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Maybe they were dead and gone.
But it was my neighborhood, and we didn't allow bad things to happen here. Not here.
Not even to vampires who wouldn't give me their names.
I found the first one walking along half a block down; it was one of the two who'd been in the backseat with me. His headphones were gone, and he looked ... vacant. Dammit. I didn't know how to stop him, short of killing him; he was shambling along with a purpose, drawn by the eerie song of the draug toward a watery grave.
I ran back toward the car, looking, and found signs of a struggle. Smashed fence at Mrs. Grather's house, some bloodstains, and a broken headset. I tried it, and it still lit up, even though the headband had snapped in half. I ditched the shotgun and dashed back to the vamp, who was still walking along, and sneaked up behind him to slap the two halves of the headphones in place over his ears.
He took another couple of steps, with me awkwardly duck-walking with him as I held the pieces in place, then stopped and reached up to hold the headphones himself as I pulled back. Then he turned and faced me, and instead of seeing just another vampire, I saw ... a young man, maybe twenty-five or so. He had thick brown wavy hair, cut into a vaguely old style, and he had dark eyes, or at least they looked that way in the gloomy afternoon.
Kinda cute, in a bookish sort of way. He nodded to me and said, "Thank you." At least, that was how I read his lips. He gave me an awkward, shallow bow, too.
I wished I knew his name, suddenly, but there wasn't much point in conversing, seeing as how he had his headphones on and I had squishy earplugs. I gestured for him to follow me, and ran back toward where I'd dropped the shotgun. No sign of draug, at least here; my new friend kept up with me easily. He nodded in a way that I interpreted to mean wait here, and dashed in a blur back to the car, where he dropped his broken headphones and, in almost the same gesture, grabbed a new pair from the dashboard and snugged them in place. I saw his body language relax as they kicked in.
Okay, that explained him. It didn't explain the lack of Adele and the others. We made awkward sign language Q&A for a bit, and I got that there had been a draug popping up, and his headphones had gotten snapped, and Adele and the others had chased the draug. No props to Adele for tactical smarts, obviously, but before he'd succumbed to the singing, my new buddy had seen which way they'd gone.
So we followed, both now armed with shotguns.
We rounded the corner into the middle of a micro-rainstorm.
I mean, one second it was clear, the next there was a blinding curtain of rain that smashed down from the sky in a thick silver flood, and it was as cold as ice and took my breath away as it hit me. I couldn't see a thing, but I could feel a burning creeping over my exposed skin.
Draug, in the rain. They were concentrating on this one spot, flooding down to add their bulk to what looked like a flooded low spot in the road.
I could see them moving like shadows through the rain, surrounding Adele and the other vampires, who were shoulder to shoulder in a circle-the-wagons formation. Even through the earplugs I could hear the muffled blasts of the shotguns.
My fanged friend grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to a halt. He was right-we couldn't get closer; with three vampires firing in there, and taking a toll on the draug, we could get hit by friendly fire just as easily. He pointed to the silver nitrate glass jars that I'd clipped to my belt carabiner, and then to the thick, squirming puddle in the depression of the road.
I gave him a thumbs-up, passed him my gun, and unclipped the jars. My hands were cold and wet, and I had to concentrate to make sure I didn't slip and drop them. And then it occurred to me that my brilliant plan was to run right into the middle of the draug.
It was suddenly not so brilliant.
The vampire bumped my shoulder and gave me an encouraging nod. He had a shotgun in each hand, like something out of a badass Old West movie; all he really needed was a big hat and bandoliers over his chest to complete the picture. And maybe a poncho. Ponchos are cool.
I got the message. He'd be right behind me, firing on the draug coming from the sides. Plus, they wouldn't be nearly as interested in me if there was hot, tasty vampire within reach.
I gave him a firm, calm nod (and didn't feel that way at all) and ran forward.
