Black Dawn

certainly killed it, because that was the smell of dead things rotting on beaches.

Richard pulled in a deep, bubbling gasp and opened his eyes. His skin was sunburn-red, stung all over from the draug’s grip, and there were red flecks of hemorrhage in the whites of his eyes. He’d almost suffocated.

One of the bullets Captain Obvious had fired had hit him in the side, probably in the liver; that was bad, but the one that had hit him square in the chest was worse. The wound in front was pumping out bright red arterial blood, and the second I saw it a queer sense of calm settled over me. I knew that sensation. It was my emotions shutting down to protect me from what was coming.

I lowered Richard to the damp pavement and tried putting pressure on the wound, but it was useless. That was a major arterial tear, too close to his heart. I packed the hole with wadded-up ripped pieces of his shirt, but that couldn’t stop it. I was only keeping the blood inside, where it would fill up his chest cavity and kill him from suffocation if his heart didn’t stop first.

“Hannah?” Michael’s uncertain voice from behind me. “We can put him in the back …”

“No,” I said. Richard’s eyes were open, fixed on mine. I could see the stark terror in them, and the knowledge. “No, we can’t move him.” I wouldn’t say, It wouldn’t do any good, he won’t last long, but I could see Richard already knew it. I could feel it in the crushing strength of his grip on my hand. He was trying by sheer will to hold himself here, with me.

He was a good man. A very good man. Brave and kind, and better than Morganville had ever deserved out of the Morrell family.

I should have been able to truly love him. In this moment, at least, I finally did. Completely.

I bent forward and kissed him, very lightly, and whispered, “I’m sorry I wasn’t what you needed me to be. I love you, Richard. You hear me? I love you. I’m sorry I never said it.”

He heard me. I saw his pale, already blueing lips shape the words back. His hand on mine was shaking—a little at first, and then more violently. But he wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t look away from me, until the very last second when he squeezed his eyelids shut, and the last warm blood flowed from the wound in his chest, covering my right hand as my left caressed his forehead, pushing the matted hair from his face.

“I love you,” I said again. “And I’m so, so sorry.”

And then he was still, and gone.

Michael was still standing there. I was dimly aware of him, until he finally moved to crouch next to me. “Is he—”

“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded oddly matter-of-fact about it. I couldn’t feel much, not yet. Not here. “Yes, he’s gone.” There was a lot of blood. A lot of it was on my hands, bright and red, still warm. There was a puddle of shallow water in a depression in the pavement near me, and without thinking I rinsed myself off in it; no burning, after. The draug weren’t hiding there, not that I’d have cared in this moment. “We need to get you all back to Founder’s Square now. I’ll come back for him.”

I’d never seen a vampire look so young, and so uncertain. I was completely freaking him out, I realized, and this was a kid who’d grown up with a fair amount of insanity and violence, and had inherited a great deal more when he’d crossed to the other side. I wondered what it was he saw in me that made him look so … tentative. “What about them?” he asked, and nodded toward the wounded by the truck.

I didn’t so much as glance that way again. “They can wait,” I said. “I’ll send help.” Maybe.

I knew that wasn’t logical, or reasonable, or even human, to leave three broken men out there to suffer, or to die, if the draug came back, but I wasn’t feeling logical, or reasonable, or human. Captain Obvious had shot Richard, and he hadn’t needed to do that. I’d already saved him. Ten more seconds, and we’d all have left here alive.

I understood why he’d done it; I’d had to fight not to do the same exact thing.

But I couldn’t forgive.

Michael didn’t argue with me. Maybe he, too, realized that I was in a very dangerous place—dangerous for Captain Obvious, for his men, for me, even for him if he tried to get in my way. He bowed his head, stood up, and went to the car. The sound of the door slamming was as final as the lid on a coffin.

I made sure Richard’s eyes were closed. I straightened him as best I could.

As I stood, suddenly and achingly aware of how very tired I was, how weary, the clouds parted, just a little, and a warm beam of wintry sunlight lanced through to bathe us both. I raised my face to it and closed my eyes for a few seconds. A better person might have thought that God was touching us to remind me that it wasn’t all darkness, that clouds passed, and storms ended.

But for now, it was just sun, and warmth, and it soon was gone as the clouds shifted again. Because just now, I wasn’t a person who believed in the future.

Only in what was right in front of me.

I kicked pieces of jellyfied draug out of my way to the driver’s side door of the cruiser. As I got inside, I heard Claire say, in a choked and very shaky voice, “There he is.”

I looked up and around. I started to ask, not that I was really curious, but Shane did it for me. “Who?” He had his arm around Claire, and she was huddled against him, quietly wiping tears from her face.

She pointed.

Myrnin—who to this point I had honestly forgotten about, because he’d done nothing, said nothing, reacted to nothing—leaned suddenly forward. “Where?”

“Right there,” Claire said. She pointed again, straight over my shoulder through the front window. “Standing on top of that building. Can’t you see him?”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked her. There was nothing on the roof where she was pointing. No—there was a passing shadow, something that shifted when I tried to fix my focus on it. Like fog, disappearing. “There’s nobody.”

“Magnus. That’s him. I swear, he’s right there. Watching us.”

Michael and Shane were both eyeing her oddly. “Claire, there’s nobody there. Nobody,” Michael said. Myrnin said nothing. His dark eyes were intent, staring at the spot where she pointed. After a moment, he silently sat back and folded his arms.

“You think you can see Magnus,” I repeated. “The leader of the draug. But I promise you, there’s nobody there.”

“And I promise you, he is there. I—I can see him.” Claire bit her lip and took a deep breath. “I could always see him. I don’t know why. When he was taking the vampires in the beginning, I saw him a couple of times and tried to follow him. I think that’s why he came for me, in the house. Because I could see him.”

Thoughts began sparking in my head, igniting into a fuse that burned directly to a very dangerous conclusion. “You can tell him from the others? The ones we can see?”

“The rest of the draug? Yeah. They’re copies of him, but they’re not as … as present, if that makes any sense. They’re just reflections. Pieces of him that have split off. I think somehow they’re all … connected.”

“She’s correct,” Myrnin said. “I tell you now what only Amelie and I know about the draug …. The master draug is the seed from which all others spring, and they are his thralls. Not mindless, but close to it. He is the thinker. The planner. He is the one we have to stop. We have to find a way to trap and kill him. Once we do, the others will fall. They cannot exist long without a master.”

He met my eyes, and that was when I realized that Myrnin was thinking exactly the same thing that I was. That as pathologically cold as I was right now, he was there ahead of me.

Vampires ain’t like most of us, I heard my grandmother whisper in the back of my mind. Cold ones. Cold at heart. Selfish. They don’t survive all this time otherwise.

I wondered what she’d say about me, now.

I exchanged a look in the rearview mirror with the vampire, and held it. Then I said, “We’ll talk about this later.”

He blinked, and inclined his head.

And just like that, we were partners in something that was going to have catastrophic consequences if it went wrong. Funny. I should have worried about that. But all I felt was a sense of savage relief, because I had an objective. Something to do. Something to plan.

And I could see, from the red sparks gathering in Myrnin’s eyes, that he felt exactly the same way.