The whole place smelled like mold and dead animals. “This way,” Myrnin’s voice said quietly, and with a hum, electricity turned on in the hall. Some of the bulbs burned out with harsh, sizzling snaps, leaving parts of the space in darkness.
Claire followed the hall to the end, which took a right turn into a small studio with some kind of engineering board. The equipment looked ancient, but clean; somebody had been here—presumably Kim—and had taken care to put everything in working order. Microphones, a chair, a backdrop, lighting . . . everything in the studio needed for filming, including a small digital video camera on a tripod.
On the other side of the room was a complicated editing console, which had a bank of monitors set up. They obviously weren’t original to the setup—decades more modern than the soundboard—and Claire identified different components that had been Frankensteined into the system.
These included an array of fat black terabyte drives, all portable.
Michael was sitting at the console. “Michael!” Eve blurted, and threw herself on him; he stood up to catch her in his arms, and hugged her close. “You incredible jerk!”
He kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know.”
She smacked his arm. “Really. You are a jerk!”
“I get that.” He pushed her off a little, to look at her. “You’re okay?”
“No thanks to you. You had to go running off in the middle of the night and not even say boo . . .”
“I should have known you guys wouldn’t stay put.”
“Where’s Detective Hess?” Claire asked. “I thought you were meeting him here.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Where did he go?”
“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Michael seemed preoccupied, as if he were trying to figure out how to tell them something they weren’t going to like at all. “This is Kim’s data vault. At least, most of it. Claire, that’s a router, right? I think this is her receiving station for the signals.”
“She’s using the tower to amplify the signals,” Claire said. “Did you find—?” She didn’t want to get more specific than that. Michael shook his head, and her heart fell. “What about the other ones?”
“She’s been a busy girl,” Michael said. “There are video files there from City Hall, Common Grounds, spots all over town. It will take hours, maybe weeks, to look at everything, but she’s done a rough cut.” He hit some controls, then pointed at the central monitor. “This is the raw file.”
After some old-fashioned leader signals, there was a shot of the Morganville town limits sign, creaking in the wind . . . and then, in special effects, the word Vampiresappeared in bloody streaks right below the sign.
“Subtle.” Eve snorted. “She’s got a future in Hollywood.”
Kim’s voice came on, breathlessly narrating. “Welcome to Morganville, the town with bite. If you’ve ever driven across the barren landscape of West Texas, you may wonder why people live out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, wonder no more. It’s because they can’t live anywhere else without people knowing what they are.”
The visuals cut to a montage of Morganville daily life—normal, boring stuff.
And then a night-vision shot of a vampire—Morley, Claire realized with a shock—sucking the blood out of someone’s neck. It was an extreme close-up. His eyes were like silver coins, and the blood looked black.
Cut to Eve, working the counter at the coffee shop in all her Goth glory. Eve sucked in a quick breath, but said nothing. More shots of Morganville, some handheld. Claire saw footage of students, and remembered Kim running around the campus with her digital camera, asking people stupid questions.
It was in there, and so was Claire, saying, “I have two words for you, and the second one is off.Fill in the blank.”
Claire covered her mouth with both hands. God, she looked so angry.And kind of bitchy.
It got worse, with the voice-over. “Even the normal people of Morganville aren’t so normal. Take my friends who live in this house.”
A shot of the Glass House, full daylight. Then some kind of hidden-camera thing of Kim knocking on the door, Eve answering.
A shot of Shane. One of Michael.
“Living in a town full of terror doesn’t mean you can’t find true love—or at least, real sex.”
The video morphed into Claire and Shane in his bedroom.
Oh God no . . .
Claire felt sick and hot and breathless, full of horror at seeing herself there on that screen. She stumbled away and almost threw herself into Shane’s arms. He, lips parted, was staring at the picture, looking just as horrified as she felt. But he couldn’t look away, while she simply couldn’t watch.
“Goodness,” Myrnin said quietly. “I don’t think I should be watching this. I don’t think I’m old enough.”
“Turn it off,” Shane said. “Michael.”
Instead of turning it off, Michael hit FAST FORWARD. He slowed it down as the scene changed. More Kim voyeur porn, this time Michael and Eve. No voice-over. Claire couldn’t imagine what she was intending to say, but it couldn’t have been good.
“I’ll kill her,” Eve said. It sounded calm, but it really wasn’t. “Why are you showing me this?”
Michael looked at her, and Claire’s stomach did a little flip at the grimness in his expression. “Sit down,” he said, and wheeled the chair closer to Eve. She looked at it, then at him, frowning. “Trust me.”
She did, still frowning, as the scene changed on-screen.
It was some dark-paneled room, with a big wooden round table, an ornate flower arrangement in the middle. Of the several people around the table, Claire recognized three immediately, with a shock. “Amelie,” she blurted. Amelie clearly had no idea she was being filmed; the camera was high up, at an angle, but it caught their faces clearly. Next to her at the table was Richard Morrell, the mayor, neat and handsome in a dark suit. At his right sat Oliver, looking—as usual—angry. Several other people around the table were talking at once, arguing, and finally Oliver slammed his hand down on the wood with so much force it silenced them all.
Then came Kim’s voice-over. “Morganville is ruled by a town council, but one not like any other. Nobody elects these people. That’s Amelie, Founder of Morganville. She’s more than a thousand years old, and she’s a ruthless killer. Oliver’s not much younger, and he’s even meaner. The mayor, Richard Morrell, he’s new, but his family has ruled the humans of Morganville for a hundred years. Richard’s the only human on the council. And he gets outvoted . . . constantly.”
She cut back to the sound as Richard was saying, “. . . want to revisit the decision we made earlier, about Jason Rosser.”
“What about him?” Oliver asked irritably. “We’ve heard your arguments. Let’s move on.”
“You can’t execute him. He gave himself up. He tried to save the girl.”
“He did nottry to save Claire,” Amelie said. “He left her to die. Granted, he did turn himself in to the police and told us about his accomplice in these murders, but we must be clear: he is far from innocent, and his history tells us he can’t be trusted.”
“He’s still a kid,” Richard said, “and you can’t just arbitrarily decide to execute him. Not without a trial.”
“With a majority vote, we can,” Oliver said. “Two for, one against. I believe that is a majority. It won’t be a public event. He’ll just quietly—disappear.”
Eve’s mouth dropped open. She leaned forward, frantically searching the screen for a clue. “When was this? Michael? When did she record this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you should know. Your brother’s been sentenced to death.”
“Oliver—he didn’t even—he didn’t say anything.”
“Well,” Myrnin said, “I don’t suppose he felt it was necessary. I expect they were planning to arrange something quiet, perhaps an accident. Or suicide.”