Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(86)

Then he sensed something looming over his head, and looked up to see a face staring down at him. Or . . . no. Not a face. In that split second it looked like a face, a formless dark thing watching him, but then it solidified into shadows and an unfortunate pattern of mold.

Still . . . he felt watched.

There was also a corpse in the room, but it was not watching him. It lay in the corner on its back. The young man was clearly dead, and had been for days. Pale and bloodless, he bore neat holes in his throat, and his eyes were closed.

“I’ve found the missing boy,” Myrnin called. “Dead.” He didn’t really need to say that. Neither he nor Oliver had been deluded enough to believe they’d find him alive.

“Our quarry’s moved upstairs,” said a voice at Myrnin’s side, and he flinched just a little. Oliver had, once again, managed to creep up without drawing his attention. “Amelie’s not going to be well pleased with this. We’ll need to get the boy decently buried and compensate his family. You retrieve the body and I’ll go up and find this . . . I can’t properly even call him a vampire.”

“The boy’s long gone, and he can wait,” Myrnin said. “This . . . might take both of us. Whatever this . . . thing may be, he is not quite sane.”

Oliver sent him a look. Not the normal look of disdain and dismissal, but . . . something else. Something more serious. “Well, you would know,” he said. “But I think you may be right.”

Oliver led the way up the steps, and Myrnin was careful to avoid the fragile center of the wood treads; this house, with its alarmingly off-true walls and stench of rot, was ready to collapse in the next strong wind. Surprising that it hadn’t already, considering its state. There was threadbare carpet at the top, and some ancient, faded photographs of a posed family lingered on the walls. A bedroom to the right held a tilting four-poster, a decaying mattress with pillows and the type of coverlet unpopular fifty years past. Clothes remained rotting in the wardrobe.

He wondered what had happened to the family who’d once lived here and so evidently vanished without a trace . . . and then decided perhaps it was best not to know. This whole place trembled with fear and tragedy. No wonder their quarry had been drawn to it as a lair.

Oliver tapped his shoulder and pointed down the hall to the other small bedroom. The door was shut, and starlight glinted on the old glass knob. Myrnin steeled himself, and nodded his readiness.

Oliver took hold of the knob and turned it.

The attack came through the door with shocking suddenness, smashing the old wood into splinters, and then the vampire was on them, screaming. It was armed with a knife, a sharp, oddly shaped thing that sliced the light as it arced for Oliver’s face. Oliver fell back, and Myrnin lunged forward over him and caught the attacker around the chest. His weight and momentum threw it backward, but the dry wood beneath them shattered on impact, sending them both crashing through the floor and down into the room beneath.

It would have stunned a human, or broken his back, but vampires were made of hardier stuff—and this creature was unnaturally fast and strong. Myrnin grabbed for the right hand, the one with the knife, while trying to keep the snapping, ravenous fangs from his own throat. There was no room for fear or strategy. He couldn’t plan, couldn’t think of anything but simply surviving from one second to the next, until Oliver dropped through the jagged hole from the floor above, grabbed the vampire’s head in both hands, and twisted it all the way around to snap its neck with a dry clicking sound.

That didn’t kill it, but it effectively rendered it helpless for a while. Oliver slung the thing off to the side and offered Myrnin a hand up, which he accepted without shame. He felt battered and greatly lucky to be alive.

“We need to kill this thing,” Myrnin said. His voice, he was surprised to hear, sounded rational and quite precise. “We must kill it. Now.”

“My orders are to bring him to Amelie,” Oliver said.

“Couldn’t he just . . . fall and accidentally dismember himself?”

“No matter how much I long for that, no. I follow her orders.” Oliver grabbed the prisoner’s arm and hauled it up. The head lolled unnaturally. “You did remember the bindings, I hope?”

“Of course.” Myrnin searched his pockets, seared his fingers raw on the touch of silver braided wire, and folded a much-abused handkerchief over the flexible length to draw it out. He wrapped it tight around the wrists, then added a silver hook to link that binding to the broken throat. The neck was healing, of course. Slowly, but steadily. It would bear careful attention to make sure the creature stayed helpless.

He tied the ankles with the same length of silver wire, and tested the tensile strength. The bindings seemed solid enough.

The prisoner’s shoulders twitched, and he seemed to be staring at Myrnin with wide dark eyes. There was a wild menace in that face, and something far, far worse.

“Careful,” Oliver snapped, and kicked at the bound body; the head bounced, but the neck was no longer limp. It recovered shockingly fast. “Look at me with such disrespect and I’ll take those eyes right out. Understand, Lucian?”

“It has a name?”

“Unfortunately we all have names. And pasts; his is a particularly unpleasant one. I don’t know who had the awful stupidity to make someone like this into one of us, but I hope his maker’s long dead, or he’ll join this monster’s bonfire.” Oliver hauled the prisoner—Myrnin refused to use a name for it, even in the noisy privacy of his own mind, because names gave things power—to its feet. It shuffled awkwardly in the silver ankle shackles, which was all to the good, as far as Myrnin was concerned. “Let’s go. The faster I have this finished, the better I’ll like it.”