Midnight Bites Page 4

  The book was gone. He did not know where he’d put it. But somehow it didn’t seem so important now. He had her. Her.

  The vision vanished, and then Lady Grey turned to him, with something strange in her wide eyes as she helped him to his feet.

  “Come, my lord,” she said. “Let us have you out of this place.”

  • • •

  Escape was difficult to achieve, but she changed from her blood-spattered gown and wrapped him in layers of heavy clothes, then hired a carriage to rush them out of London. The streets were unsafe around them, and he was, he admitted, not the most pleasant of companions. The filth on him had been unnoticeable when he was locked away, but now, with the clean smell of the countryside washing through the windows, and Lady Grey in her neat dress seated across from him, he knew he stank horribly. As neither of them breathed to live, though, it was a tolerable situation. For now.

  But in addition to the filth, he was also given to fits, and he knew they distressed her. Sometimes he would simply leave his body while it thrashed hard enough to snap his bones; sometimes, the fit came as a wave of terror that drove him to cower in the footwell of the coach, hiding from imaginary agonies. And each time such things came to devour him, she was there, holding his hand, stroking his foul and filthy hair, whispering to him that all was well, and she would look after him.

  And he believed her.

  The trip was very long, and the fits passed slowly, but they lessened in intensity as his vampire body rejected Cyprien’s poisons from it; he slept, drank more blood, ate a little solid food (though that experiment proceeded less well), and felt a very small bit better when the carriage finally rocked to a stop at the ruins of an ancient keep set atop a hill.

  “Where are we?” he asked Lady Grey, gazing at the old stones. They seemed familiar to him. She looked at him with a sudden, bright smile.

  “That’s the first you’ve spoken,” she said. “You’re getting better.”

  Was he? He still felt hollow as a bell inside, and yet full of darkness. At least there were words in him now. Yes. That was true.

  “You will remember this place,” she said. “Come. It looks worse than it is.”

  She must have paid the driver off, or bewitched him, because the coach thundered off in a cloud of dust and left them in the moonlight beside what seemed a deserted pile of tumbledown walls . . . and then he blinked, and the ruins wavered like the shimmer of heat over sand, and rebuilt into what the keep would have been, in its prime. Small but solid.

  And he did know it. He’d visited it often in his dreams, trapped in Cyprien’s cells.

  “I remember,” he said. “I had a bath.”

  “And you’ll have another, for all our sakes,” Lady Grey said, and linked her arm in his. “Can you walk?”

  “Yes,” he said. His voice sounded rusty and uncertain, but his will was strong, and he put one clumsy foot before another as she walked him forward. The gate opened as they approached, and servants bowed them in.

  One of them, a tall, lean man, approached and said, “Shall I take him and see him presentable, my lady?”

  Myrnin shrank back. He couldn’t help it. The man wasn’t Cyprien, but he seemed to be, in that moment, and he clung to Lady Grey’s arm like a fearful child. She understood, he thought, for without a flicker, she said, “No, I will attend Lord Myrnin for a while. Draw a bath, as hot as can be done. He’ll need a long soaking. Fetch him clothes, too.”

  The servant—vampire, not human, Myrnin realized—drew away and went to do her bidding. Lady Grey walked him into the dark hallways, and for some ill reason Myrnin felt safer in the gloom than he had in the light. He’d adapted to the shadows, he thought. So many years in the dark, it had seeped into him and stained him.

  “This happened before,” he said to her, as they walked. “Didn’t it?” Things blurred when he tried to focus on them. Everything blurred and shook, except for her. She was a still, steady, glowing constant, and he kept his gaze on her.

  “You were imprisoned before, yes, but not so unkindly as this time. But you are improving already,” she said, and smiled. In the darkness, it was as if the sun had come out, but it was a kinder sun, one that warmed instead of burned. “I’ve been searching for you for almost ten years, when word came that you’d gone missing. How did this happen to you?”

