Lord of Misrule

“Dad,” Shane said, “everybody in that building tonight is going to be killed. We have to get people out, not get them in. If you care anything about those idiots who buy your revolutionary crap, you’ll call this off.”

“Call it off?” Frank repeated, as uncomprehending as if Shane were speaking another language. “When we’re this close? When we can win? Dammit, Shane, you used to believe in this. You used to —”

“Yeah. Used to. Look it up!” Shane shoved his father away from him, and walked over to Eve and Claire. “I’ve warned you, Dad. Don’t do this. Not today. I won’t turn you in, but I’m telling you, if you don’t back off, you’re dead.”

“I don’t take threats,” Frank said. “Not from you.”

“You’re an idiot,” Shane said. “And I tried.”

He got back in the car, on the passenger-side front seat where Michael had been. Eve scrambled behind the wheel, and Claire in the back.

Eve reversed.

Frank stepped out into the road ahead of them, a scary-looking man in black leather with his straggling hair plastered around his face. Add in the big hunting knife, and cue the scary music.

Eve let up on the gas. “No,” Shane said, and moved his left foot over to jam it on top of hers. “Go. He wants you to stop.”

“Don’t! I can’t miss him, no—”

But it was too late. Frank was staring into the headlights, squarely in the center of the hood, and he was getting closer and closer.

Frank Collins threw himself out of the way at the last possible second, Eve swerved wildly in the opposite direction to miss him, and somehow, they didn’t kill Shane’s dad.

“What the hell are you doing?” Eve yelled at Shane. She was shaking all over. So was Shane. “You want to run him over, do it on your own time! God!”

“Look behind you,” Shane whispered.

There were people coming after them. A lot of people. They’d been hiding in the alley, Claire guessed. They had guns, and now they opened fire. The car shuddered, and the back window exploded into cracks, then fell with a crash all over Claire’s neck.

“Get up here!” Shane said, and grabbed her hands to haul her into the front seat. “Keep your head down!”

Eve had sunk down on the driver’s side, barely keeping her eyes above the dashboard. She was panting hoarsely, panicked, and more gunshots were rattling the back of the car. Something hit the front window, too, adding more cracks and a round, backward splash of a hole.

“Faster!” Shane yelled. Eve hit the gas hard, and whipped around a slower-moving van. The firing ceased, at least for now. “You see why I didn’t want you to stop?”

“Okay, your father is officially off my Christmas list!” Eve yelled. “Oh my God, look at my car!”

Shane barked out a laugh. “Yeah,” he agreed. “That’s what’s important.”

“It’s better than thinking about what would have happened,” Eve said. “If Michael had been with us—”

Claire thought about the mobs Richard had talked about, and the dead vampires, and felt sick. “They’d have dragged him off,” she said. “They’d have killed him.”

Michael had been right about Shane’s dad, but then, Claire had never really doubted it. Neither had Shane, from the sick certainty on his face. He wiped his eyes with his forearm, which really didn’t help much; they were all dripping wet, from head to toe.

“Let’s just get to the building,” Shane said. “We can’t do much until we find Richard.”

Only it wasn’t that simple, even getting in. The underground parking was crammed full of cars, parked haphazardly at every angle. As Eve inched through the shadows, looking for any place to go, she shook her head. “If we do manage to get people to leave, they won’t be able to take their cars. Everybody’s blocked in,” she said. “This is massively screwed up.” Claire, for her part, thought some of it seemed deliberate, not just panic. “Okay, I’m going to pull it against the wall and hope we can get out if we need to.”

The elevator was already locked down, the doors open but the lights off and buttons unresponsive. They took the stairs at a run.

The first-floor door seemed to be locked, until Shane pushed on it harder, and then it creaked open against a flood of protests.

The vestibule was full of people.

Morganville’s City Hall wasn’t all that large, at least not here in the lobby area. There was a big, sweeping staircase leading up, all grand marble and polished wood, and glass display cases taking up part of one wall. The License Bureau was off to the right: six old-time bank windows, with bars, all closed. Next to each window was a brass plaque that read what the windows were supposed to deliver: RESIDENTIAL LICENSING, CAR REGISTRATION, ZONING CHANGE REQUESTS, SPECIAL PERMITS, TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS, FINE PAYMENTS, TAXES, CITY SERVICES.

But not today.

The lobby was jammed with people. Families, mostly—mothers and fathers with kids, some as young as infants. Claire didn’t see a single vampire in the crowd, not even Michael. At the far end, a yellow Civil Defense sign indicated that the door led to a Safe Shelter, with a tornado graphic next to it. A policeman with a bullhorn was yelling for order, not that he was getting any; people were pushing, shoving, and shouting at one another. “The shelter is now at maximum capacity! Please be calm!”

“Not good,” Shane said. There was no sign of Richard, although there were at least ten uniformed police officers trying to manage the crowd. “Upstairs?”

“Upstairs,” Eve agreed, and they squeezed back into the fire stairs and ran up to the next level. The sign in the stairwell said that this floor contained the mayor’s office, sheriff’s office, city council chambers, and something called, vaguely, Records.

The door was locked. Shane rattled it and banged for entrance, but nobody came to the rescue.

“Guess we go up,” he said.

The third floor had no signs in the stairwell at all, but there was a symbol—the Founder’s glyph, like the one on Claire’s bracelet. Shane turned the knob, but again, the door didn’t open. “I didn’t think they could do that to fire stairs,” Eve said.

“Yeah, call a cop.” Shane looked up the steps. “One more floor, and then it’s just the roof, and I’m thinking that’s not a good idea, the roof.”

“Wait.” Claire studied the Founder’s glyph for a few seconds, then shrugged and reached out to turn the knob.

Something clicked, and it turned. The door opened.

“How did you . . . ?”

Claire held up her wrist, and the gold bracelet. “It was worth a shot. I thought, maybe with a gold bracelet —”

“Genius. Go on, get inside,” Shane said, and hustled them in. The door clicked shut behind them, and locked with a snap of metal. The hallway seemed dark, after the fluorescent lights in the stairs, and that was because the lights were dimmed way down, the carpet was dark, and so was the wood paneling.

It reminded Claire eerily of the hallway where they’d rescued Myrnin, only there weren’t as many doors opening off it. Shane took the lead—of course—but the doors they could open were just simple offices, nothing fancy about them at all.

And then there was a door at the end of the hall with the Founder’s Symbol etched on the polished brass doorknob. Shane tried it, shook his head, and motioned for Claire.

It opened easily at her touch.

Inside were—apartments. Chambers? Claire didn’t know what else to call them; there was an entire complex of rooms leading from one central area.

It was like stepping into a whole different world, and Claire could tell that it had once been beautiful: a fairy- tale room, of rich satin on the walls, Persian rugs, delicate white and gold furniture.