Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(9)

And finally, one day, Myrnin became aware that Cyprien had not come. That time had passed, and passed, and the darkness had never altered. Blood had never arrived. His hunger had rotted whatever sanity he had left, and he crouched in the dark, mindless, ready for whatever death he could pray to have . . . until the angel came.

Ah, the angel.

She smelled of such pale things—winter, flowers, snow. But she glowed and shimmered with color, and he knew her face, a little. Such a beautiful face. So hard to look upon, in his pain and misery.

She had keys to his bonds, and when he attacked her—because he could not help it, he was so hungry—she deftly fended him off and gave him a bottle full of blood. Fresh, clean, healthy blood. He gorged until he collapsed on the floor at her feet, cradling the empty glass in his arms like a favorite child. He was still starving, but for a precious moment, the screaming was silent.

Her cool fingers touched his face and slid the lank mess of his hair back.

“I find you in a much worse state this time, dear one,” said the angel. “We must stop meeting like this.”

He thought he made a sound, but it might have been only his wish, not expressed by flesh at all. He wanted to respond. Wanted to weep. But instead he only stayed there, limp on the ground, until she pulled him up and dragged him out with her.

Light. Light and color and confusion. Cyprien dead on the stairs, the cup of poisoned blood spilled into a mess on the steps next to his body. The bloodless bite on his neck was neat, and final.

There was a book in his pocket. That book. The book in which he’d recorded all of the torture, the suffering. Myrnin pointed to it mutely, and the angel silently slipped the book from Cyprien’s body and passed it to him. He clutched it to his breast. And then, with the angel’s help, stamped his foot down on the wooden mug to smash it into pieces.

“I killed him for you,” the angel said. There was tense anger in her voice, and it occurred to him then that her hair was red, red as flame, and it tingled against his fingers when he hesitantly stroked it. “He deserved worse.” She stopped, and looked at him full in the face. He saw her distress and shock. “Can you not speak, sir? At all? For me?”

He mutely stared back. There was a gesture he should have made, but he could not remember what it would be.

She sounded sad then. “Come, let’s get you to safety.”

But there was no safety, out in the streets. Only a blur of faces and shrieking and pain. A building burned, sending flames jetting like blood into the sky, and there was a riot going on, and he and his angel were caught in the middle of it. A man rushed them, face twisted, and Myrnin leaped for him, threw him down on the rough cobbles, and plunged his fangs deep into the man’s throat.

As good as the fresh blood his angel had delivered had been, this, this was life . . . and death. Myrnin drained his victim dry, every drop, and was so intent on the murder of it that he failed to see the club that hit him in the back of the head, hard enough to send him collapsed to the paving. More men closed in, a blur of fists and feet and clubs, and he thought, I escaped one hell to suffer in another, and all he could do was hug the book, the precious book of his own insanity and suffering, to his chest and wait to die.

But then his angel was there, his fiery angel. She needed no sword, only her own fury, and she cleared them from him. She was hurt for it, and he hated himself that he was the cause of her pain, but she drove them back.

The head wound must have sparked visions, because he saw himself, a different self, sober and sane and dressed in brilliant colors, and he saw himself in an embrace with his angel—no, his Lady Grey, his savior; he remembered her name now. He remembered that much, at least.

The book was gone. He did not know where he’d put it. But somehow it didn’t seem so important now. He had her. Her.

The vision vanished, and then Lady Grey turned to him, with something strange in her wide eyes as she helped him to his feet.

“Come, my lord,” she said. “Let us have you out of this place.”

? ? ?

Escape was difficult to achieve, but she changed from her blood-spattered gown and wrapped him in layers of heavy clothes, then hired a carriage to rush them out of London. The streets were unsafe around them, and he was, he admitted, not the most pleasant of companions. The filth on him had been unnoticeable when he was locked away, but now, with the clean smell of the countryside washing through the windows, and Lady Grey in her neat dress seated across from him, he knew he stank horribly. As neither of them breathed to live, though, it was a tolerable situation. For now.

But in addition to the filth, he was also given to fits, and he knew they distressed her. Sometimes he would simply leave his body while it thrashed hard enough to snap his bones; sometimes, the fit came as a wave of terror that drove him to cower in the footwell of the coach, hiding from imaginary agonies. And each time such things came to devour him, she was there, holding his hand, stroking his foul and filthy hair, whispering to him that all was well, and she would look after him.

And he believed her.

The trip was very long, and the fits passed slowly, but they lessened in intensity as his vampire body rejected Cyprien’s poisons from it; he slept, drank more blood, ate a little solid food (though that experiment proceeded less well), and felt a very small bit better when the carriage finally rocked to a stop at the ruins of an ancient keep set atop a hill.

“Where are we?” he asked Lady Grey, gazing at the old stones. They seemed familiar to him. She looked at him with a sudden, bright smile.