He managed to pull next to the still-running Oliver and said, “There are snakes, you know.” As a vampire, he had the dignity of not having to gasp it out.
“If a snake bit you, it would die of disgust, and you should die of embarrassment,” Oliver said. “He’s stopped.” Oliver immediately slowed to a walk, and Myrnin fell in beside him, happy for the change. His eyes picked up the starlight and painted a vivid, though shades-of-blue, picture of a leaning old farmhouse with broken windows and a yawning door. Someone had spray-painted slogans on it, layers upon layers of meaningless words. Some things never changed throughout the ages, and graffiti was one of them, from ancient Egypt to modern times. It was as though humanity had a burning need to make a mark, wherever it set its hand—and the mark was all too often an insult.
“How do you want to go about this?” Myrnin asked.
“Keep it simple. You take the back. I’ll take the front. We crush him in the middle.” A short pause, and then, “Be careful.”
Myrnin raised his eyebrows. “I’m touched that you’re so concerned for me.”
“I’m not concerned for you, fool. I’m concerned you’ll let him rip you apart and escape. It would be very inconvenient for me to run him down again.”
“Ah. It makes so much more sense now.”
Myrnin dodged to avoid a blow from Oliver’s fist, and moved around to the back of the farmhouse. They were just outside Morganville, and he could feel the difference here. It felt alien, unknown, uncomfortable. He didn’t like leaving town anymore. Morganville had become so much his haven, and his home. There, he was protected. Out here he felt small, and vulnerable. Too many memories of being hunted through the streets, hounded in the open. Shut up in torturously small cells. Vampires might be strong and fast, but they were just as vulnerable as all the other mighty creatures that humans had made extinct.
Out here, he was as much prey as predator.
The back door of the house was boarded shut, but he slithered in through a broken window and landed without a sound on the warped wood floor. It was rotten, but he could sense where the fragile spots were, and stepped carefully to avoid any betraying creaks and snaps. There were spiders here, lots of spiders, but he rather liked them—elegant creatures, so perfectly suited to their lives. Hard to tell how they felt about him at the moment, though, since they seemed to be scattering out of his way.
One thing he did not care for was the scorpion that scuttled out of the darkness to aim its stinger at his booted foot. Clearly, he was not amiable. Myrnin bent, picked it up by the segmented tail, and held it up to his face, frowning at it as it snapped its claws toward his nose as it twisted and turned. “Rude,” he said to it. “Learn your manners, now.” He threw it out the window, and watched it dart across the sand, still jabbing the air furiously with its barbed tail.
Then he sensed something looming over his head, and looked up to see a face staring down at him. Or . . . no. Not a face. In that split second it looked like a face, a formless dark thing watching him, but then it solidified into shadows and an unfortunate pattern of mold.
Still . . . he felt watched.
There was also a corpse in the room, but it was not watching him. It lay in the corner on its back. The young man was clearly dead, and had been for days. Pale and bloodless, he bore neat holes in his throat, and his eyes were closed.
“I’ve found the missing boy,” Myrnin called. “Dead.” He didn’t really need to say that. Neither he nor Oliver had been deluded enough to believe they’d find him alive.
“Our quarry’s moved upstairs,” said a voice at Myrnin’s side, and he flinched just a little. Oliver had, once again, managed to creep up without drawing his attention. “Amelie’s not going to be well pleased with this. We’ll need to get the boy decently buried and compensate his family. You retrieve the body and I’ll go up and find this . . . I can’t properly even call him a vampire.”
“The boy’s long gone, and he can wait,” Myrnin said. “This . . . might take both of us. Whatever this . . . thing may be, he is not quite sane.”
Oliver sent him a look. Not the normal look of disdain and dismissal, but . . . something else. Something more serious. “Well, you would know,” he said. “But I think you may be right.”