Midnight Bites (46 page)

Dedicated to Martha Jo Trostel for her support for the Morganville digital series Kickstarter

We end the collection with another brand-new look at Morganville, courtesy of Martha Jo, who wanted a story from Claire's point of view . . . and I just happened to have one lurking in the back of my mind. Claire and Myrnin (with bonus Eve) are always a dynamic combination for me; I love that his sometimes rash ideas balance out with her native caution. Mostly. This time, it isn't Myrnin putting Claire in danger so much as Claire being forced to figure out a puzzle he's put into motion, then been caught within.

If we've learned anything from our time in Morganville, it should definitely be
Don't go in the creepy building
, but then again, in Morganville . . . they're all creepy, to some extent. When you mix in Myrnin's proto-time-travel technology, anything is possible.

Fun factoid: I got the idea for this story because weird things sometimes happen when you're on a book tour. You get tired. You come in late at night. Often, there's no thirteenth floor in a hotel,
but
sometimes there is; sometimes there's a thirteenth floor but no room thirteen on that floor.

I had room number 1313 one evening, and then the next day at a new hotel, when I was also given a room on the thirteenth floor, my brain told me to look for 1313. It didn't exist. I was convinced that the room had disappeared, until I reasoned it out, but I didn't forget that out-of-body weirdness of looking for something that no longer existed.

W
hen Myrnin was in one of these moods, it just didn't pay to argue with him.

Claire sat calmly in his wing chair, near the far back corner of his laboratory, while he whizzed around at vampire speeds, tinkering with this, muttering at that, flipping through ancient tomes and flinging them across the room when he didn't find what he was looking for. She'd asked him what he was doing. He'd given her a wild, distracted look, and she'd decided that maybe it was time to feed Bob the Spider some flies, and sit and read for a while.

She was two chapters into her book when she realized he was looming over her. Without looking up, she said, “You're in my light.”

“Are you or are you not my assistant?” Myrnin demanded. “I can't find
anything
in here! What have you done, rearranged things? Again?”

“No, I haven't,” she said, and put her bookmark in place before she closed the volume and looked up at him. Myrnin had a black smudge along one side of his cheek, and his hair was sticking up at odd angles, as if he'd rubbed grease into it and forgotten about it. “You move things, and you forget you move things, and if you'd tell me what it was you were looking for—”

“I'm looking for something that isn't here, or I wouldn't be in quite such a state, now, would I? Up. Up up up.”

Claire rose and stepped aside, and her vampire boss flung himself into a boneless slouch in the chair, frowning at nothing. After a moment, he said, “It's warm.”

“What?”

“The chair. It's warm.”

“I was just sitting in it.”

“Ah. I forget, that's a side effect for people with pulses.”

“What are you looking for?” Sometimes, with Myrnin, the patient repetition of the question worked better than anything else.

Like this time, because he suddenly looked at her. His dark eyes widened, and his mouth formed a surprised O, and he bolted up out of his chair and hugged her. It was a vampire-speed hug, which meant that she didn't have time to object or respond before he was away, flashing toward a bookcase in the other part of the lab. He tossed out at least ten books, then found a slim volume and held it high. “Found it!”

“Could you please
not
leave books all over the floor?”

“Bother,” he said, and came back to throw himself into the chair with great enthusiasm. “I haven't the time for that nonsense. Shelving, reshelving, picking up, cleaning . . . Everything tends to entropy and it's just fighting the inevitable. But please, by all means, pick those up.”

“I will,” Claire said. “What is that?”

“This?” He held up the book, and she read the faded title. It wasn't some ancient dusty Latin thing, which was what he was most fond of collecting; this was printed in the 1960s, by the weird type style and strangely quaint illustration. The title was
A Traveler's Guide to Haunted Places
.

“Seriously?”

“Oh, I am dead serious. Well, dead and serious, you understand. I stored some things many years ago at a place I built, and I need them back. What time is it?”

“Time . . .” She pulled her phone and glanced at it. “Um, almost midnight. Why?”

“Because we'll need to get there before sunrise,” Myrnin said. “Most important.”

That made zero sense, because Myrnin was fully capable of going out in the daylight when he wanted to, vampire or not. He was old, older than Morganville's resident vampire queen, Amelie; that gave him a certain invulnerability to sunlight that younger undead didn't have. Besides, a coat and hat usually did fine for protection.

“Where are we going, exactly?”

“The Morganville Traveler's Rest,” he said. “Come along, then. Bring everything.”

