Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,109
she’d never met me. But I was afraid of the silence even more, as it turned out, because it had a kind of dense, hot gravity to it.
And it hurt. Bad. I might tease Eve, maybe too much, but I loved her like a sister; I thought she was brilliant and funny and sharp as my best knife. Thinking that she hated me, even if she reconsidered later … yeah, it cut pretty deep.
When the van finally rolled to a stop, I got the hell out of it, fast, hoping to just walk away, but they weren’t going to make it that easy. The driver came around the hood and shoved me back toward the van. ‘You’re in charge of the mouthy one,’ he said. ‘Shut her up or I’ll do it for you, and you won’t like how I do it.’
I felt sick, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I just nodded, grabbed Eve by the arm and pulled her out of the van. She kicked and screamed, and I yanked her close enough that the dawn light got her full in the face and made her blink.
‘Let me go, you asshole!’ she said, and shoved at me with her bound hands. ‘Swear to God if you touch me again I’ll chew your fingers off!’
‘Eve, chill it. I told you to trust me, didn’t I?’ I kept it low, almost a whisper, but I yanked her arm extra hard so that the driver, who was watching closely, witnessed the pain that burned across her face. ‘I’m trying to keep you alive, you and me and Michael and Claire and everybody else. So just – dial it down. Hate me all you want; in fact, that helps. But just do it at a lower volume, would you? Or he’ll hurt you.’
She glared at me, but I saw her nod, just a little. Not that she was on board with the whole trusting thing; I could see from the fire in her eyes that she wasn’t. She was just giving me some rope, the better to choke me with later. Hanging, she would have said, was too good for me.
‘If anything happens to him, or to Claire, I’ll skin you and use your hide for a throw rug,’ she said.
The place smelt like a working farm; there was a drifting stench of fertiliser coming off the fields, and I could hear the low mooing of cows somewhere out in the distance, hidden by thick layers of mist. I hoped they weren’t vampire cows. I didn’t want to get eaten by a steak. There was a large two-storey farmhouse with an old-fashioned wrap-around porch on it, complete with white-painted rocking chairs and little ceramic statues of ducks on the steps leading up to it. Adorkable, as Eve would have said if she was in a better mood. In the mist I could see the dim outlines of a barn of some kind. Could have been red, it was hard to tell.
‘Inside,’ the driver ordered me, and I hustled Eve up the steps and into the house.
It was like time had stopped in the eighties, with all the pastel fabrics and ruffles and white wood. If this was Douche Bag Davis’s house, his wife had definitely decorated it. Then she’d probably divorced him, and he hadn’t bothered to change it up; the layers of dust on those balloony curtain tops and on the decorations scattered around proved me right.
We didn’t have much time to admire the decor. There was a kitchen off to the right, with the divine possibility of all kinds of sharp objects and explodable chemicals, but the driver was right behind us with his gun. Pete was behind him, but he had Liz over his shoulder, and it looked to me like all the fight was out of him. Behind him came another, unburdened guy, and two more dragged Michael, who was still convulsed into a shuddering ball.
Beyond the front room with its dusty ceramic ducks and floral wallpaper, though, things changed. The next room had been renovated with a steel door, a vinyl floor, white walls, and embedded fluorescent fixtures above. A lab. I knew what they looked like, though I wasn’t one to spend a lot of time in chem classes. This one had a variety of cages up against the wall, from ones small enough to hold rats up to big ones that could have safely contained a tiger.