Black Dawn

Wake up.

We pulled to a stop, and the vampires sitting behind me opened the emergency door; those of us nearby piled out through it, and the vampires moved in a blur to the shelter of the nearest shade while the humans took their time sorting out where we were.

It was Morganville High.

The old pile hadn’t improved from the last time I’d been walking the halls and ditching class. It had been ugly when it had been built back in the 1950s, and hadn’t gotten any prettier over the years. Solid, square red brick, with patches where people (including me) had tagged it that had been covered over with white paint (all the damage, none of the art). The sign outside had a picture of the school mascot, the Viper; we’d all known how stupidly ironic that was, but right now I kind of liked how his faded plastic fangs flashed in the sunlight. The lettering on the sign itself read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, but they weren’t renovating. It was just closed, like everything else in Morganville.

With no students running around, it looked and felt eerily dead. Water dripped from the gutters on the roof, but slowly; the gushing rains were long gone now, and the puddles in the yard were dried to a thin crust of wet sand under the sparse, struggling grass. Behind the school was the football field, the single most important thing in any small Texas town, but we weren’t headed there, of course.

The vamps shattered one of the big steel-wire-reinforced windows in the shadows, and began piling inside. I joined up with Michael and Captain Obvious. “Where the hell are we going?” Captain Obvious asked, which was— heh—a perfectly obvious question, really.

And I knew the answer, without even thinking about it. “The pool.” MHS had its own indoor pool. I’d been on the swim team, so I knew all about that. It wasn’t a great pool, and in retrospect I was surprised the vampires had been persuaded to allow one to be built at all, but I supposed they’d figured one more enclosed indoor pool wouldn’t hurt.

No. They closed down the pool. Drained it. Filled it in. It’s not there anymore. Wake up, idiot.

The voice in my head wouldn’t shut up. Of course the pool was there. Now the surviving draug had withdrawn to this one spot, this place where I’d swum meets and won prizes. It was a personal place to me, and they’d violated it.

They were trapped.

So are you!

They were stranded, because of the closed valves on the pipes and the silver nitrate in the water.

Wake up, Shane!

I shot my first draug halfway through the hallway; he was hiding in a classroom and oozed out of the shadows to grab a vampire by the back of the neck. The vamp had twisted free, and as soon as she was out of range I yelled and fired, and the silver shotgun pellets ripped the draug apart in a splatter of colorless liquid that smoked on the floor. It tried to reform, but another vampire—Myrnin, in his black leather—took what looked like a salt shaker from his pocket and tapped out some metallic powder into the mess.

Silver. It set the scraps of the draug on fire, and when the blaze was done, there was nothing but a damp smear on the floor.

Myrnin bared his fangs in a fierce grin, and we went on.

Nothing had changed in the school since I’d last been inside—the same lockers, dented and scratched; the same classroom doors; the same trophies in the case. I’d won at least two of them.

They were still there, with my name shining on them.

You never won any trophies, Shane. Of course I had. I’d always wanted to win them, and I had. This is a fantasy—don’t you get that? Wake up!

About a hundred draug later, we reached the pool, and we hadn’t lost a single one of our party along the way. But the pool was a different story. Firing shotguns loaded with silver in a room full of vampires was pretty damn dangerous, so only the first and second ranks got to have the firepower; the rest of us had to wait until the first rank had to reload, and then we pushed forward, dropped to one knee, and fired steadily at the mass of draug—the identical faces, the bland and empty not-people with things shivering inside them—as they approached. A second rank fired over our heads. My ears went quickly numb from the pounding, shattering roars of the guns, but I didn’t care. What I cared about was making every single shot count.

I wanted Magnus. I wanted the bastard who’d started this, who owned it, who had killed Claire and nearly killed me along with her, even though I’d gotten her back.

Magnus, of course, didn’t risk himself.

Myrnin figured this out, because that was what Myrnin did; like Claire, he was a sideways thinker, and while the rest of us Joe Average idiots blasted away at the draug in front of us, he stepped away toward the edge of the pool and crouched down. He had a beaker in his hand, glittering and full to the brim with deadly silver and he set it down to pry the cap loose.

“He’s in the water!” Myrnin shouted. “Keep them busy—”

But he didn’t have time to finish whatever he was going to say, because Magnus reached up out of the water, grabbed him, and dragged him down.

I dropped my shotgun and ran for the beaker, pried the top off, and emptied it into the water.

The silver inside sluiced out into the water in a spreading, toxic stream. Myrnin had hold of something that had to be Magnus, the master draug, the first draug, and he was pulling him relentlessly toward the silver.

And into it.

I couldn’t see Myrnin at all now, because the water went from murky to black, swirling with vivid veins of silver. And then boiling.

The vampires were just standing there, even Oliver, staring down into the water. Nobody was moving. Captain Obvious wasn’t going to go racing to the rescue, either.

I’m not going to lie; I could have saved Myrnin. I was probably the only one who could have, who might have survived diving into that boiling, raging pool where the draug were dying.

But I didn’t try.

I left him there to die.

Just like he left you. Remember? Left you to be eaten. You need to wake up. NOW.

Nobody had left me behind. I was fine. I was just fine.

It’s you in there. You’re being consumed, Shane. Eaten. Can’t you feel it?

I did, for an agonizing second of utter horror. Felt it stripping me bare. Felt the invasion.

And then the calm settled over me, and it was all okay.

Everything was okay.

Always.

The clock ran faster after that.

The time between the pool and Claire’s eighteenth birthday was a gauzy blur; I didn’t remember much, but nothing much happened to remember, either. Amelie got better. Vampires came back. Morganville got rebuilt. Nothing ever changes, really—that’s how Morganville is. It just … exists.

I was just happy. We were all … happy. Claire cried over Myrnin, but she was happy he had saved us, happy he had died a hero.

The hero of Morganville.

The martyr.

You’re no martyr. You’re a fighter. So fight. NOW. Stop this!

Everything was fine.

One year to the day from their not-so-successful engagement party, Michael and Eve finally tied the knot, in the church with Father Joe presiding. Amelie gave her blessing, and I had to wear a tuxedo and a tie. Eve wore bloodred. Of course she did. Claire was the one who looked like a bride, really; she was wearing some other color, but I didn’t really notice except to see the light in her eyes and the smile on her lips as Michael and Eve kissed under the flower arch. Eve threw the bouquet, and as usual, her throwing arm sucked, especially backward,