Fade Out

“I don’t see Michael’s car.”

“One way to be sure,” Myrnin said. “Let’s go.”

The closer they came, the creepier the place was. Claire wasn’t a fan of blighted industrial buildings, and Morganville was full of them—the half-destroyed hospital, German’s Tire Plant, even the old City Hall had its decaying side.

This one looked so . . . grim. It was just a cinder block building, not very large, and the one window in front had been long ago broken out and boarded over. Someone had spray-painted KEEP OUT on the bricks, and part of it was heavily decorated in multicolored swirls of graffiti. Beer cans, cigarette butts, empty plastic bags—the usual stuff.

“I don’t see a way in,” Eve whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Myrnin whispered back. “Vampires can hear us, anyway.”

“Is there a vampire in there?” Claire asked.

“I’m not psychic. I have no idea.”

“You could tell in the tire plant!”

He tapped his nose. “Five senses. Not six. It’s not so easy to sniff them out standing outside the building.” He gently moved the business end of her Super Soaker away from himself. “Please. I bathed already, and I’d rather not do it in the vampire equivalent of pepper spray.”

“Sorry.”

They made their way around the side of the building, closer to the tower, and there they found Michael’s dark sedan sitting in the shadows.

Empty.

“Michael?” Eve called. “Michael!”

“Hush,” Myrnin said sharply, and flashed supernatu rally fast across the open space to grab the knob of a door Claire could barely see. It sagged open, and he disappeared inside.

“Wait!” Claire blurted, and darted after him. She switched on the flashlight as soon as she reached the door, but all it showed her was an empty hallway, with peeling paint and a floor covered in mud from some old flood. “Myrnin, where are you?”

No answer. She yelped when Shane’s hand closed over her shoulder; then she pulled in a breath and nodded. Eve crowded in behind them.

Down the hallway was a dead end, with more hallways stretching left and right. The fading paint had some kind of mural on it, something West Texas-y with cows and cowboys, and the letters KVVV in big block capitals.

The whole place smelled like mold and dead animals. “This way,” Myrnin’s voice said quietly, and with a hum, electricity turned on in the hall. Some of the bulbs burned out with harsh, sizzling snaps, leaving parts of the space in darkness.

Claire followed the hall to the end, which took a right turn into a small studio with some kind of engineering board. The equipment looked ancient, but clean; somebody had been here—presumably Kim—and had taken care to put everything in working order. Microphones, a chair, a backdrop, lighting . . . everything in the studio needed for filming, including a small digital video camera on a tripod.

On the other side of the room was a complicated editing console, which had a bank of monitors set up. They obviously weren’t original to the setup—decades more modern than the soundboard—and Claire identified different components that had been Frankensteined into the system.

These included an array of fat black terabyte drives, all portable.

Michael was sitting at the console. “Michael!” Eve blurted, and threw herself on him; he stood up to catch her in his arms, and hugged her close. “You incredible jerk!”

He kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know.”

She smacked his arm. “Really. You are a jerk!”

“I get that.” He pushed her off a little, to look at her. “You’re okay?”

“No thanks to you. You had to go ru

“I should have known you guys wouldn’t stay put.”

“Where’s Detective Hess?” Claire asked. “I thought you were meeting him here.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Where did he go?”

“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Michael seemed preoccupied, as if he were trying to figure out how to tell them something they weren’t going to like at all. “This is Kim’s data vault. At least, most of it. Claire, that’s a router, right? I think this is her receiving station for the signals.”

“She’s using the tower to amplify the signals,” Claire said. “Did you find—?” She didn’t want to get more specific than that. Michael shook his head, and her heart fell. “What about the other ones?”

“She’s been a busy girl,” Michael said. “There are video files there from City Hall, Common Grounds, spots all over town. It will take hours, maybe weeks, to look at everything, but she’s done a rough cut.” He hit some controls, then pointed at the central monitor. “This is the raw file.”

After some old-fashioned leader signals, there was a shot of the Morganville town limits sign, creaking in the wind . . . and then, in special effects, the word Vampires appeared in bloody streaks right below the sign.

“Subtle.” Eve snorted. “She’s got a future in Hollywood.”

Kim’s voice came on, breathlessly narrating. “Welcome to Morganville, the town with bite. If you’ve ever driven across the barren landscape of West Texas, you may wonder why people live out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, wonder no more. It’s because they can’t live anywhere else without people knowing what they are.”

The visuals cut to a montage of Morganville daily life—normal, boring stuff.

And then a night-vision shot of a vampire—Morley, Claire realized with a shock—sucking the blood out of someone’s neck. It was an extreme close-up. His eyes were like silver coins, and the blood looked black.

Cut to Eve, working the counter at the coffee shop in all her Goth glory. Eve sucked in a quick breath, but said nothing. More shots of Morganville, some handheld. Claire saw footage of students, and remembered Kim ru

It was in there, and so was Claire, saying, “I have two words for you, and the second one is off. Fill in the blank.”

Claire covered her mouth with both hands. God, she looked so angry. And kind of bitchy.

It got worse, with the voice-over. “Even the normal people of Morganville aren’t so normal. Take my friends who live in this house.”

A shot of the Glass House, full daylight. Then some kind of hidden-camera thing of Kim knocking on the door, Eve answering.

A shot of Shane. One of Michael.

“Living in a town full of terror doesn’t mean you can’t find true love—or at least, real sex.”

The video morphed into Claire and Shane in his bedroom.

Oh God no . . .

Claire felt sick and hot and breathless, full of horror at seeing herself there on that screen. She stumbled away and almost threw herself into Shane’s arms. He, lips parted, was staring at the picture, looking just as horrified as she felt. But he couldn’t look away, while she simply couldn’t watch.

“Goodness,” Myrnin said quietly. “I don’t think I should be watching this. I don’t think I’m old enough.”

“Turn it off,” Shane said. “Michael.”

Instead of turning it off, Michael hit FAST FORWARD. He slowed it down as the scene changed. More Kim voyeur porn, this time Michael and Eve. No voice-over. Claire couldn’t imagine what she was intending to say, but it couldn’t have been good.

“I’ll kill her,” Eve said. It sounded calm, but it really wasn’t. “Why are you showing me this?”

Michael looked at her, and Claire’s stomach did a little flip at the grimness in his expression. “Sit down,” he said, and wheeled the chair closer to Eve. She looked at it, then at him, frowning. “Trust me.”

She did, still frowning, as the scene changed on-screen.

It was some dark-paneled room, with a big wooden round table, an ornate flower arrangement in the middle. Of the several people around the table, Claire recognized three immediately, with a shock. “Amelie,” she blurted. Amelie clearly had no idea she was being filmed; the camera was high up, at an angle, but it caught their faces clearly. Next to her at the table was Richard Morrell, the mayor, neat and handsome in a dark suit. At his right sat Oliver, looking—as usual—angry. Several other people around the table were talking at once, arguing, and finally Oliver slammed his hand down on the wood with so much force it silenced them all.