Fade Out (19 page)

“Why do you want to go there? It’s hardly safe for untagged blood donors to roam around out there after dark. Even Claire would be at risk, and she’s wearing the strongest protection available. I don’t advise it.” He put the guitar aside and steepled his fingers together. “But you’re not quite foolish enough to be doing it for the thrill, I think, so you do have a reason. Tell me.”

Claire exchanged a quick look with her friends, and then said, “Michael went alone out there. We need to help him.”

“Michael is a vampire. Vampires go out at night.” Myrnin shrugged and dusted a bit of fluff from his black velvet jacket, which was pretty elegant, if you were heading off to a costume party. “Why concern yourself, unless you think there will be trouble? Stop lying by omission, Claire. Tell me everything. Now.”

Eve shook her head, a tiny spasm that was probably involuntary. Even Shane looked like he thought it was a terminally bad idea. Claire said, “We can trust him. We have to trust him.”

“Oh, this sounds interesting,” Myrnin said, and leaned forward in Michael’s chair. “Please continue.”

She did. She even brought down one of the wireless cameras, showed it to him, and explained how it worked, which was a complete delight to his obsessively scientific side. “But this is amazing,” he said, turning the little device over in his nimble fingers. “This girl, she’s quite the enterprising little thing. How many of these, you say?”

“We think seventy-two.”

He lost his smile, focused on the object in his hand. “She can’t be doing it alone, then. There must be a larger purpose. A larger plan. Still, this Kim, she may be using it for her own purposes; have you thought about that?”

“We know she’s getting her own thing out of it,” Claire said. “But you’re saying . . . she didn’t come up with it in the first place?”

“Exactly.”

So, maybe Kim had been recruited to put cameras out, and then hijacked it for her own reality-show dream project . . . but that meant someone else was in charge.

Someone smart enough to not get caught. Or even suspected.

“You really should tell Oliver,” Myrnin said. “I know he’s not the most pleasant of allies, but he is effective in the right circumstances. Rather like one of those nuclear bombs.”

“If we tell Oliver, Kim’s dead,” Eve said. “She may be an epic bitch, but I don’t want her executed, either.”

“Valid,” Myrnin agreed. “However, if this goes wrong, she’s dead in any case. I will come along. You need an adult chaperone.”

“Once again, bunny slippers,” Shane said. “I’m just pointing that out.”

“I suppose they would get dirty. I’ll be right back.” Myrnin jumped out of the chair and dashed for the portal. It snapped shut behind him with a flare of energy.

“Do you think—”

Before Shane could finish the question, the portal opened again, and Myrnin hopped out on one foot, pulling on serious pirate boots, the knee-high kind with the cuff of leather. He finished tugging the left one on and did a runway pose for Claire. “Better?”

“Um . . . yeah. I guess.” He now looked like a demented version of that pirate captain from the rum bottles.

“Then let’s go.”

As he turned to concentrate on the portal, Eve tugged on Claire’s shirt.

“What?”

“Ask him where he got the boots.”

“You ask.” Personally, Claire wanted the vampire bunny slippers.

The closest Myrnin could get them was a few blocks away. Claire was glad, actually, that he hadn’t warned her where they were going; she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to step through if he had.

German’s Tire Plant had closed at least thirty years ago, and the gigantic, multi-story facility was basically one big gold mine of creepy. Claire had been in it exactly twice before, and neither visit held pleasant memories—and those had been daytime excursions. At night, the terror level went way, way up.

The only reason she knew they were at German’s Tire Plant was that the weapons bag Shane had brought contained flashlights, and one of the first things Claire’s lit up was the spooky clown face graffitied around a big open maw of a doorway. She’d never forget that stupid clown face. Ever.

“Oh man,” Shane breathed. He wasn’t fond of this place, either.

“Buck up,” Eve said. “At least you didn’t get locked in a freezer here like next month’s entrée. I did.”

