“I’m not going to leave Eve behind,” I said. “I love her. I’m not just going to—”
She turned away from me toward the outer door. I hadn’t heard anything, but she must have; she pressed a button on her desk, and the lock clicked over.
Myrnin walked in.
He looked . . . well, different. Sane, for one thing. The pupils of his eyes were wide and dilated, and I wondered if she’d drugged him, or he’d done it himself. Either could have been true. He closed the door without being asked and stood there, hands clasped behind his back, like a schoolboy reporting to the teacher. “It’s done,” he said. “Frank has been programmed with all the necessary sequences. He’ll initiate it and shut himself down once it’s confirmed. Then the countdown will start. It’s all set to begin at dusk tomorrow.”
Dusk tomorrow. I’d been told that all Morganville human residents had to be present in Founder’s Square. “Countdown for what?” I asked. If Myrnin had set Frank to some kind of suicide mode, it was dire. Really dire.
Amelie and Myrnin both ignored me. “I will need you to help me trace Oliver’s last movements,” she said. “I realize there is no way to track Magnus directly, but we know that Oliver vanished within a short window of time. Perhaps there are clues to be seen, even now.”
Myrnin frowned at her and rocked uncomfortably back and forth. “You mean to go after him? It’s—not wise.”
“I don’t intend to stage a rescue,” she said. “I can’t. Oliver’s lost, as are the rest. But if we know where the draug are gathering those they’ve taken, we can isolate it. Perhaps we can contain them and buy ourselves some time.”
“Unlikely. You know how easily they could—”
“I know,” she interrupted, and waved him off. “No more talk. Go.”
Myrnin put a hand to his chest and bowed, just a little. As he did, he shot a look at me. This one was knife sharp. Amelie turned her back toward the window, and as Myrnin straightened, he mouthed one word to me.
Follow.
I let him leave, and heard the click of the lock engage behind him. Amelie waited, as silent as the grave, until I said, “You say I don’t have a choice, but I do. I can either cooperate or get dragged along. Right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I regret that they are the only options I can offer. Leave the humans behind now, Michael; tomorrow it will only be harder. Do you understand?”
“You can really do it that easily. Just . . . end things.”
“Yes,” she said. She sounded tired now, and sad. “Unfortunately, I can. And I will. And so will you. So which is it? Go downstairs voluntarily, or under a guard, to a locked room? You can’t leave. That much is absolutely guaranteed.”
“Then I’ll go on my own,” I said. “But this isn’t over. Trust me.”
She didn’t bother to point out to me how useless that was to say. She just pressed the button on her desk, and waved me off. I had no doubt that she had people watching me, ready to pounce, but Myrnin had been definite.
And that meant Myrnin had a plan. A crazy plan, sure, but right now, I’d take anything at all.
I walked out of the outer office and into the hallway, then looked right. Nothing showing that direction. It was entirely blank and bland.
To the left was a solid block of vampires, all impatiently waiting their turns at Bizzie’s desk.
And beyond them, I saw Myrnin standing at the end of the hall. He waited until I’d caught sight of him, then took off in the opposite direction from the elevators.
I shoved past the waiting vamps, most of whom shot me poisonous looks or flashed fangs. I managed not to get bitten somehow. When I achieved relatively free space, I moved faster. Myrnin hadn’t been dawdling, and while I didn’t dare run, I couldn’t exactly stroll.
I looked back. Two of Amelie’s best and brightest goons had come out of a doorway only about fifteen feet behind me, and they were falling in on my trail. I turned the corner, heading the exact wrong way, and knew they’d be on me in seconds.
I ran, hard, and the walls blurred around me. I couldn’t see Myrnin ahead, just more endless hallway....
. . . And then something tripped me, and I was falling.
Only a hand grabbed me out of the air by the arm and yanked, and in the next microsecond a door slammed, and I was on the floor being held down with a cold hand pressed over my mouth.
Myrnin. I rolled my eyes to look around, and from what I could dimly see, I thought we were in some kind of janitorial closet. It was tiny, cramped, and stank of cleaning products.
He looked down at me after about five seconds, and said, “We have less than a minute until they find us. Is Claire alive?”
“I thought you said—”
“I was hopeful, but you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t seen proof,” he said. “And now we have forty-five seconds.”
“I need you,” I said. “She needs you. Come with me.”
“I can’t,” Myrnin said. “It’s impossible. She’ll never allow me to leave.” He dug in the pocket of his vest, dropped a handful of old movie tickets, a foil-wrapped stick of gum, and something that looked like an ancient piece of candy to the carpet. “Where is it—Oh, bother—Wait—” He slapped pockets. I thought about reminding him of his own countdown, but honestly, it wouldn’t do much good. Myrnin, Claire had always insisted, ran on Standard Crazy Time, not the regular clock.
He found a folded sheet of paper in his breast pocket, glanced at it, and handed it over to me. “Here,” he said. “I’ll need these things. Get them for me, before morning comes. Oh, and I’ll need her body.”
I was trying to read the list, but that stopped me cold. I looked up. “Her what?”
“Body,” he repeated. “Corpse. Remains. Mortal shell. Her body, lackwit, get it to the house, and now we’re out of time, for heaven’s sake—go!”
“Go where?” I wondered how Claire dealt with this, the crazy talk, the sudden insanity, the demands—and then Myrnin spun me around, put a hand in the center of my back, and shoved. Hard.
I stumbled forward and brought up my arms, because I was going to hit the blank wall . . .
. . . And then the wall vanished into a well of black, a confusion of color, and the rest of my fall went through a freezing void and then out again into a cold, whipping wind, pellets of rain on my face, and the hard, scraping impact of my hands on pavement.
I was outside a brick wall, in a part of town I didn’t recognize at first glance, until I found the distant lights of Founder’s Square and spotted the darkened sign for Marjo’s Diner, no longer open twenty-four/seven.
I was halfway to the edge of town, in the entirely wrong direction from home . . . but the right side of town for Morganville’s one and only mortuary, run by a strange, stiff vampire called Mr. Ransom.
I was close to a single, flickering streetlight, and I took the piece of paper and angled it to catch the glow. It was a list. A crazy list.
And the first thing on it was CLAIRE—BODY.
He’s nuts, I told myself. We all knew it, even Claire; Myrnin was a few pints short of a gallon at his best, and I wasn’t exactly sure this was his best. He was medicated, for sure. That might be a good thing, of course. Amelie wouldn’t want him to be scattered, so she might have made sure he was ruthlessly focused. In which case, the nutty list I was holding might actually make sense, in whatever universe Myrnin and Claire inhabited that the rest of us didn’t.
I didn’t really have a choice. He’d given me orders, and a list, and if I wanted to save Claire, or have any chance of it, I needed to get moving.
At the very least, Amelie was going to have a hell of a time finding me.
And that made me grin, before I took off running toward the mortuary.