“Wait, getting lost?” I said, as he worked. “Are we going somewhere?”
“We are,” he said. “Come here.” I put the flashlight down on the table and came around to join him. He pushed a button on the wooden box, and grabbed my hand to slam it down on top of the switch as he slipped his own hand away. “Now, don’t let go of it,” he said. “Not until I tell you. And no matter what you see, stay still.”
“I don’t—”
My voice choked off, because darkness crashed in with the thick weight of midnight, and there was nothing. My mouth dried up; I flinched and almost pulled my hand back but managed to hang on. Myrnin gripped my arm and held tight.
“You’ll see things,” his disembodied voice whispered. “Bad things. But they won’t harm you. But one thing is very important: Don’t let me stay here. You can’t let me stay, no matter how much I want to do it. Don’t let go of the button until I tell you, and when you do, you have to be touching me. Understand?”
I couldn’t see a damn thing, and almost said so, and then something moved at the corner of my vision. Not like a light, exactly—more like a disturbance of the darkness. I turned my head that direction, and saw a very small wisp of gray that moved, got brighter, and took on form.
A ghost, at first. A woman, from the form, wearing an old-fashioned long, full skirt like something from a documentary on Victorians. She took on more color, though she stayed pale in skin. The dress was dark red, like drying blood, and it had a high collar and long sleeves. She had her dark, glossy hair up in a complicated bun thing.
It took me a second, but then I realized who she was. Ada. Myrnin’s former lab assistant, a vampire who’d gotten on his bad side and ended up as a brain in a jar. I’d only known her as a crazycakes hologram thing, but she looked real enough here, as she glided up toward us.
Myrnin took on form and color, too, but not the Myrnin who was holding on to my arm. That one never let go, never moved. The one walking toward her was the old Myrnin . . . and he was dressed out of the same period closet as Ada was, with some kind of fancy tight black trousers and high boots and a white shirt with lace under a long black coat. The only color on him was a bright bloodred ruby he wore as a pin on the front of his shirt.
That old-school Myrnin lunged at her, slammed her into the invisible wall behind her, and as she screamed, he bit at her throat. Tore it open.
Drank.
“No,” Modern-Day Myrnin whispered. He sounded shaky. Horrified. “No. No, this is not what I want. Not what I need. Stop. Stop.”
The Myrnin acting out Ada’s murder in front of us never paused. She was dying, and it was pretty horrible. I looked away and swallowed hard. I’ve never been good with just bystanding.
Myrnin—the one next to me—took in a deep breath and let it out, slowly. The scene vanished, just melted on the air as if it had never been there. His voice, when it came, was hesitant. “It is an inexact science, and that . . . nightmare is rarely far from my mind. Bide a moment.”
I guessed that was another word for wait, and I did, as more shadows moved and whispered and crowded, all unseen in the dark. Some talked. One or two screamed, and I flinched. I could almost feel them brushing over me, like damp breezes. It felt sickening.
“There,” Myrnin whispered. He sounded different. More focused. “There it is.”
This time, a storm of gray appeared, swirling like clouds, and then parted to show a confusion of bodies, men, dressed in those same period clothes, all wrestling and shouting, though I could hear it only in a muffled kind of way. It looked like they were clustered in around something.
Someone screamed. A woman. High and thin and terrified. In pain. Myrnin’s hand closed hard on my arm, hard enough to bruise, but I didn’t mind. It felt like I was falling into that crowd, or that it was rushing up on us, and suddenly I was standing surrounded by all those guys yelling and striking out, and in the center was a woman crouched on the ground, screaming as clubs came down on her. She was bloody and one of her arms was broken, but she still kept putting it up to try to protect her head.
I wanted to let go of that button and help her. I didn’t know who she was. Didn’t matter. Bunch of bullies beating somebody—my natural impulse was to jump in.
And then I realized she was protecting someone who was lying on the ground senseless underneath her. A man in dirty rags, curled into a shaking ball, bleeding in the street.
The woman raised her head, and I saw her flame red hair slipping free of pins, and her eyes caught fire and she snarled, showing fangs, and leaped for the man whose club was coming down toward her. She snapped his neck, picked up his club, and effectively beheaded a couple of guys with it.