Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(72)

And then Shane heard a child crying.

It was a lost, desperate sound, and it got inside him and pulled in painful places. He couldn’t see Michael, but he understood the rigid way his friend was locked in stillness. Michael could hear more, maybe see more.

And it wasn’t good.

Shane was trying to decide whether to whisper a question when he heard, very distinctly, a little girl’s voice say, eerily calmly, “Please let me go, sir. I won’t say a thing. I won’t tell anybody.”

No wonder Michael was so still, so quiet.

It was happening all over again, like a nightmare.

Shane felt a shiver go through Michael, an impulse, and he knew what it was. “No,” he whispered, just a thread of sound. “Don’t do it.”

“No choice,” Michael whispered back. Shane nodded, because he got it—he really did—and he took out his cell phone and texted Claire, mainly because he didn’t have any bloodsuckers on speed dial. Claire did. He gave the address, or as close as he could guess it, and added a 911 on the end, just to make it clear this wasn’t going to be pretty. If she’d turned her phone off, or left it somewhere . . .

But she hadn’t, and seconds later, the screen lit up with a message from Claire. Sending help. Get out. Get out now.

Which was a sensible kind of plan, really.

But that left Michael here, all alone, without help. Without anybody. And that ultimately wasn’t something Shane could live with. He texted back Will do, even though he knew he wouldn’t, and in the glow of the cell phone screen looked up at Michael. Michael could see what he was texting, but it was pretty obvious that Michael knew he was lying. Textually speaking.

It was really hard to fold up the phone and lose the light, but Shane knew he had to do it. The darkness fell like a thick, smothering blanket, and for a second he imagined he was drowning in it. Michael had let go of him, and the disorientation was total. Shane stayed where he was, trying not to think about all the things that could go wrong with this non-plan, and almost jumped when he felt Michael’s fingers grip his shoulder in warning. He knew what that meant, without any words being said.

Bishop knew they were here.

In a weird kind of way, that was . . . better. The suspense was over. Now it was just about the fight, and the fight was where Shane lived, inside. It was like . . . home.

“Tell me you brought weapons,” Michael said. He wasn’t trying to hide, either. Shane wondered if he felt the same way; probably not, he thought. Michael didn’t run from a fight, but he never seemed to have quite the same thirst for it, either. It was more of a grim acceptance of the inevitable.

“Don’t say I never give you anything,” Shane said, and reached into his jacket to retrieve two silver-tipped wooden stakes. Guaranteed to leave a mark, even on a vamp of Bishop’s age and power. He handed one to Michael, then checked his other pockets. He found a bag of silver nitrate powder, which he handed over, too. “When you throw this, stay out of the way, or you’re going to be sparkling, and not in that fashionable vamp kind of way.”

“How do you want to do this?”

“You keep Bishop occupied. I save the girl.”

“Really? Come on.”

“What? You think I’ve got a better shot at him?”

“No, I think you’re better at keep-away,” Michael said, “and Bishop likes going after humans first. He likes the easy kills.”

“No offense intended.”

“I didn’t say you’d be one of them.”

Shane considered it. Bishop frankly scared the bejesus out of him, but Michael had one thing right—he could get to the girl faster, pick her up, and run her out of danger much better than Shane could. He could be back in seconds to jump in the fight, too.

Shane just had to keep Bishop at arm’s length for maybe . . . a minute. Maybe less.

It didn’t sound that hard, which was why Shane knew it would be ridiculous. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s do this thing.”

“I’ll get the lights,” Michael said. “Five seconds.” And then he was gone, moving like a ghost through the dark, and Shane was left alone, gripping the stake in one hand, and his plastic bag of silver powder in the other. He counted down in his head, focusing on the numbers instead of all the things that could go wrong.

He was still on two when the lights blazed on in the warehouse, ranks of greenish, flickering things that cast a weirdly alien color over everything—which wasn’t much. Piles of debris. Old, sagging cardboard boxes. And over at the far end of the warehouse, some kind of broken-down forklift that was missing its wheels.

And there was Mr. Bishop, holding the wrist of a little red-haired girl about twelve years old. Growing up in Morganville, you knew people by sight, even if you didn’t want to have anything to do with them, and he knew that kid. Her name was Clea Blaisdell.

Not that it mattered, whether he actually knew her. He wouldn’t have left anybody, even Monica Morrell, to Bishop’s nonexistent mercy.

So he stepped out in full view, twirled the stake in his fingers like he actually felt that cocky, and yelled, “Yo, Grandpa, you eating snack sizes now? Trying to lose a few pounds?” He kept walking, closing the distance between them. He couldn’t see Michael, but that didn’t matter; he knew he was there, working his way around to a good striking distance.