Morganville Vampires 11: Last Breath (8 page)

“Bob,” she repeated, looking at Shane in wide-eyed disbelief. “Bob the
spider
.”

“Just because he’s a spider doesn’t mean he deserves any less concern! Claire, you have a way with him. He likes you.”

Just what she needed. Bob the spider
liked her
. “You do realize that he’s a year old, at least. And spiders don’t live that long.”

“You think he’s
dead
?” Myrnin sounded horrified. So wrong.

“Is he curled up?”

“No. He’s just quiet.”

“Well, maybe he’s not hungry.”

“Will you come?” Myrnin asked. He sounded calmer now, but also oddly needy. “It’s been very lonely here these past few days. I’d like your company, at least for a little while.” When she hesitated, he used the pity card. “Please, Claire.”

“Fine,” she sighed. “I’m bringing Shane.”

After a second of silence, he said, flatly, “Goody,” and hung up.

“You’re kidding,” Shane said. “Do you think I want to visit Crazy McTeeth in his lair of insanity?”

“No,” Claire said, “but I’m pretty sure you won’t like it if I go alone when I just kind of promised to be with you. So … ?”

“Right. I’ve been missing Nutty McFang anyway.”

“Stop making up names for him.”

“What about Count Crackula?”

“Just stop.”

C
razy or not, Myrnin was
trying
.

For one thing, he’d cleaned up the lab, meaning that he’d moved the leaning stacks of books up against the walls instead of leaving them as trip hazards between the tables. He’d even uncovered the surface of one of the marble-topped tables, and had set up … God, what was that? A genuine china
tea service
?

He was standing next to it, wearing his somewhat clean white lab coat with the patch on it that said EVIKL GENIUS UNION KLOCAKL 101 on it, and there were goggles dangling around his neck. For a vampire, he was surprisingly versatile in his wardrobe, in a cracked-out way. From a purely objective viewpoint, Myrnin was a good-looking guy—frozen at the age of maybe his mid-twenties, with dark hair and a ready smile. A sharp but handsome face.

If only he didn’t crazy it up all the time.

“Have you been watching
Dr. Horrible
again?” she asked him, as Myrnin poured tea into two delicate floral cups. “Not that I don’t love it, but …”

“Thank you for coming,” Myrnin said, and offered the first serving to Shane, saucer and all. Shane blinked and took it, not quite sure what to do with it; the fragile porcelain looked particularly endangered in his large hands. “It’s very nice to see you both. And how have you been? Please, sit down.”

“Where?” Shane asked, looking around. Myrnin looked momentarily panicked, and then just … disappeared, in a vibrating flash. He was back before Claire could draw in a startled breath, and he was carrying two large armchairs, one in each hand, lifting them like they were made of Styrofoam. Myrnin thumped them down on the floor and indicated them with outstretched palms.

“There,” he said.

Well, he’d gone to a lot of trouble, really. Shane sat, then jumped back up with a yelp, splashing tea in a pale brown wave.

“Oh, sorry,” Myrnin said, and picked up something that looked like a surgical saw from the seat. “I wondered where that had got off to.”

“Should I even ask?” Claire said.

“You know I do the occasional research,” he said. “And in answer to your question, quite likely you should not. Milk?”

That last was directed at Shane, who was still recovering. He slowly settled into his chair. “Dude, we live in
Texas
. Hot tea is not our thing. Iced tea, sure. I have no idea. Is milk supposed to be in there?”

“I give up trying to civilize you,” Myrnin said, and turned to Claire. “Milk?”

“No, thank you.”

“Much better.” Myrnin set down the cream pitcher and leaned against the lab table, hands in his pockets. He’d stuck the surgical saw in there, too; Claire hoped he wouldn’t slice something off accidentally. “I’ve thought of a few improvements to make to our system, Claire. Just a few. Nothing that will cause concern, I promise. And by our agreement, I am not making them on my own without peer review. Well, not
peer
, as I have no peers, but you do understand what I mean.”

