It looked … quiet. So terribly quiet. Stretching out in front of the Elders’ Council building—a big, Romanesque temple of a place, with stairs like Niagara Falls of marble—was the green of Founder’s Square, with its trees and ponds and footpaths and antique lighting that had come on to fight the gloom. Genuine gas lighting, the kind that hissed very softly, like snakes in the garden. In the center of the green was a wide, clear space with a raised platform. That was where they held town meetings, and where—not so very long ago—there had been a cage to hold humans who dared to attempt to kill vampires. Sometimes they were punished just by being caged. Sometimes, if the vampire actually died, the punishment was a whole lot worse.
But the cage was gone now. That was one thing Claire could be proud of, at least …. She’d gotten Amelie to get rid of it. Managed to secure some basic rights for the human population, but those were not exactly popular, or consistently honored.
She tore her gaze away from Founder’s Square and its bad memories, and looked over Morganville itself. Not a huge place. From this vantage point she could see the gates of Texas Prairie University, her school. It blazed with lights, still, like a beacon; when she squinted, she thought she could see that the gates were all closed. “They shouldn’t still be here,” she said to Naomi. “The students.”
“They aren’t,” Naomi said. “They’ve been evacuated, every one of them. Amelie could ill afford to explain a disaster of this magnitude; they are hard-pressed to cover the normal attrition rates.”
Attrition. That was what vampires called it. Claire called it murder. “What did she tell them?”
“Nothing. The dean made an address and said that deep cuts in the state budget required them to cut the semester short. All students have been granted excellent marks and will receive free admission to all courses at the beginning of next term. Then they announced an emergency evacuation based upon a chemical spill to drive off the faculty and the workers.”
“That’s going to bring a lot of attention to this place,” Shane said, scanning the horizon. “Last thing Morganville wants.”
Naomi shrugged. “It is the best we can manage now. Not that it will matter, when this is done; the university will never reopen, and of course we will leave this town. We must. Amelie will see the sense of it soon, or Oliver will. Morganville is dead to us.”
She said it as if it was vampire religion or something—that running was the only option. And Claire guessed that given the long and terrible experience the vamps had with the draug, maybe that wasn’t so unreasonable. But Amelie had decided to fight. Oliver would fight, too; he’d made it clear that he’d rather do that.
What scared Claire was that he might now be the only one, other than Myrnin, who really felt that way. The vampires weren’t heartless, exactly, but they were extremely focused. If they stood a better chance of survival by sacrificing the humans who were supposedly under their Protection, well, they’d send flowers to the funerals and feel a little bit sad. You can’t trust them, Claire reminded herself. Not when it comes to something like the draug, something that can kill them. They’ll always put themselves first.
But how did that really match with how Myrnin acted? Or Amelie, or even Oliver, for that matter? Vampires were different, just like people were different. Some ran. Some didn’t. Some fought. And some, a very few, actually cared.
“I can see our house,” Shane said, and pointed. There it was, barely visible in the gloom—a white house no larger than a toy from this distance, distinguished from its neighbors by the Victorian shape. No lights burning there. No one to need them now. And there weren’t many lamps burning out there anyway. A few candles or fireplaces flickered in windows, but the steady glow of electric power was out now, except here in the very heart of the city. Most people had left town already, when the vampires were distracted; Claire suspected Myrnin had lifted the barriers to allow them to do it undetected. The ones who remained were, like Shane, fighters. People who just didn’t go when they got pushed. “I told you that the outside needed paint. Truth is, this whole town needs a damn makeover.”
He was right. Morganville, soggy and dripping in the rain, did look horrible. The fierce desert sun wasn’t much kinder to it, but at least it had looked … clean. Not like this, so utterly washed of life, muddy and disheartened.
“First on my list,” Claire said, “after we try not to die. Paint the house.”
“It’s good to have goals,” he said, and held out his hand. “Watch your step.”
Naomi gave them a curious look, but jogged down the stairs, moving as lightly as a cat, and with the alien, fluid grace of one, too. Claire and Shane followed more carefully, since the rain had left the marble slippery. “How can we tell if the draug are here?” Shane called to Naomi as his boot splashed into a puddle on the first landing. She was also wearing boots, big ones that laced up to her knees.
“I expect you will know when you feel their bite,” she said. “In small, isolated puddles they are not so dangerous, but the rain keeps coming. Avoid any running streams and large bodies of still water. We’re lucky the ground soaks up so much, so fast. An advantage of the desert.”
“That’s why she built here,” Claire said. The rain was already soaking through the warm hoodie she’d thrown on over the T-shirt. She was, she thought, going to spend a lot of the day feeling cold and damp. Naomi had worn a full raincoat, with hood, though Claire felt it was less protection against the cold than against the idea of the draug drizzling down on her bare skin. “Very little rain, and people leave you alone way out here. She could control things.”
“It’s an illusion, control,” Naomi said. “You ought to understand that by now, young Claire. We are never in control of our destinies, even the strongest of us. All we can hope to do is not be too badly damaged by events.”
God, she did sound like Amelie. Depressing. Maybe they really were related after all. Shane shrugged; he wasn’t big on the concept of destiny anyway, and even less so when it was being preached by vampires.
At the bottom of the stairs, Shane said, “Which way?”
“We must keep to high ground,” Naomi said. She stood where she was for a moment, looking out over the town, and then shook her head. She pulled a device from the pocket of her raincoat; it was, Claire realized, one of Myrnin’s, with all the crazy hallmarks of something he’d cobbled together—gears, wires, tubes with strangely colored liquids. One was bubbling. Naomi adjusted a dial on the side and nodded as she returned it to her pocket. “The magic is working, at any rate.”
“Magic?”
“It wipes away the call of the draug,” she said.
“It’s not magic; it’s noise cancellation,” Claire said. “It’s just physics. You build one wave to cancel another, the way you build one to amplify another.”
Naomi just looked at her with polite, empty interest, and then said, “As you say. It appears to be working, which is fortunate, or this would be a very short venture for me. And for you.” That last was added as an afterthought.
“You said you had a way to find Theo,” Shane said. “Time to bust it out, lady. I don’t want to be out here when it gets dark. Well, darker.”
Naomi reached in the other pocket of her raincoat and took out a sealed vial. It was half full of a red powder, and she popped the cap and added a dash of water from a flask before she recorked it and shook it to mix. The liquid turned the dark red of blood. She uncapped the vial again, put it to her lips, and drank.
“The hell?” Shane stared. “Seriously, you brought a snack?”
“It’s Theo’s bloodline,” Naomi said. She grimaced and dropped the vial, then crushed it into tiny shards beneath her foot. “All the bloodlines have trace records in our libraries. It is so we can find them as we need. I could likely find him easily were he of Bishop’s bloodline, but he is not, so I must rely on this. It tastes foul, dried so …” She stopped talking, stood in silence for a few seconds and then suddenly bent over and retched violently. Then she sat down on the lowest step, as if she couldn’t find the strength to stand.