Kiss of Death (21 page)

It was odd, Claire thought, that there wasn’t a single person coming out of the buildings to see what was going on—not even out of the Civic Hall and Courts. There wasn’t a soul anywhere in sight. Blacke couldn’t have very many people in it, but it must have at least a hundred or so.

They couldn’t
all
be completely clueless, especially if Morley had been his usual obnoxious self.

Claire lurched for the bus, hobbled up the steps, and found the whole thing deserted. None of the prisoners were still in their seats, and the floor was littered with cut plastic ties in the back.

She left the bus at a limping run, crossed to the broken window—Michael hadn’t waited—and groaned when she realized it was almost head-high for her. With no time to complain about it, she jumped, grabbed the sill, and ignored the cuts she got from the broken glass. Michael had swept away most of it; what was left was irritating, that was all. Her arms trembled with the strain, but she managed to lift herself up, get the toes of her right foot into one of the cracks in the stone, and boost up onto the window’s broad ledge. From there it was easy enough to swing her legs in, but it was a longer drop to the floor than she’d thought, and she hit too hard. Her left ankle let out a fiery burst of pain, and she paused to brace herself against the cold stone wall, panting and waiting for the agony to subside.

She was in some kind of office, but it hadn’t been used in recent years; the desks looked like something left over from the turn of the century, but these weren’t antiques; they were junk. The wood was rotten, drawers were cracked and hanging loose, and in some cases the legs had actually broken off.

She surprised a mouse in one of the broken drawers, and nearly screamed as it zipped across the dirty floor in her path.
Deep breaths. Come on, keep it together; they need you. Shane needs you.

Claire pulled the heavy silver-coated stake out of her pocket and held it in her left hand as she opened the door with her right, ready to attack if she had to ... but the hallway was empty.

She could hear running footsteps, though. Noise upstairs. That didn’t mean there weren’t bad guys down here, however. Thanks to a thorough education in Morganville—Survival 101—she
always
assumed there were bad guys around every corner.

There was a lot of chaos going on upstairs—furniture crashing, thumping, running feet. People yelled—Claire tried not to think of it as screaming—and it sounded like that might be where Oliver had chosen to go after Morley.

But where was Michael?

Claire opened another door and found an office, with a desk and a computer and an old cup of molding coffee sitting on top of some papers. Nobody there. She tried the next door—same result, only no coffee.

In the third one, she found a woman slumped in the corner. She was unconscious, not dead, thankfully, as Claire discovered on checking her pulse, which proved to be strong. Claire moved the woman into a more comfortable position, rolled over on her side; recovery position, it was called. Shane had taught it to her—he was good at first aid.

The woman was older, kind of heavy, and she looked tired and pale.

Claire checked her neck on both sides, but found nothing. Then she checked the woman’s wrists and found a slowly bleeding wound, and not a neat one, either. Claire shuddered, breathed in a few times to steady herself, and then looked around for something to use to tie up the wound. There was a scarf on the woman’s desk; Claire carefully wrapped it around her wrist and tied it tight, and checked the woman again. She was still unconscious, but didn’t seem to be in any trouble.

“It’ll be okay,” Claire promised, and went on. The thing that was worrying her now was that while she certainly wouldn’t put it past Morley and his crew to be snacking on random people, this hadn’t just happened. The blood streaking the woman’s hand had been mostly dried and flaking off, the wound had been half healed, and Morley’s party bus had only just arrived in town.

That didn’t sound right at all.

Out in the hall, the fight was still going on upstairs, and as Claire carefully edged toward the stairs, trying to get a look, there was a sudden thump-rattle-crash, and a body came flying into view, hit the wall, and tumbled down the big, scarred wooden steps to sprawl at her feet.

It was a vampire.

It was
not
one of Morley’s vampires. She’d gotten a look at every one of them on the bus, and they’d all been typical Morganville folks. None of them had looked Shane’s age, or been wearing a bloodstained, tattered old football jersey that smelled like dead feet even from twenty yards away.

This was
not
a Morganville vampire.

This was something else.

