Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(126)

“Can’t say why?”

“I believe I’m paying you not to ask.”

He was. I parked the car, killed the lights, and grabbed his arm as he popped the passenger door open. “Hey,” I said, and he turned to look at me. There were red glints in his dark eyes, like sparks coming off a fire. “Tell me you’re not cooking up something dangerous.”

“Now, why would you think something like that?” Myrnin effortlessly broke my grip and got out and dashed like the spider he was down the dark alley.

Me, I locked the car doors behind me, got out my flashlight, and followed at the pace of just another human.

An armed and dangerous one, at least.

? ? ?

Claire had equipped Myrnin’s lab with motion-activated lights, mostly for her own benefit because Myrnin, damn him, could see just fine in the dark. The rising glow helped me not to break my neck on the steps leading down into the main room, because he’d spilled something all over the stone again. Sticky or slick, no way was I going to step in it. No telling what it was, but it looked biological.

Myrnin was already at one of the lab tables, which had been cleared of its usual litter of crazy stuff . . . cleared because he’d just shoved it off on the floor, of course. Claire had tried to educate him about trip hazards and keeping the place cleaned, but he just couldn’t get there, and she’d finally given up and resigned herself to picking up after him. I left the stuff on the floor. Wasn’t being paid to clean.

“So explain it to me. Why am I here exactly?” I asked him, as he fitted on a pair of weird-looking goggles. He flipped a switch on the side, and they were bathed in an eerie blue glow inside. The glass magnified his eyes.

“You’re here to protect me, of course,” he said.

“From what?”

“Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? From what.”

This wasn’t sounding too great. “Can’t help you if you’re not more, you know, specific.”

“You’re here to protect me from getting lost,” he said, as he hooked up the cemetery camera to something that looked like a vacuum hose straight off a Hoover. It didn’t quite fit. He duct-taped it together with way too much tape, and then jammed the other end into another box. . . . This one was polished wood, decorated with ornate little gold letters applied in neat rows all over it.

“Wait, getting lost?” I said, as he worked. “Are we going somewhere?”

“We are,” he said. “Come here.” I put the flashlight down on the table and came around to join him. He pushed a button on the wooden box, and grabbed my hand to slam it down on top of the switch as he slipped his own hand away. “Now, don’t let go of it,” he said. “Not until I tell you. And no matter what you see, stay still.”

“I don’t—”

My voice choked off, because darkness crashed in with the thick weight of midnight, and there was nothing. My mouth dried up; I flinched and almost pulled my hand back but managed to hang on. Myrnin gripped my arm and held tight.

“You’ll see things,” his disembodied voice whispered. “Bad things. But they won’t harm you. But one thing is very important: Don’t let me stay here. You can’t let me stay, no matter how much I want to do it. Don’t let go of the button until I tell you, and when you do, you have to be touching me. Understand?”

I couldn’t see a damn thing, and almost said so, and then something moved at the corner of my vision. Not like a light, exactly—more like a disturbance of the darkness. I turned my head that direction, and saw a very small wisp of gray that moved, got brighter, and took on form.

A ghost, at first. A woman, from the form, wearing an old-fashioned long, full skirt like something from a documentary on Victorians. She took on more color, though she stayed pale in skin. The dress was dark red, like drying blood, and it had a high collar and long sleeves. She had her dark, glossy hair up in a complicated bun thing.

It took me a second, but then I realized who she was. Ada. Myrnin’s former lab assistant, a vampire who’d gotten on his bad side and ended up as a brain in a jar. I’d only known her as a crazycakes hologram thing, but she looked real enough here, as she glided up toward us.

Myrnin took on form and color, too, but not the Myrnin who was holding on to my arm. That one never let go, never moved. The one walking toward her was the old Myrnin . . . and he was dressed out of the same period closet as Ada was, with some kind of fancy tight black trousers and high boots and a white shirt with lace under a long black coat. The only color on him was a bright bloodred ruby he wore as a pin on the front of his shirt.

That old-school Myrnin lunged at her, slammed her into the invisible wall behind her, and as she screamed, he bit at her throat. Tore it open.

Drank.

“No,” Modern-Day Myrnin whispered. He sounded shaky. Horrified. “No. No, this is not what I want. Not what I need. Stop. Stop.”

The Myrnin acting out Ada’s murder in front of us never paused. She was dying, and it was pretty horrible. I looked away and swallowed hard. I’ve never been good with just bystanding.

Myrnin—the one next to me—took in a deep breath and let it out, slowly. The scene vanished, just melted on the air as if it had never been there. His voice, when it came, was hesitant. “It is an inexact science, and that . . . nightmare is rarely far from my mind. Bide a moment.”