Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(141)

Fun factoid: I got the idea for this story because weird things sometimes happen when you’re on a book tour. You get tired. You come in late at night. Often, there’s no thirteenth floor in a hotel, but sometimes there is; sometimes there’s a thirteenth floor but no room thirteen on that floor.

I had room number 1313 one evening, and then the next day at a new hotel, when I was also given a room on the thirteenth floor, my brain told me to look for 1313. It didn’t exist. I was convinced that the room had disappeared, until I reasoned it out, but I didn’t forget that out-of-body weirdness of looking for something that no longer existed.





When Myrnin was in one of these moods, it just didn’t pay to argue with him.

Claire sat calmly in his wing chair, near the far back corner of his laboratory, while he whizzed around at vampire speeds, tinkering with this, muttering at that, flipping through ancient tomes and flinging them across the room when he didn’t find what he was looking for. She’d asked him what he was doing. He’d given her a wild, distracted look, and she’d decided that maybe it was time to feed Bob the Spider some flies, and sit and read for a while.

She was two chapters into her book when she realized he was looming over her. Without looking up, she said, “You’re in my light.”

“Are you or are you not my assistant?” Myrnin demanded. “I can’t find anything in here! What have you done, rearranged things? Again?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said, and put her bookmark in place before she closed the volume and looked up at him. Myrnin had a black smudge along one side of his cheek, and his hair was sticking up at odd angles, as if he’d rubbed grease into it and forgotten about it. “You move things, and you forget you move things, and if you’d tell me what it was you were looking for—”

“I’m looking for something that isn’t here, or I wouldn’t be in quite such a state, now, would I? Up. Up up up.”

Claire rose and stepped aside, and her vampire boss flung himself into a boneless slouch in the chair, frowning at nothing. After a moment, he said, “It’s warm.”

“What?”

“The chair. It’s warm.”

“I was just sitting in it.”

“Ah. I forget, that’s a side effect for people with pulses.”

“What are you looking for?” Sometimes, with Myrnin, the patient repetition of the question worked better than anything else.

Like this time, because he suddenly looked at her. His dark eyes widened, and his mouth formed a surprised O, and he bolted up out of his chair and hugged her. It was a vampire-speed hug, which meant that she didn’t have time to object or respond before he was away, flashing toward a bookcase in the other part of the lab. He tossed out at least ten books, then found a slim volume and held it high. “Found it!”

“Could you please not leave books all over the floor?”

“Bother,” he said, and came back to throw himself into the chair with great enthusiasm. “I haven’t the time for that nonsense. Shelving, reshelving, picking up, cleaning . . . Everything tends to entropy and it’s just fighting the inevitable. But please, by all means, pick those up.”

“I will,” Claire said. “What is that?”

“This?” He held up the book, and she read the faded title. It wasn’t some ancient dusty Latin thing, which was what he was most fond of collecting; this was printed in the 1960s, by the weird type style and strangely quaint illustration. The title was A Traveler’s Guide to Haunted Places.

“Seriously?”

“Oh, I am dead serious. Well, dead and serious, you understand. I stored some things many years ago at a place I built, and I need them back. What time is it?”

“Time . . .” She pulled her phone and glanced at it. “Um, almost midnight. Why?”

“Because we’ll need to get there before sunrise,” Myrnin said. “Most important.”

That made zero sense, because Myrnin was fully capable of going out in the daylight when he wanted to, vampire or not. He was old, older than Morganville’s resident vampire queen, Amelie; that gave him a certain invulnerability to sunlight that younger undead didn’t have. Besides, a coat and hat usually did fine for protection.

“Where are we going, exactly?”

“The Morganville Traveler’s Rest,” he said. “Come along, then. Bring everything.”

Claire rolled her eyes and texted her husband—husband; she loved thinking that so much—Shane, to let him know where she was going. It was an established thing, when Myrnin was in his crazycakes moods. Just insurance. Not so much that she thought he’d hurt her; they were long past that kind of fear. More that he’d forget and abandon her someplace. That happened way too much.

Shane texted back that he wished she were coming home. She wished she were, too. But sending Myrnin off unescorted seemed like a bad plan. He was in a manic phase, and that almost never went well . . . but she could keep him from doing something really crazy.

Hopefully.

Take everything. Right.

Claire grabbed what she thought she might need, bundled it into a bag older than she was, and followed Myrnin out into the night.

? ? ?

She had no idea where the Morganville Traveler’s Rest might be; she’d never heard of it, and Morganville, Texas, wasn’t that big of a town. So she wasn’t too surprised to find that it was one of the many dilapidated, shuttered buildings around town . . . the crumbling ruins of places that weren’t worth keeping up or renovating. Home of rats, cockroaches, and vampires too derelict or damaged to play by Amelie’s rules of good behavior. Or those who just enjoyed a good scary place to haunt.