Daylighters (5 page)

“Right, Dog King it is,” Eve said, and turned into the newly paved driveway. It was still an order-at-the-window kind of place, so that hadn’t changed, and she got a bag of mini-dogs and burgers and fries, sodas all around, and tossed the results at Shane and Claire to sort out as she piloted the beast of a car. Sharp turns were a thing the hearse wasn’t great at doing, but she managed not to scrape any of the oh-so-new paint on the building, or the fence.

Claire was past noticing after that, because the hot dog she grabbed was melting in her mouth with deliciousness that totally erased the not-so-great chili spaghetti experiment. Two mini-dogs for Claire later, and two burgers that Shane practically inhaled, Eve was parking the car in front of the (not surprisingly) newly refurbished Morganville City Hall, where Chief Moses had her office. They sat in the parking lot and munched through the rest of the food, watching the foot traffic come and go.

“You seeing what I’m seeing?” Eve asked finally, as she crumpled up the last of the wrappers and three-pointed it into the bag that Shane held up for a basket.

“Morganville has never looked this good,” he said. “It’s like that old movie about the robot wives or the pod people or something. Seriously, look at the grass. It’s actually green. And
even
.”

“No, moron, I mean the pins. Lots of pins on cops.” Eve pointed to an imaginary collar. “Daylight Foundation pins. If it gets any more popular, they’ll put it on the freaking flag.”

“Great,” Shane said. “Everybody got pinned. We live in a giant evil frat house now.”

The massive Gothic front of the building looked old, but it had been rebuilt fairly recently; the aging of the stone was done with sandblasting. Still, it looked broody and impressive, looming over them as they walked up to the big, heavy doors. Two cops lingering by the entrance gave the three of them cool, blank looks that were, well, pretty normal, actually. The police in town had never been friendly, especially toward Shane and Eve. One shrugged, though, and opened the door for them as they approached.

Both, Claire noticed, wore pins.

Inside, it was business as usual in Morganville—clerks bustling around, phones ringing, people standing in line for permits or tickets or whatever. But there was a difference, somehow; it was intangible, but there. Claire couldn’t quite put her finger on
how
it felt wrong, or at least strange, but it had something to do with the overly friendly smiles, the happy tones of their voices.

“Someone’s been spiking the Cheery Kool-Aid,” Eve said.

“Think you mean
cherry
, slick.”

“I meant
cheery
, dumbass. Try to keep up,” Eve said, and gave Shane a shove on his shoulder. “Enough sightseeing. This is your show. Get it on the road.”

He trudged up the steps leading to the second floor, went down the hall, and opened the door that led to Hannah Moses’s office. Not the office she had once, briefly, occupied as mayor; this one had a harassed-looking female cop sitting behind a desk working a multi-button phone. She shot them an irritated glance as the three of them stepped in. She hit the
HOLD
button and said, “Chief Moses isn’t seeing anyone today. She’s in meetings.”

“Can you tell her it’s Shane Collins?”

“I don’t care who you are. She’s
busy.
”

Shane leaned both hands on the officer’s desk. “Tell her it’s about my dog bite. I think I might be rabid.”

There was something in his face that convinced the woman. She frowned, stared him down for a few seconds, then hit another button on her phone and said, “Yes, I need you in the office, please. Thank you.”

“Excellent,” Shane said. “We’ll be right over here.” He walked to a small line of guest chairs. Claire took one, with Eve beside her, while Shane flipped through an assortment of ragged magazines . . . and then the door opened.

It wasn’t Chief Moses. It was, instead, the biggest, most muscle-bound policeman Claire had ever seen. Broader and taller than Shane.

His gaze fixed immediately on the officer behind the desk. “You got some kind of trouble here?” he asked. She merely pointed over her shoulder at Shane and kept talking to whatever constituent was on the phone at the moment.

“Crap,” Eve said. “Um . . . guys?”

It was too late. The officer was lumbering over, and Shane was standing up, fast, dropping his magazine to the floor. “I think there’s some misunderstanding,” he said. “Because I didn’t ask for Officer Friendly. I asked for—”

That was as far as he got before the cop grabbed his shoulder, spun him around, and pressed him flat against the wall, rattling the bland artwork hanging there. “Shut up,” he said, and reached for handcuffs.

