The woman looked at her sharply. “You seem to be thinking very hard,” she said. “About what?”
“Nothing,” Claire said.
“I see. What’s your name?” When Claire didn’t answer, the woman sighed. “All right. I’m Mrs. Grant. I’m the librarian. I’m what passes for authority in Blacke these days, since all our peace officers and elected officials are dead. Now, let’s be friendly. I’ve told you my name. What’s yours?”
“Claire,” she said.
“And where are you from, Claire?”
Claire looked her right in the eyes and said, “None of your business.”
Mrs. Grant’s graying eyebrows hitched up, but under them, her faded green eyes didn’t seem surprised. “All right. Let’s get you and your friends inside, and you can tell me why you thought that vampire was someone you ought to be caring about.”
Claire looked back over her shoulder as she was pushed/pulled along. Oliver was being carried away, limp as a bag of laundry.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
The inside of the library was cool and dark, lit mostly by the natural sunlight trickling in the windows, although there were some camp-style fluorescent and LED lanterns scattered around, and even some old-fashioned oil lamps on the tables. The Blacke library was larger than Claire would have expected, with rows and rows of books, and lots of rooms off to the sides. In the middle was a kind of command center, with a small desk, a laptop computer, and some kind of small pedal-powered generator. Ranked on the shelves nearby were weapons, including a pile of silver chains—jewelry, Claire guessed, ransacked from all over town. There were a lot of first aid supplies, too.
Inside the library there were about twenty or thirty people; it was hard to see, because they were scattered around on cots between the aisles of books. Claire heard a small voice, then someone crying; it sounded like a little kid, maybe four or five. “What is this?” she asked, looking around. Mrs. Grant led her over to a long reading table and pulled out a chair for her.
“This is what’s left of our town,” she said. “The survivors. We’re a tough bunch, I’ll tell you that.”
“But”—Claire licked her lips and settled into the seat—“what happened here?”
Mrs. Grant waited while the others—Eve, Shane, and Jason—were deposited in chairs around the table, with varying degrees of gentleness. Shane was furious, and he looked as if he were seriously thinking of grabbing a fistful of weapons from the racks. Mrs. Grant evidently saw that, because she pointed at two of her burly cowboy guards and had them stand behind Shane, blocking him in at the table.
“Blacke’s never been what you might call a cross-roads,” Mrs. Grant said. “Most folks living here were born here. Their families have been here forever; we don’t see new people real often out here.” That was, in fact, pretty much like Morganville, minus the attraction of Texas Prairie University. It was pretty much like every other small town in the area, too. Claire nodded. “One night, we got us some visitors. An old man in a suit, and his niece and nephew. Foreign people. French, maybe.”
Claire looked at Eve and Shane. Eve mouthed Bishop. Confirmation for what they already had guessed—Mr. Bishop had hit Blacke on his way through to Morganville.
And he’d had fun.
“They stayed at the Iron Lily Inn,” Mrs. Grant continued. “It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a hotel. Or had, anyway. Mrs. Gonzalez owned it. She made the best apple pie in the world, too.” She slowly shook her head. “Next morning, Mrs. Gonzalez was missing; never showed up at the school—she worked in the office up there. Sheriff John went around to the hotel and found her dead. No sign of those ... people.”
That couldn’t be the whole story, Claire thought; she knew how vampires were made, and if Mrs. Gonzalez had been drained to death, she wouldn’t have come back. So she just waited. Mrs. Grant seemed to want to take her time, and Claire was trying hard not to think about what might be happening outside, with Oliver. Morley had run off, she supposed. And she had no idea what would happen to the vampires still in the back of the truck.
“We thought the murder of Mrs. Gonzalez was the end of it—shocking, first serious trouble this town had seen in close to thirty years, but still, the end. And then the next night Miss Hanover just vanished from her store—gas station, right up the street. Best we can tell, those two women were the first victims. We know the three strangers left town that night; somebody saw them driving that big, black car of theirs like a bat out of hell. Didn’t matter. They left this behind.”
Mrs. Grant looked down at her hands, which were spread out on the table in front of her. Strong and scarred, they suggested she hadn’t always been a librarian. “It started slow. People started disappearing, maybe one every few weeks. Disappearing, or dying. Then it got bad, fast, just—in days, it all of a sudden seemed like half the town was gone. Sheriff John didn’t call for help soon enough. Next thing we knew, we saw them for the first time, in force. Terrible things, Claire. Terrible things happened. And we had to do terrible things to survive.”
“Why didn’t you just—,” Eve began to ask, but was interrupted as Mrs. Grant’s head came up sharply.
“Leave?” she snapped. “Don’t you think we tried? Phones were out, landlines and cells. Internet went down with the power the first day; they ripped the power station apart while they were still thinking. We sent everybody we could out of town on the school buses. They never made it. Some kind of trap on the road, blew out all the tires. Some made it back here. Most didn’t.”
It was like some horror movie come to life. Claire had thought Morganville was bad, but this—this was beyond bad.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But why stay here? Why don’t you just—try again?”
“You know how many people used to be in Blacke?” Mrs. Grant asked. “One hundred seventy-two. What you see here in this building is what’s left. What’s left still breathing, anyway. You think we can just walk away? These were our friends, our families. And if we leave, what happens? How far does this spread?” Mrs. Grant’s eyes hardened until they were like cold green ice. “It stops here. It has to stop here. Now, you explain to me how you’re traveling around with one of them.”
“What’s more important is that Oliver wasn’t—like those people you’re talking about. They’re sick. He’s not.”
Mrs. Grant let out a sharp laugh. “He’s dead. That’s as sick as it gets, Claire from nowhere.”
“Look,” Shane said, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table, “I’m not saying the vampires aren’t the essence of freaky; they are. But they’re not like this. Not—normally. They can be—”
“And how do the four of you know anything at all about vampires?” Mrs. Grant asked. None of them answered, and her eyes narrowed. “There are more out there. More of them. Even if we finish here, there are more.”
“Not like these!” Claire said again, desperately. “You have to believe me; they’re not all—”
“Not all bad,” said Morley, who stepped out of the shadows of one of the racks of books, looking terrifying and bloody and as unreassuring as possible. “No, we’re not. Although some of us are no doubt better than others.”
And Oliver appeared on top of the bookcase, looking down. In his long black coat, he looked very tall, very strong, and even more intimidating than Morley. More came out of the shadows, too. Claire spotted Patience and Jacob, near the edges of the group.
And Michael, golden Michael, who smiled at Eve as though it would all be all right, somehow.
Mrs. Grant came out of her chair and lunged for the weapons.
Shane slammed his chair backward, throwing the two guards behind him off balance. That was all the time Oliver needed to jump from the bookcase to the table, then to the floor, and take the guns out of their hands.