  “I trusted.”

  “The man I killed?”

  Myrnin nodded. Just the thought of Cyprien, the impartial, cool interest in the man’s face, made him shiver again. He’d known cruel men before; Amelie’s father, Bishop, had been one such, with no regard for the living or the vampires who came after them. Death had been just another tool to him.

  Cyprien hadn’t given him the kindness of death.

  “He was my friend,” Myrnin whispered, and tears welled up in his eyes, and rolled down his face in a cold trickle. “My fellow seeker.”

  “Then I should have killed him much more slowly than I did. If I’d known . . . well. Done’s done. Now, come and sit awhile until your bath is hot.”

  She sat him on some impossibly soft cushions, and he leaned his head against the pillows and slept a little, or at least thought he did, until her soft, strong hands roused him and moved him to his feet. He thought it was a dream. It seemed a dream, a sweet one, with the smell of roses in the air and the air skin-warm and damp, and her hands stripping away the layers of things he’d worn for so long.

  Someone—Lady Grey, he realized—helped him into the feverish heat of the bath, and bathed him like a child. This wasn’t like the last time, when he’d had enough of his wits to be ashamed for his lack of dignity and modesty; he’d left all that behind. Madness had stripped him far more naked. He sat passively while she scrubbed him, back and front, and poured slow torrents of soapy water over his head to clean it, too.

  It was all done in strangely comfortable silence, until she finally said, “Well, I think you look more yourself now, Lord Myrnin.” The water had gone cold, and it was black with grime. “Stand up.” He obeyed her, not thinking of anything really, and flinched only a little when she poured buckets of more hot water over him to sluice away the lingering filth.

  Then he stepped out onto the warm stone floor, blinked down at himself, and realized for the first time that he truly was nude as the day he’d been born, and Lady Grey, fully dressed, was standing in front of him with an upraised bath sheet.

  Her gaze was level and calm, and she smiled a little. “Oh, don’t be ashamed. I wasn’t the Virgin Queen, by any stretch.”

  He grabbed for the bath sheet, almost overbalanced, and she had to help him wrap it around his body. Of a sudden, his knees went weak, and he sagged in her arms. She carried him to a low couch and draped him in another layer of warmth, combing his damp curls from his face so that he could see her as she bent closer.

  “Poor dear man,” she whispered, and her eyes were so warm, so gentle. He could see the girl she’d once been, before kings and fear and death. “What was done to you, down there in the dark?”

  “Terrible things,” he whispered back, and tears blurred the sight of her. His voice trembled uncontrollably. “Terrible things. But they’re done now. Why do you bother? Why save me? I’m nothing. I’m a fool and I’m broken!” His voice rose on that last, raw and savage, and he hated himself for it all, for his foolish trust, his weakness, his madness, his continuing and pointless existence.

  “You are not nothing. You are not a fool.” Lady Grey’s hand moved from his forehead to touch his chin, and turn his face toward her. She looked fierce now, more queen than girl. Less kind but even more lovely. “And what’s broken can be mended stronger than ever.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Oh, I’m sure.” She gave him a secret, slow smile. “I’ve seen it. You may call it a vision, if you’d like. But I promise you, your future is worth the struggle. You must reach for
it, Myrnin.”

  “I’m . . . so tired.” Tired enough to weep with it. He felt raw and new and fragile.

  “Then rest,” she said. “And tomorrow, you will begin again.”

  “You won’t . . . leave me?”

  “Not until you’re ready.”

  He choked on the tears, then managed to say, “You . . . you have become my saving angel, you know.”

  “Oh, dear Myrnin,” Lady Grey said, and put her hand on his cheek. “I am nothing like an angel. And someday . . . someday, I hope that you’ll know that very well.”

  She pressed her lips to his, a soft whisper of sweetness, and then she sank down next to him, and put his head in her lap, and hummed him into a deep, deep sleep.

  And he wasn’t afraid.