Myrnin, blue-white in the flashlight beams, looked offended. “Young lady, I put you there for safekeeping. If I had meant to eat you, I would have.”

“That’s comforting,” Eve said. And then, under her breath, “Not.”

“This way.” Myrnin put out his hand to shield his eyes from their flashlights, and picked his way around a pile of tottering, empty beer cans left by adventurous high schoolers, a stained, torn mattress, and some empty crates. “Someone’s been here.”

“No kidding?”

“I mean, recently,” he said. “Not humans. Vampires. Many of them.” He sounded a little puzzled. “Not my creatures, either. They all died, you know. The ones I turned.”

Back in his crazy (crazier?) days, Myrnin had experimented on some hapless victims, trying to turn them into vampires but failing as his illness took hold. The results hadn’t been pretty—more like zombies than vampires, and not focused on anything but killing. Claire wondered how they’d died, and decided she really didn’t want to know. Myrnin was a scientist. He was used to putting down lab animals at the end of a test.

“Are these vampires hanging around now?” Shane asked. He had a stake in his left hand, and a silver-coated knife in the other—a steak knife he’d used a car battery and a fish tank full of chemicals to electroplate. Stinky, but cheap and effective. “Because a heads-up would be nice.”

“No, they’re gone.” Myrnin continued to hesitate, though. “I wonder. . . .”

“Wonder later. Move now,” Eve said. She sounded nervous, and she kept shining the light around erratically, reacting to every rustle in the dark. There were a lot of those. Rats, birds, bats—the place was full of wildlife. Claire kept her own light trained on the path ahead of her, making sure she didn’t trip or cut herself on rusty juts of metal as Myrnin led the way. Shane’s warmth behind her felt good. So did the weight of the Super Soaker in her arms.

Myrnin threw open a metal door with a snap, shattering the lock and scattering links of the big chain that had secured it all over the pitted concrete outside. “There,” he said, and pointed as they gathered around him. The clouds thinned a little, allowing some diffuse moonlight to paint the ground with cool blue and silver, and a mile or so away sat a concrete block of a building, and a tall, skeletal metal tower. Big white letters on the tower said KV V; one of the Vs was long gone, and the other was tilting drunkenly to one side, not far from dropping off entirely to join its missing mate. The place looked deserted. Wind rattled over the flat landscape, whipping up dust and scattering trash, and made an eerie whistling sound through the metal of the tower.

“I don’t see Michael’s car.”

“One way to be sure,” Myrnin said. “Let’s go.”

The closer they came, the creepier the place was. Claire wasn’t a fan of blighted industrial buildings, and Morganville was full of them—the half-destroyed hospital, German’s Tire Plant, even the old City Hall had its decaying side.

This one looked so . . . grim. It was just a cinder block building, not very large, and the one window in front had been long ago broken out and boarded over. Someone had spray-painted KEEP OUT on the bricks, and part of it was heavily decorated in multicolored swirls of graffiti. Beer cans, cigarette butts, empty plastic bags—the usual stuff.

“I don’t see a way in,” Eve whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Myrnin whispered back. “Vampires can hear us, anyway.”

“Is there a vampire in there?” Claire asked.

“I’m not psychic. I have no idea.”

“You could tell in the tire plant!”

He tapped his nose. “Five senses. Not six. It’s not so easy to sniff them out standing outside the building.” He gently moved the business end of her Super Soaker away from himself. “Please. I bathed already, and I’d rather not do it in the vampire equivalent of pepper spray.”

“Sorry.”

They made their way around the side of the building, closer to the tower, and there they found Michael’s dark sedan sitting in the shadows.

Empty.

“Michael?” Eve called. “Michael!”

“Hush,” Myrnin said sharply, and flashed supernatu rally fast across the open space to grab the knob of a door Claire could barely see. It sagged open, and he disappeared inside.

“Wait!” Claire blurted, and darted after him. She switched on the flashlight as soon as she reached the door, but all it showed her was an empty hallway, with peeling paint and a floor covered in mud from some old flood. “Myrnin, where are you?”

