“Through the center entrance, staircase down. Then we split off, right and left. Check every pool and tank,” Hannah said. “Girls, you watch your backs in there.”
“Ay-firmative,” Eve said, and tried for a smile. “Sorry. An Aliens reference always makes me feel better at times like this. Except I’m not sure I’m the one who lives through the movie.”
They moved together in a group, in through the main entrance.
It was dark inside, and Eve’s flashlight didn’t light up too much. They took the stairs down, and Monica stumbled; Eve hissed at her, something about what dumbass wears heels at a time like this?, but Claire was focused straight ahead.
They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Hannah nodded. “You go right,” she whispered. “Stay quiet. Fifteen minutes, Claire. I mean it.”
Claire nodded. She didn’t mean it at all.
She and Eve split off to the right. Eve’s flashlight illuminated a hot circle that showed concrete, pipes, neon yellow signs and tags; there were some faint emergency lights down here, still functioning on battery, Claire guessed, so she asked Eve to switch her flashlight off. It took a few seconds for their eyes to adjust, but it meant better peripheral vision.
This bottom level of the building extended out into open-air pools, but they were farther away, on the other side of a large chain-link fence. Inside, there were regimented rows of closed and open tanks. Eve climbed the ladder to the first one and used her flashlight. She shook her head and jumped down.
The next, farther on, was a closed tank with a plastic curved lid over it and some kind of sliding port for taking samples. Claire’s turn to climb, and she slid open the port, gagged on the smell that issued forth, but she couldn’t see anything in the cloudy, foul water. If Shane was in there, he couldn’t have made it.
She jumped down next to Eve. Eve didn’t even ask; Claire guessed she didn’t have to.
They kept going. Five more tanks, some closed, some open. Nothing.
The draug were nowhere to be seen, thankfully. Maybe Michael had been right. Maybe they’d ignore the humans in favor of Michael’s wild-goose chase …
“Out there,” Eve whispered. “Look.”
Michael. He was outside by the pools, running over catwalks, and the pools were bending, twisting, shuddering, reaching.
The draug were after him, but he was giving them a game.
“We have to go faster,” Claire said. “Come on.” She swarmed up the next ladder and looked in the pool.
A dead face looked back at her, eyes pale and blind in the dim light.
She screamed, and her scream echoed and echoed and echoed through the dark, loud as an alarm, but she didn’t care because oh God, she’d been wrong …
“Move!” Eve shouted in her ear. She’d climbed up next to her, and had her arm around Claire’s waist. “Go on, get down! Now!”
“He’s dead,” Claire whispered. “Oh, God, Eve—”
Eve gulped, visibly gathered her courage, and turned her gaze on the dead face in the pool. And then she said, “That’s not Shane.”
“But—” A bubble of hope rose up, fragile as glass. “Are you sure—”
“I’m sure,” Eve said. “That’s not him. Come on. We have to move it. If they didn’t hear that—”
They jumped down, landed with simultaneous thumps on the metal grating, and headed for the next tank.
But just ahead, the darkness rippled.
And then a white face emerged from that blackness, eyes that weren’t eyes, a mouth that moved all the wrong ways, that wasn’t human at all except when she looked at it straight on.
Magnus. There were others with him, but she could somehow tell when it was him; the others looked like bad photocopies. They didn’t have the same … gravity.
Magnus said, “You. The girl with clear eyes.”
“Yeah, me. You want me,” Claire said. “Because I can tell who you are. I always could. I just didn’t know it. So give Shane back, and you can have me.”
“Child,” he almost purred. “I can have you in any case.” Magnus’s whole face distorted into something so monstrous and evil that she screamed, couldn’t help it, and all the others copied him like reflections, because that’s all they were, shards and fragments of him.
They were linked, and somehow that was important, vital, but she didn’t have the time to think about it.
She fired at him.
The shotgun kicked hard at her shoulder, and a stinging fog of gunpowder blew back over her, but she was too late; he’d read her intentions and melted back into the others, and the ones who were splattered weren’t him, weren’t the master.
And then he was gone, sinking through the grating.
“Time’s up,” Eve said. “We have to find Shane now.”
CHAPTER NINE
SHANE
I was nearly gone. I could feel it now, how my body felt light and weirdly empty, how my muscles ached. My head pounded harder and faster—low blood pressure, less oxygen getting to where it counted. The water (not really water) around me was a dull crimson now, and it reminded me of terrible things, of opening a motel bathroom door and a tub and my mom’s slack white face and the color of the watery blood around her. She’d had her clothes on, I remembered suddenly. And she hadn’t filled the tub all the way, only about halfway.
I was thinking about it too much, because it started to become real, like those fantasies I’d already rejected. All of a sudden I was there, standing on cold tile, staring at my mother, and her papery eyelids opened, her eyes were the color of ice water as she said, “If you let go, it won’t hurt so much, sweetheart. Claire’s not coming back for you. Nobody ever comes back for you.”
“Mom—” I whispered. It was her voice, just like I remembered … sad and quiet and disappointed. Maybe a little scared. Mom had been scared most of the time. “Mom, I’m sorry, I can’t just give up.”
“You can’t do a lot of things, Shane,” she said. It sounded kind, that voice, but it wasn’t. “You couldn’t save me. You couldn’t save your sister. And you can’t save yourself, either. It’s too late for you. You have to let go, because that’s the only thing that will help stop the pain now. I’m your mother. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“Claire’s going to come back for me.”
“Claire’s a dream, too. She never loved you. Nobody ever really loved you, sweetie. You’re just not built that way. Why would a smart, pretty girl like that want you? You made it up, the way you made up all that other nonsense, about getting married and having a little baby and being happy. Because that will never happen either, son.”
That sounded like my dad, not my mom. He’d always been the one telling me I was hopeless, helpless, worthless. She’d quietly tried to make me feel better, not worse. Until the end.
But the terrible thing about what she was saying was that somewhere deep inside me, the black monster that lived there actually agreed with her. Good things didn’t happen to me, because I didn’t deserve them. All I was made for was fighting, right? For trying, and failing, to protect other people.
“Claire died,” my mother said, and sat up in the tub. The red water swirled around her. “Claire is dead. All this is just you refusing to admit any of that. You’ve gone crazy—don’t you understand that? It’s very sad, but you can’t hold on to fantasy any longer. You know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. It sounded faint, and lost. “No, that’s wrong. We brought her back. She’s alive.”
“Of course you didn’t bring her back. That’s ridiculous. She died, and they took her body away. And you took your father’s gun and you shot yourself, and you’ve been dying ever since. You want to know the truth? She never loved you. She loved that vampire. Myrnin.”