Black Dawn

Adele must have spotted us, because her gunfire in our direction stopped, but behind me I heard the close percussive booms of my new friend’s shotguns going off as draug lurched out of the rain from the left and the right. Don’t stop, don’t stop, no matter what, don’t stop …

I ran directly into a draug.

Literally.

It was just forming itself out of the rain, and behind that human form was something vile and monstrous and formless, twitching and oozing.

I didn’t have the time to stop, even if I’d wanted to. I don’t know which of us was more surprised, actually.

I ran right into it, and through it.

It felt like half-congealed gelatin, or the thickest possible slimy mud. I retched at the feel of it on my skin, and it burned hard and fast, like an acid bath … but then I was out of it, and the rain, even draug-infested, was cleaner, and sluicing the ick away.

And then I was at the edges of the puddle.

A draug crawled up out of it, but passed me, heading for the vampire behind me. He shot it in half. I was really glad for excellent vampire aim, because my hands were trembling hard now, and I was scared to death, horribly and miserably terrified, and I felt like I was screaming and I probably was, but I managed to bring my hands up and smash the two jars together, hard enough to pop the glass.

Silver rained down into the water, and where it touched, the water turned black, rotten and foul with dead draug.

The singing must have changed pitch, because even through the earplugs I could hear the screaming.

A hand shoved me down flat, and a shotgun clattered to the pavement next to me. My new vamp friend was still upright, standing over me now, firing steadily as draug tried to escape from the pond’s poisonous waters.

I got up to my knees and fired, too, choking on the stench of gunpowder and the moldy flavor of the draug.

Finally, the rain eased, then puttered to a stop, and Adele fired the last shot into the pulpy mass of a draug, blasting it into slime …

… And it was over.

Me, and the vampires.

Victorious.

My new friend reached down and offered me a hand up. I took it, breathless and shaking, and the help turned into a handshake.

Adele gave me a cool assessment, raised an eyebrow, and mouthed, Not bad.

Just like that, I was part of the team.

Lucky for us, the rest of the trip wasn’t quite so eventful.

CHAPTER SIX CLAIRE

“She should be back by now,” Michael said, checking his cell phone as they followed Myrnin out of the lab and into yet another maze of hallways. “Claire. You text her.”

“Her cell won’t work,” Claire said. “The human network’s still down, except for police and emergency workers.” The vampire network was, of course, fully operational … at least for now. “Maybe one of the guys with her …?”

“I don’t know who they are,” Michael said, and frowned at the screen. “She ought to be back.”

What he really meant was that he ought to be with her, Claire thought, but she didn’t say that out loud. “She’s okay,” she assured him. “Eve knows her way around town, just like you do. Just like Shane.” It was true, but she knew it wasn’t particularly comforting. The draug represented an entirely new dimension of danger that not even Morganville natives were fully equipped to handle. “She’s got loads of vamp firepower.”

“Yeah,” he said softly, and for a moment she saw a flash of red in his blue eyes. “Look how that turned out before.”

Ouch. She had a sudden vivid vision of him crouched over Eve’s motionless body, his fangs in her neck. The look on his face, the desperate and unholy joy of it … it haunted her. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to be in his head right now, or for that matter, in Eve’s. That moment had destroyed all the expectations they might have had about themselves.

“She’ll be okay,” Shane said. “Let’s worry about us, bro. Because no matter how much of a little operation Myrnin wants to tell us this is, it ain’t.”

Michael nodded. He still looked pale and miserable, and he wasn’t going to get much better until Eve got back … and maybe not even then, if things were as bad as she feared.

Maybe mortal danger was the best thing for him right now.

It was still grudgingly daylight outside, but they didn’t go out in it … not at first. Myrnin said it wasn’t necessary. Instead, he led them down a maze of corridors into a storeroom, small and dark, that stank of chemicals. Claire remembered it. It seemed a whole lot smaller with the five of them packed inside, but Myrnin squirmed past her, shut the door, and flipped on the overhead bulb, which swung in true horror-movie fashion back and forth above their heads. Just barely above Shane’s, in fact; he hunched to avoid it.

“Great,” Shane said. “Look, I’d rather not be on janitorial duty. I have allergies to cleaners.”

“And to cleaning,” Michael said.

“Look who’s talking. Didn’t they do one of those Animal Planet documentaries about the roaches in your room?”

Myrnin gave a frustrated growl and crossed to the other side of the room, next to the industrial shelving that held bleach, gloves, scrub brushes, and other things that Claire didn’t think were going to be of much use against the draug. There was one uncluttered wall, and he faced it, took a shallow breath, and closed his eyes.

The wall wavered, as if a heat wave had passed over it, but then it solidified again into just … a wall, plain white, with the usual scuffs and dings any wall got over time. Claire poked it experimentally. Paint over drywall over boards. “I don’t think that’s working,” she said. “Isn’t Frank still, you know, on duty?”

“On and off,” Myrnin said. He tried again, with the same results—a flicker that might have signaled the establishment of a portal to another location, but too brief and unstable to step through. If it went where it was supposed to go, which might not have been the case. “Frank has been unreliable of late, to be perfectly honest.”

Frank was the town’s computer nerve center—literally. He was a brain wired into Myrnin’s computer in his lab, a sinister mixture of steampunkish brilliance and vampiric blood. Frank had started out a Morganville native, then left town, then came back at the head of a motorcycle gang to try to take it over. That hadn’t gone well, and he’d ended up a vampire himself … the last thing he’d ever wanted to be. From there, he’d become a brain in a jar, mainly because Myrnin had needed one and Frank’s had been not quite dead enough.

Oh, and Frank Collins was—had been? still was?—Shane’s father, a fact that had haunted Claire for a long time since she’d discovered what Myrnin had done, since Shane had thought his father was completely dead and gone. The discovery hadn’t gone over well, and even now, at the mention of his dad’s name, Shane’s face went stiff and blank, as if he’d reached for a mask. Self-defense. Frank hadn’t exactly been Father of the Year even before he’d taken up running with bikers and hunting vampires, much less become one.

“What’s wrong with Frank?” Shane asked. “Too much vodka in his blood smoothies? Or is he just being his usual bastard self?”

“Shane,” Claire murmured, half in reproof and half in sympathy. There really had never been all that much about his dad that she could find to like, and she tried to find something good in everyone. Frank had been drunk, abusive, and angry when he was a human; as a vampire, he’d been mostly suicidal from rage over his conversion. He’d hurt Shane, a lot, but a son never stopped loving a father, she supposed. Even if he didn’t want to.

“He’s been having trouble adapting,” Myrnin said. “I fear Frank won’t be able to bear the strain of disembodiment for too much longer. I’ll have to disconnect him and look for a new subject unless he stabilizes