Claire rolled her eyes and texted her husband—
husband
; she loved thinking that so much—Shane, to let him know where she was going. It was an established thing, when Myrnin was in his crazycakes moods. Just insurance. Not so much that she thought he'd hurt her; they were long past that kind of fear. More that he'd forget and abandon her someplace. That happened
way
too much.

Shane texted back that he wished she were coming home. She wished she were, too. But sending Myrnin off unescorted seemed like a bad plan. He was in a manic phase, and that almost never went well . . . but she could keep him from doing something really crazy.

Hopefully.

Take everything. Right.

Claire grabbed what she thought she might need, bundled it into a bag older than she was, and followed Myrnin out into the night.

•   •   •

She had no idea where the Morganville Traveler's Rest might be; she'd never heard of it, and Morganville, Texas, wasn't that big of a town. So she wasn't too surprised to find that it was one of the many dilapidated, shuttered buildings around town . . . the crumbling ruins of places that weren't worth keeping up or renovating. Home of rats, cockroaches, and vampires too derelict or damaged to play by Amelie's rules of good behavior. Or those who just enjoyed a good scary place to haunt.

It was definitely scary. Definitely. Morganville's nights were clear and cold, and though she'd wrapped up in a thick jacket and a scarf and gloves, her breath fogged white as she struggled to keep up with Myrnin. He wasn't vampire-speeding away from her, at least; he was clearly impatient, but keeping more or less to a human pace.

A fast human pace.

“Slow down!” she finally gasped. He didn't slow; he stopped, and then he turned and looked back at her, sighed, and came to take the heavy bag from her.

“Better?” he asked.

“Not if you keep acting like it's a race!”

“Well, it is, a bit,” he said. “I would have asked you to drive me, but you seem to have such trouble with the windshield.”

“It's a vampire tinted windshield, Myrnin.”

“Just as I said. Ah, good. This way.”

They were at the corner of Oh-Hell-No and You're-Gonna-Die, as Eve would have put it, and
this way
looked like it was definitely worse. The silver wash of moonlight on sagging wood and leaning buildings turned it all into a Gothic nightmare, and except for the occasional streetlight, there wasn't any sign of life here. Old, old buildings, mostly built of brick with concrete ornaments on them. There was one across the street that looked like it had once been a hotel, six or seven generations back; above the boarded-up door, a
gruesome-looking gargoyle leaned down. Up near the top, letters in the concrete read
EST. 1895.

Definitely not the place Claire wanted to be urban exploring at this time of night. Or, actually, at all, ever, the end, but what was worse than urban exploring at this time of night was that Myrnin might actually leave her
alone
doing it.

She hurried after him when he darted for the
EST. 1895
building. The front door was boarded over, but the plywood hadn't weathered the tough Morganville sunshine and heat too well, and besides, vampire strength was enough to rip even sturdy plywood like tissue paper. All Claire needed to do was stand back—well back, because sometimes Myrnin forgot where he was throwing stuff, and that didn't end well. The shredded board skidded past her, out into the street, where she doubted anyone would be running over it for a couple of days, at least. Still, she trudged over, grabbed the wood (it was surprisingly heavy), and towed it back onto the sidewalk.

Myrnin had already shoved open the door, which leaned on rusty hinges like a drunk. Beyond, it looked scary-black, but Claire sighed and turned on her very bright little LED flashlight. She never left home without it, for precisely this kind of reason. It lit up an ancient hallway, a ceiling that looked bulging and precarious from some leak long ago, and wallpaper that she couldn't imagine had ever been pretty. There was a front desk up ahead, which had survived fairly well, and a honeycomb of wooden boxes behind it, most with dusty keys still in them.
Lots of vacancies,
she thought, and shuddered. She imagined most of them weren't vacant at all. It was every horror movie Eve had ever forced her to watch, come to life.

Myrnin leaned over the dusty counter and grabbed a key from a box, then hurried up the sagging, none-too-safe-looking stairs. Claire tried to see which key he'd grabbed, in case he (inevitably) left her behind.

Number thirteen. Of course.

She went up after him. Carefully. The safest part of the step was at the edges, so she went slowly, testing each for her weight and holding to the rickety banister in case something gave way. Nothing did, surprisingly. At the landing, she saw a sign in old-timey block lettering that pointed to her right for rooms one through ten, and left for eleven through twenty.

When she turned left, Myrnin was standing there, waiting for her. He snapped his fingers in that restless, manic way he sometimes got, and said, “Hurry, hurry, the moon will be down soon. Come on, Claire!”

