Black Dawn

Moses, which confirmed her intuition that there was more going on between the two of them than just professional courtesy. He even threw her a smile, and it was a sweet one. Hannah didn’t smile back. She continued to look concerned. “Everything okay, folks?”

“The car’s trashed,” Michael said, “but then again, I think it was worth it. We found a way to kill the draug.” He said it casually, but the gleam in his eyes gave it away.

Both Richard and Hannah looked at him with identical expressions of What did you just say? “Well,” Hannah said, “I know we can hurt them with silver, but—”

“Not silver,” Myrnin said. “Silver only wounds them, and it can’t kill Magnus, though it can certainly make him very unhappy. No indeed. The boy’s right. We can kill them.” He dashed off, and came back with his hands full of the blackened mass—well, not his hands, because even Myrnin wasn’t nuts enough to actually pick up the draug with his bare skin. It was actually dumped into Claire’s abandoned cowboy hat. He shook it, and it jiggled like gelatin.

Lifelessly. Bits of it flaked away.

“What the …?” Hannah bent forward over the hat, then reeled back, hand to her nose. “Oh, man. That smells like a weeklong floater.”

Claire looked at Shane. “What’s a floater?”

“Dead body,” he said. “You don’t want to know, trust me.” His gaze lingered on her, as if he was still in doubt that she was okay.

Or there.

She stripped off the nitrile gloves and gripped his hand tight and fast. He sent her a fast, unsteady smile.

“What is it?” Richard asked. He was staying well back from what was in the hat, but he took a pen from his pocket and poked it into the mass. No reaction. “I mean, what caused this?”

“Chemicals. Janitorial chemicals, to be precise. Young Shane here thought of it.” That was generous of Myrnin to say so, Claire thought; Shane seemed surprised, too. “It’s led me to think of a few other things that might work as well, but this is surprisingly effective.”

Shane’s pride, however cautious and concealed, was catching; Claire caught the gleam of it in Hannah’s face, and Richard’s, too. No, not pride. Hope. A rare commodity in Morganville.

“There’s a full barrel of it in the trunk of the sedan,” Myrnin said. “We’ll need to get it in yours, quickly.” As if to emphasize that, the clouds overhead gave another ominous rumble; he flinched, moved vampire-speed to the black sedan, and popped the trunk open by breaking the lock with a sharp pull of his fingers. He and Michael wrestled the barrel out, but allowed Shane and Hannah to help him roll it over to the police car.

Richard stayed with Claire. He glanced at her, raised his eyebrows, and said, “What’s with the biohazard suit?”

Oh. She’d forgotten about it, actually. “The sprinklers were on,” she said. “The draug were waiting out here for us. I had to have some kind of protection.”

“Good thinking.” Richard wasn’t really listening to her, though; he was watching Hannah as she helped Myrnin and Michael muscle the drum into the trunk of the police car. It didn’t fit quite as well as it had in the vampmobile. There was something kind of sad about the way he was looking at Hannah … as if he wanted something he knew he could never really have. Though he did have her, didn’t he? Maybe?

People were complicated. Claire couldn’t figure out what was in her own head most of the time, much less her friends’. Or Shane’s. And she hardly even knew Monica’s brother.

“So,” she said, “you and Chief Moses—”

“What?” he asked, and suddenly his gaze was focused on her, laser-sharp. “Me and Chief Moses what?”

“Uh …” Are dating, she was going to say, but she was afraid suddenly that she’d misread all of that. Awkward. “… Make a good team, I guess.” Lame. “She’s pretty fantastic.”

“She is that,” he said. Crisis over. He let his attention wander back to focus on Hannah; Claire wondered if he even knew he was doing it. “Did she ever tell you how she got that scar?”

“No.” The dark, seamed scar across Hannah’s face was dramatic, but somehow it only made her look … regal. Scarily more beautiful, as if it were a really exotic tattoo.

“She pulled three people out of a burning truck in Afghanistan, under heavy enemy fire,” he said. “She was going back for the fourth when the munitions exploded. She got hit by shrapnel. She was a hero. Got decorated for it and everything. And then she came back here.” He shook his head. “Why the hell would she come back here?”

Good question. Claire wasn’t sure she had any rational answer, either, but she tried. “It’s her home. Maybe there was somebody here she wanted to come back for, too. Is that … you know, possible?”

That startled him, and he was thinking how to answer that when Hannah finally thumped the trunk closed and said, “Right. We’re going to get cozy in here. Claire, in the back with Myrnin and Shane. Probably in the middle, knowing how they get along. Richard, Michael, up front with me.”

Conversation over. Claire scrambled into the back and was breathlessly jammed between Shane’s solid, warm heat, and Myrnin’s oddly cool, angular body. Manwich, she could almost hear Eve say, only Eve would never actually count Myrnin as a man, exactly.

“Get us back to Founder’s Square,” Myrnin ordered. “I have quite a bit of work to do, you know. Quite a bit. This is a very promising beginning, but there is much left to discover. We will need better delivery systems, the ability to distribute the chemicals widely, and—”

“Yeah, we get it,” Hannah interrupted. “Faster is better. No problem, we’re going right now, just keep your fangs folded.”

“That’s very rude,” Myrnin said. “I haven’t brought my fangs out for some time. Not in mixed company, anyway.”

Hannah gave him a long look in the rearview mirror, then put the car into reverse and began an expert, smooth job of backing up. Once in the parking lot, she did a wide circle and made for the exit. The boxy shape of the high school, with its faded cartoon snake mascot sign, quickly receded in the distance, and Claire breathed deeply in relief.

Almost there, she thought. We’re almost to the end of this.

And then the rain fell. Softly at first, a few fat, pattering drops on the windshield … then more of them, a bucket being emptied, then a roaring flood. It came shockingly fast. It wasn’t like rain at all, really, more like water with a few bubbles of air trapped inside. As if they’d suddenly been plunged into the deep, dark sea.

“Faster,” Shane shouted across to Hannah. A flash of lightning from the dark clouds above turned his face into blue-white stone, except for the panic Claire saw in his eyes. “C’mon, drive, lady! We’re going to get caught out here!”

She tried, she really did, but the water was rising so fast in the streets that driving faster built up a wave— first in front of the tires, and then at the bumper of the car. It took only a few short minutes for the narrow roads to flood up to the curbs. The drainage wasn’t working—no, Claire realized, it was working, just in reverse. Muddy, tainted water was flowing up out of the drains, adding to the rain that was falling.

The draug were trying to drown them fast and hard.

Hannah had to slow the car as it approached the next intersection. There was a dip in the pavement there, a deep one, and there was no telling what would happen if she drove into it. No, there was—Claire remembered what had happened to Eve’s hearse, with its burned-out motor.

The draug could disable the car.

“Turning around!” Hannah shouted, and executed a fast, sliding turn that pushed Claire hard against Myrnin. She grabbed for the back of the seat and wished she’d had time to hunt for a seat belt, but there was no room between them to fasten one now. “Going for a side road. Richard, keep your eyes open. You see anything coming, shoot it.”

She drove at a probably-too-fast speed down the side road, as closed and lightless buildings flashed past; gutters gushed water in thick, silvery streams, from what Claire could make out. The rain was coming down at a breathless pace, and it sounded like a hail of dropped ball bearings on the roof of the cruiser. They’re supposed to be getting weaker, not stronger. Or is this their desperation effort, since they know we can hurt