He didn't answer.
"That's what I thought," Myrnin said, and plunged the needle home in Claire's neck. I expected a flinch, but of course she didn't move, didn't react at all. I watched the pale blood press into her neck.
No reaction. None at all.
Myrnin knelt down and put his hands on her forehead. "Eve," he said, in a careful, controlled, calm voice. "Please press the button on the side of the machine now."
"Don't," Shane whispered. He was looking at a nightmare, I realized. He loved Claire, and he wanted her back, but the idea of having her back as a vampire . . . that had to rip him apart, right at the core.
He shut his eyes.
I reached out and pressed the button.
Chapter Sixteen
CLAIRE
Claire could feel Hiram out there, testing the walls, looking for weaknesses. It felt exactly like being in a glass-walled shark tank while the great white prowled around waiting for lunch. The house itself was protecting her - she knew that - but it was conflicted. Hiram was there first, after all. And Hiram at least thought he was in charge.
I can't stay here, she thought. She had no idea how much time had passed. This room was strange that way; it felt frozen, as if time didn't really affect it . . . or passed much more slowly than in other places. That was possible, of course; quantum physics allowed for the possibility that time was variable, but that was usually at the subatomic level, not in the visible world.... Interesting problem, though. Maybe it had something to do with the way the portals worked, also at the subatomic level.
And I'm distracting myself with physics. Well, some people recited baseball scores or movie lines; physics was a perfectly valid hobby. Besides, if she got really desperate, she could recite the periodic tables.
I can't spend the rest of my - eternity sitting on my ghostly butt up here. Alone.
But she didn't dare try to leave, either.
A ripple of raw power suddenly ran through the house. It was so strong that it seemed to break everything apart into jagged, glittering, spinning pieces - the furniture, the room, the house. It all flew apart in a sudden, confusing explosion, turning and falling and rising all at once.
And then she felt the pull.
It wasn't like she'd felt when she'd gone through the portal - that had been a kind of pull, too, but it was as if she'd been anchored and had to unravel herself into strings to move away. This felt more as if she were being pressed together, and a great, vast vacuum was dragging her away into the unknown.
Claire screamed and flailed, trying to grab onto something, anything, but it was all shattered, all cutting edges and confusion -
And then something seized her in powerful hands.
Hiram Glass.
He was still mostly whole, but there were pieces coming off him, bits chipping away and flying into the darkness. "You!" he shouted, and bared his teeth at her, right in her face. "You vandal! You've destroyed everything!"
"No, I didn't - " He wasn't listening. That mouth opened, impossibly wide, and Claire knew he was going to bite her and rip her apart before the dark could take her....
With the strength of desperation and panic, Claire pushed, as hard as she could.
And broke his hold.
Hiram looked comically surprised as his hands slipped free, and he spun off into the black void, screaming as he broke apart into tiny, glittering pieces.
Gone.
I'll be next, Claire thought. She was weirdly calm. There was no way she could resist that pull. It was like a black hole, and she was standing on the event horizon.
Claire.
It was a whisper in the hurricane that roared around her, but she recognized the sound. Myrnin. That was Myrnin's voice.
"Here!" she screamed, as the void pulled her away. "Myrnin, help me! Help!"
The spinning pieces of reality around her seemed to slow down. She saw herself reflected in one side of a jagged shard, and then it turned, and she saw Myrnin's face in it. He looked worried, and there were lines of effort around his mouth that she'd never seen before.
His hand reached out to her, but it was as if he was trapped behind the glass; his hand slapped against it, and then the spinning shard turned again, and she lost him.
Claire twisted. There, in another piece, she saw him again, reaching out.
Take it, he was trying to tell her. It wasn't a voice - it was something else, a kind of whisper moving inside her, like blood in her veins. Only she no longer had blood, or veins. This was coming out of her very core, the thing that had survived her body.
Her soul.
Take my hand.
She couldn't. He was on the other side of that glass, and the pieces were moving, and she was being dragged inch by inch into the dark.
Then she saw Shane in one of the spinning, glittering shards. He was on his back, propped up, staring out of the shred of reality, and he looked so agonizingly alone.
Take my hand, Claire - do it now! Myrnin's whisper sounded desperate now. Anguished. This was hurting him, too.
She kept her gaze on Shane's face, but she lunged for Myrnin's hand as another piece of reality slid past her.
Her fingers broke through the cold, icy surface, and touched his.
And reality came back together. She could still see the cracks, hear the awful noise of the darkness beyond that, but Myrnin's hand twisted and closed around her wrist in an unbreakable hold, and she fell, and fell, and fell....
And took a breath.
A real breath.
It hurt.
Her first thought was This can't happen, and the second was blotted out by a wave of pain so intense that she wanted to vomit, but couldn't. She couldn't move. The pain was in her neck, and she remembered the terrible snap, the darkness, the moment when everything had . . .
I'm breathing, she thought. How can I be breathing? I can feel my heart beating. I can feel . . .
I can feel.
The pain was fading now, but there was something else, something almost worse . . . something moving through her veins, like an ice-cold poison. Like death, but slower. Relentless.
She felt freezing hands on her forehead, and Myrnin's voice was inside her head, inside.
You have to choose, he told her. If you want to live as you did before, you must fight. This is your choice. I brought you back, but now you must choose.
She was confused, and scared, and hurting. Choose what?
Human life, he said. Or the endless possibilities I have to offer. But you can't change your mind once you've made that choice.
Having Myrnin in her head was like being Alice down the rabbit hole. He sounded sane enough, but in the background rushed images, feelings, an utterly mad jittering landscape of too much color, too much pain, too much love, too much hunger, too much everything. This was what Myrnin was.
And he scared her, and charmed her, and made her want to cry.
The ice in her veins had something wonderful about it, because it felt like peace. Like stillness. Not like death, but with something of death in it, and something of life. It had the fierce, sharp clarity of eternity.
Her heart was struggling to keep beating against it, and the struggle hurt. Life hurt. Everything about it brought pain, even the best things.
Then let go, Myrnin whispered. I'll catch you. But understand - you have to let go of everything when you fall. Even him.
Shane.
There was something about the uneven beat of her heart that reminded Claire of him - of the way he fought, every day, against something, even if it was only himself. Of the way he went still and peaceful when they were lying in bed together, on the edge of sleep. Of the taste of his kiss and the way he smiled at her and the way he had dared her to live.
There was cold, rational survival in the ice running through her body, and an end to pain, but Myrnin had reminded her of something else, too: that pain was life, and life could be beautiful, with all its scars and flaws.
It wasn't just Shane that was pulling her back. It was Eve, and Michael, and her parents; it was Richard and Hannah and so many others, even Monica, because in the end, they shared that experience of life. Of risking everything, every day, with every breath.
And she wasn't ready to give that up. There was so much more to learn.
She did it, in the end, for herself. For her own distant, uncertain future.
The cold intensified, and she struggled to reject it, fought so hard she thought she should be weeping, but her body was a prison, and she couldn't move it . . . and then she took in another, halting breath, and another, and the ice receded, warmed, melted, and was gone.
Myrnin's whisper said, Good girl, and she felt his sadness and loss, but then it was all gone, like the cobwebs of a dream swept away by a morning breeze.