This cellar was a lair all its own, and whatever beast had made its nest here had been red indeed. From the carefully sorted loot, dozens had died here, at the least.
Another chained wooden door led out of the cellar, and he waited to see what she wanted him to do . . . but Clemencie gave him no sign. No sign at all.
No help for it, then. No way out but forward.
He strode forward, grabbed the rusted chain that secured the door, and yanked. It broke apart with a dull thud, and the door sagged on its hinges. Not quite as rotten as the trapdoor, but on its last days.
Beyond was pitch-darkness. Even vampire eyes had trouble without some spark of light, but Myrnin could smell the death here. A century on, it had its own powerful stench.
So many bones.
He turned back to Clemencie’s broken skeleton, with the dull rags of her hair still spread out on the dirt floor, and shook his head. “It appears to me that whatever fate your family suffered, it was one they well deserved. Still, no one chooses their family, and this is a vile place to call a grave,” he said. “I’ll take you out of here and bury you in a cleaner spot, if that’s what you wish.”
He looked at the ghost still waiting in the corner. She raised her head, and she was smiling. Oh, not a smile of thanks, or of relief, or of any sweet thing.
That, Myrnin thought, was an evil smile. A truly, truly evil smile.
“No,” Clemencie Vexen said to him, and her voice was full of screams and whispers and pleas and cries. It was the voice of hell given tongue and lips. “You took away my new friend. You will take his place. You will bring them here as my grandfather did, and my father, and my mother, and my uncle. You will sanctify them, and their worldly goods will fund our great works.”
I never should have touched a ghost, Myrnin thought. Never never never. My mother was right. His mental voice seemed high and strange, and if he had not been through so much in his long, long life, he’d have broken in pieces at that moment and gone utterly mad. Her eyes had taken on a glow; they were not merely blank. They were full of things he most earnestly wished to unsee.
“Very kind of you to offer,” he said aloud, “but I already have a job. And that of pet monster has never suited me very well.”
She came at him, of course, but by then he was already moving, leaping straight up for the open square of the cellar’s entrance, and as he rose, he caught the edges and vaulted up like a tumbler, rolling across the filthy floor and up to his feet and running as hard as he could, because he knew that the little demon wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had no idea what kind of harm she could do him, but if she could make the house itself into a weapon, then he imagined it would be quite a lot of harm indeed.
“There’s nowhere you can run!” Clemencie shrieked behind him, and then in a flash she was in front of him, a cold wrathful shadow that he only glimpsed before veering away and up the stairs, past the faded photographs of her loathsome family. He ducked as a kitchen knife flew in a steel whirl toward his neck, because while neck snapping might be survivable for a vampire, neck bisection was not, and he leaped over the yawning gap where he and her last friend, Lucian, had crashed through the floor, and landed catlike in the room beyond . . .
. . . which held another ghost.
Myrnin halted in an instant, because this one was standing facing him not three feet away, and like Clemencie, it seemed to be a soft, sweet girl. Younger, though. And indefinably . . . different.
“Ah, another sister. You must be—Trothe?” Myrnin asked. “Your sister’s already made the offer. I’ve refused.”
Trothe held out her hand.
“No,” he said. “I think I am quite finished shaking hands with your family of killers.”
Trothe gave him a look of utter incredulity, and then rolled her eyes, exactly like Claire’s friend Eve might have done in similar circumstances. She drew a line across her throat with her finger. Then she pointed past him to her sister, who had slowed and stopped at the entrance to the room . . .
. . . as if she couldn’t come into it.
“Ah,” he said. “Clemencie cut your throat. And those of the rest of the family, I suspect. Let me speculate. . . . To your parents, murder was only a practical business as a means to robbery. To her, it became less a career and more of a calling.”
Trothe seemed to sigh, but she nodded.
“And what do you want me to do about it, girl? You’re dead. I’m a vampire. She’s insane. I don’t see this having a positive outcome.”
At the door, Clemencie howled. It was the mother of all screams, straight from the pit of despair, and despite himself, Myrnin shuddered.