Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(89)

He felt hands on his shoulders then. Cold hands. From the corners of his eyes, he saw the bloodless pale fingers, and felt the exhalation of cold on the back of his neck. Vampire or not, he shivered.

“You want me to find you,” he said, and drew in a sharp breath he did not need as her cold presence passed through him. When he exhaled the breath again, it hung as frozen fog on the air. Clemencie sat again in the chair across from him, staring with her blind, calm eyes. “You understand that it won’t bring you back?”

She nodded slowly.

“Are you in the house?” That garnered him another nod, this one more emphatic. Twenty questions with a ghost. Well, it was hardly the most insane thing he’d ever done. Or even in the top hundred, if he was forced to be honest. “Upstairs?” No nod. He assumed that meant a negative. “Here, on this floor?” Silence and stillness, again. He heard that buzzing whisper again, pushing at his mind like white static, and it sparked alarm in him. He needed to leave this place. He could almost hear its . . . words, and he sensed that when he did, they would burn him like silver. “Below?”

Not a nod, this time. An explosive movement. Clemencie slapped her ghostly hands on the surface of the table and leaned forward, almost nose to nose with him, and he recoiled. Couldn’t quite help it. She bared her teeth and . . . nodded.

Damnation. He really needed to leave this place.

“If I go down and find you, will you let me leave here?” he asked her. The spirit stayed frozen in front of him, locked into that aggressive, frightening lean for what felt like far too long, and then she subsided back into a calm sitting position on the other side of the table.

And nodded.

Damnation.

The basement of a murder house, haunted by a very frightening, very sad little girl.

Yes, this sounded like, as Shane would have sarcastically said, the best time ever.

? ? ?

It was easy to see how searchers had missed it, he thought; the trapdoor to the cellar was well hidden in the floorboards, much more so than if it had been an ordinary sort of cool room. Someone hadn’t wanted this place to be found. Age and rot had sagged the boards, though, and he found the seams and pried it up. The hinges broke loose as it levered away, and the square of rotting wood almost disintegrated in his hands. He stared down into the dark. He’d often said to himself, and to others, that there was nothing in the dark that wasn’t also there in the light, but in truth, he knew differently. There was one thing in the dark: fear. Fear that smothered and consumed and twisted.

He’d spent too many years in dark holes like this, and he hesitated for a moment on the lip of the cellar.

Clemencie silently rose from her chair at the table, and the table itself disappeared as she walked through them toward him. Well . . . walked was not quite the right word. Glided, perhaps.

“I know,” he told her, and sighed. “I know.” Before she could rush at him and surprise him into it, he simply stepped out, and dropped.

It wasn’t so deep as he’d expected: ten feet, at most, a minor jump that he hardly felt at all.

But he did hear it, because bones snapped and crunched, and for an instant he waited for the pain to hit, but they had not, after all, been his bones. The skeleton that lay beneath his feet was dressed in a pale wisp of a dress that matched what the ghost wore.

Clemencie stood now in the cellar’s corner, silent and as pale as the dead bones around his feet.

“Ah,” he said. “I appear to have found you, Clemencie. And without much effort, it would seem. You didn’t escape the terror that found your family after all. . . .”

His voice faded, because he began to pick out the details of the room. Near her stood a row of wooden crates, and in the crates were coins, faded old crumpled paper money, jewels, watches . . . anything of value. Gold teeth had their own special bin. Here and there lying in heaps were mounds of decaying cloth, the glint of tarnished buckles, the withered leather of belts and boots. All carefully sorted.

“What is this?” he asked her. Her head was bowed, and she slowly shook her head. Fine, pale hair had fallen to cover her face like a mourner’s veil. But in truth, he did not need her to tell him. He’d seen such a thing before, in terrible places where the dead had been murdered with brutal efficiency, their belongings put into order for later use.

This cellar was a lair all its own, and whatever beast had made its nest here had been red indeed. From the carefully sorted loot, dozens had died here, at the least.

Another chained wooden door led out of the cellar, and he waited to see what she wanted him to do . . . but Clemencie gave him no sign. No sign at all.

No help for it, then. No way out but forward.

He strode forward, grabbed the rusted chain that secured the door, and yanked. It broke apart with a dull thud, and the door sagged on its hinges. Not quite as rotten as the trapdoor, but on its last days.

Beyond was pitch-darkness. Even vampire eyes had trouble without some spark of light, but Myrnin could smell the death here. A century on, it had its own powerful stench.

So many bones.

He turned back to Clemencie’s broken skeleton, with the dull rags of her hair still spread out on the dirt floor, and shook his head. “It appears to me that whatever fate your family suffered, it was one they well deserved. Still, no one chooses their family, and this is a vile place to call a grave,” he said. “I’ll take you out of here and bury you in a cleaner spot, if that’s what you wish.”