Black Dawn

“Speak for yourself. It describes my whole life.” He reached out and took her in his arms, a sudden and unexpected crush that drove her breath right away. “Except for you.” He kissed her, and despite everything, despite the hurry and the vampires and the draug and the doom hanging over them, it felt like sunlight shining right through her skin, melting her bones into soft, pliable gold. It couldn’t have lasted long, that kiss, but it felt eternal to her, as if it might echo forever. “I can handle anything now.”

“Well,” she whispered with their lips still touching, “as long as you have a flamethrower.”

He laughed, and let go … but kept hold of her hand.

Myrnin led them into a room that had obviously started life as another ballroom … but in the course of what could have been only hours, or at most a day, he had managed to transform it into a chaotic mess that reminded Claire strongly of his original laboratory. Books were stacked, scattered, and dropped everywhere, some open to a possibly important reference, or maybe just opened at random. He’d dragged furniture in to improvise work space, with limited success, and he’d taken the shades off the elegant lamps to let the bright incandescent bulbs glare freely. The room smelled strongly of oil and metal, and … burned hair?

Myrnin strode across the deep maroon carpet (now liberally smudged with spots of dirt, oil, and who knew what else) to what had once been a giant sideboard, except that he’d ripped it away from the wall and shoved it into the middle of the room. It held about a dozen books, scraps of metal, bars of silver, and nails; he swept the whole thing clean with one dramatic gesture and then unfurled a set of blueprints across the lavish marble top— already stained from at least one chemical spill.

It was a map of Morganville. A standard-issue civilian kind of map, but there was a clear plastic overlay on it, marked with careful, precise handwriting and colored dots—Myrnin’s writing, though far more controlled than Claire had ever seen it. The entire side of town from the border up to the TPU gates had been colored in flat black, simply marking it out.

Draug territory.

“Now,” he said, and set random pieces of junk at the four corners of the map to hold it open. “Obviously, we’re here.” He pointed to a red dot overlay on the building at Founder’s Square. “This is the police perimeter around us.” A solid red line, as precisely drawn as with a compass. “This is the outer ring of our defenses.” Another ring, but this one of individual red dots, spread evenly. It reached as far as Lot Street, where the Glass House—their home—sat empty. “There is nothing within this circle that has not been drained of standing water, or salted with silver if we couldn’t drain it, so the draug cannot get here easily.”

“The rain—,” Shane began, but Myrnin cut him off.

“They can use the rain only when it is heavy and constant, and even then it’s a risk; by spreading themselves so thin, they lose many parts into the dry soil. It’s a bit of a kamikaze attack, to put it in human terms, and they dare not employ that method to attack us here, in our stronghold; there’s no catch basin for them to use that hasn’t been treated and prepared against them. But our problem is outside of this circle.” He tapped the other two-thirds of the town, where black dots and puddles of dark ink marred the surface. “I’ve tracked all the reports I could find. Claire, you said the draug came after you just now, correct?”

She nodded. “Came after Theo and Naomi, probably. But there were a lot of them.”

“Not so many now,” Shane said, and yeah, that was smug. “Flamethrower.”

“Still, worrisome,” Myrnin said, and marked the map where Shane pointed. “That is far out of the area that Oliver predicted they would occupy. Could you hear the singing?”

“Naomi had that noise cancellation device, but Theo—” Claire’s throat closed up on the words, but she forced them out anyway. “Theo had needles in his ears. To keep himself from hearing.”

Myrnin’s eyebrows climbed again, and he tapped the marker against his lips. “An interesting tactic. Perhaps one we should think about as emergency equipment to be issued to all personnel.”

“Ugh. No. Human eardrums don’t grow back, Myrnin.”

“Oh, right. Well, just the vampires, then.” He scribbled a note on a random piece of paper—actually, over the printing in a book—and went on. “Oliver believes the draug are consolidating their position here, in the occupied areas, but I think he is very wrong. Look at the blue marks.”

For a few seconds they didn’t seem to make any sense; it was Michael who said quietly, “Bodies of water.”

“Fountains,” Myrnin said, and tapped a couple of spots. “I’ve sent operatives to shut off any flow to or from them, and poison them; Oliver discounts them strategically, and he’s likely correct. But our biggest issue is obviously here.”

That was a large blue dot. Very large.

“What the hell is that?” Shane asked, frowning. “Morganville High?”

“No, that’s taken care of,” Myrnin said, and tapped another dot. “The pool there has been drained and filled in. No, this is a far different sort of problem altogether.”

“That’s the water treatment plant,” Michael said. “Out on the edge of town.”

“There are exposed pools of water there, and inflow and outflow controls for the pipes in the city. If I were Magnus, I would move my headquarters immediately to that as the most strategic point. No doubt he has already done so, or is in the process.”

“You’re kidding. He’s hiding in sewage?” Shane asked.

“Not sewage, no, though that gets treated through this operation as well. What is in those exposed pools is commonly known as gray water—the water from baths, showers, sinks, washing machines, and such. It needs treatment to be clean for drinking again, but it doesn’t contain sewage. By preference, this is where we will find the draug. Not in the sewage tanks. Even the draug have some standards.” Myrnin shook his head slowly. “The difficulty is that there are two necessary tasks to be performed. First, of course, we must attack the draug directly in those pools, if they exist there—and Oliver does not believe they do. He says he has sent operatives and they have reported it clear.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“I think the draug are more than capable of strategy,” Myrnin said, “and strategically, they are in a defensive mode at this point. We’ve hurt them; they have not overwhelmed us as quickly as they’d hoped, and they can’t attack us directly at Founder’s Square. So they’re hiding until they regain their numbers, and I believe they will conceal themselves here, at the treatment plant. It is a natural stronghold for them—they can infest this maze of iron and water like a horde of starving cockroaches, and they’ll be just as hard to anticipate and to kill in such close quarters.”

“Wow,” Shane said. “You really know how to drum up team spirit. Did you print up Team Total Fail jerseys, too?”

Myrnin gave him an entirely crazy smile. “Would you be surprised if I had?” He threw another large sheet of paper out over the map. It was a blueprint. “There are two phases to this operation, if there is to be one. The pools are a direct attack, but there is something else that is entirely necessary before that can occur: we must stop them from easily traveling through the pipes in Morganville. Right now, they have easy access through those pipes into homes, businesses, all of the abandoned structures. The university. We cannot allow them to have such easy mobility.”

“Okay, it isn’t manly to admit it, but I don’t speak blueprint,” Shane said. “So what are we talking about exactly?”

“We need to shut off the water system,” Myrnin said. “There are emergency cutoff valves that will stop the flow of water in the pipes throughout Morganville, trapping the draug where they are if they’ve infested them, and stranding those at the treatment plant there, unable to retreat.”

“It’s still raining,” Shane pointed out.

“True, but in this desert it can’t last forever. The only reason they attempted it was that it was the only way they could reach Morganville at all. Amelie chose this town specifically for its isolation, dry climate, and lack of standing water. It’s served us well, until now.”

Myrnin, Claire thought, was sounding remarkably together, but he also looked tired. She could see the bruised skin under his eyes, and the slight tremor in his hands. Even bipolar vampires needed sleep from time to time, and he was well past his recommended safe dosage of stress.

Michael was staring at the blueprints as if he really understood what he was seeing. He was even nodding. “Right,” he said. “So it looks like there’s a main control room here”—he tapped the plans, then traced a line—“and