Shane reached up for his, and she grabbed his hand and shook her head. He took a deep breath and nodded, and together, they went up the steps to the white door.
Ready? She mouthed it to him, and got a flash of a smile in response.
Not really, he said. But let’s do it.
She had the urge to move fast, but held back; Shane couldn’t move at vampire speeds, and leaving him behind, here, wasn’t even an option. Not with that sound pressing down, dragging and piercing right through the soundproofing now, digging into her brain. Closer, it was singing. Come and rest. Come and rest.
She didn’t want to rest, but she couldn’t stop herself from moving forward, slowly, with Shane’s hand clutched tight in hers.
The room she walked into was dark, and smelled of mold. The carpet was ancient and filthy, and overhead, the ceiling had cracked and split. Paint had peeled off in elaborate curls, like ribbons, and she ducked to avoid them. There was an old desk, and a wrinkled cardboard sign that read, when Shane turned his flashlight on it, MEMBER SIGN-IN SHEET. The clipboard was still there, dangling from a silver chain, but the papers were long gone.
The entire place reeked of damp and rot.
Closer, the music whispered. Peace and stillness. Closer.
There was a hallway beyond the entry hall, and it glimmered with fairyland lights and reflections.
Shane pulled at her hand, shaking his head frantically. He pointed at the door leading back outside, into the cleaner night air.
But she had to see. Just to be sure.
Claire edged forward down the hall, still gripping his hand. She tried not to touch the walls, which were black with mold. The carpet was gone now, and there were two doors off the hall, one labeled MEN’S KLOCKER ROOM, the other WOMEN’S. The texture of the floor changed to tile, and it was slick and slippery.
The hall opened into a giant open concrete space with a rusty lacework of iron overhead. The floor was cracked white tiles, and on the walls there was more tile, in patterns Claire was sure used to be beautiful, before they were discolored with time and more of the ever-present mold.
In the center was a big square pool, and it was full of glimmering blue-green water, lit from below. It glowed like a jewel, and it was beautiful and mesmerizing and the singing was coming from there, right there....
The woman they’d followed was in the pool. In the shallow end, but walking forward.
And she kept walking as the water reached her hips, then her waist, up to her chest, her neck....
. . . And she went under.
She didn’t come back up.
In the deep end of the pool, Claire saw . . .
. . . Bodies.
Claire lunged forward and ran to the edge of the pool. Shane tried to stop her, but she couldn’t let him, not now, not now!
There were bodies in the pool. Standing there, upright, six feet below the surface at least. They were anchored on the bottom, she thought, because she could see their arms floating. One woman’s long hair drifted lazily in the water, veiling her face, but as it wafted out of the way, Claire recognized her.
Naomi.
The vampire was still and silent, eyes wide. She looked dead.
Oliver was down there, anchored nearby.
And there was Michael. Right there, staring up at her.
And he blinked.
He was alive. They were all alive.
She wanted to scream. Shane was dragging her frantically backward from the edge, and she realized that even as she’d been adjusting to the horrible reality of what she was seeing, she’d been thinking about taking one more step, just one, and sinking into that warm, still water, so calm and peaceful....
He spun her around and screamed in her face, “Claire, we have to go!”
He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the hallway.
Then stopped.
Because there was a pale-faced man standing there, staring at them. Claire blinked, and he wasn’t there anymore—it was a black thing, but she could see his human disguise at the same time, like a skin stretched over the reality.
Magnus.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I killed you, girl.”
Shane dug silver-coated stakes out of his pocket. He passed one to Claire, then took out what looked like a . . . sports bottle. One had a snap-down top, and he thumbed that off, aimed, and squirted a silvery stream out of it to splash on the thing in their way.
Magnus screamed, and it was like that singing sound, only a million times worse, and Shane dropped the bottle and the stake and staggered, then went down to one knee. Claire came close; it hammered at her in waves of relentless sound, but she could see that the silver nitrate had hurt the thing, burned away some of his human-skin disguise, and melted part of him into a bubbling, seething mass that ran off in a black current to the tiles.
Claire took a firmer grip on the silver stake, summoned up all the speed and strength Myrnin had granted her, and raced forward in a blur.
She buried the silver stake where, in a human, a heart would have been. It was like pushing it into Jell-O, nothing like staking a vampire at all. Sickening. She could feel the cold ooze on her fingers.
Magnus’s mouth opened, revealing razor-sharp rows of teeth, and he lunged at her. She yelped and rolled away, still vamp-fast, and Magnus yanked the stake out and flung it away. The wound it had left was another bubbling leak of black fluid, but he wasn’t down. Not by half.
Shane staggered up, grabbed her hand, and ran for the door he’d left unguarded. Black streamers of ooze were coming across the tile at them, and Claire had the awful, sickening feeling that if they stepped in it, they’d never get free. The ick on her fingers felt like it was squeezing them white, and she felt horrible pinpricks all over the skin where it touched. She dragged her hand against her jeans as they ran.
There were more of them in the entry hall, black oily shadows with fake human faces, and they were all Magnus. Shane sprayed the rest of the bottle at them, and Claire grabbed a silver-coated knife from his belt loop. She slashed at the one who came for him, and heard that shriek again, an angry, pile-driving pressure like the whole ocean descending on them . . . but the creature went down, splashing into silvery black fragments that rolled aimlessly over the carpet, and Claire grabbed Shane’s arm and dragged him forward for the clear air outside. He was staggering, and in the wan, flickering glow of the streetlight outside, she saw that his nose was bleeding, and his eyes were red.
She was bleeding, too, she realized, from both her nose and her hand. It looked as if it had been stung by a jellyfish. It was covered with little beads of blood.
It was biting me, she thought, and shuddered in revulsion.
“Come on!” she screamed, and Shane coughed, bent over, and vomited out a stream of water.
But they hadn’t even gotten into the pool.
Magnus was in the doorway, and his eyes were silver white, like moonlight on water, and he was smiling at them.
They weren’t going to make it.
Claire screamed again, in pure agonizing frustration, and without even thinking about it, she grabbed Shane and threw him over her shoulder.
That shouldn’t have been possible, not at all; he was so much bigger and heavier than she was, but she felt like her veins were on fire, and she wanted to fight, now, fight this thing that had hurt her and come after Shane and come after Michael and Oliver and her town.