Kiss of Death

with many better than you. And they all died, friend.”

He was looking pink from exposure to the sun, but not burned. Not yet. Uncomfortable, maybe. The guard’s eyes darted around, looking for support, and found it in the form of two more cowboy-hatted men racing to the rescue.

With shotguns.

Claire threw herself forward, throwing her arms wide. Eve let out a warning cry, but Claire stepped in front of Oliver as the shotguns came up. “Wait! ” she yelled. “Just wait a second! He’s with us!”

The shotguns focused on her.

Oh, crap.

“You’re running with the bloodsuckers?” one of them said in a soft, dangerous voice. “Little girl like you?”

“He’s not like—like those things at the courthouse,” she said. She put her hands up in the surrender position and took a step toward them. “We’re not supposed to be here. We just want to leave, okay? All of us. We want out of town.”

“Well, you ain’t leaving town,” the guy holding Eve said. “You or any of your fanged little friends. We’re not letting this thing spread any farther. Blacke is under quarantine.”

The heavy library doors opened, and a small, gray-haired woman stepped out. She didn’t look much like a leader—Claire wouldn’t have picked her out of a crowd at first glance—but immediately, everybody looked toward her, and Claire felt the gravity of the scene shift in her direction.

“Charley?” the woman asked. “Why are you pointing a shotgun at this pretty little girl? I heard somebody say she was a live one.”

“She’s with them!”

“There are no collaborators, Charley. You know that. Either she’s infected, or she’s not.There’s no in- between. Now lower your gun, please.” The woman’s pleasant voice took on a steely undertone. “Lower it. Now.”

“That one behind her, he’s infected,” Charley said. “Guaranteed.”

“Actually,” Oliver said, “in the sense you mean it, I’m not infected. Not in the way you’re thinking.”

The older woman, without so much as a pause, un-slung a strap from her shoulder, loaded a crossbow bolt, and fired it right into Oliver’s chest.

He toppled over and hit the ground with a heavy thud. Claire screamed and ran to his side. When she reached for the bolt to pull it out, the woman grabbed her arm and pulled her back, struggling. She shoved Claire at one of her guards, who held her securely. “You know what to do,” she said to another one of them, nodding toward Oliver. “Let’s get these kids inside. I don’t want them to see this.”

“No, you don’t understand!” Claire shouted. “You can’t—”

“I understand that he’s a vampire, and for whatever twisted reason, you want to protect him,” the woman said. “Now be quiet. You’re not in any danger here.”

Claire thought about all the vampires locked in the back of the truck. Michael.

She couldn’t tell them about that. If they were going to kill Oliver, just like that, she couldn’t imagine what they might do to a whole, confined load of vampires. It’d probably be way too easy. The sun was sliding steadily toward the horizon. Maybe, when it was blocked by the eastern buildings and there was enough shadow, they could get out of the truck and scatter.

The woman looked at her sharply. “You seem to be thinking very hard,” she said. “About what?”

“Nothing,” Claire said.

“I see. What’s your name?” When Claire didn’t answer, the woman sighed. “All right. I’m Mrs. Grant. I’m the librarian. I’m what passes for authority in Blacke these days, since all our peace officers and elected officials are dead. Now, let’s be friendly. I’ve told you my name. What’s yours?”

“Claire,” she said.

“And where are you from, Claire?”

Claire looked her right in the eyes and said, “None of your business.”

Mrs. Grant’s graying eyebrows hitched up, but under them, her faded green eyes didn’t seem surprised. “All right. Let’s get you and your friends inside, and you can tell me why you thought that vampire was someone you ought to be caring about.”

Claire looked back over her shoulder as she was pushed/pulled along. Oliver was being carried away, limp as a bag of laundry.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

The inside of the library was cool and dark, lit mostly by the natural sunlight trickling in the windows, although there were some camp-style fluorescent and LED lanterns scattered around, and even some old-fashioned oil lamps on the tables. The Blacke library was larger than Claire would have expected, with rows and rows of books, and lots of rooms off to the sides. In the middle was a kind of command center, with a small desk, a laptop computer, and some kind of small pedal-powered generator. Ranked on the shelves nearby were weapons, including a pile of silver chains—jewelry, Claire guessed, ransacked from all over town. There were a lot of first aid supplies, too.

Inside the library there were about twenty or thirty people; it was hard to see, because they were scattered around on cots between the aisles of books. Claire heard a small voice, then someone crying; it sounded like a little kid, maybe four or five. “What is this?” she asked, looking around. Mrs. Grant led her over to a long reading table and pulled out a chair for her.

“This is what’s left of our town,” she said. “The survivors. We’re a tough bunch, I’ll tell you that.”

“But”—Claire licked her lips and settled into the seat—“what happened here?”

Mrs. Grant waited while the others—Eve, Shane, and Jason—were deposited in chairs around the table, with varying degrees of gentleness. Shane was furious, and he looked as if he were seriously thinking of grabbing a fistful of weapons from the racks. Mrs. Grant evidently saw that, because she pointed at two of her burly cowboy guards and had them stand behind Shane, blocking him in at the table.

“Blacke’s never been what you might call a cross-roads,” Mrs. Grant said. “Most folks living here were born here. Their families have been here forever; we don’t see new people real often out here.” That was, in fact, pretty much like Morganville, minus the attraction of Texas Prairie University. It was pretty much like every other small town in the area, too. Claire nodded. “One night, we got us some visitors. An old man in a suit, and his niece and nephew. Foreign people. French, maybe.”

Claire looked at Eve and Shane. Eve mouthed Bishop. Confirmation for what they already had guessed—Mr. Bishop had hit Blacke on his way through to Morganville.

And he’d had fun.

“They stayed at the Iron Lily Inn,” Mrs. Grant continued. “It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a hotel. Or had, anyway. Mrs. Gonzalez owned it. She made the best apple pie in the world, too.” She slowly shook her head. “Next morning, Mrs. Gonzalez was missing; never showed up at the school—she worked in the office up there. Sheriff John went around to the hotel and found her dead. No sign of those ... people.”

That couldn’t be the whole story, Claire thought; she knew how vampires were made, and if Mrs. Gonzalez had been drained to death, she wouldn’t have come back. So she just waited. Mrs. Grant seemed to want to take her time, and Claire was trying hard not to think about what might be happening outside, with Oliver. Morley had run off, she supposed. And she had no idea what would happen to the vampires still in the back of the truck.

“We thought the murder of Mrs. Gonzalez was the end of it—shocking, first serious trouble this town had seen in close to thirty years, but still, the end. And then the next night Miss Hanover just vanished from her store —gas station, right up the street. Best we can tell, those two women were the first victims. We know the three strangers left town that night; somebody saw them driving that big, black car of theirs like a bat out of hell. Didn’t matter. They left this behind.”

Mrs. Grant looked down at her hands, which were spread out on the table in front of her. Strong and scarred, they suggested she hadn’t always been a librarian. “It started slow. People started disappearing, maybe one every few weeks. Disappearing, or dying. Then it got bad, fast, just—in days, it all of a sudden seemed like half the town was gone. Sheriff John didn’t call for help soon enough. Next thing we knew, we saw them for the first time, in force. Terrible things, Claire. Terrible things happened. And we had to do terrible things to survive.”