Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(144)

“Right,” Claire said, but she was unconvinced. Eve had made her a mocha, and she sipped at it but didn’t taste a thing. Her brain was still racing faster than her senses. “But he seemed scared, Eve. I don’t think it was just a matter of waiting around. There’s something else. Myrnin said he was coming.”

“He? What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Claire admitted. “I only know that he was worried enough to throw me out of a second-floor window to get me away from him, whoever that is.”

With a sudden chill, Claire remembered Myrnin saying, And one for the devil. He couldn’t mean the literal devil, though, horns and tails, pitchfork and all . . . could he?

She honestly didn’t know, with her crazy vamp boss. But she did know that he was scared. And Myrnin didn’t frighten easily. He’d taken a vanishing thirteenth room in stride, but it was what was inside the room that frightened him.

Or what was inside the room when the moon wasn’t there.

It made her head hurt. She compensated by drinking the rest of the mocha in gulps, and asking Eve, “Where’s Oliver?”

“In his hidey-hole,” Eve said. “Doing ninja accounting, I guess. I don’t ask. Why? Are you going to seriously ask him for help?”

“Who else can I ask? Amelie?” Claire shook her head. “I need backup.”

“What am I, chica? I’ve got skills. Mad ones, even.”

“Fair point, but neither one of us have, you know, vampire skills. And I’m pretty sure that would come in handy at some point, seeing as we’re not dealing with a human problem, exactly.”

“It’s a Myrnin problem, not a vampire problem. I think they’re just as badly equipped as we are, sweetie.” Eve patted her hand and bounced out of her chair. In fact, she kept bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, which was a neat trick in those heavy black boots. “You said it had something to do with alchemy, right? Well, you’re the resident Morganville alchemy scholar. So you are our secret weapon. See?”

“No,” Claire said. “I don’t. I mean . . . yes, I probably know more about alchemy than anybody else here except Myrnin, but . . .”

“But what? Suit up, Alchemy Girl. We’re going to hero.”

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Claire said. Eve stopped bouncing and looked at her with a long, level stare, until she finally sighed and said, “But we’re going to do it anyway.”

“Yes.” Eve held up a fist to be bumped. “Yes, we are.”

? ? ?

First stop was, of course, Myrnin’s lab, because it was the place Myrnin kept . . . things. Claire didn’t honestly know what some of them were, but she had a good enough guess at a few, and she could decipher his scribbles well enough to infer the rest. Eve took one look at the place, shuddered, and said, “I’m fine here, thanks. I’d rather not explore the fun house of horrors.”

“I’d have thought the fun house of horrors would be your kind of scene,” Claire said, but she left Eve sitting on the steps that led down to the lab proper, and started making her way over and around the piles of debris that always seemed to collect around Myrnin. She was looking for something in particular. Myrnin had a system; she’d finally recognized what it was, and it had less to do with the placement of things than groupings of them. He mounded things together into more or less coherent subjects; once he started moving them around, he moved the piles, not just single items.

So she was looking for the pile that had to do with the alchemical influence of the moon. It was a big subject, because the idea that the moon’s light held very different properties from sunlight was central to a lot of alchemical theory; things that worked in the sun didn’t always work in the moon, and vice versa. She personally thought it was a load of nonsense, but Myrnin liked to keep an open mind, and after seeing the magically disappearing room thirteen, she was prepared to cautiously admit that maybe he was on to something.

The mound of things loosely grouped together under the general heading of moon was staggering. She started combing through the books and setting aside what might come in handy, but what she was really looking for was a particular gadget that Myrnin had shown her, once upon a time. As with most things he invented, she doubted she’d gotten the full story of what it did, but it had sounded like the alchemical equivalent of an ALS, an alternative light source.

It looked like a cross between a flamethrower (because of the giant backpack) and a flashlight (connected to the backpack with a flexible copper tube), as imagined by someone with lots of steampunk flair. Claire found it under the table, in a box marked DEADLY AND FRAGILE, which didn’t bode all that well, but she was pretty sure that the box belonged to something else entirely anyway.

“Really?” Eve said from the stairs. “You’re joining the Ghostbusters now? Because that looks like a movie prop.”

Claire avoided the obvious Who you gonna call? joke—too easy—and slid the leather straps over her shoulders. It was heavy, this thing, but it balanced okay. The flashlight-ish part had a simple on/off switch, and she took a deep breath, pointed the light at a dark corner of the lab wall, and switched it on.

A pale blue-white glow bathed the lab’s textured stone. It didn’t look much different from moonlight.