Bitter Blood

FOURTEEN MYRNIN

The trick to doing the impossible, I’ve found, is to simply never think past what is at your fingertips. Do the thing in front of you. Then the next. Then the next. In such ways have men built the pyramids, or climbed mountains, or raced to the moon on rockets.

And that is how I had carved, inch by painful inch, the niches for my hands and feet in the stone wall of the oubliette. I did not look up; I did not look down. I looked only at the task before me, and ignored the pain as a side effect. I’d had enough practice at that, certainly.

With enough concentration, the panic attacks faded into a running babble at the back of my mind, like a fast- rushing river that became background noise I didn’t feel the need to heed. In a way, it was a comforting sort of distraction. It was a bit like not being alone, even if my only real company was my own horribly distorted, screaming mind.

I found out just how far I’d ascended the hard way, when I lost my concentration, and losing my concentration was not my fault. I was remarkably centered, but when suddenly there was a sensation inside my mind that felt like cold, icy fingers shuffling through my thoughts, and…well. One does tend to get distracted when something like that happens.

My fingers slipped, then my bare toes, and as I fell—counting the feet on the way down, my goodness, nearly ten steps completed—I saw Claire’s face. Just a flash of it, pale and worried. And another face, a woman’s, with pale gold hair and light-colored eyes. It was not Amelie, though in some ways the resemblance was there…. It was someone I didn’t know.

Someone human. More remarkably, a human whose mental fingerprints were clear on my mind. A seer, a true one, like the girl Miranda—someone who could see the future, but not only that; one who could reach and touch the minds of others. I doubted she had enjoyed the experience any more than I had, but I had the conviction that through her, Claire had been told something of me.

Come for me, I begged her again, just as my fall abruptly ended in ice-cold water, and the even-colder stone beneath. Bones broke, of course. I stayed there, jammed in awkward discomfort at the bottom of hell, until I had enough focus and strength to heal, and then to start considering the climb again.

Claire, I thought. Come for me. Please.

Because the doubt had begun to creep in to inform me that ten feet was barely a beginning, and I had a very, very, very long way to go…and hunger was already nipping my heels. Soon, the clarity and focus I had managed to achieve thus far would be difficult.

And then impossible.

You won’t make it, some coldly logical part of me declared, which was just not at all helpful. I wanted to cut that part of my brain out and leave it floating in the water, but perhaps that might not have been a very sane response.

So I locked the logical part of me up in a prison made of mental bars, focused on the next thing in front of my nose, and began to climb.

FIFTEEN CLAIRE

The police took notes, sounding professionally skeptical of the idea that a strong young man might have vanished in full view of his friends. Because that never happens here, Claire thought cynically, but she knew that in a way they were right to be doubtful…. The vampires picked off strays; they didn’t run at the herd. It wasn’t smart, and they’d always been very careful not to involve strangers who might have been easily missed.

Angel was as high-profile a visitor as Morganville ever got, if you didn’t count a drive-through by the shiny- haired governor two years before. That guy hadn’t even stopped for gas, just whipped through town in a whirlwind of blown sand and shiny cars, though he’d reportedly rolled down the window at a stoplight and waved to people who hadn’t really cared.

Carrying off Angel was almost as likely as vampires stopping the governor’s caravan, ripping off his sedan door, and dragging him off in the middle of the afternoon.

They’d all provided statements—Eve, Michael, Shane, Claire, Jenna, and Tyler. Miranda had sensibly stayed inside. Tyler’s story had morphed itself into an attack by a gang of teens bent on robbing the van— armed teens—and Jenna had just said she hadn’t seen much except for one of them grabbing Angel and taking him off.

Shane had straight-out asked Eve before the first sirens and lights pulled to a stop, “Do you want us to snitch on your brother, or not? Your call, Eve. Personally, I don’t think the little monster needs any more breaks, but —”

“Yes,” she’d interrupted him. “Do it. I’m going to tell them everything.”

So the four of the Glass House residents had all identified Jason by name and provided the names of the other two vampires as well; Claire certainly felt a bitter sort of validation in doing that. She’d trusted Jason, for a while, but he’d spun wildly out of control, and he had to be stopped. Even Eve acknowledged that now.

The cops had called it in, and gone on their way; no one seemed to have much of a sense of urgency about the whole thing. Tyler and Jenna sat together on the front steps, clearly numb and unsure what to do next, so Claire asked them inside, organized coffee, and—after consultation with the others—bedded Jenna down on the sofa in the living room, and Tyler in the parlor. Nobody slept very well, and when Claire came downstairs before dawn to make coffee, she found that the two visitors were up and sitting together at the dinner table, holding hands.

Claire paused on the stairs, watching. It was an odd kind of scene, and there was something definitely weird about it. For a moment, Claire didn’t catch what Jenna was saying…and then, with a chill, she did.

“…Close,” Jenna said in a distant, drugged voice. “I can sense him out there; he’s coming…. Just a moment…It’s hard for him to get through the barriers around this place….”

Claire cautiously descended a step, then another. The room was dark, except for flickering candles on the dining table to add sinister mood lighting. What are you doing?

It became very clear in the next second, as Angel’s pale, insubstantial ghost drifted through the walls.

Tyler stiffened in his chair, but Jenna held on to his hand and made him sit down again. Angel hovered there, glowing with the eerie dim light of phosphorescence. He looked lost and distressed.

Claire’s legs felt numb. She sat down fast on the stairs, watching with her lips parted on a fast-drawn breath. What the hell is going on? Angel was clearly, well, dead—no doubt of that; you don’t get to be that kind of ghost without going all the way over the line. There was a dark smudge around his throat, and Claire winced seeing it. No doubt it evidenced what Jason had done to him. Or his friends. Whether Angel’s body had been recovered or not, he was a victim of Morganville’s growing vampire problem.

And Jenna—Jenna had been able to summon him up, and even get him past the house’s defenses to appear.

Jenna let go of Tyler’s hands, and Claire expected the ghost-Angel to vanish, but he stayed, drifting closer and closer to Jenna as if some kind of gravity were pulling him toward her. “Angel,” she said, “I am so sorry. So sorry.”

Claire realized that she was reaching out toward the ghost, and she remembered Miranda’s stark fear. “Wait!” she blurted, and came down the stairs at a run. “Wait, don’t. Don’t touch him.”

But it was too late. Jenna had already done it, and when their hands connected, Angel took on form, weight, even a little color—almost a kind of reality.

And Jenna sagged back in her chair, clearly exhausted.

“It’s true,” Angel said. His voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of a deep well. “It’s all true what you said. So many spirits here, Jenna. So lost. So angry.”