Lord of Misrule

Eve jumped out of the driver’s side, opened the back door, and grabbed Myrnin under the arms, all the while muttering, “Ick, ick, ick!” Claire slid out to join her, and Hannah grabbed Myrnin’s feet when they hit the pavement, and the three of them carried him into the coffee shop.

Claire found herself shoved immediately out of the way by two vampires: Oliver and some woman she didn’t know. Oliver looked grim, but then, that wasn’t new, either. “Put him down,” Oliver said. “No, not there, idiots, over there, on the sofa. You. Off.” That last was directed at the frightened humans who were seated on the indicated couch, and they scattered like quail. Eve continued her ick mantra as she and Hannah hauled Myrnin’s deadweight over and settled him facedown on the couch cushions. He was about the color of a fluorescent lightbulb now, blue-white and cold.

Oliver crouched next to him, looking at the stake in Myrnin’s back. He steepled his fingers for a moment, and then looked up at Claire. “What happened?”

She supposed he could tell, somehow, that it was her stake. Wonderful. “I didn’t have a choice. He came after us.” The us part might have been an exaggeration; he’d come after Hannah, really. But eventually he would have come after Claire, too; she knew that.

Oliver gave her a moment to squirm while he stared at her, and then looked back at Myrnin’s still, very corpselike body. The area where the stake had gone in looked even paler than the surrounding tissue, like the edge of a whirlpool draining all the color out of him. “Do you have any of the drugs you have been giving him?” Oliver asked. Claire nodded, and fumbled in her pocket. She had some of the powder form of the drug, and some of the liquid, but she hadn’t felt confident at all that she’d be able to get it into Myrnin’s mouth without a fight she was bound to lose. When Myrnin was like this, you were going to lose fingers, at the very least, if you got anywhere near his mouth.

Not so much an issue now, she supposed. She handed over the vials to Oliver, who turned them over in his fingers, considering, and then handed back the powder. “The liquid absorbs into the body more quickly, I expect.”

“Yes.” It also had some unpredictable side effects, but this probably wasn’t the time to worry about that.

“And Amelie?” Oliver continued turning the bottle over and over in his fingers.

“She’s—we had to leave her. She was fighting Bishop. I don’t know where she is now.”

A deep silence filled the room, and Claire saw the vampires all look at one another—all except Oliver, who continued to stare down at Myrnin, no change in his expression at all. “All right, then. Helen, Karl, watch the windows and doors. I doubt Bishop’s patrols will try storming the place, but they might, while I’m distracted. The rest of you”—he looked at the humans and shook his head—“try to stay out of our way.”

He thumbed the top off the vial of clear liquid and held it in his right hand. “Get ready to turn him faceup,” he said to Hannah and Claire. Claire took hold of Myrnin’s shoulders, and Hannah his feet.

Oliver took the stake in his left hand and, in one smooth motion, pulled it out. It clattered to the floor, and he nodded sharply. “Now.”

Once Myrnin was lying on his back, Oliver motioned her away and pried open Myrnin’s bloodless lips. He poured the liquid into the other vampire’s mouth, shut it, and placed a hand on his high forehead.

Myrnin’s dark eyes were open. Wide-open. Claire shuddered, because they looked completely dead—like windows into a dark, dark room . . . and then he blinked.

He sucked in a very deep breath, and his back arched in silent agony. Oliver held his hand steady on Myrnin’s forehead. His eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, and Myrnin writhed weakly, trying without much success to twist free. He collapsed limply back on the cushions, chest rising and falling. His skin still looked like polished marble, veined with cold blue, but his eyes were alive again.

And crazy. And hungry.

He swallowed, coughed, swallowed again, and gradually, the insane pilot light in his eyes went out. He looked tired and confused and in pain.

Oliver let out a long, moaning sigh, and tried to stand up. He couldn’t. He made it about halfway up, then wavered and fell to his knees, one hand braced on the arm of the couch for support. His head went down, and his shoulders heaved, almost as if he were gasping or crying. Claire couldn’t imagine Oliver— Oliver—doing either one of those things, really.

Nobody moved. Nobody touched him, although some of the other vampires exchanged unreadable glances.

He’s sick, Claire thought. It was the disease. It made it harder and harder for them to concentrate, to do the things they’d always taken for granted, like make other vampires. Or revive them. Even Oliver, who hadn’t believed anything about the sickness . . . even he was starting to fail.

And he knew it.

“Help me up,” Oliver finally whispered. His voice sounded faint and tattered. Claire grabbed his arm and helped him climb slowly, painfully up; he moved as if he were a thousand years old, and felt every year of it. One of the other vampires silently provided a chair, and Claire helped him into it.

Oliver braced his elbows on his thighs and hid his pale face in his hands. When she started to speak, he said, softly, “Leave me.”

It didn’t seem a good idea to argue. Claire backed off and returned to where Myrnin was, on the couch.

He blinked, still staring at the ceiling. He folded his hands slowly across his stomach, but didn’t otherwise move.

“Myrnin?”

“Present,” he said, from what seemed like a very great distance away. He chuckled very softly, then winced. “Hurts when I laugh.”

“Yeah, um—I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” A very slight frown worked its way between Myrnin’s eyebrows, made a slow V, and then went on its way. “Ah. Staked me.”

“I . . . uh . . . yeah.” She knew what Oliver’s reaction would have been, if she’d done that kind of thing to him, and the outcome wouldn’t have been pretty. She wasn’t sure what Myrnin might do. Just to be sure, she stayed out of easy-grabbing distance.

Myrnin simply closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. He looked old now, exhausted, like Oliver. “I’m sure it was for the best,” he said. “Perhaps you should have left the wood in place. Better for everyone, in the end. I would have just—faded away. It’s not very painful, not comparatively.”

“No!” She took a step closer, then another. He just looked so—defeated. “Myrnin, don’t. We need you.”

He didn’t open his eyes, but there was a tiny, tired smile curving his lips. “I’m sure you think you do, but you have what you need now. I found the cure for you, Claire. Bishop’s blood. It’s time to let me go. It’s too late for me to get better.”

“I don’t believe that.”

This time, his great dark eyes opened and studied her with cool intensity. “I see you don’t,” he said. “Whether or not that assumption is reasonable, that’s another question entirely. Where is she?”

He was asking about Amelie. Claire glanced at Oliver, still hunched over, clearly in pain. No help. She bent closer to Myrnin. No way she wouldn’t be overheard by the other vampires, though, she knew that. “She’s—I don’t know. We got separated. The last I saw, she and Bishop were fighting it out.”

Myrnin sat up. It wasn’t the kind of smooth, controlled motion vampires usually had, as though they’d been practicing it for three or four human lifetimes; he had to pull himself up, slowly and painfully, and it hurt Claire to watch. She put her hand against his shoulder blade to brace him. His skin still felt marble-cold, but not dead. It was hard to figure out what the difference was—maybe it was the muscles, underneath, tensed and alive again.

“We have to find her,” he said. “Bishop will stop at nothing to get her, if he hasn’t already. Once you were safely away, she’d have retreated. Amelie is a guerrilla fighter. It’s not like her to fight in the open, not against her father.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Oliver said, without taking his head out of his hands. “And neither are you, Myrnin.”

“You owe her your fealty.”

“I owe nothing to the dead,” Oliver said. “And until I see proof of her survival, I will not sacrifice my life, or