“All that, and modest, too,” Shane said. “Is Frank around?”

They all three paused for a moment, waiting. Frank Collins—Shane’s dad—was more or less a ghost, to all intents and purposes. In fact, he was only a little dead…. His brain had been saved, and wired into Myrnin’s alchemical machine that ran a lot of the stranger things in Morganville. But sometimes Frank paid attention, and sometimes he just didn’t want to respond. Maybe he was asleep. Brains needed sleep.

But after a long stretch of seconds, there was a flicker at the end of the lab, like an old cathode-ray tube television starting up … and then a slowly stabilizing image of a man walking toward them. Frank always manifested in gray scale, not color, and it was a paper-thin two-dimensional image. Limitations of the system, though Claire had never been able to figure out why. Then again, she didn’t altogether understand the whole mechanism of how he projected the image at all.

Frank had chosen his avatar to look a lot like his old physical self: middle-aged (though not quite as beaten-up as Claire remembered him) with a scar on his face, and a perpetual bad-tempered scowl. He even wore the same old motorcycle leathers and stomping boots.

The scowl eased up as he saw Shane sitting in the chair. “Son,” he said. “That girl’s got you drinking tea now?”

Shane very deliberately took a sip of tea Claire absolutely knew he didn’t want. “Hi, Frank.” He was trying on this front, too; dealing with his dad alive had been a struggle, and dealing with him as a vampire had been worse. But now at least there was one thing settled between them: Frank couldn’t physically abuse him. And from Shane’s perspective, things were looking up. “How’s living in a jar these days? Fulfilling?”

“Been better.” Frank shrugged. “I see you’re still together. Good. You could do worse.”

“Frank,” Myrnin said, and all the fussiness was gone from his voice, leaving it flat and cold. “If you wish to be insulting, I can just mute you for a few days until you learn manners. These are my guests. Granted, I don’t really like your son, but I tolerate him, and you can do the same.”

“I was talking to the girl. I meant
she
could do worse. Like you, for instance.”

Myrnin stared at Frank’s flickering image with dark, unreadable eyes for a few long, unsettling seconds. “Crawl back in your cave,” he told him. “Now.”

“Can’t,” Frank said. “You had me set to alert you if anything happened on my side of town. Well, it’s happening. Somebody just tried to run the southern border of town in a van. It’s disabled by the side of the road. I dispatched the cops.”

“And?” Myrnin said. “What about it?”

“And someone just walked up to the eastern edge of town and is waiting there for permission to enter. Thought you’d like to know, it being daylight and all.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know, but he’s a vampire. He’s sitting in a pop-up tent right now.”

“Well, that’s odd.”

“Seems so,” Frank agreed. “He doesn’t match any of my databases, so he’s never been in Morganville. We’ve got us a genuine newcomer.”

“A newcomer who knows enough to wait at the border for permissions,” Myrnin said. “That’s unusual.”

“That’s why I brought it up.”

Myrnin tapped a finger on his lips for a moment, then suddenly whipped around to face Claire. “You could go,” he said. “Ask him what he wants.”

“Me? I’m not the vampire welcome wagon!”

“It’s daylight,” he said. “And while many of us
can
go out, we’d prefer not to risk it; wearing layers of protection in Morganville tends to mark us as … unusual. With the current unrest among the human population, it’s safer if we send someone like you.”

“Send the cops,” Shane said. “That’s what you own them for.”

“I’d prefer to know exactly who or what we are dealing with before I involve bureaucracy,” Myrnin said. “Oh, very well, since you’re reluctant, I will come with you. I should get out anyway.”

Claire hastily downed the rest of her tea and put the cup and saucer down; Shane gratefully dumped his out on the stone floor. Myrnin did that fast-motion thing again, and zipped back again adjusting a spectacularly badass black leather duster, a wide-brimmed leather hat, and gloves.

And a long, multicolored scarf he looped around his neck about six times.

“Too much?” he asked, pointing at the scarf. Claire didn’t have the heart to tell him yes, so she shrugged.