No answer. She yelped when Shane’s hand closed over her shoulder; then she pulled in a breath and nodded. Eve crowded in behind them.

Down the hallway was a dead end, with more hallways stretching left and right. The fading paint had some kind of mural on it, something West Texas-y with cows and cowboys, and the letters KVVV in big block capitals.

The whole place smelled like mold and dead animals. “This way,” Myrnin’s voice said quietly, and with a hum, electricity turned on in the hall. Some of the bulbs burned out with harsh, sizzling snaps, leaving parts of the space in darkness.

Claire followed the hall to the end, which took a right turn into a small studio with some kind of engineering board. The equipment looked ancient, but clean; somebody had been here—presumably Kim—and had taken care to put everything in working order. Microphones, a chair, a backdrop, lighting . . . everything in the studio needed for filming, including a small digital video camera on a tripod.

On the other side of the room was a complicated editing console, which had a bank of monitors set up. They obviously weren’t original to the setup—decades more modern than the soundboard—and Claire identified different components that had been Frankensteined into the system.

These included an array of fat black terabyte drives, all portable.

Michael was sitting at the console. “Michael!” Eve blurted, and threw herself on him; he stood up to catch her in his arms, and hugged her close. “You incredible jerk!”

He kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know.”

She smacked his arm. “Really. You are a jerk!”

“I get that.” He pushed her off a little, to look at her. “You’re okay?”

“No thanks to you. You had to go running off in the middle of the night and not even say boo . . .”

“I should have known you guys wouldn’t stay put.”

“Where’s Detective Hess?” Claire asked. “I thought you were meeting him here.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Where did he go?”

“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Michael seemed preoccupied, as if he were trying to figure out how to tell them something they weren’t going to like at all. “This is Kim’s data vault. At least, most of it. Claire, that’s a router, right? I think this is her receiving station for the signals.”

“She’s using the tower to amplify the signals,” Claire said. “Did you find—?” She didn’t want to get more specific than that. Michael shook his head, and her heart fell. “What about the other ones?”

“She’s been a busy girl,” Michael said. “There are video files there from City Hall, Common Grounds, spots all over town. It will take hours, maybe weeks, to look at everything, but she’s done a rough cut.” He hit some controls, then pointed at the central monitor. “This is the raw file.”

After some old-fashioned leader signals, there was a shot of the Morganville town limits sign, creaking in the wind . . . and then, in special effects, the word Vampires appeared in bloody streaks right below the sign.

“Subtle.” Eve snorted. “She’s got a future in Hollywood.”

Kim’s voice came on, breathlessly narrating. “Welcome to Morganville, the town with bite. If you’ve ever driven across the barren landscape of West Texas, you may wonder why people live out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, wonder no more. It’s because they can’t live anywhere else without people knowing what they are.”

The visuals cut to a montage of Morganville daily life—normal, boring stuff.

And then a night-vision shot of a vampire—Morley, Claire realized with a shock—sucking the blood out of someone’s neck. It was an extreme close-up. His eyes were like silver coins, and the blood looked black.

Cut to Eve, working the counter at the coffee shop in all her Goth glory. Eve sucked in a quick breath, but said nothing. More shots of Morganville, some handheld. Claire saw footage of students, and remembered Kim running around the campus with her digital camera, asking people stupid questions.

It was in there, and so was Claire, saying, “I have two words for you, and the second one is off. Fill in the blank.”

Claire covered her mouth with both hands. God, she looked so angry. And kind of bitchy.

It got worse, with the voice-over. “Even the normal people of Morganville aren’t so normal. Take my friends who live in this house.”

A shot of the Glass House, full daylight. Then some kind of hidden-camera thing of Kim knocking on the door, Eve answering.

A shot of Shane. One of Michael.

“Living in a town full of terror doesn’t mean you can’t find true love—or at least, real sex.”