“You mean, I have a right to be silent? How about my right to an attorney, do I have that? Ouch. Look, you haven’t done this before, have you? Let me help you out—”

“Shut up, smart-ass. You’re creating a disturbance.”

“I just want to see Chief Moses!”

“Chief Moses is busy. You get to see me instead.”

“Should we be doing something?” Eve asked Claire, who was still sitting frozen in her chair. “Because I’m kinda used to Shane being arrested, but this seems wrong. And weren’t you going to ask the questions?”

Claire snapped herself out of the feeling of unreality that had settled over her, and stood up. Officer Friendly’s (the name really did fit him) eyes flicked over to scan her, then dismissed her.

She tried anyway. “Sir, we know Hannah Moses. She wouldn’t want you to do this. We only need to ask her some questions. Important questions.”

The lady on the phone, who had just finished her call and finally replaced the receiver, rolled her eyes. “Yeah. About a dog bite.”

Oddly enough, that stopped Officer Friendly for a couple of seconds, and then he grabbed Shane by the shoulder, turned him around to face him, and said, “You got bit by a dog?” It was said with both concern and eagerness, such a weird combination that Claire couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. Neither could Shane, by his expression. “When?”

Shane managed to shrug, despite the handcuffs and the grip on his shoulder. “A while back.”

The cop turned Claire’s boyfriend back around, skinned up one of Shane’s sleeves, got nothing, and tried the other. He stared at the ruddy scar for a second, then took out his keys and unlocked the handcuffs. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “I’ll get the chief. Have a seat.”

Just like that, he left. All of them—even the officer/receptionist—looked silently confused, and it lasted for a full minute until the frosted-glass door opened again to admit Hannah Moses.

“Sorry,” the lady behind the desk said, “but this young man was very insistent—”

Hannah ignored her. She walked to Shane, grabbed his arm—the correct one—and looked at the scar. “Dammit,” she said. “Come with me, all of you.”

She led them into her office, where she slammed and locked the door behind them.

“I just—,” Shane began, but then she held up one finger to stop him, went behind her desk, and opened a drawer. She flipped some kind of switch, then nodded. “What is that, spy crap?” Shane asked.

“Spy crap,” she affirmed, and sat down in the wheeled office chair. “I knew you’d been bitten, but in the press of everything else, it slipped my mind. I’m sorry. What kind of aftereffects are you feeling?”

“Hang on a minute. Who the hell is trying to listen in on
you
? All the vamps are back there not shopping at the mall,” Eve said. “Unless . . . you don’t trust your shiny new boss. I think he
is
your new boss, right? Fallon the Fanatic?”

Hannah didn’t answer that. She just fixed Shane with that steady look and waited until he said, “The bite’s feeling pretty weird, actually. Not so bad when I left Morganville, but it flared up on the road, and got worse when I came home. It started small, sort of like an ache in my arm, but then I started feeling this . . . urge.”

“An urge to hunt vampires. Fight them. Kill them,” Hannah said. “Which is why you left the mall so suddenly. You couldn’t control it anymore.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It felt like something was taking me over, and I didn’t like it. Still don’t. Look, I’m not saying I’m some vampire groupie or anything, but I don’t
hate
hate them, not like I used to do. Not like my dad did.” It was unusual, Claire thought, for Shane to look like this—helpless. Lost. “I just don’t know what I’m
doing
. I only know I don’t want to.”

“Hannah . . .” Claire sank down in one of the visitor chairs and leaned forward, staring at the chief. “Please tell us what’s going on. Please. We need to know.”

Hannah looked away, as if she was composing herself for a moment, and then she nodded. “The Daylight Foundation has been conducting research for a long time,” she said. “It’s an old organization, very old, though they’ve only recently come out of hiding. They conducted cutting-edge genetics experiments; some worked, some didn’t. Some ended up creating things they found useful.”

“Like the devil dogs,” Shane said. “Like the one that bit me that night.”

“The dogs were part of Fallon’s advance team,” Hannah said. “He’d seen an opening, with Oliver’s exile from Morganville. He thought there was enough unrest, given what had just happened, to depose Amelie from her position. And he was right, damn him. He was dead right.”

“But—I thought you were—” Eve pointed to the Daylighters pin on Hannah’s collar.