  SAM’S STORY

  I know what you’re thinking. I KNOW! Why? Why did I do . . . Okay, I’ll avoid spoilers, but I hear the question a lot. Well, this story doesn’t answer that, unfortunately, but it does show a little bit of Sam’s history and character. I do plan to write, in detail, a story of Sam and Amelie, and how their romance came to be . . . but I’m not quite ready yet. This is a little piece of character study that I did to help understand Sam in my mind—who he was, what he felt, how he related to the other characters around him.

  And if you’re asking WHYYYYY . . . I can only say that Sam told me it was the right thing to do. Would I do it again? Probably not, because at the time, I didn’t know that we’d continue Morganville for so many more books, and reach so many more readers. But choices get made, and there’s no going back. I think Sam would say that, too.

  I don’t know where to start, but I guess I’ll start at the beginning, as boring as it is.

  My name is Sam Glass—Samuel Abelard Glass, to my mother when she was annoyed.

  I was born in 1932, a Depression-era child who grew up to be a World War II teen and a postwar adult. I turned eighteen in 1950, which in Morganville meant that I had to choose to either align myself with a vampire Protector, as my parents had before me, or strike out on my own without any kind of guarantees.

  I’d like to say I was brave enough to do that. I wasn’t. I signed the contract, got the bracelet, and life went on as normal, at least in terms of this town, where vampires are a fact and living with them is a challenge everybody faces.

  I started at the local college, Texas Prairie University, and when I was nineteen, I met Melinda Barnes, and I fell in love. She was a lovely girl, bright as a star, and things went fast. Too fast, maybe. At twenty, I found myself with a wife, and a baby on the way. My parents had passed on, so I had inherited the family home, one of the big Founder Houses in town. Melinda was dreaming of a houseful of kids, and as she got bigger every month with the child we’d made, I thought about it, too. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, having kids in Morganville, but I’d made the choice, and Melinda was so happy. . . .

  And then something went wrong, badly wrong, while I was in the waiting room at Morganville General Hospital’s maternity wing. In those days, fathers were expected to sit and wait, or pace and wait, or worry and wait. I paced, wondering how many hours I had left to go, wondering whether those shrieks I could hear from beyond the doors belonged to Melinda. Feeling guilty and anxious and scared.

  When the doctor came out, he came slowly, and the look on his face told me all I really needed to know.

  Melinda had died in childbirth. They’d managed to save my son, though that had been close, too.

  Married at twenty, a widower with a baby at twenty-one. We got by, me and Steven. I’d been terrified of having a baby to tend, but he won me over right away, the first look I had at his big china-blue eyes. So beautiful. I’d never understood what it felt like to really belong so completely to someone else, but little Steven became my world.

  I wasn’t all on my own, of course—in the 1950s, nobody trusted a young man to properly raise a child on his own. I had plenty of help from the local busybodies—and some of it was welcome, I admit.

  One day, I had a visit from the Founder.

  I had never met Amelie, but I expected someone old, dry, chilly. Instead, she was beautiful, and quiet, and when she smiled, the world lit around me. It was a courtesy visit, a condolence call to acknowledge my loss and meet the newest member of the Glass family. She didn’t mean it to be anything more. Neither did I.

  Instead, we became friends. Tentative friends, well aware of the huge gulf between us, but I sensed how lonely she was, and she could see the same thing in me. I was alone in the world, with Steven depending on me, and I suppose I was overwhelmed, too. Her kindness—and it was kindness, as strange as that might sound, considering who she was—seemed like water in the desert to me.

  She began to drop by more often, helping with Steven, leaving her bodyguards at the door or dispensing with them altogether. With me, Amelie could shed the thousands of years and remember what it was like to be human. To simply . . . be.

  By the time my boy turned three, I was in love with her. Not the kind of flash-point love I’d felt with Melinda; that had burned fast, and faded. This was different, longer, richer. I knew it was stupid, impractical, impossible, but I could see, in unguarded moments, that she felt the same.

