Black Dawn

CHAPTER NINE SHANE

I was nearly gone. I could feel it now, how my body felt light and weirdly empty, how my muscles ached. My head pounded harder and faster—low blood pressure, less oxygen getting to where it counted. The water (not really water) around me was a dull crimson now, and it reminded me of terrible things, of opening a motel bathroom door and a tub and my mom’s slack white face and the color of the watery blood around her. She’d had her clothes on, I remembered suddenly. And she hadn’t filled the tub all the way, only about halfway.

I was thinking about it too much, because it started to become real, like those fantasies I’d already rejected. All of a sudden I was there, standing on cold tile, staring at my mother, and her papery eyelids opened, her eyes were the color of ice water as she said, “If you let go, it won’t hurt so much, sweetheart. Claire’s not coming back for you. Nobody ever comes back for you.”

“Mom—” I whispered. It was her voice, just like I remembered … sad and quiet and disappointed. Maybe a little scared. Mom had been scared most of the time. “Mom, I’m sorry, I can’t just give up.”

“You can’t do a lot of things, Shane,” she said. It sounded kind, that voice, but it wasn’t. “You couldn’t save me. You couldn’t save your sister. And you can’t save yourself, either. It’s too late for you. You have to let go, because that’s the only thing that will help stop the pain now. I’m your mother. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“Claire’s going to come back for me.”

“Claire’s a dream, too. She never loved you. Nobody ever really loved you, sweetie. You’re just not built that way. Why would a smart, pretty girl like that want you? You made it up, the way you made up all that other nonsense, about getting married and having a little baby and being happy. Because that will never happen either, son.”

That sounded like my dad, not my mom. He’d always been the one telling me I was hopeless, helpless, worthless. She’d quietly tried to make me feel better, not worse. Until the end.

But the terrible thing about what she was saying was that somewhere deep inside me, the black monster that lived there actually agreed with her. Good things didn’t happen to me, because I didn’t deserve them. All I was made for was fighting, right? For trying, and failing, to protect other people.

“Claire died,” my mother said, and sat up in the tub. The red water swirled around her. “Claire is dead. All this is just you refusing to admit any of that. You’ve gone crazy—don’t you understand that? It’s very sad, but you can’t hold on to fantasy any longer. You know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. It sounded faint, and lost. “No, that’s wrong. We brought her back. She’s alive.”

“Of course you didn’t bring her back. That’s ridiculous. She died, and they took her body away. And you took your father’s gun and you shot yourself, and you’ve been dying ever since. You want to know the truth? She never loved you. She loved that vampire. Myrnin.”

“No.” I was backing up now, and the tile felt sharp and wet under my shoes. No, not shoes. I was barefoot. It felt as if I was standing on broken glass, and the pain helped, somehow. Helped me remember that this room was wrong, that the walls of that bathroom in that cheap motel hadn’t been dripping with water, that my mom hadn’t opened her eyes and said these terrible things, that it was him.

All this was Magnus, talking through my dead mother’s mouth.

“No.” I said it again, louder. “Get out of my head, you freak.”

“Son—”

I charged forward, grabbed the edge of the claw-footed tub and tipped it over on its side, away from me. There was a rush of bloody water around me, and then I was in the tub—no, in water, staring up at cloudy glass, and I was fighting it, banging my hands against the cover that held me in. I left bloody handprints on it, and the blows were weak, but it meant something.

So did the bobbing light that I could see coming from the side.

My face was out of the water, the liquid, and I pulled in a breath and yelled. It came out a weakened croak, but I tried again, shouted harder, and battered the glass again.

Claire. Claire came back. But wait, maybe that wasn’t right, maybe I’d made her up, made it all up, maybe she’d never existed, or maybe she had died, or maybe she didn’t love me at all …

But it wasn’t Claire who found me.

The face was familiar, but not her. And it wasn’t a girl. A larger, more squared-off face I recognized. Dick, I thought finally. Dick Morrell. To be fair, I guessed, I really ought to call him Richard now, if he was here to save my life. It sucked to be rescued by a Morrell, after all the energy I’d put into hating the whole family.

This couldn’t be a fantasy, because no way in hell would I ever fantasize about a Morrell showing up to save me.

Richard wiped moisture from the glass and saw me, and from his expression what he saw must not have been pretty. He yelled something, and then Hannah Moses was there, too, and somebody else, God, was that Monica? Maybe I was hallucinating after all. The three of them shoved the glass away.

I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t. The draug were swirling around me, devouring my blood fast now, trying to kill me before I could get away. They’d been holding back, I realized. Making me last. That was why they’d put me in shallow water, so I wouldn’t drown before they sucked out the last drops.

