Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,90
the dead thing that had tried to kill her. It was a vampire, she guessed, but not any kind of vamp she knew about. Even Myrnin’s lab mistakes – and he’d made more than a few of them – weren’t quite that disgusting. It was like some kind of a bastardised DNA merger of bat, human and spider. She tried not to look at it too closely as Jesse hustled her back to the now-open small door. Thankfully, Jesse didn’t ask her to go first; the vampire woman, although taller, easily bent and moved fluidly through the narrow opening. Claire followed her, scrambling on hands and knees in the claustrophobic concrete space. No conduits in here, at least. Claire realised she’d dropped her flashlight in preference to keeping hold of her knife, but even as she did, Eve moved in behind her and flipped hers on to light the way. ‘You okay?’ Eve mumbled – and when Claire glanced back, she realised Eve was holding the flashlight in her mouth, the better to crawl forward.
‘No,’ Claire said, and coughed again. She couldn’t risk throwing up in here, that would be disgusting for everyone, but the stench … Eve was coughing, too. It wasn’t just her. The vampires seemed immune, and she briefly, violently hated them for it. ‘I will be, though.’
The tiny tunnel seemed unnaturally long, but that was probably just Claire’s nightmarish shock taking hold; she felt weirdly unsteady, and her whole body felt the after-effects. It would hurt later, she assumed, but just now, she mostly felt numb and clumsy. She also knew that there were things in this tunnel she would later regret touching; she could feel tiny bones crunching under the press of her hands and knees, for instance. But right now, she really didn’t care.
The world narrowed to that dark, concrete tunnel, and the rapidly disappearing form of Jesse ahead of her – how did she crawl so fast? – and then, suddenly, it opened up again, into a big, echoing room. Claire heard the harsh scritch of glass embedded in the bottom of her sneakers when she slid out and stood, and for a moment she was blind until Eve crawled out after her, and directed her flashlight around.
‘Wild,’ Eve said, and wiped her mouth with one forearm. ‘Yuck. Drool. What the hell is this?’
This, it looked like, was someone’s hack project, long abandoned … in the grand tradition of MIT, someone had discovered this place, and started tiling the big room, which had probably started as some kind of storage area. The mosaic started in the middle of the room in swirls of black misty white, and spun out in a dizzying pattern toward the edges. Claire couldn’t decide if it was meant to be hypnotic, or a representation of a black hole, but it made her feel as if she was standing on stars. It was unfinished toward the corners, and the tools and pieces of cut tiles were untidily stacked next to the large bulk of an ancient bunch of pipes that burst out of the wall like a frozen iron octopus.
Handcuffed to the pipes was Liz. Unlike Derrick, she was still alive, but she looked pale and terrified, and there was an open wound on her throat – not as bad as Derrick’s, but it was still trickling blood, and there was a lot spread around her. She was shivering and only half-conscious. Eve rushed over to her and clamped a hand over the wound, and Jesse used her knife to cut a piece from her shirt to use as a bandage.
‘Can you break these?’ Eve asked, and pointed at the cuffs. Jesse nodded and snapped the metal apart without too much of an effort; whoever had put them on hadn’t taken the precaution of coating them with silver, which was lucky. ‘Okay, let’s get her up.’
Claire took Liz’s other side, and working together she and Eve managed to lift the third girl up. Jesse could have helped, but at this point, Claire preferred to have her free and ready to fight.
Because there was no way this was so easy.
Sure enough, there was a heavy, metallic sound from behind them, and as Eve turned the flash that way, Claire saw that a solid grating had come down over the doorway to the narrow little tunnel out – a heavy barrier, coated with a nice, shiny layer of silver. Jesse and Oliver wouldn’t be moving that one, not easily, anyway. And