Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(142)

It was definitely scary. Definitely. Morganville’s nights were clear and cold, and though she’d wrapped up in a thick jacket and a scarf and gloves, her breath fogged white as she struggled to keep up with Myrnin. He wasn’t vampire-speeding away from her, at least; he was clearly impatient, but keeping more or less to a human pace.

A fast human pace.

“Slow down!” she finally gasped. He didn’t slow; he stopped, and then he turned and looked back at her, sighed, and came to take the heavy bag from her.

“Better?” he asked.

“Not if you keep acting like it’s a race!”

“Well, it is, a bit,” he said. “I would have asked you to drive me, but you seem to have such trouble with the windshield.”

“It’s a vampire tinted windshield, Myrnin.”

“Just as I said. Ah, good. This way.”

They were at the corner of Oh-Hell-No and You’re-Gonna-Die, as Eve would have put it, and this way looked like it was definitely worse. The silver wash of moonlight on sagging wood and leaning buildings turned it all into a Gothic nightmare, and except for the occasional streetlight, there wasn’t any sign of life here. Old, old buildings, mostly built of brick with concrete ornaments on them. There was one across the street that looked like it had once been a hotel, six or seven generations back; above the boarded-up door, a gruesome-looking gargoyle leaned down. Up near the top, letters in the concrete read EST. 1895.

Definitely not the place Claire wanted to be urban exploring at this time of night. Or, actually, at all, ever, the end, but what was worse than urban exploring at this time of night was that Myrnin might actually leave her alone doing it.

She hurried after him when he darted for the EST. 1895 building. The front door was boarded over, but the plywood hadn’t weathered the tough Morganville sunshine and heat too well, and besides, vampire strength was enough to rip even sturdy plywood like tissue paper. All Claire needed to do was stand back—well back, because sometimes Myrnin forgot where he was throwing stuff, and that didn’t end well. The shredded board skidded past her, out into the street, where she doubted anyone would be running over it for a couple of days, at least. Still, she trudged over, grabbed the wood (it was surprisingly heavy), and towed it back onto the sidewalk.

Myrnin had already shoved open the door, which leaned on rusty hinges like a drunk. Beyond, it looked scary-black, but Claire sighed and turned on her very bright little LED flashlight. She never left home without it, for precisely this kind of reason. It lit up an ancient hallway, a ceiling that looked bulging and precarious from some leak long ago, and wallpaper that she couldn’t imagine had ever been pretty. There was a front desk up ahead, which had survived fairly well, and a honeycomb of wooden boxes behind it, most with dusty keys still in them. Lots of vacancies, she thought, and shuddered. She imagined most of them weren’t vacant at all. It was every horror movie Eve had ever forced her to watch, come to life.

Myrnin leaned over the dusty counter and grabbed a key from a box, then hurried up the sagging, none-too-safe-looking stairs. Claire tried to see which key he’d grabbed, in case he (inevitably) left her behind.

Number thirteen. Of course.

She went up after him. Carefully. The safest part of the step was at the edges, so she went slowly, testing each for her weight and holding to the rickety banister in case something gave way. Nothing did, surprisingly. At the landing, she saw a sign in old-timey block lettering that pointed to her right for rooms one through ten, and left for eleven through twenty.

When she turned left, Myrnin was standing there, waiting for her. He snapped his fingers in that restless, manic way he sometimes got, and said, “Hurry, hurry, the moon will be down soon. Come on, Claire!”

He stalked off down the dark hall, and she lit it up with her flash, for safety. Good thing she did, because a grandfather clock had tipped over at some point, and lay flat across the path like a dead body. Myrnin had skipped right over it, but she had to be more careful.

“Ah!” Myrnin sounded gratified, and when Claire looked up, she saw him standing in front of a doorway. Number thirteen. “And one for the devil. Good. We’re in time.”

“In time for what?”

“I told you, the moon will be down soon.” He inserted the key and turned it carefully; the lock gave a groaning, rusty scrape, but the door swung open with a horror-movie creak. “Hurry, please. Speed is safety.”

That sounded . . . ominous. He was gone in the next second into the room, and she had to make a decision. Fast.

She stepped into the room.

It was, slightly to her disappointment, just an old, dilapidated hotel room, with a leaning bed on a rusty metal frame, one of those funny wooden wardrobes people used to use for their clothes instead of a closet, and a wooden stand with a cracked bowl and jug on it. Turn-of-the-century equivalent of running water, she guessed. It looked . . . depressing.

The glass was still intact in the window, and through it, she could see the moon glowing on the horizon. It was just touching the flat desert landscape, casting an icy blue glow into the room. Bright, though. Bright enough to see without the flashlight, so she clicked it off.

Myrnin opened up the old wooden wardrobe.

“What did you mean?” Claire asked him. “You said, And one for the devil. What does that mean?”

“Old expression,” he said. “Sometimes people would spill a drop of their wine and say it—one for the devil—so he’d not be angry at being cheated out of his due. But have you ever noticed that hotels of this age never have a room thirteen?”