’s people.”

Amelie’s people, as Claire well knew, had never been unanimous about anything, but in this, at least, they kept their differences to themselves. It was just an unmoving, silent block of eerily posed statues, all eyes aimed at Fallon, Eve, and the guards.

Fallon looked defeated, Claire thought . . . but then he said, “Michael, I know you’re here. Oliver’s restrained you somehow, but I know you’re listening to me. Watching. I know you can see Eve, hear her heartbeat, feel her anguish. She loves you, and even I can feel it. Don’t pretend to be indifferent.”

More silence. Fallon didn’t seem surprised; he only paused for effect, Claire thought, before he dropped his bombshell. “She says she is your wife, but she isn’t, you know. There can be no marriage between the living and the dead, neither in the eyes of God nor the eyes of the state. Morganville’s mayor has passed a new law today, one that invalidates any marriages between vampires and humans. Your marriage has been officially dissolved.”