Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(85)
“Why not?”
“He’s a better runner than you are a driver?”
Oliver whipped the wheel unnecessarily hard to the left, and Myrnin found himself flung hard against the restraint—the seat belt, as Claire insisted on calling it, though clearly it was not a belt at all, and certainly not a seat, but more of a harness. Despite that quibble, he did like the safety measures modern society had imposed. Quite a lot of carriage accidents could have come to better outcomes with the minor addition of such things.
The restraint came into play again as Oliver forcefully applied the brakes, and the vehicle skidded to a loud stop, accompanied by smoke and the smell of distressed tires. “He’s off the road,” Oliver said. “We’ll have to run him down on foot.”
“Thank Jesu,” Myrnin said. “I’d rather run a thousand miles than endure your substandard mechanized skills again.”
“Feel free to bugger off home, then.”
“I will not!”
“Then do me the kindness of being silent. I’m listening.”
Myrnin shut up, because even among vampires, Oliver had a reputation for acute hearing, and one saving grace of Morganville, Texas, was its remote location. Unlike in modern cities of any significant size, the nights here were clear and silent. Easy to hear disturbances, at least with vampire senses. Easy to hear the breathing and heartbeats of potential victims . . . but not so easy to track a fleeing vampire. Vampires were stealthy by nature, sometimes even to one another.
The creature they were tracking was more dangerous than most, and Myrnin was starting to wonder why he, of all the Morganville vampires, had decided to take up this challenge. He was, after all, more of an ambush predator than a stalker. He didn’t like the pursuit as much as Oliver; it always felt like far too much effort, and fun as it sometimes was, he often felt so guilty, after.
This was for a good cause, at least, and he was operating under orders. Amelie’s orders. Or he’d not be voluntarily spending time with Oliver. His issues with the man stemmed back five hundred years or more.
“This way,” Oliver said, and was out the driver’s side of the car and moving with speed before Myrnin could so much as fumble his way clear of his seat harness. He snapped it in a fit of pique. Useless things, good for nothing but saving humans.
Considering he’d been made vampire as an older man, Oliver was extremely lithe; even with longer legs, Myrnin had to run uncomfortably fast to keep pace. He couldn’t detect the man they were following, but keeping track of Oliver would do well enough. The riding boots he wore weren’t good for running, but he was somewhat grateful that he hadn’t chosen the bunny slippers tonight. They were certainly not made for harsh terrain, and the area in which they’d gone was littered with rusted metal scrap, discarded lumber, and snakes too slow to slip out of the way, but still fast enough to strike at him in the darkness. Dangerous footing, even for a vampire.
He managed to pull next to the still-running Oliver and said, “There are snakes, you know.” As a vampire, he had the dignity of not having to gasp it out.
“If a snake bit you, it would die of disgust, and you should die of embarrassment,” Oliver said. “He’s stopped.” Oliver immediately slowed to a walk, and Myrnin fell in beside him, happy for the change. His eyes picked up the starlight and painted a vivid, though shades-of-blue, picture of a leaning old farmhouse with broken windows and a yawning door. Someone had spray-painted slogans on it, layers upon layers of meaningless words. Some things never changed throughout the ages, and graffiti was one of them, from ancient Egypt to modern times. It was as though humanity had a burning need to make a mark, wherever it set its hand—and the mark was all too often an insult.
“How do you want to go about this?” Myrnin asked.
“Keep it simple. You take the back. I’ll take the front. We crush him in the middle.” A short pause, and then, “Be careful.”
Myrnin raised his eyebrows. “I’m touched that you’re so concerned for me.”
“I’m not concerned for you, fool. I’m concerned you’ll let him rip you apart and escape. It would be very inconvenient for me to run him down again.”
“Ah. It makes so much more sense now.”
Myrnin dodged to avoid a blow from Oliver’s fist, and moved around to the back of the farmhouse. They were just outside Morganville, and he could feel the difference here. It felt alien, unknown, uncomfortable. He didn’t like leaving town anymore. Morganville had become so much his haven, and his home. There, he was protected. Out here he felt small, and vulnerable. Too many memories of being hunted through the streets, hounded in the open. Shut up in torturously small cells. Vampires might be strong and fast, but they were just as vulnerable as all the other mighty creatures that humans had made extinct.
Out here, he was as much prey as predator.
The back door of the house was boarded shut, but he slithered in through a broken window and landed without a sound on the warped wood floor. It was rotten, but he could sense where the fragile spots were, and stepped carefully to avoid any betraying creaks and snaps. There were spiders here, lots of spiders, but he rather liked them—elegant creatures, so perfectly suited to their lives. Hard to tell how they felt about him at the moment, though, since they seemed to be scattering out of his way.
One thing he did not care for was the scorpion that scuttled out of the darkness to aim its stinger at his booted foot. Clearly, he was not amiable. Myrnin bent, picked it up by the segmented tail, and held it up to his face, frowning at it as it snapped its claws toward his nose as it twisted and turned. “Rude,” he said to it. “Learn your manners, now.” He threw it out the window, and watched it dart across the sand, still jabbing the air furiously with its barbed tail.