And it rolled up, bared terrifying lengths of fangs, and came after her with a roar full of fury, hunger, and delight.

C
laire yelped, backed up, and got the stake level just in time to bury it in his chest. His momentum drove him onto the silver-coated wood, and pushed her into the wall behind her with a bruising slam. Her head hit the bricks, and she felt a hot yellow burst of pain, but she was more concerned by his bloody red eyes, crazy with rage, and those sharp, sharp fangs....

Then he slumped against her; she shoved, and he toppled off her and down to the floor with a crash, hands thumping out to either side. Man, he really
stank,
as if he hadn’t bathed or washed his clothes in a year. And he smelled like old blood, which was sick.

His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, but Claire knew he wasn’t dead—not yet. The silver in the stake was hurting him, and the stake itself was keeping him immobilized for now. Whether or not the silver would kill him was a question of how old he was, but somehow she didn’t think he was one of the ancient ones, like Amelie and Oliver and Morley. He was more like some bully who’d turned vamp a few years back, if that.

The silver was burning him. She saw black around the wound now.

He tried to kill me.
She swallowed hard, her hand tentatively touching the stake, then dropping away.
I should let him die.

Except she really needed that stake. Without it, she was unarmed. And she knew—because Michael had told her—that getting staked was painful. Getting staked with
silver
was agony.

Claire reached for the stake to pull it out. She’d just grabbed hold when a voice behind her said, in a rich, rolling English accent, “You don’t want to be doing that.”

Morley. He must have come down the stairs while she was otherwise occupied. He was bloody, clothes ripped even worse than they had been before, and he had open scratches across his pale face that were healing even as Claire turned to stare at him.

She tightened her grip on the stake and yanked it free as she rose out of her crouch, turning to fully face him.

Morley sighed. “Do any of you fools actually ever
listen?
I said
don’t
do that!”

“He’s hurt,” Claire said. “He’s not getting up any time soon.”

“Wrong,” Morley said. “He’s not getting up at all. But then, he doesn’t really have to.”

She felt something cold brush her aching ankle, then wrap hard around it. The teen vamp had grabbed her and was pulling himself toward her.

Morley reached out, grabbed the stake from her hand, and stabbed the vampire again, with easily three times the strength Claire had used. She heard the crunch as the stake pushed through bones and into the wooden floor beneath.

The boy, no older than Shane, went limp again. His skin started to smolder from the silver.

“You can’t—,” she began, and Morley turned on her, his face hard.

“It might have dawned on you by now that I
can,”
he snapped. “It might also have occurred to you that this boy is not one of my little flock. Doesn’t that make you at all alarmed, Claire?”

“I—”

“It should,” he said, “because apart from those vampires gathered in Morganville, there shouldn’t be more. Amelie, whatever you think of her, is a thorough sort. Those who didn’t agree to participate in her social experiment in Morganville were put down. There
are
no vampires still walking that I don’t know.” He nudged the boy with one worn boot. “But I don’t know him, or his pack of jackals who just ate my supplies!”

“Pack?”
Claire looked up, startled, at another thump and crash from upstairs. Morley ignored her and dashed for the stairs, racing in a blur. There was screaming up there. “Hey, wait! Ate your—
supplies
—you don’t mean—”

Morley got to the top of the stairs and disappeared before she could manage another word. “My friends?” she finished lamely, and then blinked, because two seconds after Morley had crossed out of sight, Michael emerged from the shadows up there, with Shane beside him.

Michael was carrying Eve, who still seemed unconscious.

They came down the stairs fast, and Claire didn’t like the tense worry she saw on Michael’s face—or on Shane’s. “We have to go,” Michael said. “Now. Right now.”

“What about Oliver? And Jason?”

“No time,” Michael said. “Move it, Claire.”

“My stake—”

“I’ll make you a shiny new one,” Shane promised. He sounded short of breath, and he grabbed her hand and towed her at a fast limp after Michael, who was heading down the hall for the broken window where they’d entered. “You all right?”