He stalked off down the dark hall, and she lit it up with her flash, for safety. Good thing she did, because a grandfather clock had tipped over at some point, and lay flat across the path like a dead body. Myrnin had skipped right over it, but she had to be more careful.

“Ah!” Myrnin sounded gratified, and when Claire looked up, she saw him standing in front of a doorway. Number thirteen. “And one for the devil. Good. We're in time.”

“In time for
what
?”

“I told you, the moon will be down soon.” He inserted the key and turned it carefully; the lock gave a groaning, rusty scrape, but the door swung open with a horror-movie creak. “Hurry, please. Speed is safety.”

That sounded . . . ominous. He was gone in the next second into the room, and she had to make a decision. Fast.

She stepped into the room.

It was, slightly to her disappointment, just an old, dilapidated hotel room, with a leaning bed on a rusty metal frame, one of those funny wooden wardrobes people used to use for their clothes instead of a closet, and a wooden stand with a cracked bowl and jug on it.
Turn-of-the-century equivalent of running water, she guessed. It looked . . . depressing.

The glass was still intact in the window, and through it, she could see the moon glowing on the horizon. It was just touching the flat desert landscape, casting an icy blue glow into the room. Bright, though. Bright enough to see without the flashlight, so she clicked it off.

Myrnin opened up the old wooden wardrobe.

“What did you mean?” Claire asked him. “You said,
And one for the devil
. What does that mean?”

“Old expression,” he said. “Sometimes people would spill a drop of their wine and say it—one for the devil—so he'd not be angry at being cheated out of his due. But have you ever noticed that hotels of this age never have a room thirteen?”

“I know sometimes hotels skip the
floor
thirteen,” she said. “Because it's unlucky, right?”

“Oh no, not at all. It's the devil's number, thirteen, and a number of great power from an alchemical point of view, which is not at all the same thing, whatever the churches may say. Ah! Perfect.” He rummaged in the cabinet, throwing out decaying old boxes, one of which held something that scuttled. Claire switched on her flashlight, and recognized the shiny black shell of the spider that hurried across the floor. That wasn't Bob or his friendly cousin the house spider; that was the sleek Porsche edition of spiders: a black widow.

Claire took a couple of steps back to let it hurry past to the shadows in peace. Black widows weren't attackers, generally, but you still didn't want to piss one off. Myrnin kept searching the closet. There must have been a lot in there, because she heard him opening chests and slamming them shut again, tearing open boxes, muttering to himself.

The room was getting darker. She was glad she had the flashlight.

“Claire?” Myrnin's voice came muffled from the closet. “Check the moon. Is it still up?”

That seemed like a nonsensical question, but she edged toward the window and looked out again. The moon seemed to be shivering on the horizon now, as if it were clinging to the thin edge. Just a sliver of it remaining now. Sunset—and moonset, Claire guessed—came fast out here on the dusty prairie. “Not much of it,” she said. “Wait—there it goes.”

Suddenly, Myrnin was beside her, staring out the old, warped glass. “Damn,” he said. “He's coming.” He was holding a thing in his hand, but she couldn't tell what it was, other than large and metallic. He dropped it to the floor with a heavy crash (and she hoped it wouldn't break right through), and before Claire could draw breath, he grabbed the sash of the window and yanked it upward.

It shouldn't have opened at all, because it probably hadn't for close to a hundred years, but vampire strength forced it up with a rending shriek. Glass broke. “What are you—?” Claire started to ask, but broke off into a startled cry when Myrnin grabbed her by the arms, and swung her
out the window
.

She had time to register that she was dangling out in the cold, sharp air, with stars turning overhead, and that Myrnin had leaned far, far out the window, holding her hands.

“Pull me in!” she yelled.

He shook his head, and said, “I need to get you out of here. It isn't safe.” His face looked grim and as serious as she'd ever seen him.

Then she felt his strong, chilly fingers release hers, and she was falling.

It was a long fall, and she hit hard and rolled. She'd landed on a rotting sofa abandoned on the sidewalk, which explained why she hadn't broken bones, but the bounce to the street's harder surface left plenty of bruises.

Myrnin hadn't followed her down.

Claire rose to her feet, shaky and disoriented, and stared up at the window. Myrnin was still up there, but he'd pulled himself back into the window. “What are you doing?” she yelled up at him, and heard the angry, unsteady edge to her voice to match the pump of adrenaline through her veins. “Are you
crazy
?”