Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(90)

He looked at the ghost still waiting in the corner. She raised her head, and she was smiling. Oh, not a smile of thanks, or of relief, or of any sweet thing.

That, Myrnin thought, was an evil smile. A truly, truly evil smile.

“No,” Clemencie Vexen said to him, and her voice was full of screams and whispers and pleas and cries. It was the voice of hell given tongue and lips. “You took away my new friend. You will take his place. You will bring them here as my grandfather did, and my father, and my mother, and my uncle. You will sanctify them, and their worldly goods will fund our great works.”

I never should have touched a ghost, Myrnin thought. Never never never. My mother was right. His mental voice seemed high and strange, and if he had not been through so much in his long, long life, he’d have broken in pieces at that moment and gone utterly mad. Her eyes had taken on a glow; they were not merely blank. They were full of things he most earnestly wished to unsee.

“Very kind of you to offer,” he said aloud, “but I already have a job. And that of pet monster has never suited me very well.”

She came at him, of course, but by then he was already moving, leaping straight up for the open square of the cellar’s entrance, and as he rose, he caught the edges and vaulted up like a tumbler, rolling across the filthy floor and up to his feet and running as hard as he could, because he knew that the little demon wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had no idea what kind of harm she could do him, but if she could make the house itself into a weapon, then he imagined it would be quite a lot of harm indeed.

“There’s nowhere you can run!” Clemencie shrieked behind him, and then in a flash she was in front of him, a cold wrathful shadow that he only glimpsed before veering away and up the stairs, past the faded photographs of her loathsome family. He ducked as a kitchen knife flew in a steel whirl toward his neck, because while neck snapping might be survivable for a vampire, neck bisection was not, and he leaped over the yawning gap where he and her last friend, Lucian, had crashed through the floor, and landed catlike in the room beyond . . .

. . . which held another ghost.

Myrnin halted in an instant, because this one was standing facing him not three feet away, and like Clemencie, it seemed to be a soft, sweet girl. Younger, though. And indefinably . . . different.

“Ah, another sister. You must be—Trothe?” Myrnin asked. “Your sister’s already made the offer. I’ve refused.”

Trothe held out her hand.

“No,” he said. “I think I am quite finished shaking hands with your family of killers.”

Trothe gave him a look of utter incredulity, and then rolled her eyes, exactly like Claire’s friend Eve might have done in similar circumstances. She drew a line across her throat with her finger. Then she pointed past him to her sister, who had slowed and stopped at the entrance to the room . . .

. . . as if she couldn’t come into it.

“Ah,” he said. “Clemencie cut your throat. And those of the rest of the family, I suspect. Let me speculate. . . . To your parents, murder was only a practical business as a means to robbery. To her, it became less a career and more of a calling.”

Trothe seemed to sigh, but she nodded.

“And what do you want me to do about it, girl? You’re dead. I’m a vampire. She’s insane. I don’t see this having a positive outcome.”

At the door, Clemencie howled. It was the mother of all screams, straight from the pit of despair, and despite himself, Myrnin shuddered.

Trothe just seemed impatient and slightly bored, which was impressive in the face of such madness. It spoke volumes about their home life, when they’d had a life. And a home.

Like Clemencie, Trothe could speak when she wished, because she finally found her voice and said, “I want you to leave, man.” In contrast with her sister, she sounded completely normal for a girl of her apparent age. “I want you to go outside and then burn this house to the ground to be sure it’s finished.”

That seemed . . . surprisingly sensible. Myrnin raised a hand. “Problem,” he said. “Your sister won’t let me leave.”

“I will,” young Trothe said, with a grim determination that Myrnin recognized. He’d seen it before, in Claire, who, although she was a bit older than Trothe Vexen, had the same steely resolve. She simply used it in ways that were not so bent on insanity and murder. “Go out this way.” She walked to a boarded-up window, and pointed.

He hesitated.

“I told you that he was mine!” Clemencie shrieked in triumph, and the sound was like razor blades on a chalkboard. The screaming seemed to ring in his ears like lost souls, and he wondered for a brief moment if he was as lost as poor bedeviled Lucian, who’d been spelled into carrying on Clemencie’s evils. It was possible that the poor devil might not have begun quite so badly as he’d ended. “He is mine!”

“You see how she is,” Trothe said. “I really can’t stay in this house with her anymore. It’s unbearable. You need to send us both away.”

Myrnin gave Trothe a frown as he said, “You know that likely means sending you both to hell. Assuming you believe in that sort of thing.”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw my parents there. I was there myself. But Clemencie escaped and came back here to . . . do her work. I had to come to try to stop her. I haven’t done very well, though.”