Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(124)
The skeleton sat up and wrapped its other bony hand around Myrnin’s throat. Its fingers tightened fast, and I saw them sink in deep; it probably would have killed me, or anybody still human, but it didn’t seem to hurt him much. Benefits of being a bloodsucker. Myrnin grabbed hold of the skeleton’s neck and twisted, which only seemed to piss the thing off. Myrnin was left holding a skull that snapped its dry teeth at him, trying to bite, and the hand around his throat didn’t let up at all.
I didn’t know what to do, but I figured getting rid of the skull might help, so I grabbed it out of his hands and pretended it was a gross, snapping football. I threw it long and up, aiming for the next county.
As soon as the head left the grave, the rest of the skeleton collapsed into dust and bones. The hand around his neck clattered in pieces back to the coffin’s wood. Myrnin’s throat looked like he’d been hanged by an old-time Western sheriff, and he coughed a little, shook his head, and bent down to pick up the old black camera thing from the litter of bones. Then he jumped, straight up, out of the grave, and left me standing there like an idiot.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Little help, since I just saved your life?”
No answer. I swore under my breath, tried not to step on any bones as I pulled my feet out of the rotten wood. Hard to see how I was going to climb out, since when I scrambled up, the sides started to collapse in on me. Great, I thought grimly. I’m going to suffocate in a grave because Claire’s boss forgot about me.
Myrnin’s face appeared over the top of the grave, just as another avalanche of dirt piled in on me, raising a choking cloud. “Oh,” he said, as if he was surprised to find me still down there. “Can’t you get out?”
“Sure, I’m just staying down here because it’s so damn comfy.” I spat out a mouthful of dirt, and God only knew what else. “Little help?”
He extended one bone-white hand down to me. I grabbed hold, and he pulled so hard that he almost dislocated my shoulder. “Come along, Shame,” he said. “We have work to do.”
I was technically working for him, true, but no way did that mean he could call me that. “My name is Shane,” I said. “With an n. Dickhead.”
“Sorry,” Myrnin said. I saw the thinnest, fastest ghost of a smile. “I’m just very forgetful.”
Like hell he was. “Speaking of that, you paid me a hundred to dig up a coffin for you. Not to follow you around the rest of the night and battle dead guys. I think a little evil-skeleton-demon hazard pay might be a good idea.”
“He wasn’t evil,” Myrnin said, seizing upon exactly the wrong thing, of course. “Keep up, then; there isn’t any time to lose. I must get this camera obscura to my lab.”
I didn’t know what a camera obscura was, but it sounded like trouble. “Oh no, you don’t. If you want me to tag along, it’s an extra hundred.”
Myrnin was notoriously cheap, or at least, utterly oblivious to the concept of fair pay, but he didn’t hesitate to raise my bluff. “Two hundred, plus what I already pledged,” he said. “I suppose you want to be paid in those paper bills. You may count them out yourself. I can’t be bothered.”
I should have known that if he was willing to double my asking price, it was going to be a bad, bad night, but then again, three hundred bucks. I’d done some terrible things for less than that. Hell, I’d done them for free.
“Deal,” I said. “But we’re taking my car.”
? ? ?
My car was a sweet, sinister ride . . . deep black, with murdered-out wheels and chrome. Ninja black. Since I wasn’t a vamp like my passenger, I had to keep the headlights on, which spoiled the stealth effect, but image wasn’t worth dying over.
I half expected to argue with Myrnin about how to ride in a car like a human, but he got in, fastened his seat belt, and seemed perfectly at home. I eyed him suspiciously while I started up the engine. “Where’d you learn to buckle up?”
“Claire has explained to me the rules for riding in a motorized vehicle,” he said. “Also, I understand not to attempt to drive from this position. She got very upset when I tried it last time.”
“Touch this wheel, and swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
“I see what she likes about you,” he said. “How long have you been wedded now?”
“Coming up on a year,” I said. It still felt weird, really weird, to say that. I’d never thought past having the wedding—it seemed like the biggest possible goal there was in the world, and I hadn’t bothered to think about what would happen after.
And the wedding day came, and the fear and pride and rush of something so big I couldn’t even define it. Love, I guess. So much love.
Then the world turned, the sun came up, and . . . we were married. And that was weird, because it turned out getting married wasn’t an achievement so much as a level-up, play-on kind of deal. Life was more different now than I’d ever imagined, because there was this other person entwined with me who was there every day. Not in the boyfriend/girlfriend I-can-leave-if-I-want way, but in an I’m-never-leaving-you way. Took time to figure out how to live with that, for both of us. We had amazing times and stupidly bad times and days where nothing happened at all, because . . . life. Life was happening together now, not separately. And it was only just beginning to dawn on me how incredibly wonderful that really was.