The video morphed into Claire and Shane in his bedroom. Oh God no . . . Claire felt sick and hot and breathless, full of horror at seeing herself there on that screen. She stumbled away and almost threw herself into Shane’s arms. He, lips parted, was staring at the picture, looking just as horrified as she felt. But he couldn’t look away, while she simply couldn’t watch.

“Goodness,” Myrnin said quietly. “I don’t think I should be watching this. I don’t think I’m old enough.”

“Turn it off,” Shane said. “Michael.”

Instead of turning it off, Michael hit FAST FORWARD. He slowed it down as the scene changed. More Kim voyeur porn, this time Michael and Eve. No voice-over. Claire couldn’t imagine what she was intending to say, but it couldn’t have been good.

“I’ll kill her,” Eve said. It sounded calm, but it really wasn’t. “Why are you showing me this?”

Michael looked at her, and Claire’s stomach did a little flip at the grimness in his expression. “Sit down,” he said, and wheeled the chair closer to Eve. She looked at it, then at him, frowning. “Trust me.”

She did, still frowning, as the scene changed on-screen.

It was some dark-paneled room, with a big wooden round table, an ornate flower arrangement in the middle. Of the several people around the table, Claire recognized three immediately, with a shock. “Amelie,” she blurted. Amelie clearly had no idea she was being filmed; the camera was high up, at an angle, but it caught their faces clearly. Next to her at the table was Richard Morrell, the mayor, neat and handsome in a dark suit. At his right sat Oliver, looking—as usual—angry. Several other people around the table were talking at once, arguing, and finally Oliver slammed his hand down on the wood with so much force it silenced them all.

Then came Kim’s voice-over. “Morganville is ruled by a town council, but one not like any other. Nobody elects these people. That’s Amelie, Founder of Morganville. She’s more than a thousand years old, and she’s a ruthless killer. Oliver’s not much younger, and he’s even meaner. The mayor, Richard Morrell, he’s new, but his family has ruled the humans of Morganville for a hundred years. Richard’s the only human on the council. And he gets outvoted . . . constantly.”

She cut back to the sound as Richard was saying, “. . . want to revisit the decision we made earlier, about Jason Rosser.”

“What about him?” Oliver asked irritably. “We’ve heard your arguments. Let’s move on.”

“You can’t execute him. He gave himself up. He tried to save the girl.”

“He did not try to save Claire,” Amelie said. “He left her to die. Granted, he did turn himself in to the police and told us about his accomplice in these murders, but we must be clear: he is far from innocent, and his history tells us he can’t be trusted.”

“He’s still a kid,” Richard said, “and you can’t just arbitrarily decide to execute him. Not without a trial.”

“With a majority vote, we can,” Oliver said. “Two for, one against. I believe that is a majority. It won’t be a public event. He’ll just quietly—disappear.”

Eve’s mouth dropped open. She leaned forward, frantically searching the screen for a clue. “When was this? Michael? When did she record this?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you should know. Your brother’s been sentenced to death.”

“Oliver—he didn’t even—he didn’t say anything.”

“Well,” Myrnin said, “I don’t suppose he felt it was necessary. I expect they were planning to arrange something quiet, perhaps an accident. Or suicide.”

Eve fell into the chair, and blindly reached out for Michael, who took her hand. “They can’t just kill him. Not like some—rat in a cage. Oh God, Michael . . .”

“I told you Detective Hess was here. He left right after we found that. He’s going straight to the jail to be sure Jason’s okay. He’ll put him in protective custody, okay? Don’t worry.”

She gave out a breathless, broken laugh.“Don’t worry? How do I not worry after you show me things like this?”

“Good point,” Shane said. “Michael, Kim bugged the council meeting. How could she possibly do that?”

“She couldn’t,” Myrnin said. “The human parts of town, yes, of course, but not the vampire parts. She has no excuse to be there, and she’d be caught if she’d gone anywhere near the official chambers. Or Amelie’s house.” He held up another black hard drive, which was clearly labeled in silver ink. “Or Oliver’s, for that matter.”