Morganville Vampires 11: Last Breath (41 page)

They made it to the Bloodmobile just as Myrnin came out the door, firing a shotgun behind him and dragging Oliver with his other hand. Claire got Shane into a seat and met Myrnin at the door to pull Oliver inside. Naomi was awake and less insane now, and when Claire screamed at her to get blood, Naomi staggered to the back and came back with armloads.

“Where’s Amelie?” Claire yelled at Myrnin, who was standing in the vehicle’s door, still firing. He shook his head. He looked taut and desperate, and his eyes were glowing red not so much with hunger as with fear, she thought.

Amelie hadn’t come out.

“We have to go back!” Claire said. Myrnin’s shotgun ran dry, and he backed up into the Bloodmobile and slammed the door shut as a draug rushed forward at them.

“We can’t,” he said. “I’m out of shells.” He sounded shaken and oddly flat, and he shoved her back when she tried to push past him. “
No.
Wait.”

Magnus was standing in the doorway of the Civic Pool. He was holding Amelie, and she was limp as a doll.

Magnus held her up in silent triumph. “If you want her,” he said, “come and get—”

Somebody shot him. Not Myrnin, because he was out of shells. Not Amelie, who was hanging helpless.

The shot came from a speeding pickup truck that raced by, then screamed into a slewing 360-degree turn, and Claire recognized it. Men poured out, all armed, desperate, and
human
.

And Captain Obvious was in the lead, pumping another shell into his shotgun.

Magnus hadn’t gone down, and hadn’t even screamed, so whatever they were firing wasn’t silver, but it was inconveniencing him, at the very least. He dropped Amelie, and she rolled limply down the steps to a crumpled heap as Magnus turned his empty, not-human eyes on the new threat.

And laughed.

Myrnin unlocked the Bloodmobile door, lunged out, grabbed Amelie, and jumped back inside as the firing continued. “Well,” he said, “it does appear that your idiot redneck friends are good for something after all. Do tell them to run, Claire.” He looked down at Amelie, and stopped talking. His eyes went from red to black in a second.

Claire snapped open the window and screamed at the men in the truck. They kept firing. Well, she’d tried.

“Myrnin?” Claire asked, short of breath with fear.

He didn’t look up. “Drive,” he said. “Take us out of here.” It was a good idea, because Captain Obvious and his friends had finished unloading their bullets into Magnus and the draug, and were piling back into the bed of their pickup, which was revving its engine. Claire jumped into the driver’s seat, started the Bloodmobile, and followed the pickup as it drove away. She couldn’t match its speed, but it didn’t matter. The pickup was racing toward the edge of town, and she didn’t intend to go that way.

She turned and headed toward Founder’s Square.

“Is she alive?” Claire asked, as Myrnin sat down in the passenger seat with Amelie cradled in his arms. She looked as pale as a marble statue now. Her eyes were closed.

“For now,” he said. He pulled back the collar of her black shirt, and Claire saw two giant black holes in her skin, three or four times the size of even the messiest vampire bite she’d ever seen. “There’s no cure for a master draug’s bite.”

 

 

It was silent in Founder’s Square. The cops had formed their lines again; the fight with the mob was over, just some wrecked vehicles left to mark the whole event.

The whole thing had a nightmare kind of stillness to it. Claire pulled the Bloodmobile up to the curb and parked it, and Myrnin silently stood up with Amelie in his arms.

Oliver blocked him as he turned for the door.

Oliver was still pale, and trembling, but he seemed sane, at least; he’d wiped the excess blood he’d gulped off his mouth, but there were still smears of dark red here and there. He didn’t speak, but he held out his arms, and Myrnin, after a brief hesitation, handed Amelie to him.

Oliver shut his eyes for a moment, then nodded and took her outside.

Naomi followed, moving more slowly than Claire had ever seen a vampire move. Myrnin helped her out, which would have looked gallant except for his outfit, which was more like something a crazed beachcomber would wear than a knight in armor, however tarnished.

That accounted for almost all the vampires they’d rescued. Claire got up and walked toward the back. She stopped when she reached Shane, who was lying down on a donation couch. He’d wiped himself clean of the blood, but she could see bleeding pinpricks on his face and hands. He looked terrible, she thought, and wanted to cry in wild, screaming sobs. Somehow, she gulped it back.

He sat up and held out his arms, and she collapsed against him. He kissed her, and even though he still tasted like that pool, like all the nightmares, she sank into the kiss, because underneath it he was Shane, he was alive, he was
alive
.

