Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(45)

He’d recently had our family portrait tattooed over his heart.

I forgot to breathe for a second, staring at it. Yeah, it was crude, but those were the lines of Mom’s face, and Alyssa’s. I didn’t realize, until I saw them, that I’d nearly forgotten how they looked.

Dad looked down at the tat. “I needed to remind myself,” he said.

My throat was so dry that it clicked when I swallowed. “Yeah.” My own face was there, frozen in indigo blue at the age of maybe sixteen. I looked thinner, and even in tattoo form I looked more hopeful. More sure.

Dad held out his right arm, and I realized that there was more new ink.

And this stuff was moving.

I took a step back. There were dense, strange symbols on his arm, all in standard tattoo ink, but there was nothing standard about what the tats were doing—namely, they were revolving slowly like a DNA helix up and down the axis of his arm, under the skin. “Christ, Dad—”

“Had it done in Mexico,” he said. “There was an old priest there—he knew things from the Aztecs. They had a way to bring back the dead, so long as they hadn’t been gone for more than two years, and were in decent condition otherwise. They used them as ceremonial warriors.” Dad flexed his arm, and the tattoos flexed with him. “This is part of what does it.”

I felt sick and cold now. This had moved way past what I knew. I wished wildly that I could show this to Claire; she’d probably be fascinated, full of theories and research.

She’d know what to do about it.

I swallowed hard and said, “And the other part?”

“That’s where you come in,” Dad said. He pulled his T-shirt on again, hiding the portrait of our family. “I need you to prove you’re up for this, Shane. Can you do that?”

I gulped air and finally, convulsively nodded. Play for time, I was telling myself. Play for time; think of something you can do. Short of chopping off my own father’s arm, though . . .

“This way,” Dad said. He went to the back of the room. There was a door there, and he’d added a new, sturdy lock to it, which he opened with a key from his jacket.

Jerome gave me that creepy laugh again, and I felt my skin shiver into gooseflesh.

“Right. This might be a shock,” Dad said. “But trust me, it’s for a good cause.”

He swung open the door and flipped on a harsh overhead light.

It was a windowless cell, and inside, chained to the floor with thick silver-plated links, was a vampire.

Not just any vampire. Oh no, that would have been too easy for my father.

It was Michael Glass, my best friend.

Michael looked—white. Paler than pale. I’d never seen him look like that. There were burns on his arms, big raised welts where the silver was touching, and there were cuts. He was leaking slow trickles of blood on the floor.

His eyes were usually blue, but now they were red, bright red. Scary monster red, like nothing human.

But it was still my best friend’s voice whispering, “Help.”

I couldn’t answer him. I backed up and slammed the door.

Jerome was laughing again, so I turned around, picked up a chair, and smashed him in the face with it. I could have hit him with a powder puff, for all the good it did. He grabbed the chair, broke the thick wood with a snap of his hands, and threw it back at me. I stumbled, and would have gone down except for the handy placement of a wall.

“Stop. Don’t touch my son,” my father said. Jerome froze like he’d run into a brick wall, hands working like he still wanted to rip out my throat.

I turned on my dad and snarled, “That’s my friend!”

“No, that’s a vampire,” he said. “The youngest one. The weakest one. The one most of them won’t come running to rescue.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch somebody. I felt pressure building up inside, and my hands were shaking. “What the hell are you doing to him?”

I didn’t know who he was, this guy in the leather jacket looking at me. He looked like a tired, middle-aged biker, with his straggly graying hair, his sallow, seamed face, his scars and tats. Only his eyes seemed like they belonged to my dad, and even then, only for a second.

“It’s a vampire,” he said. “It’s not your friend, Shane. You need to be real clear about that—your friend is dead, just like Jerome here, and you can’t let that get in the way of what needs to be done. When we go to war, we get them all. All. No exceptions.”

Michael had played at our house. My dad had tossed a ball around with him and pushed his swing and served him cake at birthday parties.

And my dad didn’t care about any of that anymore.

“How?” My jaw felt tight. I was grinding my teeth, and my hands were shaking. “How did you do this? What are you doing to him?”

“I’m bleeding it and storing the blood, just like they do us humans,” Dad said. “It’s a two-part spell—the tattoo, and the blood of a vampire. It’s just a creature, Shane. Remember that.”

Michael wasn’t a creature. Not just a creature, anyway; neither was what Dad had pulled out of Jerome’s grave, for that matter. Jerome wasn’t just a mindless killing machine. Mindless killing machines didn’t fill their spare time with the adventures of Dorothy and Toto. They didn’t even know they had spare time. I could see it in Jerome’s wide, yellowed eyes now. The pain. The terror. The anger.