Adele must have spotted us, because her gunfire in our direction stopped, but behind me I heard the close percussive booms of my new friend's shotguns going off as draug lurched out of the rain from the left and the right. Don't stop, don't stop, no matter what, don't stop ...
I ran directly into a draug.
Literally.
It was just forming itself out of the rain, and behind that human form was something vile and monstrous and formless, twitching and oozing.
I didn't have the time to stop, even if I'd wanted to. I don't know which of us was more surprised, actually.
I ran right into it, and through it.
It felt like half-congealed gelatin, or the thickest possible slimy mud. I retched at the feel of it on my skin, and it burned hard and fast, like an acid bath ... but then I was out of it, and the rain, even draug-infested, was cleaner, and sluicing the ick away.
And then I was at the edges of the puddle.
A draug crawled up out of it, but passed me, heading for the vampire behind me. He shot it in half. I was really glad for excellent vampire aim, because my hands were trembling hard now, and I was scared to death, horribly and miserably terrified, and I felt like I was screaming and I probably was, but I managed to bring my hands up and smash the two jars together, hard enough to pop the glass.
Silver rained down into the water, and where it touched, the water turned black, rotten and foul with dead draug.
The singing must have changed pitch, because even through the earplugs I could hear the screaming.
A hand shoved me down flat, and a shotgun clattered to the pavement next to me. My new vamp friend was still upright, standing over me now, firing steadily as draug tried to escape from the pond's poisonous waters.
I got up to my knees and fired, too, choking on the stench of gunpowder and the moldy flavor of the draug.
Finally, the rain eased, then puttered to a stop, and Adele fired the last shot into the pulpy mass of a draug, blasting it into slime ...
... And it was over.
Me, and the vampires.
Victorious.
My new friend reached down and offered me a hand up. I took it, breathless and shaking, and the help turned into a handshake.
Adele gave me a cool assessment, raised an eyebrow, and mouthed, Not bad.
Just like that, I was part of the team.
Lucky for us, the rest of the trip wasn't quite so eventful.
CHAPTER SIX
CLAIRE
"She should be back by now," Michael said, checking his cell phone as they followed Myrnin out of the lab and into yet another maze of hallways. "Claire. You text her."
"Her cell won't work," Claire said. "The human network's still down, except for police and emergency workers." The vampire network was, of course, fully operational ... at least for now. "Maybe one of the guys with her ...?"
"I don't know who they are," Michael said, and frowned at the screen. "She ought to be back."
What he really meant was that he ought to be with her, Claire thought, but she didn't say that out loud. "She's okay," she assured him. "Eve knows her way around town, just like you do. Just like Shane." It was true, but she knew it wasn't particularly comforting. The draug represented an entirely new dimension of danger that not even Morganville natives were fully equipped to handle. "She's got loads of vamp firepower."
"Yeah," he said softly, and for a moment she saw a flash of red in his blue eyes. "Look how that turned out before."
Ouch. She had a sudden vivid vision of him crouched over Eve's motionless body, his fangs in her neck. The look on his face, the desperate and unholy joy of it ... it haunted her. She couldn't imagine what it was like to be in his head right now, or for that matter, in Eve's. That moment had destroyed all the expectations they might have had about themselves.
"She'll be okay," Shane said. "Let's worry about us, bro. Because no matter how much of a little operation Myrnin wants to tell us this is, it ain't."
Michael nodded. He still looked pale and miserable, and he wasn't going to get much better until Eve got back ... and maybe not even then, if things were as bad as she feared.
Maybe mortal danger was the best thing for him right now.
It was still grudgingly daylight outside, but they didn't go out in it ... not at first. Myrnin said it wasn't necessary. Instead, he led them down a maze of corridors into a storeroom, small and dark, that stank of chemicals. Claire remembered it. It seemed a whole lot smaller with the five of them packed inside, but Myrnin squirmed past her, shut the door, and flipped on the overhead bulb, which swung in true horror-movie fashion back and forth above their heads. Just barely above Shane's, in fact; he hunched to avoid it.
