Morganville (Justin Bieber)

Chapter 112

He was feverishly working, and every lamp and candle in the room burned at full capacity. He hadn't stopped to change, though he'd lost the cone-head cap somewhere; as I watched, he got one of his full white sleeves too close to a candle and caught it on fire.

"Cachiad!" he blurted, and ripped off his sleeve to throw it on the ground and stomp out the blaze. Irritated, he stripped off the whole billowy top and dumped it, too.

He looked up, half-naked, wild, and saw me watching him.

For a second neither of us moved, and then Myrnin said, "It's not what you think."

I stepped away from the door. I swung it shut and clicked the padlock shut. "If you didn't want anybody coming after you, you should have locked up."

"I don't have time for this, and neither do you. Now, do you want to help me, or - "

"I'm done helping you!" I shouted. My abused voice broke like shattered glass, and I heard the raw fury bleed out. "You ran! You left us all to die!"

Myrnin flinched. He looked away, down at what he'd been doing at the lab table, and I saw that he'd prepared a number of slides. "I had my reasons, " he said. "It's the long game, Ana. Amelie understands."

"Amelie got staked in the heart," I said.

His head slowly rose. "What?"

"Bishop bought off her tribute, Jason. Jason staked her."

"No." It was a bare thread of sound. Myrnin shut his eyes. "No, that can't be. She knew - I told her - "

"You left her to die!"

Myrnin's legs failed. He slid down to his knees and buried his face in his hands, silent in his anguish.

I gripped the cross, holding it at my side, and walked toward him. He didn't move.

"Is she alive?" he asked.

"I don't know. Maybe."

Myrnin nodded. "Then it is my fault. That shouldn't have happened."

"And the rest of it should have?"

"Long game," Myrnin whispered. "You don't understand."

There was a chessboard, a familiar one, set up in the corner where Myrnin normally read. A game was frozen in midattack. I stared at it, and for a second I saw the specter of Amelie sitting with Myrnin, moving those pieces in white, cold fingers.

"She knew," I said. "She helped you. Didn't she?"

Myrnin stood up, and I held up the cross between us. Myrnin didn't so much as look at it. I pushed it closer. Maybe it was a proximity thing?

Myrnin closed his hand over mine, and took the cross away. He held it on the open palm of his hand.

No sizzling. No reaction at all.

"Crosses don't work," he said. "We all pretend they do, but they don't."

My mouth was hanging open. "Why?" Great. My last words were, as always, going to be questions.

"Obviously, it keeps people from moving on to things that will hurt us." Myrnin lifted his eyebrows, but the dark eyes below them were cautious and sad. "Ana. I wasn't supposed to stay. I was to provide a distraction, get my sample, and leave."

"Sample."

He pointed toward the lab table, and what he'd been doing. I saw the silver gleam of the knife he'd carried to the feast - clean now, no trace of blood.