“Sure,” she said, and controlled a wince as she came down wrong, again, on her ankle. But in the great scheme of things, yeah, she was all right—more all right than the people upstairs, from what Morley had said. “What is going on up there?”

“Morley’s having a very bad day,” Michael said. “Tell you later. Right now, we need to get out of here before—”

“Too late,” Shane said, in a flat, quiet voice, and the four of them stopped in the middle of the hall as two vampires glided out of the shadows at either end, blocking them in. One was a shuffling, twisted old man with crazy eyes and drifting white hair. The other was a young man, wearing a football jersey—teammate of the vamp Claire had already staked, she guessed. This one was broader than Shane, and taller. Like the old man, he looked ... weird; crazy, even for a vampire.

“Give,” the old man said in a rusty, strange voice. “Give.”

“Holy crap, that’s creepy,” Shane said. “Okay, plans? Anybody?”

“In here.” Michael slammed his foot against the door on the opposite side of the hall and blew it back on the hinges with a splintering crash. Shane hustled Claire ahead of him into the room, and Michael jumped in after, slamming the door in the faces of the two vampires and shoving his back against it. “Barricade!”

“On it!” Shane said, and nodded for Claire to grab the other end of a heavy wooden desk, which they slid across the floor to block the door as Michael, with Eve in his arms, jumped effortlessly up onto the desk’s top and then lightly down as it slid past. “Think that’ll hold?”

“Hell no,” Michael said. “Did you
see
that guy?” Eve stirred in his arms, murmuring, and he looked down at her, his face going still with concern. As she restlessly turned her head, Claire saw a matted spot in her hair—blood, almost invisible against the black.

“What happened?” Claire blurted.

Michael shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“She got on Morley’s bad side,” Shane said. “He backhanded her into a wall. She hit her head on the corner. I thought—” He went quiet for a second. “Scared the shit out of me. But she’s okay, right?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said.

“Well, use your superpowers or something!”

“I’m a
vampire,
idiot. I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Some supernatural monster you are,” Shane said. “Remind me to trade you in for a werewolf, bro. Probably be more useful right now.”

Claire ignored the two of them and moved to the other side of the room. There was a window, but as she unlocked it and threw up the sash—which didn’t want to move, and was caked with dust and old, dead bugs—she discovered that the grime had disguised a thick set of iron bars on the other side. “Michael,” she said, “can you break these?”

“Maybe. Here.” Michael handed Eve over to Shane, who balanced her with a lot more difficulty. He looked at the bars, which were in full, blazing sunlight. “That—could be a problem.”

He was still wearing his leather coat, but his gloves were ripped—it looked as if somebody had shredded them with claws. Pale strips of skin showed through on the backs of his hands.

Shane, who was leaning against the desk that blocked the door, was almost knocked over as the vampires on the other side slammed into the barrier, sliding the desk nearly a foot before Shane dug in his feet and shoved back. The desk slid toward the door, inch by slow inch, until he’d jammed it hard against the old vampire’s grabbing hands caught in the doorway. “Decide quick!” he yelled. “We’re running out of time!”

Michael took a deep breath, grabbed one of the ancient, dusty drapes on the side of the window, and yanked it down. He wrapped it over both hands, then grabbed the bars. Even then, the sleeves on his coat rode up, and Claire saw the strips of reddened skin, already burned from before, start to smoke and turn black. Michael shook with effort, but the sun was too much for him. He let go of the bars and stumbled backward, panting, eyes gone red and wild. “Dammit!” he yelled, and tried kicking the bars. That worked better; his booted feet and jeans protected him better, and the first kick landed solidly, bending the bars and rattling the bolts.

He didn’t have time for another one, because the vampires on the other side of the door hit it again, sliding the desk halfway into the room and sending Shane stumbling into Claire. Michael whirled in time to face the first vamp in, which was the younger one in the ragged football jersey.

Michael was fast, but his multiple exposures to the sun had slowed him down, and the other vamp hit first and hard in a blocking tackle, and Michael was thrown all the way into the back wall. He shook it off and rolled back to his feet just as the bloodsucking jock reached out for Claire.