I was here, and having our own clothes would feel a whole lot more comfortable in exile. So despite the vamps waiting impatiently outside, I ran upstairs, rummaged in each of our rooms as fast as possible, and shoved shirts, pants, underwear into the bag.
I wanted to take everything, but there wasn’t time. On the way out, though, I hesitated, then put Michael’s guitar into its case and clicked it shut.
The vamps could just stuff their objections.
I came out on the porch and locked the door—habit, I suppose—and turned to see …
… Nobody.
The vamps had all vanished.
The sedan was sitting at the curb idling. All the doors were shut. The trunk was still open.
I didn’t like the feeling of the earplugs, suddenly; they felt oppressive, magnified my fast breathing, made me feel oddly suffocated. I wanted to take them out, and I actually reached up for the left one before I realized what I was doing. I could make out, very faintly, a high-pitched sound.
Singing.
Dammit.
I ran for the car, threw the bag and guitar into the trunk, and grabbed a shotgun pre-loaded with silver shot, plus a couple of the vials of silver nitrate. Then I pulled open the door of the sedan.
I wasn’t exactly shocked to find it empty. The impulse to get in and drive away—even if I’d be driving blind, given the opaque tinting—was almost irresistible, but though the vamps hadn’t even wanted to give me their names, I was the one who’d gotten them out into this. The noise cancellation headsets clearly hadn’t worked … or else something else had drawn them off. Either way, I owed it to them to find them.
So I went looking.
I mean, it was my own neighborhood. I lived here. That was the Farnhams’ house right there; I didn’t like them, because they were a mean, bitter old couple of the get-off-my-lawn variety, but they were familiar. Across the street was Mrs. Grather, who’d been a librarian since books were carved on stone or something. She was always out puttering around with dying flowers. I knew each and every person who lived on this block, or at least had lived here, before the events of the past few days. Maybe they were still locked up inside, hiding. Maybe they’d left Morganville for good.
Maybe they were dead and gone.
But it was my neighborhood, and we didn’t allow bad things to happen here. Not here.
Not even to vampires who wouldn’t give me their names.
I found the first one walking along half a block down; it was one of the two who’d been in the backseat with me. His headphones were gone, and he looked … vacant. Dammit. I didn’t know how to stop him, short of killing him; he was shambling along with a purpose, drawn by the eerie song of the draug toward a watery grave.
I ran back toward the car, looking, and found signs of a struggle. Smashed fence at Mrs. Grather’s house, some bloodstains, and a broken headset. I tried it, and it still lit up, even though the headband had snapped in half. I ditched the shotgun and dashed back to the vamp, who was still walking along, and sneaked up behind him to slap the two halves of the headphones in place over his ears.
He took another couple of steps, with me awkwardly duck-walking with him as I held the pieces in place, then stopped and reached up to hold the headphones himself as I pulled back. Then he turned and faced me, and instead of seeing just another vampire, I saw … a young man, maybe twenty-five or so. He had thick brown wavy hair, cut into a vaguely old style, and he had dark eyes, or at least they looked that way in the gloomy afternoon.
Kinda cute, in a bookish sort of way. He nodded to me and said, “Thank you.” At least, that was how I read his lips. He gave me an awkward, shallow bow, too.
I wished I knew his name, suddenly, but there wasn’t much point in conversing, seeing as how he had his headphones on and I had squishy earplugs. I gestured for him to follow me, and ran back toward where I’d dropped the shotgun. No sign of draug, at least here; my new friend kept up with me easily. He nodded in a way that I interpreted to mean wait here, and dashed in a blur back to the car, where he dropped his broken headphones and, in almost the same gesture, grabbed a new pair from the dashboard and snugged them in place. I saw his body language relax as they kicked in.
Okay, that explained him. It didn’t explain the lack of Adele and the others. We made awkward sign language Q&A for a bit, and I got that there had been a draug popping up, and his headphones had gotten snapped, and Adele and the others had chased the draug. No props to Adele for tactical smarts, obviously, but before he’d succumbed to the singing, my new buddy had seen which way they’d gone.
So we followed, both now armed with shotguns.
We rounded the corner into the middle of a micro-rainstorm.
I mean, one second it was clear, the next there was a blinding curtain of rain that smashed down from the sky in a thick silver flood, and it was as cold as ice and took my breath away as it hit me. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could feel a burning creeping over my exposed skin.
Draug, in the rain. They were concentrating on this one spot, flooding down to add their bulk to what looked like a flooded low spot in the road.
I could see them moving like shadows through the rain, surrounding Adele and the other vampires, who were shoulder to shoulder in a circle-the-wagons formation. Even through the earplugs I could hear the muffled blasts of the shotguns.
My fanged friend grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to a halt. He was right—we couldn’t get closer; with three vampires firing in there, and taking a toll on the draug, we could get hit by friendly fire just as easily. He pointed to the silver nitrate glass jars that I’d clipped to my belt carabiner, and then to the thick, squirming puddle in the depression of the road.
I gave him a thumbs-up, passed him my gun, and unclipped the jars. My hands were cold and wet, and I had to concentrate to make sure I didn’t slip and drop them. And then it occurred to me that my brilliant plan was to run right into the middle of the draug.
It was suddenly not so brilliant.
The vampire bumped my shoulder and gave me an encouraging nod. He had a shotgun in each hand, like something out of a badass Old West movie; all he really needed was a big hat and bandoliers over his chest to complete the picture. And maybe a poncho. Ponchos are cool.
I got the message. He’d be right behind me, firing on the draug coming from the sides. Plus, they wouldn’t be nearly as interested in me if there was hot, tasty vampire within reach.
I gave him a firm, calm nod (and didn’t feel that way at all) and ran forward.
Adele must have spotted us, because her gunfire in our direction stopped, but behind me I heard the close percussive booms of my new friend’s shotguns going off as draug lurched out of the rain from the left and the right. Don’t stop, don’t stop, no matter what, don’t stop …
I ran directly into a draug.
Literally.
It was just forming itself out of the rain, and behind that human form was something vile and monstrous and formless, twitching and oozing.
I didn’t have the time to stop, even if I’d wanted to. I don’t know which of us was more surprised, actually.
I ran right into it, and through it.
It felt like half-congealed gelatin, or the thickest possible slimy mud. I retched at the feel of it on my skin, and it burned hard and fast, like an acid bath … but then I was out of it, and the rain, even draug-infested, was cleaner, and sluicing the ick away.