Midnight Bites (47 page)

“Well, yes,” he said. “Get me out before he—”

He never finished the sentence, because the window in front of him warped
in
, toward him. No, not just the window—a whole vertical piece of the building sucked inward, about ten feet of it.

And then it was gone. The window, the ten-foot column of brick building—all
gone
. But it wasn't as if there were damage or a bomb or something.

A part of the building had sucked in on itself and vanished without a trace, without a seam, as if it had never been there at all.

Claire stood staring upward for a long moment, then dashed for the open front door. She pounded up the rickety stairs, not concerned anymore for the condition of the steps, and turned left.
Room eleven. Room twelve.

Room fourteen.

Claire stopped in her tracks, breathing hard, and slowly backed up.

Room twelve.

Room fourteen, right next to it.

There was no room thirteen.

Not anymore.

It had vanished into thin air, and it had taken Myrnin with it.

•   •   •

“That's . . .” Eve's dark-rimmed eyes were wide, and she sat very still on her chair, hunched over her cup of coffee. They were sitting
together in Common Grounds, at way-too-early o'clock. Eve had the morning shift, and though she'd opened the shop, there was nobody here yet. Just Eve, and her morning cup. “That's just crazy.”

And Claire, with her problem. “I know,” she said. “I spent hours in that hotel, looking all over the place. It only has twenty rooms. Number thirteen is just . . . missing.”

“So it has to do with moonlight? As in, it's only there when the moon shines? That's beyond regular crazy, girl. That's restraining-order, straitjackets, and men-in-white-coats crazy.”

“I know! Believe me, I know. But I was
in
that room, Eve. I was there. I saw it. Myrnin . . . saved me, I guess. But he's trapped in there, and I need to get him out.”

“Um, so . . . moonrise? Or just a really nice spotlight with . . . a moon bulb, I guess? Look, what's the harm? He's a vamp. A day hanging out in a hotel room won't exactly kill him, right?”

“Right,” Claire said, but she was unconvinced. Eve had made her a mocha, and she sipped at it but didn't taste a thing. Her brain was still racing faster than her senses. “But he seemed scared, Eve. I don't think it was just a matter of waiting around. There's something else. Myrnin said
he
was coming.”

“He? What the hell does that mean?”

“I don't know,” Claire admitted. “I only know that he was worried enough to throw me out of a second-floor window to get me away from
him
, whoever that is.”

With a sudden chill, Claire remembered Myrnin saying,
And one for the devil.
He couldn't mean the literal devil, though, horns and tails, pitchfork and all . . . could he?

She honestly didn't know, with her crazy vamp boss. But she did know that he was scared. And Myrnin didn't frighten easily. He'd taken a vanishing thirteenth room in stride, but it was what was
inside
the room that frightened him.

Or what was inside the room when the moon wasn't there.

It made her head hurt. She compensated by drinking the rest of the mocha in gulps, and asking Eve, “Where's Oliver?”

“In his hidey-hole,” Eve said. “Doing ninja accounting, I guess. I don't ask. Why? Are you going to seriously ask him for help?”

“Who else can I ask? Amelie?” Claire shook her head. “I need backup.”

“What am I,
chica
? I've got skills. Mad ones, even.”

“Fair point, but neither one of us have, you know,
vampire
skills. And I'm pretty sure that would come in handy at some point, seeing as we're not dealing with a human problem, exactly.”

“It's a Myrnin problem, not a vampire problem. I think they're just as badly equipped as we are, sweetie.” Eve patted her hand and bounced out of her chair. In fact, she kept bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, which was a neat trick in those heavy black boots. “You said it had something to do with alchemy, right? Well, you're the resident Morganville alchemy scholar. So
you
are our secret weapon. See?”

“No,” Claire said. “I don't. I mean . . . yes, I probably know more about alchemy than anybody else here except Myrnin, but . . .”

“But what? Suit up, Alchemy Girl. We're going to hero.”

