Black Dawn

bending, twisting, shuddering, reaching.

The draug were after him, but he was giving them a game.

“We have to go faster,” Claire said. “Come on.” She swarmed up the next ladder and looked in the pool.

A dead face looked back at her, eyes pale and blind in the dim light.

She screamed, and her scream echoed and echoed and echoed through the dark, loud as an alarm, but she didn’t care because oh God, she’d been wrong …

“Move!” Eve shouted in her ear. She’d climbed up next to her, and had her arm around Claire’s waist. “Go on, get down! Now!”

“He’s dead,” Claire whispered. “Oh, God, Eve—”

Eve gulped, visibly gathered her courage, and turned her gaze on the dead face in the pool. And then she said, “That’s not Shane.”

“But—” A bubble of hope rose up, fragile as glass. “Are you sure—”

“I’m sure,” Eve said. “That’s not him. Come on. We have to move it. If they didn’t hear that—”

They jumped down, landed with simultaneous thumps on the metal grating, and headed for the next tank.

But just ahead, the darkness rippled.

And then a white face emerged from that blackness, eyes that weren’t eyes, a mouth that moved all the wrong ways, that wasn’t human at all except when she looked at it straight on.

Magnus. There were others with him, but she could somehow tell when it was him; the others looked like bad photocopies. They didn’t have the same … gravity.

Magnus said, “You. The girl with clear eyes.”

“Yeah, me. You want me,” Claire said. “Because I can tell who you are. I always could. I just didn’t know it. So give Shane back, and you can have me.”

“Child,” he almost purred. “I can have you in any case.” Magnus’s whole face distorted into something so monstrous and evil that she screamed, couldn’t help it, and all the others copied him like reflections, because that’s all they were, shards and fragments of him.

They were linked, and somehow that was important, vital, but she didn’t have the time to think about it.

She fired at him.

The shotgun kicked hard at her shoulder, and a stinging fog of gunpowder blew back over her, but she was too late; he’d read her intentions and melted back into the others, and the ones who were splattered weren’t him, weren’t the master.

And then he was gone, sinking through the grating.

“Time’s up,” Eve said. “We have to find Shane now.”

CHAPTER NINE SHANE

I was nearly gone. I could feel it now, how my body felt light and weirdly empty, how my muscles ached. My head pounded harder and faster—low blood pressure, less oxygen getting to where it counted. The water (not really water) around me was a dull crimson now, and it reminded me of terrible things, of opening a motel bathroom door and a tub and my mom’s slack white face and the color of the watery blood around her. She’d had her clothes on, I remembered suddenly. And she hadn’t filled the tub all the way, only about halfway.

I was thinking about it too much, because it started to become real, like those fantasies I’d already rejected. All of a sudden I was there, standing on cold tile, staring at my mother, and her papery eyelids opened, her eyes were the color of ice water as she said, “If you let go, it won’t hurt so much, sweetheart. Claire’s not coming back for you. Nobody ever comes back for you.”

“Mom—” I whispered. It was her voice, just like I remembered … sad and quiet and disappointed. Maybe a little scared. Mom had been scared most of the time. “Mom, I’m sorry, I can’t just give up.”

“You can’t do a lot of things, Shane,” she said. It sounded kind, that voice, but it wasn’t. “You couldn’t save me. You couldn’t save your sister. And you can’t save yourself, either. It’s too late for you. You have to let go, because that’s the only thing that will help stop the pain now. I’m your mother. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“Claire’s going to come back for me.”

“Claire’s a dream, too. She never loved you. Nobody ever really loved you, sweetie. You’re just not built that way. Why would a smart, pretty girl like that want you? You made it up, the way you made up all that other nonsense, about getting married and having a little baby and being happy. Because that will never happen either, son.”

That sounded like my dad, not my mom. He’d always been the one telling me I was hopeless, helpless, worthless. She’d quietly tried to make me feel better, not worse. Until the end.

But the terrible thing about what she was saying was that somewhere deep inside me, the black monster that lived there actually agreed with her. Good things didn’t happen to me, because I didn’t deserve them. All I was made for was fighting, right? For trying, and failing, to protect other people.

“Claire died,” my mother said, and sat up in the tub. The red water swirled around her. “Claire is dead. All this is just you refusing to admit any of that. You’ve gone crazy—don’t you understand that? It’s very sad, but you can’t hold on to fantasy any longer. You know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. It sounded faint, and lost. “No, that’s wrong. We brought her back. She’s alive.”

“Of course you didn’t bring her back. That’s ridiculous. She died, and they took her body away. And you took your father’s gun and you shot yourself, and you’ve been dying ever since. You want to know the truth? She never loved you. She loved that vampire. Myrnin.”

“No.” I was backing up now, and the tile felt sharp and wet under my shoes. No, not shoes. I was barefoot. It felt as if I was standing on broken glass, and the pain helped, somehow. Helped me remember that this room was wrong, that the walls of that bathroom in that cheap motel hadn’t been dripping with water, that my mom hadn’t opened her eyes and said these terrible things, that it was him.

All this was Magnus, talking through my dead mother’s mouth.

“No.” I said it again, louder. “Get out of my head, you freak.”

“Son—”

I charged forward, grabbed the edge of the claw-footed tub and tipped it over on its side, away from me. There was a rush of bloody water around me, and then I was in the tub—no, in water, staring up at cloudy glass, and I was fighting it, banging my hands against the cover that held me in. I left bloody handprints on it, and the blows were weak, but it meant something.

So did the bobbing light that I could see coming from the side.

My face was out of the water, the liquid, and I pulled in a breath and yelled. It came out a weakened croak, but I tried again, shouted harder, and battered the glass again.

Claire. Claire came back. But wait, maybe that wasn’t right, maybe I’d made her up, made it all up, maybe she’d never existed, or maybe she had died, or maybe she didn’t love me at all …

But it wasn’t Claire who found me.

The face was familiar, but not her. And it wasn’t a girl. A larger, more squared-off face I recognized. Dick, I thought finally. Dick Morrell. To be fair, I guessed, I really ought to call him Richard now, if he was here to save my life. It sucked to be rescued by a Morrell, after all the energy I’d put into hating the whole family.

This couldn’t be a fantasy, because no way in hell would I ever fantasize about a Morrell showing up to save me.

Richard wiped moisture from the glass and saw me, and from his expression what he saw must not have been pretty. He yelled something, and then Hannah Moses was there, too, and somebody else, God, was that Monica? Maybe I was hallucinating after all. The three of them shoved the glass