I stood still. It wasn’t easy, because after Myrnin let go of my shoulders, I felt like I was drifting in the dark, pulled out into space. Nothing seemed real. I finally reached out and put my hand on what felt like rough, solid dirt to the side, and that reminded me that I was standing at the bottom of a grave. Weird that it should make me feel better.
“I think I said stand still,” Myrnin said, but he didn’t sound too angry. I could hear creaking, and then a sound that seemed like snapping bones, and then he let out a pleased sigh. “Perfect. Brace yourself.”
I didn’t know what he meant, and then there was a soft click, and light poured in. After that complete darkness, it seemed like somebody had a flashlight pointed directly in my face, and I gasped and blinked and realized that, hey, someone was shining a flashlight directly in my face, and that someone was me, because the thing hadn’t been working before and now it was. Probably because of something Myrnin had done.
I switched the beam off, blinked a few times, and saw Myrnin crouching down, examining what looked like some ancient, boxy camera held in the hands of a grinning skeleton. I’d managed not to step on him, whoever the dead guy was; my feet were braced on either side of the corpse.
Suddenly, I really wanted out of this grave.
“Don’t move,” Myrnin said absently, and carefully moved one of the skeletal hands. I expected the thing to come apart, but the hand held together. That seemed weird, because I thought skeletons this old fell apart. I didn’t see any muscle connecting the bones.
“I’d really like to go now,” I said.
“Oh, I wasn’t talking to you,” Myrnin said, and moved the other bony hand. It suddenly turned and wrapped around his wrist like a living thing. “Damn.”
The skeleton sat up and wrapped its other bony hand around Myrnin’s throat. Its fingers tightened fast, and I saw them sink in deep; it probably would have killed me, or anybody still human, but it didn’t seem to hurt him much. Benefits of being a bloodsucker. Myrnin grabbed hold of the skeleton’s neck and twisted, which only seemed to piss the thing off. Myrnin was left holding a skull that snapped its dry teeth at him, trying to bite, and the hand around his throat didn’t let up at all.
I didn’t know what to do, but I figured getting rid of the skull might help, so I grabbed it out of his hands and pretended it was a gross, snapping football. I threw it long and up, aiming for the next county.
As soon as the head left the grave, the rest of the skeleton collapsed into dust and bones. The hand around his neck clattered in pieces back to the coffin’s wood. Myrnin’s throat looked like he’d been hanged by an old-time Western sheriff, and he coughed a little, shook his head, and bent down to pick up the old black camera thing from the litter of bones. Then he jumped, straight up, out of the grave, and left me standing there like an idiot.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Little help, since I just saved your life?”
No answer. I swore under my breath, tried not to step on any bones as I pulled my feet out of the rotten wood. Hard to see how I was going to climb out, since when I scrambled up, the sides started to collapse in on me. Great, I thought grimly. I’m going to suffocate in a grave because Claire’s boss forgot about me.
Myrnin’s face appeared over the top of the grave, just as another avalanche of dirt piled in on me, raising a choking cloud. “Oh,” he said, as if he was surprised to find me still down there. “Can’t you get out?”
“Sure, I’m just staying down here because it’s so damn comfy.” I spat out a mouthful of dirt, and God only knew what else. “Little help?”
He extended one bone-white hand down to me. I grabbed hold, and he pulled so hard that he almost dislocated my shoulder. “Come along, Shame,” he said. “We have work to do.”
I was technically working for him, true, but no way did that mean he could call me that. “My name is Shane,” I said. “With an n. Dickhead.”
“Sorry,” Myrnin said. I saw the thinnest, fastest ghost of a smile. “I’m just very forgetful.”
Like hell he was. “Speaking of that, you paid me a hundred to dig up a coffin for you. Not to follow you around the rest of the night and battle dead guys. I think a little evil-skeleton-demon hazard pay might be a good idea.”
“He wasn’t evil,” Myrnin said, seizing upon exactly the wrong thing, of course. “Keep up, then; there isn’t any time to lose. I must get this camera obscura to my lab.”
I didn’t know what a camera obscura was, but it sounded like trouble. “Oh no, you don’t. If you want me to tag along, it’s an extra hundred.”
Myrnin was notoriously cheap, or at least, utterly oblivious to the concept of fair pay, but he didn’t hesitate to raise my bluff. “Two hundred, plus what I already pledged,” he said. “I suppose you want to be paid in those paper bills. You may count them out yourself. I can’t be bothered.”
I should have known that if he was willing to double my asking price, it was going to be a bad, bad night, but then again, three hundred bucks. I’d done some terrible things for less than that. Hell, I’d done them for free.
“Deal,” I said. “But we’re taking my car.”