For answer, Hannah unbuttoned the crisply starched sleeve of her uniform shirt and rolled it up, revealing a jagged bite mark that looked every bit as inflamed and angry as the one Shane had been hiding. “Some of us don’t have a choice,” she said. “Either I’m his hunting dog or I’m his dog handler. He keeps the instincts in check with a medication he gives me. Without that, I’m just another one of the pack.” She nodded at Shane as she refastened her sleeve buttons. “Like you, kid.”

“Wait a second, I’m not part of any—”

“No?” Hannah cocked her head at him. “Only because Fallon hasn’t bothered to make use of you yet. He hasn’t needed to. But he will, Shane. He certainly did me, and others.”

“How many others?” Eve asked. “And what do you mean, exactly, about him
making use
of them? Because if there’s anything I hate more than vamp mind control, it’s mind control by somebody who isn’t a vamp.”

Hannah’s dark eyes flashed toward her, suddenly hot with anger that had, Claire realized, been simmering under the surface the whole time. “You’ve got no idea,” she said. “I just got my life back from one vampire’s mind games, and now to have this son of a bitch doing this. . . . You think I don’t hate it? Don’t want to rip his head off? Fact is, I can’t. I can’t even raise a hand to him. It’s part of the—the programming.” The woman was generally so controlled that it took Claire aback, seeing her lose it even that small amount. There was a tremendous tide of rage under that surface of calm. Rage and frustration.

“How many?” Shane asked. “In the pack?”

“Six,” Hannah said. “Including you and me. I don’t know if we were just unlucky, or if somehow those dogs of his were programmed to target specific individuals. I’d like to think he picked us because . . . because we’re the ones most capable of fighting him, as humans.”

Shane swallowed hard. “Yeah, I’ll do my best to take it as a compliment,” he said. “But how do I handle this? What do I do?”

“Stay away from vampires,” she said. “Which ought to be pretty easy to do, now that they’re in the enclave—and yes, I hate using that word. But if you feel a surge of what you felt back there, you’ll know he’s activated you for a hunt. Once that happens . . . once that happens, you won’t be yourself.”

“What do you mean, ‘won’t be himself’?” Claire asked, but Hannah just shook her head and changed the subject.

“Eve, I’m keeping an eye on Michael, I promise you that. I am trying to make sure they all stay safe. Right now, the best way to do that is to keep them confined and compliant.”

“Are you still Captain Obvious?” Eve asked. “Which side are you on? Because I don’t get you, Hannah. I really don’t.”

“Captain Obvious won,” Hannah said. “That’s the problem—none of us really thought about what we’d do if we managed to defeat the vampires and take control. We never thought about what we would do with them—what kind of future they’d have. So in a certain sense, I no longer get myself anymore.” She seemed sad about it, and angry, and there was a moment of silence before she continued. “Now, all of you, please go home. Shane, there’s nothing that can be done about what you’re feeling, but if you find yourself struggling, just—stay as far from any vampires as you can. That will help.”

Shane leaned on her desktop and looked her straight in the eye this time. “Why does he need a pack of people pre-programmed to hunt down vampires, Hannah?”

“For strays,” she said. “Not all the vampires are going to stay in the mall. Eventually, they’ll get out, and he will need to track them down. That’s where you—where
we
—come in.”

That was the end of the meeting. She crossed to the door, opened it, and there didn’t seem to be any choice but to leave, with Officer Friendly scowling at them from the outer office. The receptionist ignored them with stubborn intensity as she answered more calls . . . and then they were out in the hall, and Shane was restlessly rubbing his arm and looking more disturbed than ever.

“Did that help?” Claire asked him. He shook his head.

Eve said, “At least we know he’s not the only crazy one in town. Come on, Dog Soldier. Let’s go.”

•   •   •

They spent about an hour cruising Morganville, noting the changes. A lot of it was cosmetic—buildings painted, roads repaired. But there were also new places going up all over town, and it was Shane who pointed out the Daylighters symbol that was cropping up on nearly all the business signs or store windows. As if they were proudly saying,
No vampires allowed.

But oddest of all were the people. So many Morganville natives out and about, walking, chatting, taking their kids to the small municipal park. Shopping. It looked so damn normal that it gave Claire the creeps, because their body language was completely different now. It wasn’t the Morganville she’d gotten so used to seeing; that much was certain. Where before, people had walked with a kind of guarded, reflexive awareness of what was around them, these folks were almost giddy about
not
looking paranoid. Oblivious. Safe.