Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(57)

Oliver was still lying on the floor, too weak to get up, but when he spoke, it sounded as if he somehow towered a dozen feet over Fallon and his people. “You’ll get no volunteers here,” he said. “Be off with you, and take the girl away. She’s meat for the dogs if she stays here, and you know it. You’ve not forgotten what it feels like to starve, Fallon, and you’re not so saintly as you pretend.”

“Neither are you, for all you pretend to be a leader.”

“I’m no leader,” Oliver said, with a short, bitter bark of a laugh. “And you’re no kind of holy man.”

“I’ve never claimed that.”

“You claim to offer salvation.”

“Your salvation is your own affair. What I offer is a chance at redemption, pure and simple, and you’ll never get such an offer again. You know that to be true.” Fallon seemed to be almost pleading. “I know you think your cause is true, Oliver. Has there ever been a time you didn’t? But even you must remember that the faith we share holds that vampires are damned. Cut off from heaven, doomed to walk the earth and drain the living of their hope and their eternal rewards because of their own sin of pride. You are not immortal. You are lost. And I am showing you the way home.” He meant every word; Claire could see that. There were even tears shimmering in his eyes. He really did believe he was their savior.

“You’re showing me to the grave,” Oliver said. “A cold homecoming, indeed. The answer is no. You’ll get no volunteers here.”

“Not even Michael Glass? Not even when that would reunite him with his lovely girl, who’s been so brave in pleading for his release?”

“Wife,” Eve said. Her voice sounded husky and wrong somehow—dazed, drugged, and deeply afraid. But she was still standing. Still fighting. “I’m his wife.”

“You’re his bait,” Oliver said, and rolled painfully to his feet. Guards tensed, and Fallon hovered his thumb over the control on the box he held. “Michael won’t be biting, Fallon, so take her out of here before something unfortunate happens.”

“To her?”

“To you,” Oliver said, and there was a deep, dark purr in his voice that made Claire’s skin crawl with a strange mix of dread and anticipation. “No more games, you pathetic shell of a man. You haven’t been saved—you’ve been hollowed out, emptied, made into a shadow of what you were. You’re walking dead, and you know it. Go shamble toward the grave alone. You’ll find no followers among Amelie’s people.”

Amelie’s people, as Claire well knew, had never been unanimous about anything, but in this, at least, they kept their differences to themselves. It was just an unmoving, silent block of eerily posed statues, all eyes aimed at Fallon, Eve, and the guards.

Fallon looked defeated, Claire thought . . . but then he said, “Michael, I know you’re here. Oliver’s restrained you somehow, but I know you’re listening to me. Watching. I know you can see Eve, hear her heartbeat, feel her anguish. She loves you, and even I can feel it. Don’t pretend to be indifferent.”

More silence. Fallon didn’t seem surprised; he only paused for effect, Claire thought, before he dropped his bombshell. “She says she is your wife, but she isn’t, you know. There can be no marriage between the living and the dead, neither in the eyes of God nor the eyes of the state. Morganville’s mayor has passed a new law today, one that invalidates any marriages between vampires and humans. Your marriage has been officially dissolved.”

“What?” Eve turned on him, her mouth open, and in the next second, fury splashed color over her cheeks and she slapped him. Hard. All her fuzziness was gone. “You son of a bitch! You lied to me!”

“Yes,” he said. The mark of her handprint was red on his skin, but he hadn’t moved an inch. “It was necessary. Now, you get to choose. Michael’s made his choice; he could have stepped forward to take the cure, and join you again as your husband, but he’s rejected it, and he’s rejected you along with it. I’ll offer you now the opposite: reject him. Take off that ring and throw it away. Tell them all that you are proudly human and will stay human, and in return you’ll find a welcome home here in Morganville, with us.”

“Go to hell,” Eve said. Claire hadn’t expected to hear anything else, but the ring of loneliness under the anger surprised her. But of course Eve felt alone; she would. The humans of Morganville had turned against her completely after she’d married Michael, and none of the residents of the Glass House had ever been accepted, not really accepted, because they hadn’t fit into the framework in the first place.

The ground kept shifting around them, around their little island of misfits, and Claire couldn’t help but feel this terrible sense, again, that what she was doing in helping the vampires . . . might all be wrong. But what was right? Fallon? The Daylighters? She couldn’t believe that. She wouldn’t.

Fallon was shaking his head. “Refuse to accept the facts, cling to this fantasy of loving a creature that cannot love you in return. . . . Well, then you’ll end up in a cell, and we’ll have to treat you for this mental illness you suffer from until you’re cured of it.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re going to put me in an asylum?” Eve said. “For loving someone?”