Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(84)

“Maybe,” Michael said, but he sounded doubtful. “I heard there’s a blood record somewhere, but I have no idea where it is. Or if Myrnin’s in it. From what I heard, he’s the only one still living out of his line. It’s pretty ancient, and he didn’t make any others who survived long, so there may not be a record.”

“But could you ask? Maybe look around? I need to find him, Michael. I think—I think he’s in trouble.”

“Why?” He put down the knife and looked at her directly. “Did he say something?”

“Only that he didn’t like the way things were going in town,” she admitted. “And that he was planning to leave. But you know how he is. I don’t think he really would have run away. Not like that. You saw the lab!”

He shrugged. “The lab’s always a mess; you know that. It’s impossible to tell whether there was a struggle, or he just didn’t like the latest newspaper he read and decided to trash the place.”

“He left Bob! And how did Pennyfeather get in? He didn’t have authorization.”

“You don’t know that. And maybe he just forgot about Bob. It’s not like he’s an exciting pet.”

“Bob’s cool, and Myrnin loves him like any other pet. He’d never just abandon him to starve,” Claire said. “But…I just have the feeling, okay? So would you? For me?”

Michael ruffled her hair. “Yeah, sure. For you. Here. Chop some onions.”

“Hey!”

“Consider it prepayment.”

Lunch cheered her up—as did Michael’s promise—and Claire actually enjoyed the burgers, which Shane had cooked pretty much to perfection. Eve and Shane got into it over the age-old mustard versus mayonnaise debate, but they had a nice time, even with that controversy devolving to tossing packets of condiment at each other. Even better, since it was Shane’s turn to clean up.

After lunch, Claire went upstairs to her room while Michael and Shane settled in to try out a new first-person shooter game, and Eve shopped online; she stretched out on the bed and fell immediately, deeply asleep.

For a while she was too tired to dream, but finally she dreamed, and it was…odd.

At first, she didn’t really understand. She was someplace dark and very, very quiet, except for the steady hiss of water dripping. She was cold and felt a gnawing, desperate hunger.

Then she heard a voice out of that dark whisper, “Claire?” It was as if she were torn out of her body and thrown violently up through the dark in a blur, and everything in her wanted to scream but she didn’t actually have lungs or a body to use to do that, only a pure, condensed feeling of real terror….

And from a great height, she looked down into a very deep, narrow pit, and far below, a starkly pale face upturned to her in the moonlight.

The voice.

It had sounded like Myrnin’s voice, but it couldn’t have been; it couldn’t. There was no sense to this dream, because what would Myrnin be doing at the bottom of a hole, and why wouldn’t he just jump out?

“Help,” he said, from very far below, very far away. “Help me.”

“I don’t know how!” she called down, at least in the dream, and because it was just a dream, it made sense that he could hear her, somehow, and that even though she was very far away, she could see the desperation in his expression.

“Come for me,” Myrnin said, and it sounded like a ghost, like Shane’s sister whispering out there in that eerie vacant lot, like Miranda being torn to shreds of fog.

It sounded like someone who was already gone.

She woke up with a pounding heart and a nauseating headache bad enough to drive her to the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen, which she washed down with handfuls of bottled water in frenzied gulps. Somewhere in there, she noticed she’d managed to sleep away the rest of the day; it was already approaching sunset. What the hell was that? she wondered. She’d had anxiety dreams before, lots of them, but they usually involved being naked in a crowd, or running in slow motion, or taking a test unprepared. Nothing like this.

This was awfully—suspiciously—specific. If she was going to dream about Myrnin, why have him stuck deep in a hole in the ground?

Trapdoor spider, something whispered in the back of her mind. Gramma Day always called him that. So did you, once.

Yes, but she hadn’t meant it literally.

Maybe you just want him to need you, that awful, calm voice said. Maybe you just like it that he depends on you so much.

The thought unsettled her. She decided to put it out of her mind, all of it, especially the dream, because it was just her imagination working out her anxieties, just as it ought to do.

Maybe.

She went downstairs and found the video game amazingly still in progress, but on pause, as Michael and Shane argued the finer points of how the weapons array worked, and which would be a smarter choice with which to attack some kind of fortified position. It was confusing, and she still felt weird and sick. Downing a glass of milk helped settle her stomach, though, and she was just rinsing out the glass when the doorbell rang. The ring was followed up by knocking.

Michael had gotten up from the sofa, but Shane, still locked in his game world, was not paying much attention to anything else. Claire came out of the kitchen and met Eve coming down the stairs.

“Mail call?” Eve guessed.