Daylighters

Not now that we’re getting rid of the vampires.”

Shane raised his head for the first time. “Getting rid of, how?”

“The only way to be sure. We’ve tried to be kind and give them a place to live in peace. They couldn’t follow the rules. They never could. You should know that, Collins. The rules of Morganville, the rules they made up to control us . . . they never applied to them.” The man wasn’t actually all that old, Claire realized; maybe the age of Monica’s deceased brother, Richard Morrell, mid- to late twenties. He knew Shane, clearly.

Just as clearly, Shane knew him. “You’ve always been a cowardly little whiner, Sully. I didn’t see you or your family stepping up to defend people. You just kept your heads down like good little citizens. Hell, you didn’t even have the guts to stand up with Captain Obvious when you had the chance.”

He’d struck gold with that one, Claire saw from the red flush that spread across Sully’s broad face. “Collaborator,” Sully spat back. “Traitor. You’ll get what’s coming to you, and I’m going to enjoy seeing it.” He literally spat the words out; Claire got flecks of saliva on her face. Ugh. She felt filthier than ever, which was saying something, considering she was wearing someone else’s underwear.

“Sully,” Hannah said, with the snap of command in her voice. “As long as you’re working with me, you’ll treat my prisoners with respect and keep quiet. Shane’s no danger to you, and all he can do is needle you. Don’t let him score points.”

“Did I?” Shane asked, and smiled the most casually bitter smile Claire had ever seen on his face. “Score points?”

“Quiet,” Hannah said, but Claire caught a quick gleam of humor in her expression before she locked it down to her professional mask again. “Time’s wasting. Get them out of here.”

Sully took personal charge of Shane, which was weirdly comforting; Claire knew Shane could get to him, and that was a kind of control that they both needed just now. Her own guard was one of Hannah’s cops—a familiar one. “Officer Kentworth,” she said. He was one of the two who’d searched their house with Halling: the polite one. He touched his fingers to his cap.

“Miss,” he said. “Let’s be businesslike about this, okay? No funny business.”

“You know you’re taking us to be killed, right?”

He flinched, but controlled that quickly, and gave her a flinty stare. “You’re just being transported, miss. Let’s not make this any more complicated,” he said.

Shane was led to yet another car by Sully, and Claire could almost imagine how much fun that ride was going to be. She hoped Shane didn’t push him so far that Sully really snapped. With his hands pinned, Shane couldn’t fight back very well . . . and Eve was the one who still had the nail clippers to snip their zip-tied bonds. Eve and Michael, she noticed, were also being separated out from the folks from Blacke and loaded into a car.

Claire hoped they would all end up in the same place, because she had the feeling they’d really need those nail clippers before too long, regardless of what kind of positive spin Officer Kentworth tried to put on things.

Claire expected to be driven to the Daylight Foundation’s building, but instead, the little parade—complete with flashing lights, though no sirens—wound its way through Morganville’s main streets toward Founder’s Square. That seemed odd. Founder’s Square was vampire territory; it was where they’d lived and worked and had their own late-night businesses. It was where Amelie had her offices, and where they kept the records of their long, long lives.

It was also where they’d executed people, from time to time, for infractions of the Morganville rules. Where they’d threatened to execute Shane, when Amelie had thought him guilty of a vampire’s murder.

It was, Claire thought with a sinking feeling, exactly where Fallon would choose to make his new headquarters.

The parade turned and took the ramp underground, into the parking garage Claire remembered so well. It was full of cars, mostly black-tinted vampmobiles that had probably been confiscated when their owners had gone into “protective custody” at the mall. What had Fallon called it? The enclave, like it was some fancy, exclusive members-only apartment complex instead of an eighties nightmare of a building stripped down to dust and concrete.

And now Fallon lived in Amelie’s palace.

The other cars parked in the lot alongside her own transportation, and one by one, they were brought out —Shane, still sniping at red-faced Officer Sully, and then Michael and Eve, not in handcuffs but obviously being escorted along by their own guards.

She, Shane, Eve, and Michael, plus their minders, all crowded into one elevator for the trip upstairs. They were taken to the first floor, the entry level. It looked just like Claire remembered it—lush carpets, expensive chandeliers, the faint, oppressive smell of roses, and gloomy, brooding paintings hanging on the walls. Anything that displayed someone who was recognizably a vampire had been taken down, and there was a stack of canvases in the corner of the central atrium.

“This way,” said Hannah, meeting them in that space. Claire didn’t know how she’d arrived before they did, but somehow, she had. Maybe she’d been at the front of the parade. She led them down the hall and out to the big fancy entryway, with its vast, vaulted ceiling . . . and then out onto the porch, where the morning sun was dazzling the marble.

Once her eyes adjusted to the glare, Claire saw that Founder’s Square had been kept looking perfect—the hedges and lawns were neatly trimmed, the flower beds exploded with fresh, live color. It all looked as clean and graceful as anything you could find in a picture of Paris, complete with the marble-columned buildings ringing the park.

Except for the banners, which were red, white, and blue, snapping and lifting in the breeze that swirled through the courtyard.

A Morganville-sized crowd, maybe three hundred people strong, had gathered on the lawn. They were conducting some kind of ceremony in connection with the sunrise. Claire spotted a raised stage at the other end, where the vampires had once kept a cage where those who broke their laws were displayed . . . and sometimes held executions, too. The cage was gone, and that was a good thing, but she had a sudden nasty flashback to a photograph she’d seen in history class—a fancy square with dignified grand buildings, long red banners, a stage. A passionate, fiery speaker delivering his speech to a sea of rapt people.

History, repeating.

Fallon must have been delighted, thinking his timing couldn’t have been better. The bodies of Morley, Oliver, and Amelie were being carried through the aisle in the center of the crowd, and there was total silence until the procession was halfway to the stage . . . and then someone started to clap.

Then it was an avalanche of applause, and cheering.

They were cheering dead bodies.

Claire looked over at Shane, and saw that he was watching with a stony expression on his face. He was probably thinking how he might have been in that crowd, cheering, at some point in his life. Maybe he’d have even been the first to clap.

“Makes you proud to be human, doesn’t it?” he said to no one in particular.

Eve moved up beside them. “So proud,” she said. “They’ll probably open a souvenir shop later. Vampire- bones keychains and stake earrings. Maybe they’ll even put the town name on them.”

Claire felt something cool and metallic brush her fingers, and flinched, but then she realized that it was the nail clippers, and it was Eve’s hand pressing them into her palm. She clenched her fist around them.

“Time to go,” Hannah said, and walked their group down the steps toward the ceremony. The cheering had mostly died down by the time they got there, and the three vampires were being laid on the stage, in the sun. They’d be burning—slowly, because they were so old, but still. Definitely painful.

Michael paused on the steps, and Eve stopped with him and anxiously asked, “Honey? What’s wrong?” His eyes were shut, and he looked very strange. “Are you feeling okay?”

When he opened his eyes, Claire saw tears break free and run down his cheeks. “It’s the sun,” he said. “Eve, I’m standing in the sun. It’s so warm.”

She understood, and she hugged him. Claire didn’t get it for a second, until she realized how long it would have been since Michael had felt the touch of sunshine without the horrible scorching and scarring that came with it as a new vampire. It must have really hit him in that moment that he was genuinely human again.