And so was she.

He was shaking, she realized, but he was trying to comfort her with soothing strokes down her back, a gentle touch on her face.

Neither one of them tried to speak.

Michael carried Eve past them. There was a thick bandage on her neck, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and she seemed okay. She had her arms around him, and her head was lying in the hollow of his shoulder, and Claire thought she’d never seen a look like that on Michael’s face, that complicated mixture of fierce love and fear and regret.

He looked almost as frail as Naomi had, but he carried her anyway.

“What are we going to do?” Claire whispered. “Oh God, Shane, what
can
we do?”

He shook his head and sighed, and pressed his lips against her hair in a gentle kiss. “We’re going to win,” he said. “That’s our only choice. I don’t know how, and I don’t know what the cost is going to be. But we’re going to win.”

“Yes.” The voice was raw, and quiet, but it was Oliver’s. He was standing in the doorway, and Amelie was still in his arms. “There’s no option now. We fight them for Morganville. All of us.” He looked down at Amelie. “And the cost will be high, Mr. Collins. It will be very high indeed. Come now. It won’t be safe out here for long, and the sun is coming up.”

Claire didn’t want to move, but she did, and helped Shane up. Oliver stared at the two of them for a moment, then shook his head.

“What?” Shane asked.

“I don’t understand humans at all,” he said. “Why would you do such a thing, for us?”

Shane exchanged a look with Claire, and shrugged. “Had to be done,” he said. “And we needed you to stop Amelie from pulling the pin on Morganville. She was going to kill us all.”

Oliver sighed. “What makes you think I won’t?”

“Because you’re a fighter,” Shane said. “Like me. And now you’re in charge.”

“Oh, trust me, you won’t enjoy that,” Oliver said, with a touch of his old acid tone. “We haven’t even begun to fight.”

“Good,” Shane said. “Because as far as I can tell, we’re getting our asses kicked, and I’m tired of that.”

Oliver gave him a slow, odd smile. “So am I,” he said. He turned to go and said, in an offhand kind of way, “Thank you.”

He was gone before Shane could make some kind of smart-ass remark. As, Claire could tell, he’d been about to do.

“Don’t,” Claire warned him, and put her finger to his lips. “Just enjoy the moment.”

“I am,” he said. He met her eyes, and in that moment, she could see absolutely everything in them. Everything he felt. All the fear and the anger and the horror and the determination.

And the love. So much of that.

“Sun’s up,” he said. She blinked and realized that outside the open door of the Bloodmobile there was a pink blush on the horizon. A new day. Maybe the last day.

He took her hand and led her out into it, and despite everything, despite the stillness and the danger and all that she knew, Claire took a deep breath of fresh, clean air and thought,
We’re going to win. We have to win.

And standing there with the sunrise washing over them, driving away the clouds, she thought that maybe, just maybe, it was possible.

“Wait,” Shane said, and pulled her to a stop as she started to follow Michael, who’d already made it to the shadows, down the sidewalk toward the square. “Claire.”

“We shouldn’t stay out here even if the sun’s up. The draug—”

He put his hands on either side of her face, looked down at her, and said, “I want you to understand something. I hate this place. I hate Morganville. I hate the vampires. But I swear to God, I will fight to my last drop of blood for Michael and Eve and
you
. Do you understand? If you want to run, if you want to go right now, I’ll go. But I’m not going without you.”

“If we run, what’s to stop Oliver from letting everyone die?” she asked him. “From doing just what Amelie would have done?”

“God, Claire—stop thinking about them. Think about you. Just you.”

“I am,” she said. “I can’t face being a coward. Not this time.”

“Then we stay,” he said. “And when we get out of this … and we
will
get out of this … I want you to promise me one thing.”

“What?”

He swallowed, and shifted his weight a little uneasily, and then said, very quietly, his lips almost touching hers, “Promise me you’ll marry me. Not now. Someday. Because I need to know.”

Claire felt a flutter inside, like a bird trying to fly, and a rush of heat that made her dizzy. And something else, something fragile as a soap bubble, and just as beautiful. Joy, in the middle of all this horror and heartbreak.

“Yes,” she whispered back. “I promise.”

And she kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him, while the sun came up and bathed Morganville in one last, shining day.

A
s always, I need a sound track to keep me going as I write! So here, for your listening pleasure, is a list of the songs I used on my own personal track list. Please buy the music, don’t torrent it; musicians work hard to make beautiful things, and only you can make sure they can continue to do so.