“Well, we’re not,” Shane said, and shone his light around. They were in an underground tunnel. It was damp and dark and it smelled really foul—much worse than most of the vampire highway tunnels under Morganville. This one didn’t look like it had been used for a road, either. “Wrong turn.”
Eve said, in an entirely different voice, “ Reallywrong turn.” She pointed off down the tunnel, and Claire saw shapes moving in the darkness. Pale skin. Shining red eyes. “Oh man. Dial us out, please.”
The only problem was that the portal system refused to pick up. They were locked out.
Claire looked at Shane and Eve and shook her head. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute, and she could see the light trembling from the force of her pulse beats. “We’re stuck,” she said.
Shane dropped the bag he was carrying, unzipped it, and passed weapons to Eve, then took out a wicked-lethal crossbow with silver-tipped bolts. “Somebody up there doesn’t like you, Claire.”
Claire primed the Super Soaker. “It’s Ada,” she said. “This time, I’m not letting Myrnin talk me out of it.”
The vampires—well, vampirelike things, sort of like Myrnin’s experimental attempts to turn humans back in his crazy days—hurled themselves out of the darkness with high-pitched, batlike squeals. Claire resisted the urge to scream, and let loose with the water gun. A blast caught three of them in midleap, and they shrieked even louder, hit the ground, rolled, and kept rolling. She could see the ghostly blue flare of flames around them as the silver ate into their exposed skin—which was most of it, because these things were more like tunnel rats than anything approaching human. Giant undead tunnel rats.
Only in Morganville . . .
Shane aimed and fired, taking one of them out just as it was preparing to leap, and reloaded with an ease that told Claire he’d been practicing. Eve had a handful of what looked like darts—regulation darts, the kind you threw at a target in a bar. She was dead-on accurate with them, too, as soon as any tunnel rat came within ten feet of her.
By the time Claire was starting to worry about her water reservoir, and Shane was running low on crossbow bolts, the attacking forces were running. “Let’s go,” Eve said, tossing another dart that landed in the ass of a retreating vampire. “Ooooh, trip twenty!”
“You’re enjoying this way too much,” Shane said. “Darts? When did you come up with that?”
“I was playing with your electroplating thingy. After I did all my jewelry, I started in on pointy things.” Eve held out a dart for inspection. It had—of course—a skull on the fletching. “Sweet, right?”
“Cute. Time to run now.”
Claire slung the Super Soaker around her back and ran up the hill, chasing Shane, who was, as always, faster—the result of longer legs, not really dedicated practice. Shane only ran when someone chased him; he was more of a weights kind of guy.
The fact that the tunnel tilted uphill was a good sign—it was basically an entrance ramp, which meant they’d come up to ground level soon enough. Then Claire could figure out where they were, how to find a working portal, and get back to the business at hand—find Kim, beat Kim like a taiko drum to find out who her vampire coconspirator was, and then hit Ada’s RESET button.
Simple.
Except, of course, it wasn’t.
Shane slowed, and Claire almost crashed into him. He dashed over to the side of the tunnel, hugging the wall, and Claire and Eve piled in next to him. “What?” Eve asked around breathless pants. She wasn’t much for running, either.
“Someone’s coming,” Shane said. “Shhhh.”
Eve choked and strangled on a cough, and muttered, “Got to cut down on the cigarettes.”
“You don’t smoke,” Claire whispered.
“Then I’m completely screwed.”
Shane whirled toward them and put hands over both their mouths. His face looked fierce. They nodded.
It was dark where they were, but not dark enough. A shape appeared ahead of them, coming down the tunnel . . . then another. Then more. Six—no, ten. Claire lost all will to snark, and she was pretty sure, from Eve’s wide-eyed look, that she felt the same. They’d done pretty well against the tunnel rats, but these were realvampires.
Hunters.
Morley stopped about twenty feet away, still facing straight ahead, and held up a hand to stop the group of vampires following him. Claire recognized some of them from earlier. Some of them were still healing from the burns left by her water gun.
“Look who’s come to visit,” he said, and turned his head in their direction at the side of the tunnel. “Claire and her friends. I wonder if they want to stay for dinner.”
Shane snapped the crossbow up and took aim on Morley. “Don’t even think about it.”
Morley stuck his hands in the pockets of his dirty raincoat. “I tremble in fear, boy. Obviously, in all my long life, no one has everthreatened me with a weapon before.” His tone changed, took on edges. “Put it down if you want to live.”
“Don’t,” Eve whispered.
Morley smiled. “The boy’s got two arrows left,” he said. “You have a handful of darts. Little Claire’s water weapon is almost empty. And by the way, I am aware of your strategic position. I hate to repeat myself, but I wilclass="underline" put down your weapons if you want to live.”
“No choice,” Shane said, and swallowed hard. He crouched down and put the crossbow on the concrete, then rose with his hands up.
I could get in one good spray, Claire thought, but she knew it was a terrible idea. She lifted the strap of the toy gun over her head and let it fall. It sounded empty.
“Shit,” Eve said, and threw down her darts. “All right. What now? You get all Nosferatuon our asses? If you make me a vampire, I’ll make you eat those fangs.”
Morley eyed her with a bit of a frown. “I believe you might,” he said. “But I’m not interested in converts. I’m much more interested in allies.”
“Allies,” Claire repeated. “You’ve tried to kill us a whole bunch.”
“That wasn’t about you,” he said. “The first time, you were simply with Amelie. The next, well, I was doing a favor for someone else. Another ally, as it happens.”
“What do you want?”
“We want freedom,” Morley said. “We want to live as God meant us to do. Is that such a terrible thing?”
There were a few vampires in his group that Claire recognized with a nasty jolt of surprise. “Jacob,” she said. “Jacob Goldman? Patience?” Two of Theo Goldman’s family—and Theo was the last vampire she’d expect to be in the middle of this. His kids, though . . . she really didn’t know them very well.
Jacob looked away. Patience, on the other hand, stared right back, and lifted her chin as if daring Claire to say anything else. From her last encounter with the Goldmans, Claire had been aware the younger generation was starting to hate the whole philosophy of their parents; it made sense that they’d found someone here in Morganville more like-minded.
“Amelie and Oliver are trying to make us into something we never were,” Patience said. “Tame tigers. Performing bears. Toothless lions. But we can’t be those things. Vampires are not caretakers of humanity. I’m sorry, but it will never be true, however much we wish it could be.”
“You’re not making much headway on this Let’s be friendsargument,” Eve said. “I’m just saying.”
Morley let out an impatient sigh, and looked back at the other vampires. “Surely you want us out of your town,” he said. “As much as we’d like to go. But Amelie won’t allow us to leave. We have only two choices: destroy Morganville, or destroy her. Destroying Morganville seems easier, in many ways.”
The light dawned. “You were working with Kim. She suggested the cameras, didn’t she?”
“It seemed a way to achieve what she wanted, and what we wanted,” he agreed. “The end of Morganville. The beginning of her career. Granted, spying is an unseemly way to go about it, but it’s probably less objectionable than murder.”