There wasn’t anything else to say, so Claire nodded and left. She closed the gate behind her and glanced back to see Hannah stand up, lean against the porch pillar, and gaze out into the street like a sentry watching for trouble on the horizon.
Anybody who decided to go up against Hannah Moses had to have a death wish. It wasn’t just the gun she’d so expertly assembled and loaded—heck, gun toting in Texas was practically normal. It was in her body language: calm, centered, ready.
And deadly.
If there really was going to be a war, being on the side against Hannah would be a very dangerous place.
Claire headed down the alley, away from the normal world of construction and power tools and Hannah standing sentry. As the wooden walls rose on either side of her, and narrowed from a one-car street into a cart path into a claustrophobic little warren, she hardly noticed; she’d made this walk so many times that doing it in broad daylight held no terrors for her at all.
But something was different when she got to the end of the alley.
The shack, the ancient, leaning thing that had been there ever since Claire had first come here, was just… gone. There was no sign of wreckage, not even a scrap of wood or a rusty nail left in its place. There had been stairs going down into Myrnin’s lab inside the shack itself.
Now, there was a slab of concrete. It was almost dry, but it had been poured only a day ago, Claire was certain of that; concrete dried fast in the Texas desert heat, and this was still just a tiny bit cool and damp to the touch. Someone had left a handprint at the corner of the slab. She put her own hand in the impression; it was a larger hand, longer fingers, but still slender.
Myrnin’s hand, she thought.
He’d sealed up the lab.
Claire felt an odd wave of dizziness pass over her, and she lowered her head and breathed in deeply to combat it. He’d told her that he was going to leave, but she hadn’t really believed it. Not like this. Not this fast.
But sealing your lab with concrete was a pretty definite sign of intent.
Claire left the alley at a run. She blew through the Day House gate and up the steps, and said breathlessly to Hannah, “I need to use your portal.”
“Our what?”
“C’mon, Hannah. I know you’ve got a portal in your house. It’s in the bathroom. I used it to get to Amelie before. I need to see if I can still get into the lab that way.” Hannah’s face remained tight and guarded. “Please!”
The front door creaked open, horror-movie style, and the tiny, wizened form of Gramma Day appeared in the gap. She studied Claire with faded brown eyes that still held the same sharp intelligence that Hannah’s did, and held out a palsied, wrinkled hand. Claire took it. The old lady’s skin was soft as old, fragile fabric, and burning hot, but beneath it was a wiry strength that almost pulled Claire off-balance. “You get in here,” Gramma Day said. “Ain’t no call for you to be standing out on the porch like some beggar. You, too, Hannah. Nobody’s coming today for us.”
“You don’t know that, Gramma.”
“Don’t you tell me what I know or don’t, girl.” There was a firm tone of command in the old lady’s voice as she led Claire down the hallway. There was an eerie sense of déjà vu to it—the same hall as the Glass House, the same parlor to the left, the same living room opening up ahead. Only the furniture was different, and the march of family portraits on the walls, some of them going back to the mid-1800s, of earnest-looking African American people in their Sunday best. As they shuffled down the hall, it got more modern. Color portrait photos of people with heavily lacquered bouffant hairdos, then thick, luxurious Afros. Toward the very end, Hannah Moses looking incredibly neat and imposing in her military uniform, and a framed set of medals beneath it.
There was one important difference between the Glass House and the Day House: there was a downstairs bath. It must have been added ages ago, but Claire envied it, anyway. Gramma swung open the door and shooed her inside.
“You going to see the queen?” Gramma asked her.
“No, ma’am. I’m going to see if I can find Myrnin.”
Gramma snorted and shook her trembling head. “Ain’t no good gonna come of that, girl. Trap-door spider’s not a safe thing for you to be running after. You ought to go home, lock your doors, get ready for trouble.”
“I’m always ready,” Claire said, and grinned.
“Not like this,” Gramma said. “Never seen a time when the vampires weren’t scared of something, but now, they ain’t afraid of anything, and it’s gonna go hard for us. Well, you do as you like. Folks always do.” She swung the door shut on Claire, and Claire hastily felt for the light switch, an old-fashioned dial thing on the wall. The overheads clicked on. From the look of the bulbs, they might have been original Edisons.
It was an altogether normal sort of bathroom, and although she kind of needed to go, Claire didn’t dare use it. Only Myrnin would have ever been thoughtless enough to build a portal in a bathroom, she thought. The people in the Day House must have a lot more fortitude than she did, because she’d never be able to take down her pants in a room where anyone with the secret handshake could walk right out of the wall and stare at her. Granted, that was a smallish circle of people…Amelie, Oliver, Myrnin, Claire herself, Michael, a few others (and even Shane had managed once or twice).
Oh, and a couple of would-be serial killers who’d gotten their hands on the secret. Ugh.
Claire cleared her mind, closed her eyes, and focused. She felt the answering tingle of the portal, lying dormant and invisible, and when she looked, she saw a thin film of darkness forming over the white-painted door. It was misty at first, then as dark as a velvet curtain hanging in midair, rippling gently in an unfelt breeze.
She built the image of Myrnin’s lab in her mind: the granite worktables, the art deco lights on the walls, the chaotic mess of books and equipment. Then there was Bob the Spider’s tank in the corner, larger than ever and thick inside with webs, along with the battered old armchair sitting next to it where Myrnin sat and read, when he was in the mood.
The image flickered in the darkness, ghostly, and then flared out. No, it was still there, Claire thought, but the lights themselves had been turned off. To keep her away?
Screw that. Claire reached into her backpack and pulled out a small, heavy flashlight. She switched it on and stepped through the portal into the dark.
It was not just dark in the lab. It was profoundly, elementally black. This far below ground, and with the entrance sealed anyway, it felt like being sealed into a tomb. Claire felt the portal snap shut behind her, and for a moment she was tempted to turn around and wish herself home, immediately, but that wouldn’t help. She still wouldn’t
There was a master switch to the power, and by carefully watching her footing (Myrnin hadn’t bothered to clear up the leaning piles of books or the scattered trip hazards), she found her way to the far wall, next to a musty old mummy case she’d always assumed was a genuine thing—because it was Myrnin’s. She’d never opened it. Knowing Myrnin, there could be anything inside, from a body he’d forgotten about to his dirty laundry.
She threw the master switch up, and lights flared on. Machines started up around the lab with a chorus of hums, pops, crackles, and musical tones. The laptop she’d bought for Myrnin booted up in the corner and glowed reassuringly. At least one beaker started bubbling, though she couldn’t see why.
But there was absolutely no trace of Myrnin.
She stopped at the table where she’d left the device she’d been working on; it was still there, covered over with the sheet. Myrnin hadn’t taken it with him, and he hadn’t made any more of his suspiciously accurate adjustments to it, either. For a moment, Claire debated sticking it in her backpack—she couldn’t leave it here, gathering dust, not when she was close to it actually starting to work—but the weight was pretty extreme, and she needed to look around more.
She’d come back, she decided, and flipped the sheet back into place.
Claire edged past a pile of boxes and crates in the corner and opened the door in the back—or tried to. Locked. She rooted around through drawers until she came up with a set of keys, which contained everything from ancient, rusty skeleton models to modern gleaming ones. She sorted through, eyeing the lock, and tried likely
