Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(87)

“What about . . . this place?” Myrnin gestured at the house around them without giving it another look, because once had been truly enough for a lifetime. “It’s a certainty there are other victims in here.”

“It’s a police matter. Something for Chief Moses to deal with, although I suspect most of the victims will be transients. He’d not have gotten away with his killing so long if he’d been preying on Morganville residents exclusively.”

Pity poor Chief Moses, then. Myrnin shuddered. “Better to burn it to the ground,” he said. “It’ll bring their loved ones no peace to tell them how they died.”

Oliver stared at him for a second, with a very odd expression. “It’s always better to know,” he said. “Better haunted by ghosts than always searching for what’s not there.”

That sounded oddly like experience speaking, and Myrnin almost asked, but all he really wanted was to be out of this oppressive place, with all of the house’s evil humors.

Oliver muscled his captive out a broken window, and Myrnin walked toward it to follow . . . and that was when the window disappeared. Between one tick of time and the next, it just vanished, as if it had never been. Instead, there was just a wall, with its skin of wallpaper peeling from the bones of plaster.

Myrnin stopped. He slowly put out a hand, and touched crusted dry paper. It crumbled at his touch.

He moved for the other window, and caught a glimpse of Oliver turning impatiently to find out why he hadn’t followed . . . and then that glimpse disappeared as the window filled with old, dry boards in a strange shimmer.

Well. This called for direct action. He punched the wood in a flurry, unmindful of the splinters and shards, and they did indeed break . . . but as soon as they did, more appeared. And more. An endless supply of barriers.

He heard Oliver hammering on the outside of the house, trying to batter a way in, but clearly, the house did not want Oliver.

It wanted him.

? ? ?

Shouting Oliver’s name at full volume did nothing, except to rain down a tiny storm of dust from the decaying ceiling. Myrnin shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Nothing seemed to have changed. He was used to imagining things, but those always had a certain feel to them; he’d trained himself in recognizing when his wandering mind threw up falsehoods.

This did not seem to be such a case.

He headed for yet another broken-out window, moving very slowly this time. As he stretched his hand forth, the house shifted . . . and his fingers touched a barrier, not open air.

This place did not want him to leave.

He could hear it now, a kind of low, lethal hum well below the level of even vampire understanding, but he knew in an instinctive way that it was saying something to him . . . and what it was saying would eat away at him, strip him down to bone and madness, and he could not have that. He was vulnerable here. He’d sensed it even outside, and he’d thought it was only his worry of being away from the safer ground of Morganville, but it was more than that.

This place was alive.

“You want something,” he whispered.

Oliver and his prisoner were almost certainly gone by now. Oliver, being Oliver, would have decided that taking his prize back to Amelie would have precedence over any rescue effort—and to be fair, the prisoner he had in chains was too dangerous to leave to its own devices for long.

He’ll come back for me, Myrnin told himself, to stem a rising tide of anxiety. Or he’ll send help. I only have to stay calm and find a way to save myself.

Well, that seemed easy.

He felt in his pockets and found the cell phone that Claire always insisted he carry; it was the simplest possible model, one with only a few numbers programmed and the choice of CALL, END, and EMERGENCY CALL. He decided that this was rightly an emergency call and pressed that button.

Silence.

He checked the small glowing screen. It told him there was no signal. I knew these things were useless, he thought, and dropped it to the floor to spin randomly, like a compass pointing toward insanity.

When he looked up again, there was a dining table crouching in the middle of the room. It was entirely out of place, because it seemed new, shining, spotless. There were six chairs around it.

He glanced back toward the wreck of a kitchen, and found it neat and orderly, as though the house itself was going back in time. No ghosts visible. That should have been an improvement. It didn’t seem so.

There was now a book on the table—a photograph album, made of old green velvet with fancy celluloid corners. On it, in antique metal script, it said Our Family.

There didn’t seem much alternative, and it was pointless to try for another exit. He had to follow the path this place set for him, at least for now. The house wanted to tell him something.

He was willing to listen.

Myrnin sat down in the chair in front of the album, and reached out to flip open the latch. There was a space on the left-hand side of the cover for a name, and written in faded copperplate it said The Vexen Family.

Vexen. That seemed an ill-omened name.

The right side held a single large photograph—or, rather, a tintype—of a thin, craggy old man in an ill-fitting formal nineteenth-century suit, with a top hat. He was standing in what would have been the best days of this old farmhouse, with a pinch-faced wife half his age in her Sunday-best bonnet and black dress of mourning. A group of children sat at their feet.