  It might never have been anything more than a phantom, a dream that neither of us could acknowledge, except that Edgar Bryan went insane.

  Old Edgar had never been one of the town’s saner residents; he’d been bounced in and out of mental treatments for years, and most knew to avoid him when he was “in a mood.” I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but I earned a reputation as a reasonable man, someone who could help calm down a bad situation; I’d dealt with more bar fights than I could remember, and even a few political arguments between humans and vampires.

  When Edgar went around the bend, the first person they called was me. In fact, I got to the Barfly Tavern before the police, although I could hear the sirens wailing across town. Edgar had barricaded himself in a back room, along with six hostages, after he’d gone crazy and accused half the town of being out to get him.

  It was already a killing matter by the time I got there. One of those he took hostage was a vampire—a young one, not nearly as capable of protecting herself as most of the others. And I knew her. Her name was Marion—she was so quiet and shy she barely registered as a vampire at all.

  When Edgar started waving his Buck knife around at one of the bartenders, Marion stood up and stepped in between them. She had to, by Morganville’s rules—she owed the girl Protection. I wasn’t there, but I heard she was brave. She trusted that being a vampire was enough to protect her, because nobody could be that crazy.

  Only Edgar was, and he killed her.

  In Morganville, that meant that Edgar’s time was up; he was going to die for that, most likely in a medieval, horrible way. There was nothing I could do for the dead vampire, but I could try to get the other five people out without losing more of them to Edgar’s ravings.

  It took all night, but I convinced Edgar to let the rest of them go—and it was a good thing I did. Amelie showed up before dawn, with her entourage, just as I took the last of them out to safety, while Edgar agreed to lay down his knife for good.

  He snapped completely at the sight of her—maybe knowing that his life was over anyway. He went straight for her, screaming. If I’d been thinking at all, I’d have known that he couldn’t hurt her; she had guards, and she was far stronger and faster than he was.

  But I wasn’t thinking. All I could see was Amelie, and the knife, and that horrible sight of poor Marion in the back room with her head lying two feet from her bloodless body.

  So I played the hero. You can guess how that ended—with Edgar’s Buck knife buried so deep in my guts that the tip sliced through my spinal cord. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I’d stopped him before he got to Amelie.

  I didn’t see
what happened to Edgar, which I suspect was a blessing. I closed my eyes for a while, and when I opened them again, my head was lying in Amelie’s lap, and she was staring down at me with an expression of completely unguarded grief on her face.

  There were tears in her eyes. Tears. That meant something, something so huge I couldn’t even put a name to it.

  Before I could, I went away again.

  The next time I came back, I was . . . different. It felt quiet inside, so very quiet, and yet I could hear everything, feel everything so intensely. Amelie’s cool fingers against my face, like silk and marble.

  I tasted salt on my lips. Salt and copper.

  Blood.

  Amelie hadn’t made a human into a vampire in a hundred years in Morganville. But she’d done it to me. She’d done it to save me, for my son’s sake—or so she told me. But she knew, and I knew, that it was something else.

  I blamed her at first. It was hard to understand the life—if you can call it life—that vampires lead, the cravings, the impulse to violence and cruelty. I’d never been a cruel man. It sickened me to find that in myself, and I fought hard to beat it down. Stay the kind of person I’d been in life. Be a peacemaker.

  I tried to stay away from Amelie. Being around her awakened all kinds of emotions in me—and the stronger the feelings, the harder it was to control my worst impulses. Amelie kept me at arm’s length, rightly afraid that she and I would make each other too open, too vulnerable, and after what seemed like an eternity, I spent whole days at a time without feeling out of control and desperate.

  But I missed her. I missed her all the time.

  I was a terrible father in those years, but Steven turned out better than I deserved. He grew up strong and wild, and not a bit afraid of me, even when the black moods came over me. I suppose his love helped keep me the person I wanted to be, in the end.