“What about Bob?” she asked.

“Oh, Bob’s fine. I think he’s shedding his exoskeleton, which is why he didn’t want to eat. Our Bob is a growing boy, you know.”

Frank gave him an unpleasant smile and said, “You know, I think I’ll call and get an exterminator in here. There’s a real problem with creepy-crawlies. Present company not excepted, of course, since I consider leeches to be creepy-crawlies as much as spiders.”

Frank Collins had been an ass when he was alive, and he wasn’t any better dead and living in a machine. Claire didn’t
like
Bob, but that didn’t mean she wanted him chemically murdered, either. And referring to Myrnin as a leech … Well, that was just rude.

So she frowned at Frank, then turned to Myrnin and said, “I’m ready if you are.”

Shane said, very quietly, “I hope you know what you’re getting us into.”

“Would you really rather drink more tea and chat with your dad?”

“Right,” Shane said. “Let’s roll.”

 

 

It was bright enough outside—barely—that Claire commandeered the keys to Myrnin’s sleek black car and had Shane drive. Yes, it was dangerous; vampire cars weren’t meant to have human drivers, and the window tinting made it like driving at night without headlights, even in full sun. But she’d been driven by Myrnin before, and it was an experience she
really
didn’t care to repeat. Shane was careful, and the roads heading to and from Morganville were, as always, relatively deserted, except for mail and delivery trucks that were just passing through.

He pulled off the road on the dusty shoulder near the KLEAVING US SO SOON? sign. It had a 1950s-era sad clown painted on it that had been rendered almost a ghost by sun and time. Someone had decorated it with a spray of shotgun pellets, but it had happened long ago; the whole sign leaned and creaked in the wind, about one gust away from collapsing completely.

And in its shade was a pop-up tent, and inside the shelter sat a young man wearing a sports hoodie, with BKLACKE TIGERS written across it in raised embroidery in black and red. As the three of them got out of the car, he scrambled to his feet, looking anxious; that got worse when he saw Myrnin’s outfit, but Claire held up a hand to calm him down. “He’s harmless,” she said. “You’re from Blacke?”

The boy nodded hesitantly, watching her with wary dark eyes. She didn’t remember him, but she remembered Blacke
very
well. It was another little isolated town, one that had been overrun with infected vampires a few months back. With Oliver’s help, Claire had managed to cure the sick ones, and a group of Morganville vampires had settled in there as a kind of satellite colony. Blacke’s citizens had good cause to support them, because so many of Blacke’s own people had been turned during the initial chaos caused by the sick vampires.

“How’s Morley?” Claire asked, still trying to sound calm and reassuring. The boy looked like he might bolt at any moment. Morley had spearheaded the group that had left Morganville and settled in Blacke; he was definitely an old-school vampire, but he was oddly entertaining, sometimes. She respected him, a little.

“Morley sent me,” he replied, looking just a little relieved she’d found the magic word—or name, anyway. “He and my aunt—Mrs. Grant. They kind of run the town now.”

“I’m Claire.” She stuck out her hand, and he took it and shook.

“Graham,” he said. “Hey.”

“Graham, this is Shane.” Shane shook hands, too, and Claire finally got around to Myrnin, but she didn’t need to; he stepped forward decisively, whipped off his hat, and bowed.

“I am Myrnin,” he said. “I’m in charge.”

Claire rolled her eyes and mouthed, behind his back,
Not really.
Graham almost smiled, but he managed not to, and gave Myrnin an awkward bow back. “Uh, hi, sir,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“That all depends on what you’re here to convey,” Myrnin said. “Did you walk all this way from Blacke?”

“No, sir,” Graham said. “I ran. But mostly during the night. It’s not bad. Kind of restful, actually.”

That settled the question of which sport Graham had been—or still was?—part of in school before he’d been turned vampire…. It had to be cross-country. “So what’s so important you’d run more than fifty miles over the desert, but Morley couldn’t pick up a phone?” Claire asked.