“I really don't think this is a good idea,” Claire said. Eve stopped bouncing and looked at her with a long, level stare, until she finally sighed and said, “But we're going to do it anyway.”

“Yes.” Eve held up a fist to be bumped. “Yes, we are.”

•   •   •

First stop was, of course, Myrnin's lab, because it was the place Myrnin kept . . . things. Claire didn't honestly know what some of them were, but she had a good enough guess at a few, and she could decipher his scribbles well enough to infer the rest. Eve took one look
at the place, shuddered, and said, “I'm fine here, thanks. I'd rather not explore the fun house of horrors.”

“I'd have thought the fun house of horrors would be your kind of scene,” Claire said, but she left Eve sitting on the steps that led down to the lab proper, and started making her way over and around the piles of debris that always seemed to collect around Myrnin. She was looking for something in particular. Myrnin had a system; she'd finally recognized what it was, and it had less to do with the placement of things than groupings of them. He mounded things together into more or less coherent subjects; once he started moving them around, he moved the piles, not just single items.

So she was looking for the pile that had to do with the alchemical influence of the moon. It was a big subject, because the idea that the moon's light held very different properties from sunlight was central to a lot of alchemical theory; things that worked in the sun didn't always work in the moon, and vice versa. She personally thought it was a load of nonsense, but Myrnin liked to keep an open mind, and after seeing the magically disappearing room thirteen, she was prepared to cautiously admit that maybe he was on to something.

The mound of things loosely grouped together under the general heading of
moon
was staggering. She started combing through the books and setting aside what might come in handy, but what she was really looking for was a particular gadget that Myrnin had shown her, once upon a time. As with most things he invented, she doubted she'd gotten the full story of what it did, but it had
sounded
like the alchemical equivalent of an ALS, an alternative light source.

It looked like a cross between a flamethrower (because of the giant backpack) and a flashlight (connected to the backpack with a flexible copper tube), as imagined by someone with lots of steampunk flair. Claire found it under the table, in a box marked
DEADLY AND FRAGILE
,
which didn't bode all that well, but she was pretty sure that the box belonged to something else entirely anyway.

“Really?” Eve said from the stairs. “You're joining the Ghostbusters now? Because that looks like a movie prop.”

Claire avoided the obvious
Who you gonna call?
joke—too easy—and slid the leather straps over her shoulders. It was heavy, this thing, but it balanced okay. The flashlight-ish part had a simple on/off switch, and she took a deep breath, pointed the light at a dark corner of the lab wall, and switched it on.

A pale blue-white glow bathed the lab's textured stone. It didn't look much different from moonlight.

“Got it,” she called to Eve, and grabbed up a random assortment of other things that might come in handy, too—weapons, mainly. Myrnin had a lot of weapons lying around, everything from modern guns to ancient clubs. All that went into a black nylon bag with a sports logo; she doubted Myrnin even knew the brand, but he probably liked that the name came from Greek.

“I'll take that,” Eve said, and grabbed the bag. “Anything else? Do you have to feed the spider or anything?”

“Bob's fine—Myrnin fed him yesterday,” Claire said. “And I didn't think you liked spiders.”

“Ugh, I don't. But he's weirdly cute, I guess. For a spider. Whatever, this place is creeping me out.”

“Wait until you see where we're going,” Claire said. “Maybe we should call Michael?”

“Michael's teaching today. What about Shane?”

“He opened the restaurant for the day, and he's kind of, you know, in charge.”

“Heavy lies the assistant manager crown. Okay, then, it's girl power all the way.” Eve grinned, and bounced on her toes again. “Lead the way, Ghostbuster. I'm ready.”

“You're really not,” Claire said, “but here goes.”

•   •   •

Eve had grown up in Morganville, and left it only once in her entire life, and even
she
didn't come to this area of town. “I thought they'd torn it down,” she said, as she pulled her big black hearse to a stop about a block from the hotel. That was as close as she could get, given the stuff littering the street ahead . . . trash, but also boards with rusty nails sticking up and broken bricks. It looked like the aftermath of a riot, but it could just as easily have been the last big storm that had swept through, about the time the water-vampire draug had attacked the town. Morganville wasn't real big on civic services. Or civic pride, in these parts of town.

