Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(123)

“We aren’t,” he said. “Well, I suppose we are, in a sense, but the bones aren’t what I’m after. . . .” His voice trailed off, and I heard scraping, as if he was clearing dirt away, and then a sharp snapping sound. A heavy, groaning creak. Yeah, that was some serious ghostly soundtrack, and it said something about my experiences in Morganville so far that it didn’t even make me nervous.

Silence then. Pardon the pun, but . . . dead silence.

“Hey,” I finally said. “Everything okay down there?”

No answer. Perfect. I tried to get up and my aching muscles put up a fight, but I won and rolled up to look over the edge of the hole.

Into . . . darkness.

The lid was up on the coffin, but there was no body. It was just . . . black. Kind of disorienting, and I sat back a little because it almost felt like it was trying to suck me in.

“Hey, Myrnin? Stop screwing around. You down there?” No answer. I flipped a rock over the side, expecting it to hit the bottom of the coffin, but it just . . . disappeared. “Come on. I’m getting paid to dig a hole, not haul your ass out of one!”

Myrnin had been mostly a giant pain in my neck since I’d first met him. He’d been suspiciously nice to my girl, Claire, for one thing, and I knew he had feelings for her. . . . Of course, what those feelings actually were was a different story, because Myrnin didn’t exactly follow normal rules of behavior. For instance, he’d once intended to kill her and put her brain in a computer, and to him, that didn’t even seem all that unfriendly. He’d gotten a little less crazy over the past few years, but honestly? Still pretty nuts.

Not something you really like to see in a guy who’s capable of ripping you limb from limb if he’s in a bad mood.

But also . . . unlike most vampires, Myrnin did care. He cared about pretty much everything, including people. He protected puppies and little kids. He had a spider for a pet. He’d practically adopted Claire, and personally saved her life (and mine, sad to say) more than a few times.

So I kind of owed the crazy bloodsucker.

“Dammit.” I sighed and grabbed the shovel, because I was not doing this unarmed. I had an LED flashlight clipped to my belt loop, and I turned it on and aimed it into the grave. Whatever that was at the bottom of the coffin, it just ate the light whole. “Why me, God?”

I didn’t wait for the answer, because I already knew it.

Because you can.

I jumped.

? ? ?

I felt my feet hit the bottom of the coffin with a thump, and then crack right through the rotten wood into soft, damp dirt. I won’t lie—it smelled pretty foul, and my skin crawled, because there was no way that it ought to be this dark down here; I’d just been in this hole, and the moonlight had been bright enough for me to see up top. Now it was like being trapped inside a black velvet bag.

I still had the flashlight in my hand, and I smacked it against my thigh, hoping that it would turn on and somehow this was all just some big misunderstanding, but it stayed pitch-black.

And then a pair of cold, too-strong hands grabbed me in the darkness. Yeah, I might have yelped. A manly sort of yelp, obviously.

“Calm yourself,” Myrnin said. He sounded annoyed, not unnerved, which would have been interesting if the sane part of me hadn’t been kind of freaking out. “It’s perfectly normal.”

“Normal?” My voice came out high enough to have been mistaken for my friend Eve’s. I cleared my throat and tried again, and got it into a more usual range. “What the hell is normal about this?”

“It’s a bit difficult to explain, but clearly, the item I was hoping to find is here. . . . Now stand very still, boy. And try not to make noise.”

I stood still. It wasn’t easy, because after Myrnin let go of my shoulders, I felt like I was drifting in the dark, pulled out into space. Nothing seemed real. I finally reached out and put my hand on what felt like rough, solid dirt to the side, and that reminded me that I was standing at the bottom of a grave. Weird that it should make me feel better.

“I think I said stand still,” Myrnin said, but he didn’t sound too angry. I could hear creaking, and then a sound that seemed like snapping bones, and then he let out a pleased sigh. “Perfect. Brace yourself.”

I didn’t know what he meant, and then there was a soft click, and light poured in. After that complete darkness, it seemed like somebody had a flashlight pointed directly in my face, and I gasped and blinked and realized that, hey, someone was shining a flashlight directly in my face, and that someone was me, because the thing hadn’t been working before and now it was. Probably because of something Myrnin had done.

I switched the beam off, blinked a few times, and saw Myrnin crouching down, examining what looked like some ancient, boxy camera held in the hands of a grinning skeleton. I’d managed not to step on him, whoever the dead guy was; my feet were braced on either side of the corpse.

Suddenly, I really wanted out of this grave.

“Don’t move,” Myrnin said absently, and carefully moved one of the skeletal hands. I expected the thing to come apart, but the hand held together. That seemed weird, because I thought skeletons this old fell apart. I didn’t see any muscle connecting the bones.

“I’d really like to go now,” I said.

“Oh, I wasn’t talking to you,” Myrnin said, and moved the other bony hand. It suddenly turned and wrapped around his wrist like a living thing. “Damn.”