I managed to hold up a hand. It was pale and trembling, but I got it in the air, and Hannah grabbed it and pulled, hard. Once my shoulders were up, Richard took hold, too, and pushed, and I rolled over the lip of—what was it? A pool? No, some kind of container, maybe part of the purification process for the water treatment—and I hit hard steel grating with enough force to bruise, except I probably didn’t have much blood left to form any bruises. My skin was sunburn-red and stinging as if I’d rolled in broken glass, but I was alive.

Barely.

“Claire,” I whispered. I tried to get up, but my arms were too weak to lift me up. “Where’s Claire?”

Hannah crouched down next to me and took out her cell phone. She hit a button, listened for a tense few seconds, and hung up. “We need to get him out of here. Monica. Take his other side.”

“Me? Are you kidding? Blood is never coming out of this dress!”

I wasn’t imagining her, that was for sure, because I would never, ever, imagine Monica, and even if I did, why would I make her so damn useless? “Shut up,” I managed to say. She gave me a filthy look as she bent down and put her shoulder under mine. My right arm draped over her shoulder. I hoped I was bleeding on her.

“You shut up. I broke both heels off my shoes on these stupid grates of yours.” She looked pale, and scared out of her mind, but she was still Monica.

Maybe that did mean there was still a Claire out there, somewhere. It was hard to know. Hard to figure out what was real, what was false, what was just a dream.

This felt real. The pain felt very real.

Hannah and Monica muscled me up to a standing position, not that it did much good, because I couldn’t do more than shuffle along with them. “Richard,” Hannah said, and Richard Morrell turned to glance at her. “Watch our backs.”

“Done,” he said. He looked at me for a second, and nodded. “Glad you’re okay, Shane.”

I wasn’t, of course. But it was nice of him to think so. “Thanks,” I said. “For coming.” Like it was some kind of party that I’d thrown. How polite I was, all of a sudden.

“Thank Hannah. She was the one who signed us up.” He smiled, and all of a sudden he wasn’t the Dick Morrell I’d distrusted all my life, the one who was the shining football star and class president and perfect student, the good son of the bad mayor. He was just Richard, a guy who’d come to get me.

A guy who’d saved my life. “Hey,” I said, “sorry I’ve been such an asshole to you all your life.”

“Can’t really blame you,” he said. “Everybody judges me by my little sister and my old man. It isn’t unfair exactly.”

“Hey!” Monica said, and aimed a halfhearted, off-balance kick at her brother. Which he avoided. “I am so not voting for you next election.”

“I don’t think there will be another election,” he said, “or that I’d want to be mayor of this slow-motion disaster, anyway. I only did it because they said I had to.” He was walking backward now, facing away from us and watching our tails as we inched along the walkway. I began to wake up enough to see that we were in the water treatment plant’s lower levels, which reeked even though they were open to the air. There were tanks on all sides, and open pools on the other side of the chain link. Sewage was moving through there, or should have been, I guessed; it was no longer going anywhere, which was part of why it stank so badly.

I’d been locked in the last set of shallow tanks, where the recycled and treated water was given a final rinse before heading into the storage towers.

But it was worse than that, a whole lot worse. The pool we were passing now was large, and it was deep, and it had bodies. Just like the Civic Pool, but this water was a murky gray-green color, thick with draug and contaminants.

This was Magnus’s new blood garden, and it teemed with the draug, although few of them had any kind of shape to them. They were ignoring us, because we were human, and they were ripping into their favorite snacks. I felt the droplets of draug that were still on me sliding down, drawn toward the main pool, and a trickle of water ran from my feet to the edge.

Hannah had paused, staring. Monica made a strangled noise and tried to pull me forward, but I stayed put. “What?” Monica demanded. “Okay, fine, drowned people, gross, but we have to go!”

“Not yet,” Hannah said. “Hold on to him.” She slipped out from under my arm, and Monica staggered on her heel-less shoes as I sagged against her.

“Hey, watch the hands, Collins!” she snapped. As if I had any control over them, or wanted to feel her up anyway. She was just scared, and she wanted nothing more than to dump me and run.

I guessed that it was kind of impressive that she didn’t do that.

“Hannah?” Richard asked, backing toward her. “What are we doing?”

“We can’t leave this. They’re growing in numbers again. We have to take them down if we can.”

“How?”

“I have silver powder,” Hannah said. She grabbed the phone again and dialed. “I need to let them know to evac. Come on, come on …”

She finally got an answer.

I heard the screams coming out of the phone from four feet away.