“They should,” Claire said. “But maybe the vampires don't want it torn down.”

“Prime lurking territory,” Eve said. “Can't imagine they get a lot of wandering victims, though. Even meth cookers go more upscale than this.”

Claire had to agree with that. There was a totally creepy vibe to this place, and suddenly she wished she'd called Shane, or Michael, even though they had work to do of their own.
This is my job,
she told herself, and put the steampunk moonlight on her back while Eve gathered up the weapons. Eve added a shotgun from the back—probably Shane's—and locked up the car. Claire looked around. In the daylight, she'd have expected this place to seem more sad than scary, but nope. Still scary. The shadows were too dark in the bright sunlight, and with the warming wind hissing sand through the streets, it seemed like an alien, empty world.

“Which one?” Eve asked. She didn't sound worried; she sounded steady, and Claire needed that just now.

“The hotel,” Claire said.

“With the creepy gargoyle? Awesome. Take point, fearless leader. I've got your back.”

Eve might sometimes seem fragile, but she wasn't; growing up in Morganville either broke people or gave them a core of strength that wouldn't bend. Eve was solid steel where it counted, and having her on hand made Claire feel steadier, sharper,
ready
.

She adjusted the dragging weight of the—moonlight?—and led the way through the still-open door, down the molding hallway, to the silent, dusty check-in desk. The key for thirteen was still missing. She supposed that Myrnin had held on to it.
Could be a problem,
she thought, and went behind the counter to rummage around in the drawers. Carefully, of course; she was mindful of the shiny black widow spider that Myrnin had discovered upstairs. There were decades of dead insects in the drawers, but under a desiccated old beetle, she found a ring of keys.

The master set for the rooms.

“So,” Eve said, in an appropriately quiet voice for the venue, “just how scary is this going to be?”

“Well, how do you feel about disappearing rooms with vampires trapped inside?”

“When you put it that way, it
is
a moot point,” Eve said. “Right. Let's do this. Oliver said I could have the morning off, but it's already nearly ten. If I'm not back on the clock at noon, he'll want blood. I mean, literal, actual blood.”

Claire nodded and went up the stairs. She remembered running them before, but that seemed desperately unwise again, because they really were pretty rickety from dry rot and just plain old time. Nothing gave way, but the groaning was horror-movie loud.

The landing was just as she'd left it . . . silent, forbidding, and dark. Claire turned down the hall and switched on the special moon-flashlight. It cast an eerie bluish glow onto the wallpaper, and the
wallpaper seemed to . . . crawl. For a shocked instant she thought she'd surprised bugs, but no, that was just the wallpaper moving, all on its own.

This place was definitely not what it seemed.

“Stay close,” she said to Eve. Eve was staring hard at the crawling wallpaper, too.

“Not a problem, sister,” Eve said. “I plan to be so close we might have to get married. Seriously, does the creepy ever stop in this town?”

Claire didn't answer that, because she honestly had no idea. She concentrated on running the light slowly over the door to Room Eleven. It looked dusty and normal. The wallpaper crawled like ants between that door and the next, but again, Room Twelve looked sane.

The wallpaper didn't just crawl after that; it pulsed and heaved and pushed, and as she passed the light over the center section, a door appeared. It shoved up
out
of the wallpaper, first in a thin line, then expanding like something drifting up out of black water. A closed door, with the number thirteen in tarnished brass on it.

Claire reached out and touched it. Cool, painted wood. She ran her fingers across and onto the wallpaper. Different texture.

Just as an experiment, she moved her hand back to the door, pressed it flat, and switched the cold blue light off. Instantly, the texture changed from paint and wood to the brittle, dusty feel of wallpaper.

Eve made a little sound of distress as the dark closed in. Claire switched the light back on, and there was the door, impossible but present.